September 12, 2017

There are people in this world who would take precious vacation times and spend it – voluntarily, mind you – attempting to peddle up a cliff.

This astonishes me. We’ve spent dreamy summer weeks in Vermont. We stay in ski condos where jaunty ski motif decorations looking wildly out of place amid the warm, green afternoons. I’ve driven past more bikers than I can count who are grinding their way up the mountain in their tight-pants-serious-helmet gear, and I shudder as I steer around them. Who would DO that?

Who would say “I know what let’s do – let’s straddle a seat that gets increasingly uncomfortable as the long day wears on and attempt to summit great heights by peddling madly with straining thighs and gasping lungs; wouldn’t THAT be a fun break from the daily rut of air conditioning and swivel chairs?”

But then I think of my friend Al, who once told me – with real joy in her eyes – that her workouts weren’t really good if she hadn’t thrown up at least once. Al is one of those people you see running up and down (and up and down) (and up and down) stopped escalators at Metro stations.

And my friend Bob agrees with her; Bob is an ultra-runner who just completed a 212-mile round trip trot through the Virginia countryside. It took him about three days and teams of friends took it in turn to run with him because no one else can (or would) run for as long as he can. Bob once said to me (in apparent sincerity), “running is the most fun thing you can do. It’s like a playground for grown-ups.”

So there’s something going on here. Something I’m not getting. I have to believe that those Vermont bikers aren’t going up the hills just for the bliss of coasting down the other side (which takes mere moments after hours of grunting; seems like a very poor payoff). No, they must LIKE the uphill part. And like it MORE than the downhill part. Go figure.

I hear about endorphins and runners’ highs and other concepts that confuse me; there’s a buzz (apparently) derived from exercise that I don’t get.

But I know you can rewire your brain. I know that smokers and heroin addicts open receptors in their brains that are inactive in non-users, and those receptors don’t close again. Once you’re addicted to something, you stay addicted, whether you’re using or not.

So I’m thinking maybe I can force the endorphin receptors in my brain to creak slowly open like the basement door in a horror movie. What evil lurks beyond that door?! Will I, too, one day transform into someone in padded black shorts and a high-tech helmet who stomps around in clickety bike shoes while buying Kambucha in the general store to power me up Burke Mountain on my ten-speed?

It seems unlikely. But I’ll keep trying… and what gets me there is oomph. Pure guts. The Finnish concept of sisu – a determination to keep slogging even when the outcome is all but hopeless.

In that light, my work-outs are far more gutty than when Bob or Al or those Vermont bikers work out, for I derive very little joy from it. I’m relying on will power where they’re relying on addiction.

Look. I’m actually beginning to look quite heroic in this scenario. Yay, me!

This is my final thought: Every single one of us does the best we can every single day. There’s only a finite amount of oomph in every soul. It recharges, sure… but if you manage to get through your day without killing the jerk who’s racheting up your frustration, if you can still be kind to strangers, if you find the time to do the laundry and wash the dishes and maybe raise a child or hold on to a relationship and if THEN you find you don’t have the oomph to exercise or trek to Whole Foods to buy pumpkin seeds, then don’t beat yourself up about it. There’s only so much oomph in your day.

But be aware that you and I are missing out on a legal and socially-acceptable high that will actually help you live longer, better, and stronger. I’m siphoning off some oomph to see if I can get that high. I’ll let you know how it goes.

But I’m not buying any padded bike shorts.

 

September 11, 2017

Barbara Gallagher Benson is my Gandalf.

(Except way prettier and a great deal less bearded…)

She guides me. I’m capable and competent and all that, but she’s the one who figures out where we’re heading, even when I can’t see the destination.

(Barbara is my first and lead trainer at Body Dynamics in Falls Church, VA.)

On my very first day working out with her, over a year ago now, she had me go to my hands and knees. “Now reach your right hand forward while stretching your left leg behind you.” I’d barely shifted my weight to attempt this when she said “Nope. Stop. Not yet. Do this instead.”

What had she seen? What fell voice on the winds had she heard? I have no clue; it’s part of her wizarding ways to spot invisible signs. (She has x-ray vision anyway, which has to be a useful addition for a trainer. How she can see through baggy clothes, ample insulating fat, and straining muscles to know what my bones are doing is beyond me, but when I ask her how she can see that, she looks mildly surprised and says “I can see it” in a “duh!” sort of way. Wizard.)

