And that title about sums it up. 

I got back Monday afternoon, but haven’t been able to rouse myself to do much since then.  I think it’s a combination of exhaustion and the kind of food I was eating while I was in Missouri.  My body is all out of whack like WHOA.  I just feel sort of stagnant: physically, mentally, emotionally.  Like I’m swimming underwater and everything is heavy.  It’s weird. 

(It probably doesn’t help that I pretty much forgot to take all those supplements for my medical crap while I was there.  That might have a TEENY TINY EENSY BEENSY bit of something to do with it.  :P)

So I got nothing today.  Except, I’m back. 

FWIW, the wedding was beautiful, and it was good to see my friend again.  I’ll have to make sure I don’t let 4 more years go by before I see her again. 

Just wanted to say thanks to everyone for the snack ideas.  I’m getting ready to get on a plane in a couple of hours, and I don’t know if I’ll have time to post while I’m gone.

I’m really looking forward to seeing my friend, though: we haven’t seen each other face-to-face in 4 years!  Holy cow! 

Talk/write you all soon!

Marste

Ok, I’m leaving (*sings* ooooon a jet plane . . . ) town on Wednesday morning.  (At 7:00AM!!!  Who flies that early??  Well, me, apparently, but seriously!  That’s EARLY!  Especially since it means I have to be at the airport - which, thank God is close to my house - by 5:30AM!!  There is no God.  :P)

What?  Oh, yeah.  The subject of the post.  Right.

So I’m staying with my friend’s best friend, whom I’ve never met, but who is being gracious enough to provide me with a place to stay and food to eat.  (She’s got a big ol’ Thank You present coming her way after I get home!)  But here’s the thing: I can’t exacly turn up my nose at whatever she offers me, because that would be bad manners.  BUT I also know that she cooks a lot of pasta and stuff like that, which yanno, messes with the hypoglycemia and makes me feel like CRAP. 

I’m hoping she’ll let me cook a couple of the nights I’m there (”Oh no, really please, it’s the LEAST I can do!” - I’m good at that Minnesota Nice stuff: the sincere kind, not the snarky kind), and I know we’ll go out to eat once or twice, but overall, does anyone have any ideas for NOT feeling like total crap all the time?  I just don’t want to be one of those people who shows up going, “Oh, thanks for giving me a room and feeding me - that’s really generous of you.  And by the way, I can’t eat flour, sugar, starch of almost any kind, ground meat, any cheese and oh, do you have organic veggies?  Because I only eat organic veggies.”  We all know those people.  (And they wonder why I stop inviting them to my dinner parties.  Ahem.)

So how do I keep from being sick all the time without being totally rude?

Help!

(Also, check this out for “Minnesota Nice” - I almost peed my pants, it was so funny.  Although that might be because I have family from the MidWest, and that dialogue isn’t THAT far off the mark!)

I need a giggle.

I really like some of the LOLCats, but this?  Cracks. Me. Up.

Ok, as promised!  Here’s the thing: After that last post, a few people commented or implied (but not in a bad way) that wow, they thought they were ok with themselves . . . but apparently not so much.  And it was a LEEEEEETLE TEENY BIT depressing.

I get it.  But here’s the thing (again), speaking TOTALLY personally, if I can get angry about something like this, I can usually use it in a MUCH stronger and more constructive way, internally.

So the quote of the day?

“Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”
Naomi Wolf

Look at that quote, and think about all the things you could think about if you didn’t think so much about what you ate and how you looked.  What could you do?  How many advanced degrees could you have gotten with that brainpower?  How much more could you accomplish? 

Several years ago, I went on a modified fruit-and-juice fast.  It was modified because I ate dinner every night, but the rest of the day I mostly drank juice.  And sometime late in the 2nd day I realized that I felt like I had so much EMPTY SPACE in my head (no jokes from the peanut gallery, LOL).  I felt like I had all this space to think extra thoughts because I WASN’T CONSTANTLY THINKING ABOUT FOOD.  I wasn’t constantly thinking about what I could eat, what I couldn’t eat, whether or not I should or shouldn’t have eaten something, how many calories, fat grams, FIBER (thanks a LOT, Weight Watchers).  I just felt . . . free.  And I wondered: if I felt this way all the time, how much more could I accomplish?  How much LESS overwhelming would my life seem?

