September 20, 2017

I just noticed that this doesn’t seem to have posted… so here it is: The original post, from the Stone Age. (Three months ago.)

June 22, 2017

I know this photo doesn’t look like much, but really – it’s a small milestone for me. (Or actually, a 2X milestone for me!) I’ve been working out at Body Dynamics – this gym that my friend Steve found in Falls Church, where all the staff are just dripping with advanced degrees and they’re not drill sergeants and they actually want to find out WHY you don’t like to exercise and then they work to change that. And for a year or more, I’ve gone there dressed in baggy sweats and even more baggy t-shirts. This is “shame” clothing, and a useless attempt to hide the bitter truth.

My glorious trainer Barbara gently persuaded me to take the leap and buy new shoes specifically for exercising. Doesn’t sound like a big deal to you? It was to me; I had to go to a running store and have a bearded (and very kind) millennial watch the way I walked, like I was some Take Myself So Seriously athlete.

And the shoes were not such a big deal, after all…

So I threw myself on the mercy of my sister Twig, who derives tremendous joy from exercise, and she was so pleased to be asked about getting me into less shame-based workout wear that she bought me a selection based on what makes her comfortable – which is exercise pants under a loose top that skims over the upper body. What a blissful idea.

It took a few weeks for me to get the fit right; had to send lots of clothes back and order new sizes for a while… but today I bravely put on my new arm-baring garb and went to the gym and sweated in it. My classmates were hugely supportive and said nice things, and I worked out hard and easily in my not-quite-so-shamed outfit. This is a bit of my internal dialog as I faced the mirror in the work-out room at Balance Class:

1. I feel like a five-year-old dressed in a Wonder Woman costume; people will smile on me fondly and think – how cute! Look – she thinks she’s all that!
2. I’ve got a pretty good oompa-loompa/jodhpur thing going on there at the midline.
3. Next time, white socks, so I look less like a boxer in a Boston gym. Okay, okay, okay.
4. I’m used to wiping my face on my t-shirt – neckline or sleeve, which is gross but easy. Where’s a damned towel? This is a prima donna outfit. Sheesh.
5. I’m looking better than I did; now I look less like a fat lady and more like an East German Olympic swimmer.
6. I’m looking better…

So that’s my long-winded post on the glacially-slow evolution of body image. Tomorrow I go back to the same gym to start working with their nutritionist. Maybe I should go scarf some sugar now while I have the chance!

September 20, 2017

In the Venn diagram of life, there is not a lot of overlap between me and Michael Jackson videos… but there is this tiny, almost invisible little crescent, if you squint hard and pull out a magnifying glass. It is only this:

In the 80s and 90s, I would take aerobics classes. Then as now, I was a tall, goony woman in the back of the room, too much solidity in the backside and too little natural rhythm to EVER be found in a neon-lined nightclub.

But I could grapevine like a mad woman, as long as no one was paying attention. Back then, aerobics classes were big deals. The one at work had 20 or 30 women in it; the one at the rec center was maybe 50 women, all of us doing huge, sweeping arm circles as we leapt and turned and slid aaaaaaand CLAP!

Oh, it was awesome. Sometimes you’d get a dud of a song (like “I Just Called To Say I Love You,” which PLEASE, no line dance in the world can maintain its self-respect to THAT puddle of treacle), but more often you could strut around to “Walking On Sunshine” or “Dancing At The Zombie Zoo” and then step back because mama needs some ROOM.

For a few brief moments, once the routine was learned for the song, I could feel like Subway Dancer #14 in a Michael Jackson video. Nowhere near the camera – just another body, way in the back, creating a wave of movement that showcased the lead dancer like black velvet around a diamond. COOL!

Did you think I was going to say I’d been IN a Michael Jackson video? I snort in amusement. Nope; this is not the bizarro universe.

In fact, reality was an ever-looming threat. I was infamous among aerobics instructors for the staggering rapidity of my pulse. After each song, all the women in their shorts and t-shirts would immediately thrust two fingers into their own necks, each searching for her carotid pulse. We’d walk briskly but aimlessly, focused on that internal beat, while the instructor marked off a set amount of time. “Okay!” she’d call (sometimes she would wear a sweat band like Olivia Newton John; she was SO groovy), “who got up to ten beats?”

Hands would shoot up.

“And eleven? And who got to twelve? That’s good! Anyone higher?”