Over the past year, she’s been leading me over the pass at Galapas and through the mines of Moria. (If this gets a little too Lord of the Rings for you, pardon me; I have nerdishness in me.) Sometimes she stops to think, trying to figure out where we go next, but she always ends up with a reassuring “It’s THAT way,” and on we go.

Wait – my analogy is giving me the giggles. I’m the ring-bearer, only it’s the ring of excess weight around my middle that I’m trying to take to Mordor to throw in the flames of Mount Doom. (Hah!)

And I have my fellowship now to help me. Barbara is my Gandalf, and Grace my Legolas. Chip is my Boromir, only he’s really Faramir, Boromir’s far more noble brother. Gwynn is Aragorn, hiding her royalty beneath a fetching hooded cloak. Chad is the tallest, most fit Gimli, skillfully wielding his Shoulders Down axe.

(Devin, blissfully friendly front desk expert and Zoomba teacher, can be Arwen, the elven princess. A dud of a role in the books, but they smoked her up nice for the movies. Devon’s got a Liv Tyler thing going on, too.)

Those who smile and nod at me as we work out together – Marty and Alma and Nadine and Doris – those are my fellow hobbits. Good-hearted, kind, supportive, working on a hero’s journey of their own.

And Steve, the too-rarely-mentioned bestie, is my Sam, the true hero and the one who really does all the work while I have to be dragged or cossetted or carried to get to the end. One Metabolism To Rule Them All.

Now I’ve totally entertained myself and probably driven you off, an Ent disgusted with all this noise and chatter. But my point is – without Gandalf, my journey would be so much harder. Maybe impossible. If you’re on a journey of your own, for Pete’s sake, get a wizard. They’re very, VERY useful!

By the way – I can now do that on-all-fours, opposite-hand-and-leg reach like a champion. Barbara nods as if she knew it all along. “You weren’t ready for it before. Now you are.” And that makes me wonder what she’s doing now that will let me do something amazing later.

There’s a rope hanging from the rafters in the corner of the big fitness room at Body Dynamics, and once I idly commented that I wish I, too, could climb that rope. “You want to be able to do that?” Barbara asked. “Well, yeah – I’d also like to be able to fly, but that’s not going to happen.” “Okay,” she came back at me. “We’ll get to that.”

What?? This woman who knows my muscles better than I do thinks I could EVER climb a rope? There’s no way in hell.

Is there?

Barbara is my Gandalf.

 

 

 

September 10, 2017

“I’m so glad,” my mother said to me yesterday, “that you and your sister are FINALLY taking your weight seriously.”

I have two sisters. Twig finds bliss in exercise and now looks like she could kick your ass after perfectly landscaping your garden and finding just the right scarf for your outfit. That’s definitely not the sister Mom was referring to.

The other sister, Lexie, has a harder row than me, even – she started out slim-hipped and sporty and has since come to the “I can survive a famine” school of hip-and-butt plenty. So she knows what it’s like to be … well, normal. She’s tasted it and now it’s been taken from her. That’s tough. She and her husband are currently grinding their way through the theory that if you rigidly watch every single thing you eat for six days and then have a cheat day once a week, you can maintain your sanity and your weight at the same time. I wish her great good luck with a plan that didn’t help me at all.

Mom is the worst of all – she’s a Born Again. She actually lost weight in her adolescence and spent most of her life slim and lovely. Therefore she believes that weight is a moral failing. You COULD do it. You’re just not trying hard enough.

Poison.

Mom’s comment that Lexie and I were FINALLY taking our weight seriously rankled, and I replied “I’ll pay you five bucks if we can stop this conversation right now.”

“Oh,” she replied, her huffy empress crown descending invisibly onto her head, “I thought YOU wanted to talk about it.”

She’s a million years old and there’s really no benefit to arguing, so instead I’ll argue with her here. “Finally?!” I would scream. “FINALLY?? Shall we review what my genetic make-up has subjected me to over the last 57 years?? Not to mention YOUR disappointment in having The Fat Daughter?!”

