Good With Cheese

This is post #100 here at my little blog, and  I wanted to have something awesome to say, some recap of my journey here.

But then today happened and it’s all gone to hell.

I spent hours with the Weight Watchers today.  I heard about Points, and the fun of losing weight and how grand it is watching the scale move down, down, down, yay, yay, yay.

That, combined with shopping (which is always a giant kick in the head for me) and a too-big lunch, left me feeling shaky and uncertain and too big for my skin.  I came home, rattled around the house, ate a snickerdoodle, a couple of waffles, then fell face first into a 2-pound bag of Reese’s Pieces. 

I don’t even like Reese’s Pieces.

Okay, now a quick flashback: in January 2007, when I decided to see how skinny I could get, I’d been stuck at home for several days due to an ice storm and found myself watching (this is embarrassing) this ridiculous show on CMT about Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders?  And there were these beautiful young women being told to lose weight and something in me just sort of clicked.  And I thought, hey, I can lose some more weight, too.  If I just work hard enough, I can lose as much weight as I want.  And then things went kind of crazy for four months.

Flash-forward to today: So, I’m face-down in the Reese’s Pieces and flipping through channels and OHMYGOD it’s a new season of that stupid cheerleader show.

I was on the treadmill before I even realized what was happening.  I just pulled myself off (with minimal tears) after 4 miles and I’m going to count that as a small victory, because it’s still early and I could have easily knocked out another 10 miles before bedtime.

Now here I sit: sweaty, queasy, tired, anxious, confused, alone, and terrified.  I’m like the seven dwarfs of suck.

I want my disordered behaviors back so badly today.  I want them; I want to feel disciplined and controlled and strong.  I also want to keep this all a secret, because I don’t want to disappoint anyone. 

But no secrets has been my rule for these past 99 posts, so I’m going to put this out there, send these anxious, horrible feelings out into the ether and out of just my head, and hope for the best.

Tomorrow’s a new day.

Today I would like to pile up pillows on the bed, drag Little Dog into my lap, and spend the day watching TV and eating bowls of cookie dough.

My mouth has been screaming for sugar this week; it’s been engaging in inappropriate fantasies about gently peeling the chocolate off a Swiss Roll, unrolling the cake, and licking the cream out of the center.  It’s been imagining splitting a Whopper between my front teeth, then taking a long drink of Dr Pepper and letting the malty center dissolve in the flood.

I don’t think my body is asking for these things; it seems to be my mouth and my Crazy, acting in concert with one another.  I am irritable and sad, anxious and tired.  Sugar and caffeine seem like the answer, though I’ve been at this long enough to know they are not.

Damn self-examination.  I am sometimes so tired of having to look closely at myself, to ask so many questions.  I like rules — they tell me what to do without my having to exert any effort.  But I know that when I abdicate my authority to outside rules, well, that’s the road to disordered behavior for me.

So, I’ll sit here at my desk and in an hour or so I’ll be hungry, and I’ll eat my turkey sandwich and my veggies and focus on feeding my body, not my feelings.

It’s hard work, all this, because the answers are not simple and the questions come back again and again and again.

But what’s the choice?  I either do it, or I quit.  And I can’t quit.

Though I wouldn’t mind a day off every now and then.

One day back in 8th grade, our speech teacher had us all sit in a circle on the floor for most of 4th hour.  I sat cross-legged, because sitting on my shins resulted in my thighs looking far wider than they actually were. 

I hate that I remember being aware of that, but I was the only girl in that class who wasn’t willowy and lean; that meant I spent the better part of that year hyper-aware of how trunklike my thighs were, the way they spread out and over the edge of chairs and across bus seats, threatening to press against the person sitting next to me.  I remained in a state of perma-clench for most of that year, trying to control those thighs.

Anyway, we sat on the floor for an hour and I didn’t change position once, because if there’s anything worse than junior high thigh-spread, it’s being the fat 14-year-old rolling around on the floor in speech class.

At the end of class, the teacher dismissed us and everyone else popped up and zipped out the door.  I rose slowly (again, to avoid any unflattering positions), only to discover that not one, but both my feet had fallen completely, totally, Rip-van-Winkle-y, asleep.  Both ankles rolled outward, and down I went in a swirl of purple tunic and black stirrup pants.

Only a few people were left in the room to witness my mighty thudding tumble and the ensuing crawl to a desk to get myself up, but even thinking about it today makes my face burn with shame.

