An Update and Being the Same Me

The experiment is going pretty well. The first week I gained a pound and a half, the second week I stayed the same, and the third week I lost two pounds. More importantly, I'm entirely angst free. It's really nice not to be even a tiny bit stressed about my food choices. I would bet that I'm eating pretty close to the same stuff in the same amounts as I was when I was tracking. Go figure.

Saturday I'm going to visit friends and family in California. Most of them I haven't seen in over a year, which means they haven't seen me in over a year. As it is commonly spoken and written, most people would be really excited and happy anticipating the unveiling of a body 73 pounds thinner. I hear I am supposed to relish the compliments and attention and be proud of what I've achieved and whatnot. I'm actually pretty anxious about it. I haven't told anyone I'm losing weight. It's not a secret, exactly, but I feel weird about it. I have such conflicted feelings about the concept of dieting and about involving myself in the diet industry, so I don't love talking about that. I also hate how the whole world seems to be having a constant conversation about having lost weight, wanting to lose weight, regretting cookies, wanting donuts, wishing they had time to exercise, hating exercise, being virtuous for eating salad and bad for skipping the gym. I don't want to engage in that conversation and I don't know how to casually tell my father or my childhood friends that I've been losing weight for the last 13 months and that they should expect me to look pretty different. So then when they see me they'll be shocked, which just draws more attention that I don't want. I don't want to talk to everyone I see about how I lost weight or even to accept compliments if they're giving them. Each of them will only have that conversation once, but I'm having it all the time with strangers as well as friends. It makes me tired.

A few weeks ago I had lunch with an old, dear friend who is local, but whom I don't see often. I'm sure she noticed that I've lost weight -- I am aware that I look pretty wildly different, though it makes me uncomfortable -- but she managed to show no sign of it. She treated me exactly as she always has. We ate together, we took a walk, we had a conversation about our gym memberships and she just treated me like me. It was deeply comforting. That's what I want from everyone, really. I don't think my weight loss should be interesting to anyone but me. I care about losing weight. I think about what I'm eating. I want to be thinner, to look better, to buy cuter clothes. All of that is a big deal to me, but I don't want it to be a big deal to anyone else. I just want them to be with me exactly as they've always been. I wish I could send a memo ahead of me explaining that...

An Anniversary and an Experiment

So as of last week, I've been doing Weight Watchers for a year. I've lost about 70 pounds, which is nice, and in an extremely unlikely event, have become a fitness nut, which is thrilling.

But I've been struggling lately. As much as I believe it's unhealthy for me to worry about food, to feel guilty about overeating, I still do. It's a stressful situation. I can tell myself that it's okay to eat what I want, that I'll still be working out, that I'll be eating healthier things later, that it's not the end of the world if I gain a pound, but I can't really turn off the other voice. The one who says I'm sabotaging my weight loss efforts when I eat cookies, that I'm still fat and look horrible, that I should be making healthier food choices.

I've always had only two rules for myself. One was that I would record my Weight Watchers points as accurately as I could. Always. It was okay to eat whatever I wanted in whatever quantity I wanted, but I had to record it. For most of the last twelve months, that has been really helpful. I actually find it comforting to write down a number after I overeat, even if the number is huge. It's just a number. I start over with daily points the next day and with weekly points the next week. I earn more points every time I work out. I haven't killed any puppies, I just ate a lot of points. No one cares but me.

Only for some reason, over the last few weeks, it's been causing a lot of anxiety. I hate that I sometimes debate over a breakfast that's one or two points higher than another or over whether or not to eat a piece of fruit because I'm thinking about how many points I have left. How ridiculous is that? Deep down, I don't believe it's ever a bad idea to eat a bunch of grapes or a bowl of oatmeal with peanut butter.