No – that’s tougher on her than I want to be… but let’s review the bidding:

Jenny Craig – I was 180 pounds when I walked in the door, alongside my husband-to-be and a dear friend. The three of us ate dehydrated food for months. I lost nine pounds and discovered the concept of the Cheat Day. Get weighed in and immediately repair to a restaurant where the food was not at all dehydrated. Eventually eating out of boxes wore on all of us and we stopped – at which point I gained the nine pounds I’d lost plus an additional thirty.

Weight Watchers – I was 210 pounds when I started. I calculated points like a trackside bookie. I learned the secret value of vegetable soup, which would at least fill me up. I cut my restaurant portions in half. I sat in meetings and dutifully examined the empty boxes that other people brought to show off something they’d found that had fewer points and better taste. Fanaticism and the fact that it was working pretty well for my husband kept that going for quite a while. I don’t remember how much I lost, but two months after stopping, I was up to 230 pounds.

Gall bladder – this was the event that taught me just how powerful negative reinforcement is. I had a hot gall bladder; if I combined the stress of being a freelance fundraising copywriter with any fat at all, tiny grit in my gall bladder would whoop out of the barn and raise all kinds of hell in town, scaring the womenfolk. Tremendous pain. Since I had to be anesthetized to have it removed and since my husband and I had decided one kid was all we dared visit upon the world (my son was a handful; charming, but busy), I decided to get the surgeon and the gynecologist in the same operating room together and have my tubes tied at the same time as they popped out that gall bladder. A twofer. While waiting the three months for them to clear their schedules, I was so afraid of the pain from a gall bladder attack that I grew to fear dietary fat. I lost forty pounds – my red letter weight loss – and was told by a friend that my butt looked “positively sexy” in jeans. No! Really?! Operation – immediate gain of fifty pounds. Now up to 250.

Self-guided exercise – finally aware that diets seemed to have a dangerous effect on my body, I spent 437 consecutive days getting at least one hour of exercise every single day. I did “Dance, Dance Revolution” in the basement. I did yoga CDs. I walked around my neighborhood like an obsessive. I tried to teach myself to tap dance, but at least in the beginning, that’s not sweaty enough while learning, so I abandoned that. Same with a tai chi DVD; good exercise, I’m sure – but not enough gasping for air to qualify as a work-out. Through ice storms and rain and work deadlines and complaining child, I set aside time every day to grimly exercise. On the 438^th day I forgot to put in my hour, and having broken my record, the entire thing came to a crashing halt. I lost about three pounds and tightened up some muscles.

By the time I got to Body Dynamics, I was too pudge to even be called Rubenesque – the best of the words intended to disguise the fact that I’m fat. I defined my sense of self by how thoroughly I’d failed at “taking my weight seriously.” I have tremendous arrogance about my brain, but hopeless shame about my body.

And now I think that it has nothing at all to do with will power or moral failings. I think I didn’t have the knowledge or skill to care for my kind of body the way I was assured would work. I have a genetic predisposition that is different from my mother’s.

Sooner or later science will catch up and there will be big headlines that shout what shame-filled fat women have known forever: HEY! WE ARE NOT ALL THE SAME! What works for some people is the kiss of death for others – who knew??!

I knew. We knew.

So I come with defeatist baggage. I trust that the many large and kind brains at Body Dynamics can help, but I remain astonished to see a lower number on my scale… and I’m still not sure I’m not just visiting these lower numbers on my way back up to the big digits. I hope it’s permanent.

And I’d like to shake my fist at my mother and let her watch my overlarge-but-now-muscly rump as I stalk grandly from the room. Won’t happen, of course, but that’s the fantasy.

Finally take my weight seriously? Yeah – no.

Image of “Flaming June.” She’s by Frederick Leighton, not Peter Paul Rubens, from whom we get the phrase “rubenesque.” Flaming June is a better color and I’ve always liked that expanse of thigh. She’s a woman of substance. Like me!

September 9, 2017

When I wake up in the morning, I’m not fat.

I don’t mean that elven plastic surgeons come in the night to carve away all the adipose tissue like a cherished Beverly Hills fairy tale. I mean that for a few blissful, warm, horizontal, totally relaxed moments, I have achieved the fully “neutral” status that Barbara at Body Dynamics has been trying so hard to help me achieve in more vertical and conscious postures.

I can’t feel the drag of my butt. I am aware of the line of my hip bones, sleek and slinky. My shoulders are relaxed and down; even Chad the stretch class teacher would nod with approval.

