Good With Cheese

Dear Santa,

I’d like to get over myself.

Sincerely, Megan.

Dear Megan,

Then just do it already.

Love, Santa.

I haven’t worked out since December 6. 

 Today is December 19.

Let me allow the gravity of that to sink in.  I gave myself a couple of days off right after my birthday because of some planned shenanigans, and then the ice storm arrived, and then my sister and family moved in, and then they moved out again, and then I had to work late, and here I am.  Thirteen consecutive days of no exercise.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t freaked.  This is the longest I’ve gone without exercise in 6 years.  The lack of physical activity combined with the weird eating that results from no electricity has allowed my weight to shift a bit in the upwards direction.  I don’t have a number because I’m not venturing anywhere near a scale, but it feels like five or six pounds.  You know, enough to make your clothes fit differently, enough to make you look past yourself in mirrors.

I feel so shaky right now.  I want to be able to eat normal meals and go out to dinner and have a glass of wine and not exercise for 13 straight days if life turns upside down, but I also want to feel…okay.  And I don’t right now.  Not at all.  I feel like this body isn’t mine, like I am fooling myself if I think that how I look right now can possibly be okay. 

And my most secret-y secret?  My husband will be moving back to Texas in about 5 weeks, and I keep thinking, I’ll just try not to make things worse before then, and then I’ll be able to do what I need to do.

What I need to do.

The little dieter in my head seems to be planning a reunion with the disordered eating.  She wants shopping for clothes to be fun again.  She wants to be able to look below her neck when faced with a full-length mirror.  She wants to feel attached to her own body.  She wants to feel okay.

And of course, I know that none of those things really and truly accompany my disordered behaviors.

But when you’re faced with someone you don’t even recognize in the mirror most mornings? 

It gets hard to remember that.

So, an ice storm moved through, well, most of Oklahoma on Sunday.  Lots and lots of ice.  Lots and lots of tree branches snapping off and falling onto power lines.  And as a result, lots and lots of people with no electricity for lots and lots of days.

Here’s a quick rundown of my week:

• Our power went out early Monday morning. 
•  I watched five of our six trees fall to the ground that afternoon, thankfully only grazing the house.  
•  I threw out everything in the fridge and freezer on Wednesday. 
• I reached my official breaking point around 4 pm on Thursday. 
• Around 5 pm that day I consumed two whiskey-based beverages and felt a little bit better. 
• Around 6 pm our power came back on.  It’s entirely likely I cried when that happened. 

 I asked my husband if he’d ever been happier in his whole life.  He said, “Yes, when I asked you to marry me and you said yes.”  I told him not to lie, that electricity is so much better. 

But power remains out for much of my family, so my sister and her kids have been sheltering here in our home since Friday.  The washing machine never stops running; the dishwasher fills up in what seems to be minutes.  But I am happy, happy, happy that we are able to take them in and hopeful their power will be back on soon. 

So, just checking in to report I am not frozen here on the Oklahoma tundra (and Jill, I hope your power is back on by now!!).   I’ll be back with a real post soon. 

In the meantime, I’ll be composing long, flowery, and incredibly sincere love letters to linemen, and of course, doing another load of laundry.

I came across something yesterday that I wrote 10 days before I made the decision to stop dieting.  I’m going to reprint it here, because I think it’s important for me to make sure this stays vivid for me.  It’s long, but I don’t want to forget, to risk losing this sheet of paper in the chaos of my desk.  So, this is from April 6, 2007:

“I am the smallest I’ve ever been in my adult life and I really feel like I got here by magic and it could just as magically go away.  In my head, I’m not a 4 or 6;  I’m a size 10 or 12, so being at this size feels temporary and strange.  The jeans I’m wearing today are 4s.  That incredibly meaningless little number feels by turns ridiculous and awesome.  It’s real and it’s not, you know.  But I also can’t allow myself the option of becoming that 10 or 12 that lives in my head because to do so indicates failure and for once in my life, I’ve found something I’m better at than anyone else I know.  I can lose weight like a champ.  I am brilliant at it.  I can drop fat and push myself insanely hard and turn down things that sound delicious and even experiences that might cause me to eat off-plan.  I’m fantastic at it.  And it feels really good to be almost perfect at something.