My other rule is No Angst. So when recording points, worrying about points, started to cause me angst, I had to decide which was a bigger rule. I decided No Angst. So as an experiment, I'm not recording or thinking about points. My goal is to do everything pretty much the same except without the anxiety. My exercise routine will be the same because it makes me happy, I will still go to Weight Watchers meetings and get weighed and will still weigh myself at home. I will keep eating basically as I've been eating, except without recording anything. I'm going to see what happens for about a month. If I find that I'm steadily gaining weight, I'll reassess. If my weight stays the same, I'm okay with that for now. If I lose weight, even if it's more slowly than I have been, I'll be thrilled. It's been almost a week so far and I am feeling optimistic about it. I am definitely less anxious around food and don't think I'm eating any more than I was before. I've lost a pound. I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

In defense of emotional eating

It seems like everywhere I look, there are articles in magazines and posts on health blogs about how to overcome emotional eating. I'd like to break away from the pack and praise emotional eating. At least for me, it serves a purpose, and it hasn't done me any harm lately.

I'd like to start by saying I am an emotional eater. I eat for comfort, I stress eat, I get lonely and crave cookies or Chinese food or ice cream and I not only have to eat exactly what I'm craving, but I have to eat too much of it. Part of the comfort comes from the feeling of being too full. I'm not saying that's a good thing. It's probably a huge factor in how I got to be overweight in the first place and that feeling of being too full is uncomfortable. I hate it. But I believe it's more important to pay attention to it than to fight it. It has been helpful for me to notice my patterns of emotional eating -- what kind of mood sets it off, what happens if I don't succumb, how does it feel when I do, etc... And I certainly try to keep it in check -- I can often find other ways to comfort myself. I can write or talk or work out and sometimes doing one of those things curbs my desire to eat a whole pizza. Sometimes going to the trouble of cooking something that's healthy and delicious and eating that will curb the desire. Part of the comfort comes from the idea of giving myself what I want -- I deserve these cookies -- if I can shift that to: I deserve this root vegetable soup, then the same purpose is served.

I've been losing weight for nearly a year now, and one of the most important things I've learned is that giving in to occasional fits of emotional over-eating does not derail me. I can eat way too much for one meal or over the course of a day or over the course of several days. It usually doesn't feel good. It usually makes me feel sluggish and guilty and fat. But it is also comfortable and familiar and on some level, it works. It provides a certain quality of comfort that nothing else does and if I deny myself the right to that comfort, I get more and more agitated. I start to resent that root vegetable soup instead of craving it. Once I've eaten the donuts (because I absolutely had to, because I wanted them and don't I deserve to have what I want? because one donut doesn't make me feel like I got what I wanted, I have to eat four and have a sugar headache...) I relax. I crave my next work-out. I crave my next salad. And I see, again and again and again over the last year, that it doesn't stop me from losing weight. It doesn't stop me from working out or eating well 90% of the time. Now, part of the comfort comes from that. From the realization, over and over, that my binge didn't make me regain 70 pounds, or even 5. It didn't take away my muscles. It didn't take away my desire to work out every day or my love of vegetables. I am comforted by not having to lose my source of comfort in order to lose weight.

What I mean when I say Love

I love my body. No, seriously. I don't mean it's perfect or that I never look at myself and cringe about something -- the size of my belly or a pimple, new wrinkles, hair growing where I don't need hair -- I'm vain enough and I have plenty of room for negative body image -- I don't think anyone escapes that entirely. What I mean is, I love my body like I love my family and my dearest friends and my city and my car. They are all flawed. They all have qualities that drive me crazy and make me hate them momentarily. They are limited, which is frustrating. But the core of the relationship stays strong. Deep down in my heart, I want my body to be happy. I love that it carries me around all day. I am proud of how strong it is. I am amazed at its resiliency, its ability to heal itself. It gives me pleasure. And sometimes I am blown away by its beauty. All that makes me want to treat my body well. It makes me happy to nourish my body well, to allow it to rest, to take it out for runs and yoga classes. I am forgiving when I see an ugly side or am slowed down by its limitations. I forgive it when it causes me pain.