All the muscles are lying the way they’re supposed to, relaxed and ready as if Gwynn had just untangled me like a knot of knitting yarn.

Warmth and energy radiates down my spine along neural pathways Grace is working to open wider.

And then I stretch. The delicious contraction starts at my shoulders, with my arms going up and out. I’m breaking up the night’s fuzz between my muscles and it feels good. It has ALWAYS felt good, that first morning stretch…

…but now, thanks to the hard work I’ve done and the wise guidance of Barbara and then Gwynn and then Grace and then Chad, I can feel muscles rippling down my core from shoulders to pelvis to butt to legs to toes… and it feels like power.

It’s a REALLY nice way to wake up.

(Of course, that’s only if I’ve been able to wake up in my own time; if it’s an alarm that jars me from my slumbers, then all bets are off and the day begins with me cursing a blue streak.)

When I get up, I’m fat again… but there’s muscle now below the blub. There’s strength in my walk. The morning stiffness a 57-year-old fat lady earns simply through being alive so long – that stiffness works itself out within two or three steps.

And I go downstairs to eat the pumpkin-seed-laced breakfast that Chip recommends. (And water – water, water, water! I’m thirsty as I write!)

I tried for 56 years to do it alone – to recapture that sense of well-being and balance that shines for a few elusive moments every morning. Now I have a whole team helping me. And at last I’m getting closer!

Thomas Cole’s “River of Life” – this painting is dawn. It’s an awesome, overt, slap-in-your-face-with-a-fish allegory; the real thing is in the Smithsonian. You should check it out; it’s four huge paintings representing the stages of life. A hoot requiring absolutely no subtlety or advanced thought. (Hey! No subtlety or advanced thought?? An allegory for MY life!)

September 8, 2017

Oh my frickin’ Gawd, it has come to this.

I could have been curled up asleep. I could have been working on the massive project that is now FOUR days late. I could have been playing solitaire on my iPad while contentedly spooning down my “Chip Special” – yogurt, fresh fruit (peach today – mm!), walnuts, wheat germ, and pumpkin pumpkin pumpkin seeds. Zinc – for that morning zing.

Instead I was slavishly and obsessively calculating the relative merits of regular organic whole milk no sugar yogurt and GREEK organic whole milk no sugar yogurt.

At 6:55 in the morning.

Math and early hours; WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ME??

The Greek yogurt is mad for protein – you can see that it merited an exclamation point in my assessment. But is it TOO much protein? The plain has less sodium. Does Greek yogurt taste more salty? I don’t think so. Two identical containers and two identical serving sizes, but the plain holds four servings and the Greek holds three and a half. What’s up with that?

I’m taking both containers (washed, naturally) as a show-and-tell the next time I meet with Chip at Body Dynamics; he’ll have to help me figure out which one is better.  Or if there’s such a thing as “better.” Nutrition is wicked confusing.

(Chip – a sincerely charming man – will undoubtedly tell me he’d choose the morning’s yogurt based on what else he was eating that day, because Chip is organized and has a clue. I rarely know where my shoes are, much less what percentage of my protein needs I’ll be able to consume at dinner.)

Here’s a photo of my morning’s assessment, shot on top of the Entertainment Weekly photo of Jamie and Claire from “Outlander” because morning math merits SOME kind of reward and it’s otherwise impossible to make either yogurt or blog posts seem sexy.

September 7, 2017

Lean in here and I’ll whisper it in your ear, because I’ve discovered a truth that you may know at the top of your mind, but you haven’t accepted it yet deep down in your lizard brain. Here it is – ready?

Every single person – from slim to curvy, from tall to short, from plucked and enhanced to floppy and au naturel – is UNHAPPY WITH THE WAY SHE LOOKS. Or he looks, because guys are not immune to this either.

Sometimes people are accused of vanity for looking in every reflective surface they pass – mirrors, shop windows, whatever. I don’t think it’s vanity. I think it’s from the constant nervousness that Something Might Be Amiss. You’ve tucked the hem of your skirt into your waistband. You have a hunk of arugula riding shotgun on your teeth. You’re wearing one brown and one black shoe.

But it goes deeper than the occasional wardrobe malfunction. We none of us look in the mirror and say “Yep; I look awesome.” Even if we DO look awesome. We are filled by self-doubt. Even the naturally beautiful, those who won the genetic lottery, check their reflections nervously to see if age has made a dent yet.