Even when enjoying the anonymity of the back row, I have a hard time shutting up. “I counted thirty.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Yes, I did.”

She would approach, with concern “How do you feel? Maybe you should just walk around a bit for this next song.”

“I feel fine. Do I look like I’m having a heart attack?”

She would regard me dubiously. “No…”

“Okay, then.”

Now that I look back on it, I wonder if I wasn’t counting the “lub-dub” of a single heart beat as two beats… and if you go counting that high and that fast, perhaps you can be forgiven for missing a few. I was probably between twelve and fourteen beats; fast, but not the kind of response that might explode, launching me off the rec room pinewood to land me with my head through the roof and feet grapevining madly across empty air…

I loved aerobics. This evening, I’m going to a free introductory Zoomba class at Body Dynamics in Falls Church, taught by Devin. I can’t wait to see if there’s any difference between aerobics and Zoomba… and oh, how I hope Devin will sport a jaunty Olivia Newton John “Let’s Get Physical” sweatband!

Darkness falls across the land…

September 19, 2017

“Don’t forget about your abs,” Chad said as he prowled through his stretch class today. “Just because we’re rolling out the IT band doesn’t mean you can forget the core.” He paced between us, assessing and correcting. “That core is always on.” He touched Nadine’s shoulder, Mardy’s hip, approved and murmured before continuing.

“Always on. That core is always on.”

“Unless you’re not watching,” I said through gritted teeth. My IT band is very argumentative a few inches above the knee.

From beside me, my friend Steve was silent, and then muttered, “He’s ALWAYS watching.”

This, of course, made me snort with laughter… but he was right.

All these Body Dynamics people are always watching.

It used to be just my mother on a mental loop. (I hear her whether she’s there or not. She speaks up when I cross the street in traffic, questioning whether my underwear is too tatty to be seen by an ambulance crew when I’m hit by a car [which always confused me; is that what I’d be worrying about? Really?]. She warns me about raw chicken on the kitchen counters. She natters endlessly about thank you notes.)

Once I heard my father, clear as if he was sitting beside me, telling me to steer into a skid, which proved to be a very useful commentary at the time.

But now I also hear Chad saying “shoulders down” when I’m driving.

I hear Barbara question the location of my headlights; oddly enough, NOT when I’m driving and actually HAVE headlights to be questioned.

I hear Gwynn and Grace and Devin and Mario, and LORD KNOWS I hear Chip every time I walk into a grocery store or pick up a menu.

These people have gotten into my head; they are always watching.

And somehow that makes me feel safer!

If they start up commentary about the tattiness of my underwear, I’m going to draw the line. Bad enough when Mom does it.

September 18, 2017

Grace looks like the gorgeous angel in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” just before it morphs into a death head and starts melting people’s faces. She stands over me as we work out together and croons lovely words that seem at first to be impossible.

For example, if Grace says “Soften your ribs,” she actually means “Clench your abs as tight as you can because your rib cage has shifted upwards and that means you’ve let go the grip you have on your pelvis.” And of course, with her uncanny trainers’ eyes, she’s absolutely right.

She’ll ghost her hands so lightly over my ribs; she honestly seems to think I can soften the bone that is straining to accomplish whatever the exercise is.

So there’s a lot of Grace-speak that needs translation at first… just as it takes a moment to get that the Barbara-speak question of “where are your headlights?” actually means “you’re letting your pelvis tip down again; yank it up, there, girlie.” But Grace did hand me one glorious concept on our very first session together that resonates within me still, like a struck bell.

“We’re going to build in you CONSCIOUS competence in holding your hips straight, and then over time, this will become UNCONSCIOUS competence. That’s your goal. But it won’t happen quickly, so don’t worry about it.”

Unconscious competence. Perhaps that’s a common phrase at Body Dynamics – or at gyms and physical therapy sites far beyond Falls Church, Virginia. But I first heard it from Grace, and so I credit her with the thought.

I stand at the fridge, filling up my water bottle, and find I’m wondering at the mild strain in my back. “Oh, right – conscious competence,” I think, and turn the abs on low to draw the hips into a neutral position… which immediately stops any protest in my low back and makes me feel more firmly rooted to the kitchen floor. A position of power.

I watch the dog chase gleefully after the Frisbee, full helicopter tail expressing his joy, and I absent-mindedly tip my hips back to neutral.

