Jun 21: "Birthday Week"

Stumblers upon,

First things first, I will relieve you of your hopping crossed-leg feeling of anxiety and assure you that I lost a pound this week and have now crossed from one meaningless family of numbers to another. Weight: 149.4; total lost: 21.6 pounds. Good on me.

Saturday I came back from the weigh-in to surprise pizza and wings. In the afternoon! Insane. Saturdays are a day of gluttony and indulgence in my household. It's kinda disgusting but it is one of life's small pleasures.

Anyway, Sunday I got back on the horse, until I came home from the shopping mall and felt like eating ice cream and such. Then take out Thai for dinner, followed by macademia nut cookies and All Dressed. Yiiiiikes. Food coma. Two nights in a row of this crap is a punishment. The Miaouw reassures me: "It's Birthday Week!" The Miaouw loves a good week of totally insane eating and gluttony as much as the next guy. More than most guys, actually. Last year we had TWO cakes on my birthday. Cake is one of my all-time favourite things to binge on, but even so, that was an embarrassing amount of cake. I am going to put my foot down this year with the Miaouw, though. One king size cake only.

It is interesting, though, going through a night of bingeing and watching myself from my Samantha-from-Bewitched perch at the top of the room. You can't read a book about eating awareness and then engage in compulsive eating without some degree of cringeing/shoulder shrugging. I tell myself it is okay to do anything that I want to do as long as I choose to do it with awareness. Sometimes awareness is something I fight against, I think. Tricky stuff.

Anyway, off to do booty-busting penance tonight.

Jun 17: Just hey-sayin

Heya folks,

Yeah, I got nuthin. Last week I gained .4, so I am still clinging stubbornly to the 150s. It's fun here! You should try it. Have some ice cream. Or, some celery, depending. God aren't you sick of it? I know I am. At the same time, after awhile, I find I settle into a rhythm. I am sick of it mattering so much to me though. So I pretend that it doesn't. Fake it to make it. Sometimes that even works.

Booty Boot Camp fucking hurts like a motherfuck. Sorry Christians and under-agers, but it's the truth. Ah well. There is satisfaction in getting through a class, to be sure. I haaaate when I look around because I am taking a break when my gluteous is maximussed out, and I see all these skinny ...young ladies... still cheerily lifting their tiny asses off the ground. At such times I comfort myself with the fact that I am out there AT ALL. (Which I wasn't, yesterday. Sigh. I felt as though I'd cheated on my taxes or littered or something.)

On Monday I did 45 mins of cardio before Bootcamp, which I thought was superior work. I went to the gym for another 45 mins of cardio on Tuesday, and was set to repeat the pre-Bootcamp cardio last night, when suddenly I was hit with a wave of exhaustion. I went home with the intention of napping and then doing a run on the treadmill later in the evening instead. Anybody laying odds on how that worked out? (Tip: go for the safe bet.)

So tonight I have plans to do some sort of something or other. And tomorrow, glorious Summer Friday (my office has summer flex hours - we work 45 mins longer for 9 days and get the 10th off, i.e. every other Friday) my plan is to get out my beautiful, dusty Specialized bike (that's me posing with it during a bike tour of British Columbia in 2003) and go for a loooooong bike ride on Lake Ontario's glistening-if-you-don't-look-too-closely shoreline.

And then on Saturday I will get weighed in BUT I TOTALLY DON'T CARE IF I HIT THE 140s.

Have a great weekend fwiends.

Jun 9: Distortion

Fwiends, Womans, Countwymen!

How's everybody? I am a little bit shy, after posting my gearing up for change blog last week. Feels like, okay, I put it out there, so now I have to do it. Which... not really. Since posting it, I have retreated in a most typical fashion, resisting my own throw-down to self. That's okay. I recognize it as part of my process. Haven't picked up the Geneen Roth book since, either. I could get all mean and bully myself over it, but instead I find myself laughing gently as a parent does toward a child (or as a human companion does toward a cat). Oh, Lindsay! You silly girl! I say it to myself affectionately. Practicing kindness as best I can.

Meantime, for those who only pretend to be highly evolved and really want to know the numbers sitch, I have now lost 20.6 pounds. Last week I went in to JC all set to gain access to the long lost land of the 140s. Of course my body defied me and I lost .6, which put me at exactly 150. Fine, if that's the way you want to be about it, body... uh, okay. Next week. Or, the week after. Whatever. I'm highly evolved and don't care one whit.

On Monday I went to my first session of Booty Camp Fitness. I had my last [sniffle!!] session with Derek on Friday, so it was perfect timing. Booty Camp is for the ladeez only. It's twice a week in an outdoor setting and it seems designed to rip your quad muscles into shreds. Two days later, they are sore to the touch. I do know from the last time I did it that the soreness goes away after a couple of sessions. It is a brutal workout. They make Derek look like Roseanne. Anyway, that's the fitness update.

Okay, on to subject heading: today's blog is about uncertainty regarding body image. For as long as I can remember, I have not been able to pass a reflective surface of any kind without glancing over for reassurance and/or self-flagellation. It's humiliating to admit one's extreme vanity, but there it is. The thing is, I just can't tell. Sometimes I'm walking outside and I look in a darkened window and I'm like, hunh, not bad. Okay, you can pass for average. Next thing you know I am punished severely for my hubris by the bathroom mirror at work.