I look back at pictures of me in my twenties and thirties and I think, “I looked cute!” This grates against my sense of self at the time which – like now – included a running internal monolog about how weak I was because I couldn’t lose weight. (And I bit my fingernails; a revolting habit. When I have no nails available, I go after the cuticles. It’s disgusting; I constantly have a thumb pressed over some bleeding patch along one nail bed or the other. Shudder.)

Here’s the definitive proof of my point:

Yesterday I told Grace I wanted to take a picture with her, and this ethereal, attenuated, fluid woman IMMEDIATELY put a nervous hand to her head and said “Oh, no – I can’t. I look terrible.”

See? She was about to stand next to a 238-pound client in a muumuu and yet she felt alarmed at the thought of someone taking her photo without the prep time to hide whatever she could possibly imagine her flaws to be.

So here’s what I’m thinking: We could all turn down the dial on the self-hatred and remember that in ten years we’ll look back and think “Why was I so worked up? I looked cute then! Not like NOW!”

Let’s BE in the now. Let’s try to love ourselves just a little. Even if we don’t work out. Even if we don’t track the amount of zinc in our diets. Even if we have the hem of our skirts tucked into our waistbands. Nothing at all would change; we’d just be a little less stressed.

Here’s a photo of me back when I thought I was SO fat. See? I was cute!

Still am, damn it!

September 6, 2017

So, let me tell you why working out with Grace makes me think of sex, and I promise it’s not the reason you’re thinking.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve seen a dirty movie. Yes – this admission puts me on a par with other heroes like firefighters and the guy who cleans up road kill on Rock Creek Parkway. (Not a job I’D take – would you??) In fact, it’s possible I’ve seen TWO dirty movies. Who’s counting?

I realize that those movies do not inspire in me the same reaction they may have in others. I look at improbably beautiful and surgically enhanced people having sex (and not ALL of that is surgical, after all; my God – doesn’t that hurt??) and I think nervously, “I’m not sure I look like that.”

That’s a multi-paragraph trip to get to the reality, which is that when I work out with Grace and she demonstrates an exercise I’m supposed to do, I definitely find myself thinking, “Oh, I’m SURE I don’t look that good when I do this.” Grace makes this stuff look easy.

She is aptly named. Grace is a ballet dancer, and she can’t make a note in her folder without me wanting to applaud and call for an encore. And yet, she does not look on less-elfin mortals with contempt; Grace greets my lumbering self with real joy. I honestly think she doesn’t see that I’m grossly overweight; instead she sees that I’m trying really, really hard to recapture and maintain good health, and she is delighted to help guide me on this journey.

Today we did some extremely simple exercises that were somehow so impossibly hard that I spent our entire hour apologizing for laughing so hard. At the risk of making this post too long, I’m going to walk you through one of them. Listen:

Inhale. Then exhale.

See? Told you it was extremely simple. Of course, here’s how Grace adds her own remarkable flavor to the fundamental act of respiration:

Lie on your back on a flat surface; you can have a little pillow if you want. Hold a towel or a belt or something loosely over your belly, palms up. Inhale through your nose slowly – like you’re filling a balloon with helium.

Exhale through your mouth; as you do it, tug gently on the towel or belt outwards. That turns your arm bone outward in the socket and opens your chest. Feel the openness? That moves your shoulders down and in, and that’s the dynamic movement that triggers a wave of energy that runs down your back and loops around the bottom to come up the belly. The lower belly pulls in and the pelvis tilts upward.

Now inhale again. Repeat.

Keeping that sequence straight turns out to be a lot to think about… but then she adds in things like bridging or leg lifts or (lying on my side) clams. And then she stood me up and handed me the towel again and put me in front of a low push-bar.

“Put one foot on the bar and when you inhale, push down. When you exhale, keep that good energy going and let your leg come up with control. Slowly. Tug on the towel – feel the openness in your chest. Shoulders back and down. Let that energy loop down your back and around to your stomach. Feel it? Feel that warmth all along your spine?”