I walk down the hallway and do a pivot sort of pelvis dance that I can’t imagine ANYONE could see (unless they’re trainers like Barbara and Grace, who have x-ray vision) in which I let my hips rock down as far as possible, I then tug them up as high as my abs will draw them, and then I center them in the middle – the neutral position I’m supposed to be maintaining.

And this is becoming so rote that now I think I’m heading into semi-conscious competence. (Like a coma patient just beginning to stir. “Doctor! I think she’s coming round!”)

I feel that unconscious competence might be out there somewhere. Maybe I’ll actually get there one day!

I hope Grace doesn’t melt my face off in the meantime, though.

 

 

 

 

 

September 17, 2017

“If you could lose just 10% of your body weight,” said the overperky nurse type at the front of the classroom, “you could have SUCH a good impact on your health!”

I rolled my eyes at her, of course. It would be every bit as impossible for her to lose the dozen pounds that made up ten percent of HER body as it was going to be for Jonathan to lose 36.

This was back before we were married – so, in the Bronze Age. Jonathan had just been diagnosed with diabetes, and we were at a health and nutrition class for diabetics that I now realize was hopelessly inadequate for the situation.

And here was a woman who had clearly never personally faced obesity implying that it ought to be easy for us to drop 10% of our weight. No, not 10%. She said “just” 10%.

Over the years, I’ve focused on the inherent cruelty in that statement instead of the message she was sending… the part about having a good impact on my health.

This morning, I weigh 234 pounds. That’s a loss of 26 pounds since I started with Body Dynamics in Falls Church, a little more than a year ago.

Today, based on the original definition of the word (“to reduce by a tenth”), I am decimated.

Bring on the lab work – draw that blood, doctor! I’m ready to see what’s happening in there!

September 17, 2017

It’s a very odd thing for your thigh to fall asleep.

A foot, sure. Standard operating procedure for someone who likes to read on the toilet; you get up and have to stomp around like Frankenstein until circulation is restored.

Maybe you sleep too heavily on your arm and when you wake up, your hand is asleep. A few brisk shakes and all is well.

But for a part of the body rather closer to the trunk to fall asleep, all by itself and uninvited, is – well, it’s odd.

Last October, my right thigh fell asleep. My reaction was a disinterested “That’s odd.”

Eighteen hours later, the “asleep” feeling had crept, like the Blob, from the thigh up to my ribs on one side and down to my feet. On the other side, it went from just below my waist to my toes. It wouldn’t be dismissed by brisk walking; in fact the brisk walking was challenging since I couldn’t exactly feel my feet.

That stopped being just odd.

So my husband and I toddled off to the emergency room, where for once I was the patient, not the loyal attendee clutching the backpack full of iPads and sweaters and lists of medications.

(No, I’m on no medications. This shortens the check-in process considerably. Jonathan’s list of medications by this point was longer than my arm and we had to keep it written down and updated electronically.)

The ER staff sent The Stroke Nurse in to see me. I’m quite sure that’s how her title was written – The Stroke Nurse, in all initial caps. She was a brisk, efficient woman determined to identify signs of the stroke they were sure I’d had.

Well, I could have told them it wasn’t a stroke. Except for feeling like my lower body was asleep, I was as right as rain.

But I squeezed her fingers and did all the other stroke tests. Two or three times, in fact, as she seemed disappointed that I wasn’t living up to her expectations.

Finally they decided I had Guillain-Barré syndrome. Rapid onset muscle weakness caused by a hyper-vigilant immune system that decides to attack the myelin sheath around the nerves.

People with GBS (and I actually don’t think that’s what I had) sometimes discover the muscle weakness gets into the lungs and they suddenly can’t breathe, so The Stroke Nurse backed away and the admissions team rushed forward, vast laptop computers on rolling desks, to gather me into the antiseptic, plastic-mattress embrace of Inova Fairfax Hospital.

Despite feeling absolutely fine, I was kept there for a solid week. People who have amputations get booted after a day, but not me. I sat around in a hospital johnny and wrote my projects on my laptop (advantage of being a freelance fundraising copywriter; your office can be anywhere with a flat surface and an internet connection), and fielded the sometimes tearful fears of my family. (My in-laws tend toward the immediate disaster scenario.)