Whether or not you’re a feminist, whether or not you agree or disagree with Naomi Wolf, just think for a MINUTE about how much time you devote in your mental and emotional spaces to food.  Ten percent?  Thirty percent?  Forty?  Fifty?  NINETY?  I think my ratio is probably around 75%, and that’s AFTER I’ve worked on it a LOT.  I’d guess it used to be well over 90%.  Really think about it: what could you do with all that extra brainpower?  (I mean, I know the stereotype is that women are bad at math, but come on, how bad at it could we BE?  We’re COUNTING ALL THE FREAKIN’ TIME!  Calories, Points, body fat percentages . . . don’t tell ME we’re bad at math!  We’re just directing our skills at mundane things!)

So here’s how I think about it.  I imagine that “perfect” scenario that I metioned in the last post.  And I realize that if I were to wake up in perfect health tomorrow, all my fitness goals met, etc., I STILL would not be happy with myself.  I would STILL feel fat and gross.

But why?

If I had everything I THINK I want, why on EARTH would I still be unhappy?  Because I live in a society that assigns VALUE AND WORTH to the way that I LOOK.  Read that again.  Value and worth to the way that I LOOK.  The. Way. That. I. LOOK.  Whether or not I am VISUALLY PLEASING to OTHER PEOPLE.  THAT is how society determines a large portion of my value.

Society does not determine my worth by how fast I can run, how much I can lift, whether or not I’m a good person, whether or not I give to charity.  My friends and family do, but society doesn’t.  At FACE VALUE (interesting term, don’t you think: the value of a face?) society looks me over, assesses my size, decides whether or not I take up too much SPACE for its liking, and then finds me either acceptable or unacceptable.

And I believe its assessment.

You know what?

FUCK. THAT.

Do you remember when your mother said, “If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it, too?”  Remember how infuriating that was?  Well, Mom was right, kids.  Because in those moments when we were whining about how everyone ELSE had one, everyone ELSE did it, everyone ELSE got to go, what we were really doing was learning to let society (in that case our immediate peer group) make our decisions for us.

Remember what I wrote yesterday about how we all like to think we’re independent thinkers, but none of us are?  Yeah.  We absorb all KINDS of things from our cultures, whether we want to or not.  How old we “should” be when we get married, how many kids make up a “normal” family, that we should “save for a rainy day,” etc.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing: a society can’t survive without some level of conformity from its members.  But when it comes to something as personal as the way I FEEL about myself, I call shenanigans on society.  Society at large does NOT get to determine whether or not I love myself.  It just doesn’t.  That’s when I get mad, and I holler my war cry:

“YOU ARE NOT THE BOSS OF MEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!”

Yeah, it’s childish, but it works for me.  It reminds me that when I feel like crap because I weigh more than I did in college (even though I haven’t had a bloody nose in FOREVER because, oh, I don’t know, I’M EATING NOW), that feeling is NOT mine.  It belongs to the outside world, but I’ve adopted it as my own.  I know someone who is fond of saying, “Don’t just THINK any thought that pops into your head!  You don’t know where that thought has been!  It could have come from ANYWHERE!”  It always cracks me up, but I think it’s pertinent here.  Are you thinking your OWN thoughts about your body?  Or are they thoughts you just picked up somewhere?  Get mad.  Get them out of your head.  Yell at them.  Curse at them.  Throw some pillows at imaginary forces who WANT you to hate your body, because really, WHO THE HELL ARE THEY TO TELL YOU HOW TO FEEL ABOUT YOURSELF?!?!?

I found that it was REALLY hard at first to get those social thoughts out.  But it got easier.  I hope it continues to get easier.  Now I see them sneaking in the back door and most of the time I holler, “YOU!!  OUT!!!!” and they slink away.  (Sometimes after that I find myself muttering like a crazy person: “I don’t know WHAT that was all about, but I am NOT going to entertain that CRAP in my HEAD anyMORE.”  Kind of like a crazy mom, LOL.)