I missed school for three days because I couldn’t walk with two sprained ankles.  I spent those three days sitting at home, 100% certain that my classmates were laughing at me.

I have suspected for the past 30 years that my body was out to destroy me, that it existed solely to embarrass me, torment me, make me a laughingstock.  I have fallen down in stores, taken kickballs to the head in PE, tripped in hallways, slid down stairs, and disappeared beneath cars in icy parking lots.

I think now that maybe my body has just been trying to get my attention.  Maybe it thought that if I fell down enough flights of stairs, I’d start inhabiting my body and stop just living in my head, that I’d reconnect with the bones and muscles that were carrying me down those stairs in the first place.

In 8th grade, if I’d listened to the tingling in my feet, if I’d stopped caring about what my classmates were thinking about my body, I would have shifted to another position.  And when class was over, I would have risen with the rest of my classmates, sailed out the door, and avoided the sprained ankles and the humiliation.

Now I listen.  Because my body and me?  We’re playing for the same team.

The Weight Watchers and I have planned a Shopping Expedition to a larger city a few hours away this upcoming weekend.  While we do live right on the edge of the 2nd largest city in our state, we also live in a state that is, population-wise, wee.  So, “2nd largest” doesn’t mean much.

Anyway, shopping!  Yay!  Perhaps I can address my tragic lack of pants.  I’m tired of rotating the same three pairs of cargo pants and one pair of jeans.  I’m rarely work-appropriate in terms of the actual dress code, but things are getting a bit out of hand, even for me.  I look like a street urchin from Oliver Twist most days.  Or possibly Natty Gann.  Very professional.

My initial thought about the Shopping Expedition was this: “Hmm…should I buy new clothes right now considering the still-shifting nature of my weight?”

Lately, my ass seems to be contracting and expanding like a variable star; one day a pair of pants will be loose, three days later tight, the next week fit perfectly, repeat, repeat, repeat.  It’s maddening and making getting dressed unpredictable and fraught with body-acceptance peril.  There is frequent cursing.  Pants are thrown.  The dogs hide.  It’s ugly.

But to put off buying new clothes will probably only make that situation worse.  I just want to feel cute in this body because this body is cute.  It’s the exact-right body for me, for the live I’m living right now.  So, don’t I deserve to be dressed in clothes that make me feel like myself?  Don’t I deserve to get to go into my closet and choose from things I like, not just things that fit?

I think it’s basically an issue of trust.  I don’t completely trust my body quite yet.  I don’t trust that it’s going to choose one size (or very small range of sizes) and stay there; that’s why I still have clothes ranging from 4s to 12s in my house.  I don’t know where my body is headed and while it does seem to be holding rather tightly to the size 10 / mid-140s range, I’m scared to make an investment in clothing if I’m going to get larger or smaller.

Honestly, it’s kind of silly, isn’t it?  Like any clothing I buy right now has to last the rest of my life.  Like I won’t be buying new items of clothing next season (or next month).

If I’m going to feel good about my body, I have to extend self-care to include how I dress myself.  If that means spending a small fortune of my my husband’s money to get some saucy new clothes that may or may not fit in three months?

Well, I’m worth that.

Someone has pointed out to me that my saying diets don’t work is…kind of a lie, at least for me personally.

The fact is, when I went on my very first diet back in 2001, I weighed at least 187 pounds.  I say “at least” because that was my official doctor’s office weight about four months earlier.  I suspect I weighed more by the time I started the diet, because I had moved up a clothing size by that point, but as I didn’t own a scale, I don’t know what my true “starting weight” was. 

When I stopped dieting, I pretty speedily gained about 15 - 20 pounds, and now my body has settled here around 143 and doesn’t seem inclined to move more than 5 pounds in either direction (interesting sidenote: my original goal weight was 145 — odd that my body picked that as well).

But that is at least 44 pounds below my highest weight.  So, as this person pointed out, I can say that diets don’t work, but the one that brought me to my original goal?  Well, it seems to have kind of stuck.

I have a really different lifestyle now then I did in 2001.  I was decidedly sedentary then; now I get an hour or more of physical activity most every day.  I also eat in a very different way.  Back then, entire weeks would pass without me consuming a fruit or a vegetable; now at least half my grocery shopping is done in the produce section.

So, maybe my natural weight range is just kind of…broad?  Like, my body wants to be in the 140s when I’m pretty active and eating in a minimally processed kind of way, and it likes to go up to around 190 when I’m not working out and mostly consuming processed, refined foods?