I feel that I was taught for so much of my life to hate my body, to want it to be different, to fight to change it. And that never inspired me to treat it well. Loving my body right now, is what allows me to change it. If I were hating it now, or hating it as it was a year ago, in order to will it to be different at some point in the future, I wouldn't treat it with kindness. I wish that when people talked about losing weight or striving for better health, they spoke more about loving your body, loving your self, and being kind.

My mother's idea of a compliment

I'm actually having my first really good day in weeks, and I promise to write positive, cheerful things here in the near future, but I'm just stopping by to record this:

I had breakfast with my mother this morning after not seeing her for several months (she's visiting from far away) and she attempted to compliment me by telling me I look like a normal person now.

Seriously. I couldn't make this shit up.

f&*%ing people

I hate people sometimes.

I went to work today and there were lovely baked goods in honor of one of my lovely co-workers. I should mention that we're in the middle of a weird and stressful transition in my workplace and as a result, I am working with many people who I had never worked with before last week. Many of them I still haven't met. I picked up a scone from the box of lovely baked goods and one of the above-mentioned new co-workers -- a woman in her 70s with whom I have never spoken before -- pointed to the scone I was holding and said, "That's fattening."

May I ask, in what universe could that possibly be an appropriate thing to say?

Let's first discuss the word fattening*. All by itself it is one of my biggest pet peeves. Only as I wrote that, I realized there's nothing petty about my peevishness. It's a word that's wrong on so many levels and I take that seriously. It implies that the only thing that matters about a food's nutritional value is whether or not it will make you fat. And even by that definition, it means nothing. Any food will make you fat if you eat too much of it and no food will make you fat if you don't eat too much of it. There are no fattening foods.

But let's move on from semantics. What could she have possibly meant by saying that to me? Is she warning me not to eat it? Does she not recognize that I'm an adult and a total stranger and that what I eat is none of her business? Is she saying it because I'm fat and she thinks she's being helpful? Would she have said it if I weren't fat? Would she have said it if I were a man? Is there anyone on earth who really thinks that would be helpful rather than horribly, offensively rude? And remember: total stranger. Is she just making conversation in that way that people do about food? Even though I recognize that this is a cultural norm -- talking about what we should and shouldn't eat and how bad we're being when we eat junk -- usually that kind of statement refers to the speaker's food choices, not the food choices of the total stranger who she is addressing.

Would an appropriate response have been: "I work out six times a week and have lost seventy pounds in the last year, so thank you, but I believe I can make my own food choices?" I just went with, "Excuse me?" She repeated herself, pointing again, as if I hadn't understood which food she was referring to, as if it had been an appropriate thing to say in the first place. I walked away.

Now I am left hating a perfect stranger, which is a pretty icky feeling. The anger, combined with stress about lots of other things going on this month drove me to eat three of those big delicious scones over the course of the day. So now I feel physically icky, too.


* (an aside regarding my hatred of that word) When I was growing up, this was the only thing my mother ever said about food. Something was "fattening," and thus to be avoided or eaten in small quantities or it was "not fattening" and could be eaten freely. I never learned a damn thing about nutrition, never had a conversation about how my body needed certain types of food for nourishment and that other foods and chemicals found in junk food were bad for my body. The only bad thing food could do to me was make me fat. The only good thing it could do was not make me fat.

My trainer is a flake

I think I'm in a fight with my trainer. This isn't a real problem, but it's a small annoyance in the middle of a month that is turning out to be full of small annoyances, so I'm going to go ahead and bitch about it. I've said before that I adore him. I do. He's very good at his job -- clearly knowledgeable, creative, kind. It's obvious he's thinking about me and my progress and my limitations, rather than just throwing the same stuff at me he throws at every client. Also he's good company and if he's had enough coffee, he gossips about the other trainers, which is endlessly entertaining.