The physical therapy team put a broad belt on my broad waist and nervously walked me around the hallways and up and down stairs, their skinny-girl arms outstretched to catch me should I go over. “Honey,” I told them, “If I start to go down, you’re just going to want to stand back and call ‘Timber’ to warn passers-by. There’s no way YOU are going to stop ME from falling.”

No, they were quite sure I was going to fall, and that they were going to save me. As it happens, I was teetery and uncertain, but I never fell. Not once.

(Secret weapon? I’d been taking Barbara’s balance class for over half a year; I already had the muscles to keep myself upright even while Frankensteining all over the neurology wing.)

I had CAT scans and MRIs aplenty. I’d say in that week, I spent maybe six hours inside a chilly white tube while invisible, whirring machinery thunked loudly around me. I had a lumbar tap; three times unsuccessfully in my hospital room and the fourth time (we hit oil!) in the radiology department.

A nerve guy wheeled in a lightning-in-a-box machine and stabbed my legs with a needle while zapping me to chart the nerve conditions. (Result? Huh. Everything looks fine.) (Yeah – I keep telling you that!)

And my neurologist put me on day after day of intravenous immunoglobulin (called IVIG for short). This is the concentrated health of about a hundred people in a bag; it ought to be the most revered substance on the planet. Enriched plutonium, take a back seat. I felt very guilty having all that donated plasma dripping into my arm. Really, I feel FINE.

You’re not fine, intoned the neurologist.

She’s a lovely lady – kind as she could be. She explained that GBS resolves itself once the nerves can regrow that myelin sheath. She and Jonathan bonded immediately. “It will take up to 18 months,” she shook her head at my husband. They both regarded me like a moderately interesting exhibit at the zoo. “It won’t take HER that long, though. She’s positive.”

She said it as if my optimism was a character flaw. Jonathan and the neurologist, both of them prone to negative thinking, shook their heads at each other in an unexpected accord. Positive people – what can you do?

After six or seven days, they decided to spring me. (Maybe I’d run through the hospital’s precious IVIG stores.) Nothing had changed, but I guess they were reassured that I wasn’t going to stop breathing. Home I went to slowly heal.

I got better at staggering around; I did the physical therapy department’s take-home exercises (which weren’t a patch on Barbara’s balance class tasks), and I got used to Jonathan’s outstretched arm whenever we went anywhere. Again – just call “Timber” and stand back. But I never fell.

Barbara suggested I meet with Gwynn, the therapeutic masseuse at Body Dynamics.

Our first session together was such an eye-opener that I’ve been going back every week ever since.

Gwynn was the one who explained the fascia to me. “You know that white film around a chicken breast?” she asked. I nodded. “That’s fascia. It’s everywhere – all over your body. It’s supposed to be supple and like a liquid, but sometimes it stiffens up and gets hard. Your fascia feels… odd.”

There we were, back to something feeling odd again. Sounds familiar.

Gwynn put her hyper-intelligent hands on the back of my leg, right above the knee. “This feels… like there’s a bag of oatmeal in here.”

A week in the hospital, million-dollar machinery fired up, techs and specialists and physical therapists on demand, and none of them found the “ground zero” of my condition. Gwynn did that.

“I never knew it until just now,” I said, face-down on her heated massage table, “but that’s the spot that is the most numb. I think that must be where this whole thing started.”

Gwynn was silent as she did her Braille thing on my muscles, every inch of her focus in her hands.

“It’s the fascia,” she finally said. “Something’s going on with your fascia.”

“No – it’s like potholes in the myelin sheath. That’s what the doctors said.”

“I don’t doubt it, but there’s also something going on with the fascia.”

At my follow-up visit with my neurologist, I asked her what the intersection was between GBS and the fascia.

“Fascia?” she said darkly. “No, I don’t think so.”

“I DO think so,” I insisted. “It feels like – I can feel my skin, and I can feel my muscles, but there’s a layer of numbness in between the two. That’s fascia, right?”

She nodded doubtfully, but I could tell she wasn’t persuaded. I went on.

“This is your Nobel Prize in Medicine right here. You should investigate the role of fascia in GBS.”

“Well,” and here she looked to Jonathan, also regarding me doubtfully, “I’ll look into it.”

She never took it seriously. Oddly, while there are specialists for every random nook and cranny in your body, there are NO faciologists. Which is weird, because fascia is everywhere; even in your brain. Apparently the fascia has been entirely abandoned to the tender ministration of massage therapists…

…who thankfully know what they’re doing.