I don’t have an answer for this person.  I don’t know why my body has maintained that weight loss for close to 6 years.  I’m eating more these days than I did while dieting and I have so much more muscle than I ever did pre-diet, so my body just seems to function in a different way.

Or maybe I’m just an exception, because the other women in my life, the ones who have been on and off diets numerous times in these same 6 years, none of them have maintained any long-term weight changes.  So my single experience doesn’t change the fact that, for most people, diets won’t work.

But how convincing is that coming from me?

There’s this vending machine at work that I pass by every day on my way to and from lunch.  I am a sucker for snack cakes, and so slot B-2 is where my eyes are always drawn.

Oh, B-2.  Some days you hold Twinkies, some days Honey Buns (which I suspect contain no actual honey), some days those creepy raspberry Zingers that have the coconut stuck all over them.  Yeah, those I can resist.  But every time I pass by, there’s something different in that slot — it may be the most exciting part of my day, checking out the new selection.

When I was at the peak of my disordered eating, it really didn’t matter what was in B-2; I would long for it regardless.  I’d never make direct eye contact, but instead would twitch my eyes repeatedly to the side, and OH.  The glistening cakes tucked inside their bright wrappers, their icing thickly spread and pressed against the plastic.  Some women fantasize about Hugh Laurie; I fantasized about running through a field holding hands with Little Debbie.

After I gave up the dieting, I ate my way fairly swiftly through a box of Twinkies.  Now an unopened box lives in my pantry, purchased who-knows-how-long-ago.  As I’ve learned with most other “forbidden” foods, it’s the wanting that makes them taste so good.  Twinkies are tasty for, like, the first bite.  Then the filling is too sweet and coats your mouth in what can only be described as a film, and the cake isn’t quite as moist and spongy as you had hoped, and ultimately, the whole thing falls quite short.

Every now and then, I think about a Hostess Cupcake with its whirly twirl of lacy icing across the top, and it sounds lovely, and so I buy one and eat it.  And then I’m done.  I don’t want another, or another dozen, because it’s not forbidden anymore.  I can really have another whenever I want, really and truly.  I believe that now.

I still check out B-2 when I walk by because, c’mon, SNACK CAKES.  But I don’t feel sad and distraught and freaked out by what I see there.  Snack cakes aren’t a test anymore.

I sometimes wonder how much my thinking has really changed in terms of my disordered eating, and then I realize something like this, some huge shift in how I think about food, and I’m so proud of myself.

And I’m also excited to see what other shifts are coming.

I’m playing with my nutrition a lot these days, trying to figure out what foods make me feel my best, my worst, my strongest, my most lethargic.  It’s interesting to make food choices based on function instead of caloric content, and while I always swore I’d never be one of those annoying “food-as-fuel” people, I’m starting to see that learning how different foods affect your body?  It’s not as sad or detached or joyless as “food-as-fuel” makes it sound.

I want to run faster.  I also want to be able to lift heavier weights and, damn it, I’m learning to do a real, non-cheater pull-up if it kills me.  And to achieve my fitness goals, I have to feed my body.  Restriction has no place in my life if I want to be stronger.  I need to eat, lots of food and frequently and the absolute best quality I can afford.  I need it.  My body needs it.  My heart and lungs and muscles and bones don’t care what size pants I wear; they just want to be as strong as possible.

So, I’m giving myself what I need, giving it without conditions, without restrictions, without rules about having to earn anything.

This sense of living in abundance is extending to other areas of my life as well.  I need a minimum of 8 hours of sleep a night, so I don’t really care how uncool it is to go to bed at 9 PM.  That’s what I need, so that’s what I do.

I also need time alone, so even though I’m thrilled to have my husband home, I’m going to honor my need for solitude and disappear for an hour or so every evening.

I’m done being miserly with myself, withholding food and rest and pleasure and fun until I meet some arbitrary standards.  I need what I need; denying that fact does not change that fact.  It only makes me unhappy and obsessive and so, so sad.

I’ve never thought I was worth all that much, so taking care of myself initially felt very uncomfortable and selfish, but I have learned this:

If you wait until you think you “deserve” it to begin caring for yourself, then you will be waiting for the rest of your life because something is always there to hold up a mirror to your perceived failures and flaws.

Stop waiting.  Just start doing.  After a while, you’ll wonder why you ever lived any other way. 

I went for a long run through my neighborhood yesterday morning at sunrise.  Normally, I’m a total treadmill girl, because the treadmill is indoors with the air conditioning and the television that distracts me from the burning in my lungs.  But alas, the treadmill also means I miss out on the very best part of running:  the quiet solitude part.