But he is a flake. He is late about half the time. The other half, he texts me right before we're supposed to meet and asks to reschedule. If I get that text the day before, I'm really impressed by how organized he is that week. That's how low my standards have gotten. To his credit, he always remembers to reschedule and always says if he knows he'll be late. He usually apologizes. I know he takes his job really seriously, but I don't think he gets how irresponsible it is to be so unreliable.

The last two weeks went like this: Last Tuesday he asked me (the day before -- woohoo!) to meet at 6:00 instead of 6:30. For me that means getting up at 5:20 so I can get to the gym 10-15 minutes early to warm up. I said yes without complaint, and even though I woke up Tuesday morning with both a cold and cramps, I showed up at 5:45. He arrived at 6:10. Yesterday I left for the gym at 6:05, checking my phone for messages before heading out. I warmed up, I stretched, I waited. At 6:45 I assumed he wasn't coming and worked out on my own, listening to the horribly annoying gym music because I'd come without my ipod, expecting to be following orders. Got home to a text he'd sent at 6:10 saying he'd been out sick all week and could I do Wednesday morning instead. I'm not unsympathetic to his need to stay home sick, but 6:10? Really? I texted back that I wanted to go to my yoga class Wednesday and asked if he could try to cancel earlier in the future since by 6:10 I'm out of the house without my phone or my ipod. I don't think 30 minutes notice is too much to ask. I really don't. It's Wednesday evening now and he still hasn't responded. No offer of another day to reschedule, no apology, no argument. It's extremely uncharacteristic of him not to communicate, so I can only assume that he is either annoyed or guilty. Either way, kind of childish.

Like I said, not a big problem. In the grand scheme of things, it's not disrupting anything except the inside of my head, but I'm kind of sick of it.

The Green Microgym

Of all the things I do to destroy the earth, the one I feel most guilty about is belonging to my gym. It's an environmental nightmare. When I think about the dozens of electrical cardio machines, the heat in winter and heavy-duty air-conditioning in summer, the horrible toxic cleaning products used all over the building, the hundreds of towels laundered every day, and the fact that we are all in there working so hard, expending so much human energy that goes nowhere, I feel like my head is going to explode. And I know I've read articles about people who power their homes from one exercise bike -- human energy generating electricity! -- how cool is that? They powered the Times Square new year's ball that way this year. Left a couple bikes out for anyone who walked by to ride until they filled up enough batteries to light all those little bulbs. I've been obsessing about this for months -- why don't all gyms function this way? Why don't any?

I thought maybe in California -- there must be at least one. And then I found it. It's in Portland, Oregon, which makes even more sense than California, because people can work out outside in California. In Oregon it's always drizzling. It's called The
Green Microgym and I dearly wish I could be a member. They use solar energy, have floors of recycled rubber and cork, allow members to turn on lights, fans and TVs only when using them, have double flush toilets, use non-toxic cleaning supplies, etc... And they have those bikes that generate electricity and give members cash back for time spent riding them. The owner, Adam Boesel does phone consultations for those interested in opening a green microgym or greening their existing gym. I am so impressed with him. I hope gyms will start moving in this direction. It makes so much sense -- offers all the same services as any other gym at less cost to everyone and with less damage to the planet.

Spread the word.

Do I really have to talk about this?

I'm afraid I do.

I don't usually get into other pieces of my life here, but it's all twisted up in body stuff, so I will. I'm single and heterosexual. I do the online dating thing. I don't particularly like it, but I don't really have other places to meet men, so it's what I do. One of the horrifying things about online dating is that you can see right there in black and white that many, many men are very specific about what you need to look like to date them. Mostly, they don't want you to be fat. Some of them want to date someone between 5" and 6" but not over 130 pounds. Do they know what 130 pounds would look like on a 6" woman. Well, obviously not, since she'd be dead. Anyway, they're not all like that and while it does hurt my feelings sometimes, I am also aware that (at every size I've been) I am like most people in the world: some people will find me attractive and some people won't. Frankly, I have no interest in dating someone who doesn't find me attractive.

