Great news! I gained .8 this week. Gah, jeez, right? Well I am okay with it. I mean, I don’t get it, but I’m okay with it. I stuck with the plan and I worked out 3 times. Okay, yes, there was that incident Friday night with the three quarters of a litre of TOLL HOUSE Cookie Dough with Brownie Chunks LOADED Frozen Dessert. Yikes they can’t even call it ice cream. Anyway, yes, I ate a lot of it. But I calculated my points and it was within the plan.
So, you know… eh. Sometimes you do everything you’re supposed to do and your body just doesn’t respond the way you expect or hope it will. I was saying to a friend yesterday that it’s like long term investments. You can’t let a bad week freak you out. If you stick with the plan, you’ll eventually see gains in your portfolio. Holy crap that metaphor just triggered a huge dividend in the irony stock. (FYI, I had to spend about ten minutes on Wikipedia figuring out how to phrase that joke. I’m putting everything into irony derivatives. Maybe?)
Anyway, when you have a week like this, you have to find your win somewhere other than the scale. Spin doctoring is an important skill in life and is transferable across pretty much every plane of existence. So the great news from this week was my ever-improving fitness. The night before the weigh-in, (the same day I posted the workout music blog), I went to the gym and ran for a full hour, the longest I’ve run in probably a year. Distance was 4.5 miles or around 7k. This is awesome work on my part and I am very encouraged by my progress. And that’s how you spin a .8 gain into a major victory!
Oh sure there will people who earnestly say “this is not spin doctoring, you really did win! It’s not about the scale, it’s about changing your life and being healthier and loving yourself and putting Post Its on every mirror in your house telling you how fantastic you are”. Bless them! These sweet, well-meaning people are champion spinners and I tip my hat to them as they are #winning the life game, unquestionably! I think I would need to offload a huge chunk of my blue chip irony and dispense with my cynicism treasuries altogether to make that investment worthwhile.
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.
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.
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.
Greetings rock stars from Mars avec Adonis DNA!
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