At sunrise in my neighborhood on a Saturday morning, there is only me awake.  Houses are still dark, newspapers wait in driveways, dogs bark sleepily from backyards.  It is so, so quiet; the only sounds are the smack-smack-smack of my shoes on the sidewalk and my one-two-three inhales and exhales.

It was just me.  Just me and the clouds turning all shades of cotton candy. 

 I could tell when 7 AM rolled around without even checking my watch, because everything started to wake up.  Cars backed out of garages and puttered down the street and the sun began to burn through the clouds.

All told, I was out for about an hour and came home aware of two things.

One: A morning run is less expensive than therapy and possibly just as effective.

And two: For the first time since I started running four years ago, I ran outside in the daylight and did not once think about how my jiggling ass must be completely grossing out the random strangers who were seeing it.

I think that’s a gold star day.

My mom and I eat lunch together most days because we work in adjoining buildings and we’re both die-hard brown-baggers.  Every day, there’s cookie exchange: I bring two Chips Ahoy! and she brings two Fig Newtons (they’re fruit and cake!) and we swap.  That way, we get both chocolate and figgy goodness.

About once a week, we splurge and get a cookie from the snack bar instead; they bake these double-chocolate cookies fresh every day, and while we’ve agreed they make an excellent treat, we don’t have them every day because that would make them feel less…special.  Yeah, we’re dorks.

Anyway, on Tuesday this week, she said she thought it was a double-chocolate cookie day.  I just wasn’t feeling it; I really wanted the Fig Newton, so I told her she should go ahead and have the special cookie, but I was gonna go with the Newton.  She became…well, pouty, and said if I wasn’t going to have the cookie, then she didn’t need it either.

And I just thought, “This is where it comes from.” No wonder I’m weird about food.  It’s a lesson I learned at my mother’s knee.

I was telling my husband about this little exchange, about her inability to give herself permission to eat what she wanted without me participating, and he gave me this raised eyebrow kind of look.  He said, “Yeah, that doesn’t sound like anyone I know.” 

I may have punched him.  Or I may not have.  But he’s right; that’s been me for pretty much our entire relationship.

But it’s not me anymore.  And I said that to my husband and he agreed that these days, I’m having what I want whether he joins me or not.  I want an apple fritter for breakfast and he’s just going to have eggs and toast?  Hey, I’m worth a trip to the bakery for the fritter, and fritter-eating is not a team sport anyway, so  I can do it alone.  He wants pizza and I want a bowl of cereal, then I wish him and his pizza well, but I’m having my frosted mini-wheats, thank you very much.

This most basic form of self-care, the ability to choose something and eat it regardless of what others may or may not be eating, is so hard.  It’s hard for my 58-year-old mother and it’s hard for me here at 30 and I know it’s hard for scads of other women, too.

Let’s just stop already.  Eat what you want. 

We don’t need anyone’s permission to take care of ourselves.

As I sat at the kitchen table at 5:30 this morning, the darkness swirled in the open back door on a cool breeze and ruffled my notebook pages across the table.  Fall is here!

This is my favorite  time of the year.  That spicy scent of fallen leaves, the toasty coziness of flannel PJs, the promise of pumpkin pie and candy corn.  As part of my attempt to live a real life, one not narrowly confined by my diet/exercise schedule, I am going to pretend I am the secret fantasy Megan and do what she does.  And fall?  Well, that’s when life gets really good.

I’ve always been an at-home girl even though as a kid I adored camping and being outside.  At some point, I traded in bike rides and campfires for holing up in my room with books and TV.  I swapped outside life for inside life but now?  I want take-backs.

I can’t wait to go on a bike ride until I’m skinny and lean like a dancer because my genetics prefer me curvy and built like a pioneer.  And I can’t pass on going on a hike because trail mix doesn’t fit into my calories for the day.  And I can’t turn down a day of apple-picking because I have a long workout planned.

Basically, I can’t keep leading the exact same life I’ve led for the past 5 or so years and expect to have a different life, right?

This year, Fall = Fun.  I will make S’mores by a campfire, I will hike in the woods and not parcel out a precise 1 oz. of almonds as my snack, I will ride my bike until the wheels fall off, ass-spillage-over-seat be damned.

I waited for 5.5 years to be thin enough to be acceptable and now I’ve been waiting 5 months to get strong enough to be accepting, and now?

Done waiting.  Time for doing!