Only this weird things is happening where my body is changing and I look different and I had this online profile with a picture of me (a picture I like -- wind is blowing my hair in my face and I am laughing at something my little sister is telling me and I look like myself) and it no longer represents what I look like. So I changed the picture. I posted the one I mentioned awhile back. It's a nice picture. I am laughing at my nephew. I look like myself. And I suppose I look more accurately like myself now.

A few days ago, someone wrote to me, asked if I wanted to chat, said he'd like to know more about me. I'm usually wary when they don't say anything more specific than that, but I looked at his profile and he actually sounded like someone I'd like -- we had some interests in common, he sounded like a grown-up, he sounded kind -- so I said hello, mentioned that we had the same favorite book and said, "Ask me anything." He responded by asking me out to coffee. Sure. I'm all about a face-to-face meeting. I believe you learn very little by corresponding with someone you haven't met. So we made a plan to meet tomorrow morning and he asked if I'd send him another picture, "...just to be on the safe side." I assumed he wanted to be sure he recognized me. But then I had this dilemma: I don't have another recent picture. I have a handful of pictures I've used before -- the one that shows me laughing at my sister and two or three others -- but in all of them I am somewhere between 25 and 50 pounds heavier than I am now. I look different. And apparently the way in which I look different is a big deal to a lot of men. Ugh. I am at the same time vain, wanting to send a picture of me right now, not just thinner but fitter, happier, more at ease in my skin -- I think all of those things make a difference --and I am resentful that it makes a difference. I like those older pictures. I think I look good in them. Why should I not send a picture in which I look good? In any case, I didn't have the option of another new picture, so I sent an older one. In it, I'm about 25 pounds heavier than I am now, which is about 18 pounds heavier than I was in the picture he's already seen. I refused to mention the change in my size, but I did say that I didn't have another recent picture and that this one was a few years old.

I got an email from him ten minutes later: "I've changed my mind, sorry. Good luck."

I feel so icky about the whole thing. I mean, he's being horribly rude. No one has ever done that to me before in years and years of online dating. And I find it odd that anyone could take a picture so seriously -- I've done this enough to know that people just look different in person. I never know if I'm attracted to someone until I meet him. Part of me, even though I now hate this man and would never want to date him, is still insulted and kind of hurt. I don't like to think of myself as so unattractive that I'm not worth an hour in a coffee shop. I don't like to think that someone would find me attractive now or sometime in the future when I'm thinner than I am now, but would be repelled by a photo of me taken 25 pounds ago. I absorb that. I feel shame. I hate that I can still feel that.

You Know What's Hard?

Swinging a very large kettle bell for 45 minutes.

Which is how my week began. Okay, it's how my Tuesday began. My trainer is trying to teach me kettle bell swings, which is apparently an acquired skill, thus the 45 minutes of, "Okay, you're doing this part right, but you want to do this other thing differently." This was, mind you, a kettle bell two sizes bigger than the biggest one my gym owns. He brings his own. If done correctly, this is a lower body exercise. Because I'm still learning, I managed to exhaust every muscle I have. By the time I got to work Tuesday, I felt I would never be able to lift my arms again. Wednesday morning I went to power yoga (more on that another time), which felt good while I was doing it, but made my muscles more tired. Am only just now feeling mostly recovered after resting today. Damn.

I've been delinquent here. I'll catch up. This was what I could write today without doing too much thinking. Between the muscle fatigue and my world being completely covered in ice, I'm not much for thinking.