I know my measurements, and when I watch shows like Bulging Brides and The Last 10 Pounds Bootcamp, I see these women who have similar measurements to mine in their "before" stage, and to me they look pretty average. But I am so conditioned to think of myself as "the fat girl" that I don't trust what I see in the mirror (unless it's the distorted fat-view). And of course, I always factor in my height (5'2"). I might have similar measurements to the women on the shows I mentioned above, but if that's the case, I usually assume I'm 5 inches shorter than them. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But when it comes to assessing where I sit on the spectrum of body types, I really honestly just do not know. I think that I must be fooling myself when I see a reflection that looks okay (if not fantastic).

I always used to say that my goal in wanting to lose weight is not to be super-skinny - I don't even entertain the notion anymore. I just want to be able to walk down the street and feel like I am average. "Not fat." Like, if someone were to casually glance at me, they would not mentally classify me as overweight. (Spoken like a person who does this to everyone else she passes on the street. Urgh.)

At the first session of Booty Boot Camp two nights ago, I scanned the group of about 30 women, vainly searching for someone with lumps and imperfections. (Most of the women there were about 15-20 years younger than me and looked the way I'd hope to look in my "after" picture.) I was relieved to spot a few, and even more relieved that, actually, I didn't really care all that much. I'm out there, challenging myself, working just as hard as any of the other women. Some of us may have a little futher to go. Some of us may never reach the "destination". I think part of "getting ready to get ready" is letting go of this false destination, and re-setting my sights on a more fulfilling goal. I suspect if I ever find a way to absorb the Geneen Roth message, it won't matter. I will accept my body.

Not there yet. Not even close. But... closer than I used to be. And that's good enough for now.

Jun 1: Getting ready to get ready

Two or three lifetimes ago, I confided to a new friend that I was unhappy in my marriage and that I didn't know what I was going to do about it. She gave me some very simple and compassionate advice that I have always remembered: "Give yourself permission to do nothing about it, except get ready for change." At the time, I was young (24) and it hadn't occurred to me that I could just sit with my feelings, be aware that I had a problem but do nothing to solve it. Her advice came as such a huge relief to me. "When you're ready to do something, you will." She was right.

Well I've been giving myself permission to not deal with my dieting and eating addictions for about 10 years now. Not that this has only been a problem for 10 years. But 10 years ago was when I started seeing a therapist after successfully dieting down to 120 pounds. Despite the fact I preened in front of every mirror I passed, I was utterly miserable. My job was stressful, I was over worked and under appreciated. I was engaged to a guy I loved dearly but was not in love with. I hungered, but I did not know for what. I got into the habit of binge eating for 2-3 days after getting weighed in, and then exercising furiously and eating frugally for the rest of the week in a desperate bid to hold on to my new thin body.

I told my new therapist about my diet/binge cycle and she said if I really wanted to get to the core of the problem, I needed to stop dieting all together. "Eat whatever you want," she told me, even if it was cake for dinner. Music to my ears! I gained 20 pounds in the space of a couple of months. (Hmmmm, my inner Marge Simpson thought.) She also suggested that I try "eating in awareness". That is, don't watch TV, don't read, don't do anything else while you are eating. Stay in the moment and pay attention to what happens when you eat. I tried it a few times and I gotta admit, it freaked me out. I found the exercise too challenging. It made me afraid.

I'm not sure what I was afraid of, but I can tell you that the fear has never left me. It is at times paralyzing, debilitating, and probably contributes greatly to my cycling depression in the past few years. I know that I'm afraid that "there is no cure" for what ails me. I've tried to just accept that binge eating is "what I do", and tried to control it with a balance of eating well and exercising in between. But I know there's a lot more to it, and that I've been afraid of the hard emotional work I need to do to get to the bottom of it.

Some time later, after I'd quit my stressful job, broken up with my fiancé, gained 10 more pounds and stopped seeing this therapist, I realized that I wasn't ready to deal with the core issues behind my eating disorder. In the interim years since then, I've yo-yo'd up and down the scale, been officially diagnosed with binge eating disorder, sought treatment that I wasn't ready for, and started to believe that there is no hope for me, that I will always look to food as my best friend and worst enemy, recognize it as hollow and superficial but keep running back to it, seeking the validation I desperately crave. All along, in the back of my mind, I know that diets don't work, that I am substituting food for... something, that I am avoiding dealing with some fundamental core issues. When I have those conscious moments of awareness, I soothe myself by saying, "give yourself permission to do nothing, until you are ready". I think sometimes it just takes as long as it takes, and the best thing we can do for ourselves is forgive ourselves for needing and taking comfort where we know we can find it, even if it is fleeting.

In my blog from last month, Coping with success, my beloved friend Joy commented that she'd been reading Geneen Roth's latest book, Women, Food and God. Joy said Geneen Roth has been around a long time writing about "food stuff", but I had never heard of her. I did a bit of googling and decided to check out some of her writing. So I went out one restless Saturday night and picked up one of her first books, Feeding the Hungry Heart. On the way back from the bookstore, I bought a huge bag of chocolate from the bulk candy store. Heh.

It took me a couple of weeks to start reading it. And I am reading it in small bits, taking time to absorb the message. But as soon as I opened the book and read the introduction, I realized I had found someone who understands. It gave me hope. My intuition had told me this would be my experience, before I even opened the book. (Hence the pit stop for chocolate en route home, avoiding the book for a couple of weeks, etc.... I knew reading it would, or could, lead to facing some powerful demons.)

I have not given up dieting (have lost 20 pounds, FYI), and I have not given up bingeing on weigh in day. But I am getting ready to make a change, to face the real hunger within. It feels like the right time, at last.

I'll keep you posted!