Now, without any time to digest all that, here’s another one for you.  In our society Fat=Bad, and Thin=Good, right?  So when we feel “fat,” are we really just feeling “bad?”  Check out this comment (edited slightly for length) by Rebster from another post at Shapely Prose, which sums it up so much better than I can:

Something that might be important to remember is that (as I have learned in “When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies” as well as other FA positive books) that saying that we “feel fat” or “feel thin” is really code. The code is that fat can cover a multiple of negative feelings/experiences and thin a multiple of positive feelings experiences.
Fat is not bad. What do we really mean when we “feel fat”? (unattractive? unwanted? lonely? unsuccessful?).  It seems that people in general connect fat with negative things and thin with positive things ([asking if] you’ve lost weight when really you look happy). I know I do this to myself, as well. The key, for me, has been to figure out what I really mean when I tell myself I’m “fat.” (Which is different than acknowledging the fact that, yes, I am fat, and that’s ok.).

So if I accept that fat isn’t inherently BAD, then the next time I feel fat, what am I feeling?  I’m probably feeling an emotion connected to my perceptions of what it MEANS to be fat.  In other words, “I feel fat” might very well translate into, “I feel fat and gross and ugly and like no one will ever want me, ever ever ever.”  No?  Just me?  Oooooookay.  (Liars.)

And then I have to stop.  And I have to ask myself, “Why would being fat make me any of those things?  Why do I think that?”  And the answer of course, takes me back to the top of the post.  To a society that determines my worth based on how I LOOK, according to standards that THEY determine.  And to that I say:

“Fuck off.  YOU ARE NOT THE BOSS OF ME!!!!!!”

So, here’s the thing: I am staunchly anti-diet-for-weight-loss.  Staunchly.  Did I mention staunchly?  (Wow, that’s starting to not look like a word anymore: staunchly.  Staunchly.  Staunchlystaunchlystaunchly.  Weird.  Aaaaaaanyway.) 

I know all the reasons people give for dieting, and mostly they seem to boil down to 2 ideas: people want to lose weight “for [their] health” or they want to look better in a swimsuit.  Ironically, I don’t really have a problem with the latter.  While I wish that every single person would be happy with the way they look and rock that bikini on the beach whether fat or thin, the fact is that it is very hard to do that in our culture, and not everyone is cut out to fight every battle.  In other words, I see a problem with the paradigm, but not with the individuals who go along to get along, so to speak. If you’ve absorbed the message that your body isn’t “right” so much that every time you walk past a mirror or a window you’re plunged into a swamp of self-hatred and body-loathing, I can’t fault you for doing everything in your power to fix that state of mind, EVEN IF it includes things I don’t agree with on principle. 

So.  In an odd way, I can respect someone who says, “I’m losing weight to rock that bikini.”  I think it’s sad that we’ve come to that - I’ve been there, and I know what it feels like to hate my body - but I can understand it.  But as a society, why do we treat it as a big moral triumph?  Honestly, how is changing your body any different than changing your hair color?  Dieting might take more work/obssession, but that doesn’t automatically make it worthy of the praise we heap on it in this culture.  When I colored my hair a got a few, “hey nice hair” comments, but I didn’t discuss every freakin’ detail of the bleaching process to a bunch of fascinated ladies in the lunch room for the whole hour.  (And before you say I’m exaggerating, please think about how much time you or your friends spend talking about what you eat.  I’ll bet it’s more time than you realize.  I know it was for me.)

But if someone says they are dieting only for their health, I’ve got to call bullshit on that one.  Frankly, there are so many conflicting studies that I don’t think anyone can say with any certainty that thin is healthier than fat.  There are a bunch of links on the “Links and Studies” page, above, so I’m not going to go into a lot of it here. 

But how do we know if we’re doing what we’re doing for our “health” or because of cultural brainwashing?  We all like to think we’re independent thinkers, but really none of us are.  God knows I really thought for a long time that if I didn’t lose weight, I was doomed to be unhealthy.  But when I was at my lowest weight (which ironically put me at the middle-to-low end of “normal” according to the *cough*bullshit*cough* BMI), do you know how I’d gotten there?  Eating under 500 calories a day, sometimes less, and exercising at least 60 minutes a day, sometimes as much as 90 minutes, 7 days a week.  Was I healthy?  Um, no.  I blew out my (other) knee, blew out a couple of discs in my back, had a constant cold, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t focus, had recurring bloody noses . . . I was NOT.  HEALTHY.  But I was thin. 