What actually happened was that I suddenly couldn’t remember if I was supposed to inhale through my nose or through my mouth and if I was tugging on the towel or not and also how the hell to press my leg down and I fell right over, laughing and fully out of control. “WHAT??” I said. This utterly simple task is far, far more challenging than patting your head and rubbing your stomach, by several major muscle groups. It took another few tries before I could do it – and even then, my shoulders never really drew back well. (Shades of Shoulders Down – Chad teaching stress class. It’s ALLLL connected!)

I made Grace take this picture with me because I want to make sure I’m honest in this blog about the sense of scale. When it’s just me in a photo, I look, you know, okay. Ish. It’s not until Legolas’ sister stands next to me that you say “Yeah, I see the problem.” Grace didn’t like that theory, because she definitely doesn’t see my body as a problem – but I insisted. Gyms tend to show already-fit people working out in their ads or publications, and I think it’s very important to make it clear that people who are NOT Grace-ful are also welcome and feel at home at Body Dynamics. She’s a babe, though, huh?

September 5, 2017

This is Chad (street name “Shoulders Down”). He looks like a nice guy, doesn’t he? Yeah – watch out. Chad is DANGEROUS!

He teaches the stretch class at Body Dynamics. I liked the idea of taking a stretch class because my idea of stretching is (now) being able to get my hands somewhere near my feet in a “touch your toes” posture.

(This is a great departure from my youth, when being flexy and stretchy meant sitting on my butt, holding the arch of my foot in one hand, and then straightening my leg out somewhere near my ear. That’s a distant and quite laughable dream now, but once I really could do it!)

But Chad is something extremely dangerous: he is THOROUGHLY EDUCATED. Chad could care about feet and ears; Chad has OTHER PLANS. Like – do you know what your IT band is? (Not your “it” band – we say “eye-tee” because we know what that means and like a little shortcut.) (Yeah – don’t ask me. I’ve been told twenty times and forgotten twenty times. I know it does not stand for Information Technology, Intestinal Turbidity, or Iberian Turmeric; beyond that you’re on your own.)

It’s a strap that runs under your skin from your hip bone to your knee, about where your hand would hit if you held your hands at your sides. I never knew it was there because I seem to have established an unspoken détente with my IT band; I don’t bother it and it doesn’t bother me.

BUT NO. Here comes Chad, with the light of zealotry in his eye. (This is rank miscasting; Chad is kind and calm and very, very opposed to causing any pain at all.) He puts foam rollers on the ground, arranges his students in improbable poses on the foam rollers, and has us roll ourselves over and back, across the IT band WHICH OBJECTS STRENUOUSLY.

So of course I object strenuously, too – to which Chad offers a kind smile and the comment “Good stuff!” He is nefarious.

And then when I stand up, I’m easily six inches taller. I have no idea how.

Chad says that as soon as the lower body feels any tension, the shoulders creep upward in sympathy, so his constant murmur as he prowls the room checking alignments is “Shoulders down.” And EVERY SINGLE TIME I discover that by damn, my shoulders have crept up again. How is that possible?? I was focused on keeping them down. I look away for two seconds and BOING! Like a spring. Up the shoulders come.

And why does it matter if the shoulders are up? “I’m picky,” Chad says with approval and warmth in his voice. And that makes me want to please him, so I push my shoulders down again. Doesn’t matter; they pop up like a Weebles Wobble But They Don’t Fall Down, but I’ll keep trying. He knows more than I do, and my IT band is SO limber now.

(Not really; I continue to not be able to feel my IT band unless I’m rolling over it, but I trust it’s better now than it was before!)

September 4, 2017

I can resist anything but temptation.

(Who said it first? Oscar Wilde? Woody Allen? Can’t remember.)

Patterns and habits require tremendous will power to overcome, but yesterday I had used up all my will power on other things and was feeling pathetic and deprived and, well, subject to temptation.

I don’t take drugs – I pop an Advil only very reluctantly. I don’t drink, for fear of alcoholism. (I believe I’m an alcoholic who just hasn’t started yet.) I don’t gamble the rent money, I don’t visit disturbing brothels in Thailand, I don’t associate with nefarious types (well, not VERY nefarious) (you know who you are). What I do is eat.

And that means I wear my moral failings on my butt, for all the world to see and comment on. Really, it would be much more attractive to be a heroin junkie. For a while, at least.