Trust

My goal for this week, (because, yeah, I do kind of have goals even though I try to be mellow about them) is to not gain more than a pound. After a few days of eating with abandon, I seem to have swung back to a more moderate place yesterday, and I have been working out as much as ever. I'm going to my trainer's class this afternoon. My weight fluctuates from day to day, but I go by my Weight Watchers weigh ins on Monday evenings. Right now I'm at about the same place as last week, so if the next couple days go well, I might even lose. Every single time this happens -- I eat in a way that feels out of control for awhile and then I work my way back to a place that feels better -- I am relieved to have made it back and comforted that it hasn't really damaged my efforts to lose weight. I feel almost, almost but not quite able to trust it.

As I wrote on Thursday, I am trying to banish the voice that tells me eating a lot of crap is bad. And part of that is about the fact that it's not bad. Bacon has no ethical value attached to it. Eating bacon isn't like torturing puppies or cheating on taxes or even driving a car. Gaining weight isn't bad. Nor is being fat. I'm working on that. But I also recognize that I am trying to lose weight. I want to lose weight. It's not necessary, it's not the right thing to do, it's not me doing good. It's something I want. So the other piece of banishing The Voice is trusting that a little setback like a craving for pizza or two parties in two days at which I choose to eat delicious food, does not derail my efforts to lose weight. It doesn't put back the 65 pounds I've lost, it doesn't take away my remarkable biceps, and it doesn't mean I will be eating that way forever. And even though I've seen it happen time and time again, I apparently don't quite trust it yet because I am still feeling that relief when I make it to the other side.

Voices in my Head

That said, regarding the bacon, I have been indulging in not so healthy foods a lot this week. I ate too many cookies on Monday (Trader Joe's Peppermint Joe's O's, which are entirely irresistible.) On Tuesday I ate pizza for dinner and gingerbread with whipped cream for dessert. Wednesday I ate leftover pizza for lunch and some cookies and later lasagna and all sorts of other delicious heavy things at a dinner party. It's funny to listen to my internal monologue while making decisions about what to eat. A voice says to make healthier choices and then another says to go ahead and eat what I want because thus far, that has worked out pretty well for me, has left me feeling indulged, not deprived, and then allows me to go back to healthy stuff. The first voice comes back then to say perhaps I should feel badly about what I've eaten and perhaps I should make extra healthy choices now, since yesterday didn't go so well. Voice two tells me that kind of thinking leads to feelings of obligation and guilt and that doesn't work for me. It tells me to eat bacon for breakfast because that's actually a good way to start the year. It tells me that I am happy in the grand scheme of things and that I am looking forward to my next workout. It tells me that the brunch I'm going to in a little while will offer more treats and that it will be just fine for me to eat them because after that, life goes back to normal and I'll be buying and cooking my own food and most of it will be delicious and healthy.

I love the second voice and I wish I could live without the first. I'm grateful to have come to a place that allows me to see that the first voice is unhealthy. I used to believe that the first voice was Right. I believed it had my best interest at heart and that by not listening to it, I was sabotaging myself. I know now not to listen to it, but I don't know how to make it go away. I wish I could recognize that I'm eating a lot of junk this week and truly, purely not worry about it. For now I will have to at least embrace my desire not to worry about it.

New Year's Bacon

I began the year this morning with bacon. It seemed the thing to do. Because I want my year to have bacon in it. And also cashmere, so that's what I'm wearing. These things feel symbolic -- creating the kind of life I want, the kind of luxuries I think I deserve, in the coming year. It's nicer than resolutions. We all know that resolutions beget failure and guilt and I am so anti failure and guilt. The closest I came to a real New Year's Resolution was sometime around Rosh Hashona a couple years ago I swore never to accept another plastic bag. I have kept to it and am pleased. But there was no emotional baggage (excuse me) attached to that decision and it didn't stink of "self-improvement." We don't need to improve ourselves, we need to figure out how to live better and happier lives. For me, bacon and cashmere are part of that. So are strength training and yoga and soup with kale. So is spending time with people I love and being kind as often as I am able. So is avoiding plastic bags and other disposable things. So if I were to resolve, I would resolve to remember what makes me feel good and do it more often.

Wishing anyone out there a joyful 2009.