And for a long time, I really thought that if I gained weight I would be not only fatandugly, but UNHEALTHY (because obviously, I was a paragon of health before).  Even after that crazy period in college, when I started eating more and exercising a little less and started gaining weight, even when I pendulumed back the other way into binge eating and gained even more weight, I thought that THE REASON I WAS UNHEALTHY WAS BECAUSE I WASN’T THIN. 

I was saying that to someone one day, and she asked me the $64,000 question.  Are you ready?  It rocked my world, and made me realize that underneath my belief that I was FINE with my body, REALLY, I JUST WANTED TO BE HEALTHIER . . . I still hated myself with a fiery passion.  And then my REAL internal work began.  Here you go:

What if you did all the “right” things, got the “right” amount of exercise, had perfect blood pressure and cholesterol numbers, never ate anything but unprocessed, organic food, could run 5-10 miles easily and without getting out of breath and every doctor you saw said you were the healthiest person they’d ever seen?  Pretty great, right?  Now imagine that you wake up tomorrow and all those things are true, BUT YOUR BODY IS STILL EXACTLY THE SAME.

Are you happy with yourself?  Or do you hate yourself just as much?  (I know the first time I heard that, I felt a wave of physical revulsion wash through me that I could not BELIEVE.)

Edited to add: The next question, after “YOUR BODY IS . . . THE SAME,” is, would you feel differently if in order to acheive all that, you had to GAIN weight?  Would you do it?  Would you rather meet all the above criteria and weight 50-100 pounds more than you do now?  Or conversely, would you rather lose your desired amount of weight at the PRICE of those things?  What if you could wake up tomorrow at 125, 150, whatever you wish your weight were, but you would have none of the health benefits above?  (I am glad to say that most days I wouldn’t choose to be skinny and unhealthy, but I’m a little ashamed to admit that most days I would not gain 50-100 pounds to improve my health, either.  I’m working on it.  It’s some tough shit.)

THAT’S how you root out the cultural brainwashing.

So, I just wanted to say that I’m doing really well on the Hundred Pushup challenge.  I’ve started it at LEAST 3 times now.  LOL, eventually I’ll get to Day 2!!!  (In all honestly, I will eventually finish it: dude, I’d be stoked if I could even do FIFTY!!!  That’d be AWESOME!  :D)

In other news I’m going to my mom’s for the weekend to make a bridesmaid dress for my friend’s wedding in 2 weeks, so I don’t know if I’ll be posting much for the next few days.  Regular posting will commence Monday.  Anything before then is your lucky break!  Ha! 

See (write?) you all Monday!

Ok, well I’m not really serious about the perfection thing.  Well, I mean, I AM, but I know I won’t get it.  (Right?  No chance?  Are you sure?  Damn.)

I am a SERIOUS perfectionist.  I’ve gotten a lot better over the last few years, but it’s that part of me that adheres SO RIGIDLY to a diet right up until I screw it up and then chuck it all because I FAILED.  There is no “progress” in my head: there is Excellence and there is Failure.  I’m working on that, but it’s funny to see how much I’ve really internalized it - that mentality pops up in all kinds of odd places. 

Part of that comes from being labeled a “gifted” child.  I was a really smart kid, and I never really had to learn persistence as a child: being good at stuff was just built in to my brain, so I never had to be persistent about anything.  There is a line in the movie “Good Will Hunting,” where Minnie Driver asks Matt Damon about how he can think organic chemistry is easy.  And he says something like, “Some people just get stuff.  Mozart looked at a keyboard and saw music.  He could just play.  Me, I see a bunch of black and white keys that mean nothing.  But when it comes to stuff like organic chemistry . . . I can just play.”  And I was that kid.  Nothing mental was hard, nothing academic required work - I could just play.  (My mom says the first time I got into a ballet class and realized I wasn’t just perfect at it without trying, that it was like seeing a big “TILT” sign over my head: it just didn’t compute,  LOL.)  But I think that translates into an expectation that I will ALWAYS just be good at everything, all the time.  And it’s a pretty deeply ingrained expectation because in many ways, it’s always been true - at least in the ways we encounter when we’re kids. 