So Gwynn worked on my fascia and my numbness faded so quickly that the neurologist reconfirmed her mildly-contemptuous view that it was my positivity that was doing it.

Fine. She doesn’t want a Nobel Prize, I’m not going to force one on her.

But GWYNN knew.

And BARBARA had already equipped me with the muscles that kept me upright.

It’s been less than a year since I first brushed my thigh and wondered at the sensation. The numbness is pretty much gone on the left side. The right side is down to about 20% of the original sensation; now it feels like a silk scarf over the skin of my thigh and a bit of my shins. Not a bad sensation; things could be a lot worse!

I’m not saying that a trainer and a therapeutic masseuse can rescue you from medical emergency – but I AM saying that a medical emergency is in your future. That’s inevitable. Will you be ready for it once it hits?

Here’s a photo of my IV stand, CLEARLY designed by someone at Industrial Light and Magic with a sense of humor. Could this look MORE like a helpful Star Wars robot? Roger-roger.

September 16, 2017

If you sent a middle schooler into the trading pit at the New York Stock Exchange and told her to “pick up a little orange juice,” you’d have about the same sense of bewilderment and abandonment I felt yesterday.

Chip – the kind, friendly nutritionist who guides my food choices from afar – flattered me the other day by saying “I think you’re ready to do a little detoxifying.”

This was very clever of him because I am a sucker for praise.

“Really? What should I do?”

“Here’s a recipe for a very gentle cleanse, and we’re going to make it even easier.”

He began crossing off things. “If you use the Vega All-in-One shake, you won’t need this flax fiber.”

Good. Flax fiber sounds like I’d be gnawing on a wall-to-wall carpet. Probably industrial grey.

“And you won’t need the liquid lecithin.”

Phew. I’m all out of liquid lecithin.

“But you’ll want some fresh fruit and some yogurt.”

Hey! I recognize those! I HAVE those!

“And pick up some walnut oil and some [and I’m copying carefully here] lactobacillium acidolphilus and Bifidobacterium bifidum.”

Um. Huh.

“It’s easy. You get it at Whole Foods. I think it’s on the “whole body” aisle. Here’s a picture of the box.”

Oh. Okay. Yeah. I can do that.

So today I braved Whole Foods. I’m getting really good at the raw cheese department and obviously the pumpkin seeds recognize their master when I arrive, but I don’t much venture into the interior of Whole Foods; I’m more of a shop-around-the-edges type, for fear I’ll fall into some alfalfa soap or hemp footwear.

But where Chip leads, I follow.

Of course, that only works when he leads…

I found myself standing in front of THREE sections of “probiotics” (I only photographed one of the three), and NONE of them said “This is what Chip says you need.”

Diet Start Cleanse. Ultimate Flora. Super Thislyn. Digest Smart. Ultimate Flora FIZZY. Ultimate Flora in a convenient capsule. Yum-Yum dophilus. Jarro-Dophius EPS. Each box toted increasingly outrageous promises of the vast content of goodness they enclosed, like “FIVE BILLION PER CAPSULE, EIGHT STRAINS!”

Or get the Intestinal & Immune Function & Health version; it has TWENTY FIVE BILLION.

I stood there, a stranger in a strange land, and felt utterly abandoned.

You might say – why didn’t you ask someone?

I reply, because would YOU ask a Whole Foods worker in the MIDDLE of the store for a probiotic recommendation? I believe that’s the actual legal definition of A Big Deal.

I simply didn’t have the courage.

I fled. I couldn’t even brave the search for walnut oil.

This detoxification is going to have to wait, by golly. That’s good; I wasn’t looking forward to drinking down an industrial carpet, anyway.

September 15, 2017

You’d think something called “balance class” would feature… well… balance-related things. Like maybe we’d all spin in circles like Maria Von Trapp on the top of a mountain and then try not to fall over, giggling at the dizzy sensation.

But that ain’t how Barbara rolls.

Her theory (and I have to say, she’s got justification) is that you need balance not just when you’re whirling, arms outstretched, while hitting a perfect C sharp with the kind of clarity that causes avalanches… because how often is THAT going to happen?

No, to Barbara, you need balance when you trip over a curb or a small dog gets its leash tangled around your ankles or you’re about to head down the stairs with your arms full of laundry – and when THAT happens, you’re going to want the muscles up and down your trunk to be ready to YANK you back upright again.