So yesterday I remembered that I’d bought ice cream sandwiches for my son before he went to college. He didn’t eat them (because – oh, gosh, did I do that? – I bought delicious Baskin Robbins Jamoca almond fudge ice cream sandwiches and the kid ain’t a fan), and there were two left, and they’ve been sitting there for weeks.

Before yesterday, I was able to resist them. First, I resisted them by eating OTHER more dense, more delicious ice creams. (Clever ploy, huh?) Then, after the Great Zinc Connection was made (that is, Chip at Body Dynamics explained that I was sugaring away all the zinc I’d been eating in pumpkin seeds), I resisted the treats by growling like a dog spotting the UPS man. Defense! Defense! Back, you bastards!

But not yesterday. I ate one and then the other. I muttered “zinc” and “fasting blood sugar” and “don’t do it” while I wolfed them down, but those words of power had lost their oomph.

So after that, I made myself a perfectly enormous cup of Earl Grey, with whole milk and STRAIGHT WHITE CANE SUGAR scooped amply out of the canister – pure and glistening and grainy and deadly. And then I looked around in vain for some other way to destroy all the good I’d done. If a dealer had walked by, I would have crooned “Come on, baby – just a little bump. I’ll do ALL the things you love.”

And then – remorse.

I didn’t even particularly enjoy the indulgences I was packing in; I just did it because I was sad and low and self-destructive. And then guilty, too.

BUT today is a new day. I’m going to eat no-sugar, whole-milk yogurt with fresh fruit, wheat germ, walnuts, and zinc-rich, hopeful, little-engine-that-could pumpkin seeds. I’ll drink a big glass of water. And I’ll shoulder my burdens with renewed determination. Because old patterns are hard to break… but with a lot of help, I’m going to break them.

I hope.

 

 

September 3, 2017

Want to see something simultaneously SO GROSS and also SO COOL??

This isn’t for the dainty, because the video I’m linking you to includes the use of a cadaver to see how muscles work. It’s icky… except that it’s really fascinating. (But don’t look if the idea of a dead body gives you the heebies.)

Gwynn the therapeutic masseuse guru at Body Dynamics sent me the link. She was telling me about how she could feel that muscles in my legs weren’t sliding across each other as they should.

That made my eager little ears prick up, like my dog when he thinks something tasty might be dropped on the kitchen floor.

“But my legs feel fine… don’t they?”

Gwynn (and Barbara) (and Grace) (and Chad) (and Chip) (and Jorge) (it’s a cluster of concern)  have noted my “turn-out.” This is a very gracious way of saying that I’m a duck-foot; my feet splay out to the side. If I lie on my back, it’s the sides of my feet that touch the ground, not the heels.

For the uninitiated, it’s something that makes me look like I waddle a little when I walk – but for anyone who has studied ballet (and at Body Dynamics we’ve got a jag of ‘em, son), the turn-out is a source of envy. I did a frog-pose sort of exercise with Grace once and she actually called excitedly across the room to Chip, working with another client. “Did you SEE that TURN-OUT?!”

“No – do it again!”

I’m not used to the admiration of athletic ballet dancers, I can promise you, and I basked in their surprising regard for all of ten seconds until it turned out my pelvic alignment was off again; story of my life. Back to work.

But it turns out that ballet dancers (and massage gurus and physical therapists, etc.) want that turn-out to be voluntary; I’m supposed to be able to walk with my toes pointing more or less forward. So Gwynn’s been working on loosening up muscles that haven’t had to move against each other because I am ALWAYS splay-foot. And those muscle groups were proving obstinate; they didn’t think they needed to move against each other and they dug in their stubborn little muscle feet and tried to resist Gwynn’s ministrations.

Of course, that’s like a peewee football team attempting to hold back the starting line of the New England Patriots, so eventually she got the movement she was looking for.

“But you’ll have to move them, or they’ll fuzz up again.”

“I’m sorry – they’ll what?”

“Ooh – have you seen the fuzz video?”

“No!”

“I’ll send you the link. You’ll never again stretch in the morning without thinking of fuzz. You’ll love it.”

And she was right – I LOVE this video. It’s just over five minutes long. The guy is a bit of a nutter, but only because he seems eccentric; he certainly seems to know what he’s talking about. (And the video is all the more entertaining because he seems to have come back later and edited in a lot of commentary.)

So here you go.  Gross, but very, very cool. Tell me what you think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FtSP-tkSug