As an adult, though?  It doesn’t really work that way.  Nothing is easy or cut-and-dried - there are all these shades of grey.  And that’s the part I struggle with the most, I think: that whole concept of baby steps, of getting back on the proverbial horse, with the idea that I won’t stumble across one thing that is the Right and Perfect Diet (or Life) Plan For Me And Which I Will Never Screw Up. 

This might be a bad time to mention this, but I have no idea where this post is going.  I thought I knew, but . . . um . . . apparently not. 

Anyway.

So it seems like a bonehead thing to say, “Well, THAT idea didn’t work for the week that I tried it, after 31 years of doing something totally different.  So it must not be the right idea!”  Seems silly, right?  But that’s always my reaction.  Hell, I don’t know, maybe that’s EVERYONE’S reaction.  Beats me.  But there was a lot of good stuff in the comments to the last post about baby steps and getting back on the horse and reframing and not giving up. 

And the other thing I have to remember is that I have to find something that works for ME.  If I know it makes me crazy to think “I can’t have [x],” then I have to find a way not to think that. 

It’s funny how sometimes the Powers that Be (God, Universe, Spirit, Great Cosmic Muffin, whatever) show up in your life when you need them most.  I came across a post at All My Jiggly Bits (I can’t write that without giggling) yesterday called “HELP: What is Eating Right?” that addressed a LOT of the same stuff I’m dealing with.  Down on the 18th comment, Em said:

Limiting your consumption of something that you like isn’t necessarily ‘dieting’. It can just mean keeping that thing special. You’ll enjoy it more if you don’t have it all the time.

And in some ways the end result of that action isn’t really any different from “cheating,” but it IS a way of thinking about it differently: a way of looking forward to something instead of walking through the days thinking “Must not eat [x].”  And the word “treat” has SUCH a different connotation for me than the word “cheat.”  Because I have NEVER been a “cheater” - I have ALWAYS been “perfect.”  But even perfect people get a treat now and then, right?  (Hm.  Suddenly I feel like a performing dog, LOL.)

So I won’t chuck the new eating plan just beacuse I had a hard moment (or two).  And I might do some reframing, as recommended.  And I’ll remember that what works for someone else might not work quite the same for me, and that THAT’S OK.

And now I’m really tired of writing.  LOL

Hey, I just noticed that my last post was my 100th post.  Neat! 

Anyway.

So after yesterday when I was all (insert holier-than-thou voice here), “Oh I haven’t binged in forever and it’s all because of Intuitive Eating, and oh, by the way I’m kind of on a diet, but kind of not, because it’s just for my health, but I’m losing weight and not eating refined carbs” and on and on and on? 

Um, yeah.  Last night?  Was not so great.  I’ve been really depressed for the last couple of days (ok, 4 or 5 days), for no reason that I can pin down.  Seriously.  The kind of depressed where I left the grocery store on Saturday, got in the car, and just started crying.  No reason for it.  Wasn’t even sad about anything specific. 

I actually wondered if it was because I was eating fewer carbs, since carbs are nature’s Special Mood Regulators (”potatoes not prozac” and all that jazz).  I wasn’t totally sure, but the fact that I’d been thinking about bread and sugar a LOT over the last week (you know, when I was trying not to eat so much of it) made me think that it was either my body telling me it needed carbs, or it was my brain obsessing over them because OMG I CAN’T EAT THEM!!!  *sigh*  And neither one of those scenarios is a good one.

So last night was my very first binge in a VERY long time.  Interesting how it coincides so neatly with NOT eating intuitively, dammit.  And it wasn’t really a “binge” by anyone’s standards but mine: I had a couple of those “chick beers” (you know those Hard Lemonade things?  I LOVE those) and a piece of cake that was in the freezer.  And some coleslaw.  And 2 glasses of wine.  (But it was red wine, so it was good for me, right?  RIGHT?  LOL)  But it was a binge by MY standards - not because of how much I ate but because of WHY and HOW I was eating: mindlessly and uncontrollably, standing over the sink just shoveling it in as fast as I could (which is really embarassing to admit, btw).  And it was specifically sugar that I was after, which ties back in with trying to eat fewer refined carbs and either needing them physically or obsessing over them mentally (I’m still not sure which it was - probably a combination of the two).