So balance class is really a core work-out. And while spinning like a top would definitely be more fun, it isn’t anything like as useful.

Yesterday we were working on core exercises. Whenever we use the large exercise balls to sit on, I’m sent to the next room over to fetch the red ball, which is (yay!) much larger than the blue or the white balls. There are advantages to being rather tall.

(The red ball is kept on a rack about eight feet off the ground. To get it down, you have to find something you can use from below to pop it off the rack and then (if you’re jaunty) catch it on the way down. You can drag over a step, or be a buff jock and jump up. Getting it down isn’t as hard as tossing it back up again so it will stay and not rebound off the wall and escape once again, but I’m getting better at it. Three or four tries instead of finally saying “Here – YOU do it” to one of the many kind and ultra-fit people who staff Body Dynamics.)

By the time I got back from getting the red ball, the other five people in the class had lined up in a row against the back wall. No room at the inn. I very bravely took a spot in the front, close to the mirrors.

Make no mistake, this IS brave of me. If asked to grab an open space, I will gravitate towards the corner farthest from the door (so someone walking by who casually glances in the room from the hallway will see other smaller, more delicate bodies than mine) and away from the mirror (because I don’t like to see my body any more than I like passing strangers to see it).

But yesterday I was front and center, pretending I didn’t mind. And at least in my conscious mind, I didn’t. (Lizard brain, however, wanted to scurry to the corners and wouldn’t have minded a more flattering lighting situation.)

We were doing crunches – sit on the ball and walk out until your mid-back is on the ball. Do a dead Egyptian with your hands crossed on your chest or – if more advanced – behind your head, and then pulse for five crunches. Walk back up. Repeat.

I usually do balance class exercises thinking “I’ll do three sets and then I’ll ask if we can stop, I’ll do two sets and then ask if we can stop” on a steady loop. That’s what I was thinking when I finished my last internal round of what I thought I could do. Instead of asking (it wasn’t long enough; Barbara wouldn’t let us stop yet), I just took a breather and hung my head.

When I lifted my eyes, I saw that Mardy and Steve, behind me, were both jocking it out with their hands behind their backs, keeping time to the excellent playlist Steve had put together.

And suddenly I felt like a dripping-sweat, broad-in-the-beam Diana Ross, with the Supremes keeping perfect time behind me.

This amused me so much that I very rudely interrupted Barbara from her skillful combination of supportive cheerleader and Marine Corps drill sergeant and made her hand me my phone so I could take a photo.

(And yes, I was thinking that this was an EXCELLENT way to get out of doing several sets of crunches.)

There’s Peggy back there, too, in the photo, using the barre to ensure she can get the most from her crunches. Balance class can handle people of all levels. Steve and Mardy are the most advanced in strength and technique, but everyone works that hard, at their own level. We have to – Barbara wouldn’t have it any other way!

Next week maybe I can get the class into long, white spangly dresses and we’ll do “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, Which Brings Us Back To Doe A Deer.”

Exercise probably sends too much oxygen to my brain.

Oh, shoot. In this photo, I’m on a white ball. Right – we’d been doing HORRIBLE exercises where you lay on your back and pass the ball between your hands and your ankles, going fully flat between each pass, and the red ball was too wide to control. Too bad; the red would have looked nice for the photo!

September 14, 2017

Forget invisibility or the power of flight. You want to talk secret super-power? Here’s what Chip can do – and you will wish YOU had this ability:

Chip, who is not just a ballet dancer and a personal trainer but also the nutritionist at Body Dynamics in Falls Church, Virginia, can munch on tortilla chips in front of other people who KNOW he’s a nutritionist, and he has the power to put up his hand at them and say “Don’t even.”

And he means it.

Chip can reject guilt.

I know – right??

Chip says it’s not wrong to eat chips, or whatever else it is that calls out to you in weak moments, because you’re only striving to be pure and healthy 80% of the time. To maintain your sanity, you have to have something that just plain tastes good about 20% of the time.

So really, what he says when he holds up that imperious, arrestingly graceful hand is “Don’t even with me – eighty-twenty,” and the people who have gathered to mockingly watch the nutritionist nibble some empty calories have to skulk away disappointed. There will be no public ridicule today.

So straight off the bat, you have to love Chip, right?

He gave me two great new phrases yesterday, and they both equip me to respond to some very helpful people in my life.