Even as I was writing that, I realize how jacked up it is.  I’m devaluing everything else about me and giving all the weight (ha!) to my ability to control my body.  I’ve always felt like I’m not really great at anything.  I’m smart, but not supersmart.  I’m not athletic, I have no talents, I have no hobbies, I don’t even have friends.  I’m shy and odd-looking with a crooked nose and uneven skin, and my hair doesn’t ever look shiny and swingy, and I’m about as regular and unnoticeable as a person can get.   But I have a secret self-discipline that allows me to push myself beyond what most people can do.  I have a little ramrod for a spine; I can push through pain, tiredness, soreness, boredom.  I can get up and get on the treadmill every damn day and then I can come home and work out again.  Who works out twice a day??  Who does that??  Me.  I do it.  I do it and I do it every day and I’m kind of ashamed but also really proud because in some part of my brain I don’t talk about, I think it might make me better than most people that I can be that disciplined.  Most people are weak, but I am strong.  That’s my secret, and maybe it helps me to feel better about all the ways in which I disappoint myself, all the ways in which I don’t measure up.

I want to be something special and being regular me for years and years hasn’t felt all that special.  But being skinny me, the girl who has visible hipbones and may look a little too sinewy in places, that makes me different than most people, because most people don’t have the focus to get there.  And I do.  It’s the one thing I’m most proud of — my self-control.

But whenever I step back for a second and look at myself and what I do, I can see how it’s not about my health at all.  I don’t run because it’s good for my heart and I don’t eat low-fat ice cream because it’s a taste sensation.  I do it all because it’s how I earn my value.  I have to work for my self-esteem.

And that is why I think I might have a problem.  It’s not about anything but control and making me feel like I have some kind of power, and there’s not a point at which I can stop and say, “Here.  Here is where I can stop because this is good enough.”  There’s not a “good enough.”  A size 6 feels good, but I’m more proud of the 4s.  I like the way the size 8s I bought two weeks ago literally hang off my hips now, and even though it’s kind of icky to me, I also like seeing all my ribs and the way my belly button has almost gone away.  It’s real, physical proof that there’s something I’m really good at.  It’s tangible in a way that thrills me.  And I look at my body and I see the million ways it’s sill not falling under my control, the cellulite, the spider veins, the thighs (dear God, those thighs) and while I can’t do anything about the pale skin or the veins or the giant pores or the kind of ugly face, maybe the next ten miles I run will make the cellulite go away and maybe if I do two hours of cardio every day, I won’t be able to grab handfuls of fat on my thighs.  Maybe then I’ll be good enough, but I know I won’t.  There will be something else.  The arms that aren’t as defined as I’d like or the fat knees or the heaven-knows-what.  Hypercritical = always something wrong.  That’s the shitty part of all this.

If I don’t get to a point where I can accept all the parts of my body, where I can enjoy what I can do for the sake of doing it, not because it gives me some kind of outside validation, then I’m going to hurt myself, either through the insane exercise regimen or because I just finally freak out.

I shouldn’t have to work this hard to feel acceptable; I know that for a damn sure.”

It’s easy to forget where I’ve come from, to romanticize what it was like when I was thinner.  I can’t let myself forget, though, how much I absolutely hated myself back then.

And how far I’ve come.  Happy birthday to me.

Last night, my husband made meatloaf.  Yum, right?  The recipe is out of one of my “healthy” cookbooks, but we really like it, so it’s the one he always makes.  It serves six and one serving equals 168 calories.  Yeah, I wish I could forget that, too.

Anyway, last night, he made a slightly smaller meatloaf, probably about four servings based on my highly-trained eyeballing.  I ate a serving of meatloaf, a spoonful of mashed potatoes, some sauteed veggies, and a half an apple.  It was tasty.  But after dinner I felt…weird.  Kind of…angry?  Annoyed?  My husband ate the remaining three servings of meatloaf, the rest of the mashed potatoes, and the other half of my apple.

I realized what was upsetting me about 10 minutes after I finished eating.

I was still hungry.

Here’s the thing.

I’m mostly okay at eating what I want, making choices a good 70% of the time based on what food actually appeals to me.  But what is killing me is my idea of servings.

I seriously struggle with eating more than one serving of anything.  I eat whatever the alloted portion size is, and then I just can’t get myself to eat more.  I put precisely 5 slices of deli ham on my sandwich because that’s a serving.  I count out crackers.  I only eat cereal out of a specific bowl because it holds a cup and that’s the serving size for my cereal.  Same thing with baby carrots — I pack them for my lunch every day in a container that holds exactlya half a cup.

This is ridiculous.

Last night, as I sat there feeling surly and hungry after eating, I ran a quick calculation and determined that my supper had been about 310 calories.  Son of a biscuit, no wonder I was still hungry!  Even worse, I felt annoyed by my husband, thinking how unfair it was that he didn’t have to stop eating when he was still hungry.  You know, completely ignoring the fact that I didn’t have to stop either.

I think this is one of my last huge hurdles, giving up the idea of “appropriate” portion sizes.  It’s just really, really, really scary to let go of and I find myself slipping back into it over and over again.

It seems I’m secretly afraid of eating the world.  That idea is just so damned hard to shake, isn’t it?