I don’t know.  Maybe I’ll sort of split the difference and go back to eating oatmeal in the morning for breakfast, and see what that does to my system.  The really sucky part is that I was kind of enjoying the weight loss (which yeah, I know is dangerous territory for me, but there you go).  And now the thought of eating oatmeal every morning freaks me right the hell out: BUT WHAT IF I STOP LOSING WEIGHT???  SCREW FEELING BETTER!  I WANNA BE SKINNY!!11!!!!eleventy-one!!!

Ahem.  Crazy Bitch, anyone?  Anyone?  If you want her, you can have her.  No? No takers?  Damn.

Either way, I’m back to the question: when you know something makes you sick, how do you eat less of it without obsessing over it to the point of insanity?  You know, that whole, “Must not eat sugar, must not eat sugar, MUST EAT SUGAR” phenomenon. 

Maybe I just need to make myself really, really, REALLY sick a few times.  Aversion therapy works wonders on stuff like that.  (Kidding, I’m kidding.  I think.)

So you know what’s weird?  The fact that I have had some serious writer’s block since I got so many new visitors.  Seriously.  Nothing seems good enough to say suddenly, now that I know people out there are actually reading this, LOL. 

I had an idea that this would happen, because MizFit asked if she could link over here before she actually did, and I had a moment of panic when I thought about it.  Then I thought about it some more and decided I was being a dork, and that maybe possibly this should be something I should deal with - “this” being the overwhelming need to have EVERYONE like me ALL THE TIME.  Because you know, the more people who visit here, the more likely someone won’t like it (me), and well, you know, I CAN’T HAVE THAT, RIGHT?? 

Lordy.

The funny thing is, that people-pleaser part of me is only half the story.  The other half of me is a, “You don’t like what I have to say?  Kiss my ass” sort of person.  So it’s a little weird to have those two dynamics coexisting in my head.  I’m not sure how that works, actually, but there it is.

So mostly this is kind of a filler post, where I remind myself that I don’t have to actually be all profound and entertaining and educational and whatever other pompous adjectives I can think of.  It’s still my journal.  And the whole, “What if people don’t like me?  I should CHANGE! BE DIFFERENT! PLEASE EVERYONE!” panic is just freakin’ ridiculous.

Did I mention that’s easier said than done sometimes, though? 

Oh, I did want to say that in the comments to the Intuitive Eating post, there seemed to be an overarching theme of not being able to trust yourself around eating whatever you want.  And honestly, that was the hardest, scariest thing for me to deal with, but this post helped a LOT.  Mostly because that “Kiss my ass if you don’t like it” part of me does really well with the idea that “You-are-not-the-boss-of-me.”  (That was actually the old title for this blog in Blogger.  LOL)  So the part in there where the author writes this:

I mean, think about it for two seconds. People are selling plans that allow you to “eat what you want,” to the tune of billions. That’s lunacy. Because I love you, I shall offer you the Kate Harding Lifetime Diet Plan — which permits you to eat whatever you want — absolutely free! It goes like this:

DAY 1:

Eat whatever you want. It’s your body. You’re allowed.

DAY 2 THROUGH DEATH:

Repeat Day 1.

That part about “It’s your body.  You’re allowed” was fucking REVOLUTIONARY for me.  It was sort of one of those “Duh” moments like, “Well, DUH, who ELSE do I have to answer to?  The people who tell me what I’m ’supposed’ to eat/weight/aspire to/think?  THEY ARE NOT THE BOSS OF ME!!!”  *grin*  See how that “Boss-of-me” thing works?  Sometimes it’s handy.

So I really, really, REALLY recommend going and reading that post (and if you have time, the comments, but there are a LOT of them, just fyi). 

And for what it’s worth, when I started making an effort to really listen to my body, and to give it what it wanted (even if that was sugar or chips or whatever), I found that after about a week or 10 days my binges stopped and that most of the time I really didn’t want the junk food, anyway.  I was just eating it because it was there, or because I was in a situation where I had “permission” or because . . . hell I don’t know.  Maybe I was afraid of a national frosting shortage (because frosting is the whole POINT of cake, you know).

Aaaaaaanyway.  I think I have my mental space back from the “Please everyone” monster, now.  So that’s good.