I blog a lot about pumpkin seeds because I have the fanaticism of the new convert – and I talk about them a lot too (to the real, sincere, eternal joy of all the people around me, no, tell me MORE about zinc and pumpkin seeds because I didn’t get enough LAST time). And loving people say to me, “Why don’t you just take a vitamin? That’s what I do.”

So I looked worshipfully to my messiah and said “Chip, why don’t I just take a vitamin?”

Ooh – new words! “Bio-availability,” said Chip, the phrase rolling forth easily but with power – a grand jeté from the master.

“Tell me more.”

“You can pack many times the amount your body needs into a vitamin,” he explained, “but that doesn’t mean your body can absorb what’s in the vitamin. Zinc will only do you good if it’s bio-available.”

“And it’s not bio-available in a pill?”

“Some of it is, but if you think you’re getting all of what’s listed on the box, you’re assuming something that isn’t true. If you get your zinc from pumpkin seeds, your body can absorb it more readily. You won’t just – ” and here he made a gesture of discretion in case I was too nice to consider the concept of peeing away all the vitamins I’d dutifully swallowed. He’s a very kind man.

“And that’s why I want a variety of foods that aren’t too processed.”

“Exactly. That’s why the pizza box nutritional content confused you. The percentage of macronutrients – that’s fat, protein, and sugars in the form of carbs – was good, but it was lacking [and here came delicious phrase number two] NUTRIENT-DENSE opportunities to give your body what it needs.”

So there I sat, already dazzled by the power of the 80/20 hand and made further drunk by “bio-available” and “nutrient-dense,” and I thought “Thank God I have a blog because I’ll never remember these excellent details if I don’t write them down somewhere I won’t lose them.”

I’m going to work on that guilt-deflecting hand. That would be a great superpower to achieve.

September 13, 2017

Hey – this looks familiar. I’ve been lost here before.

I’ve come to see that my determination is like an on-off switch, like in the kitchen. Either I am fully determined and every light in the ceiling is blazing, or I give up and plunge my brain into safe, lazy darkness.

But what I need is a dimmer switch, like in the dining room. I need to be able to back off a little from my determination, instead of simply going all out or going to nap. There has to be a way I can MODERATE my determination.

Two examples: As noted in an earlier post, I once spent an hour a day exercising for 437 consecutive days. You’d think that would be long enough to create a habit; that I might think “I’m feeling a little stiff and stuffy; think I’d like to go for a nice brisk walk through the nabe while listening to Eurythmics through ear buds.” But no; when I forgot to exercise on the 438^th day, I sat down and it took several years for me to stand up again.

And at my last nutrition appointment at Body Dynamics with Chip, he looked at my three-day food journal (Chip discouraged journaling every day; probably to stop on/off switches like me from becoming fanatics and then failures). “Looks like you’re drinking too much water.”

Me (aghast): “What? I LOVE water now; I’m constantly thirsty. I’m not forcing it in; I like it!”

Chip (fully reasonable): “So, just keep it below 100 ounces. Looks like you’re getting up to 120 some days.”

Me (small, defeated): “…oh.”

And what happened? I seem to have stopped drinking water. No, that’s not true – I still drink, but I no longer wander around with a water bottle. (I have this bitchin’ water bottle that bongs like a Zen gong if you whap it up against something, which I do often because the sound is such bliss.) I no longer have to pee every two hours. I’m probably drinking 50, 60 ounces a day. And that feels like (say it with me) FAILURE. I’m fighting not to give up at the first wisp of setback.

This is a common problem for me. I’m doing great, I’m doing great, I’m doing great, I mess up, I’m done. It is a pattern I would like to break.

I told Barbara I was concerned about moderating my effort; she told me that mine is a personality type. All or nothing; determined or defeated. There’s very little middle ground, and it was worth thinking about. “It’s good that you’re getting help, but the day should come when you WANT to go out and get exercise on your own.”

Horror rolled over me. Moi?! No way. If I don’t have someone guiding and correcting me, I find it very, very hard to get off the couch. Go it alone without my fellowship of the fat?? I’ll never make it.

Barbara says I can. We’re going to work on moderation because at the moment I ain’t got none.

Apparently it’s not enough to change your body. You have to change your mind, too. As Chip would say – it’s ALLLLL connected.

Sigh. I need a rheostat.