11.23.17

I tried to force both my sisters and my mother into a photo today, during the Thanksgiving prep time, but one sister is notoriously slippery and refused to participate – so here’s me with my mother and my sister Lexie.

(Twig, an early escape artist, charmed all and then fled fast, before I could corral her.)

These are two of the three women who share my DNA; these are the women to whom I would give a kidney. If Twig was in the photo, you’d see that all three of them are the same height (about three or four inches shorter than me), have similar faces and hair, and are adorable. I am taller, far fatter, and spent the entire day attempting to hold my core muscles as rigidly tight as possible…

…except when, howling with laughter, I proved to Lexie and mom just how much Barbara (at Body Dynamics) and her team have done for me by demonstrating “before” and “after” examples of just how much those muscles were holding in.

(Really, it’s impressive; if I remember, I’ll post both photos tomorrow because it makes me snort with amusement. If I could only hold that utterly clenched pose – which involves pelvis, ribs, abdominals (rectus and transverse), and those huge, fanning seashells of the obliques – then I could really fool the world!)

But despite not looking much like them, those women are my heart. It was a wonderful Thanksgiving and I dined as much on love, affection, support, and giggles as anything on a plate – and a most nutritious meal it was, too!

11.22.17

I awoke from a long, sound, delicious sleep this morning because my son was standing at the foot of the stairs hollering up at me.

“What?” I replied cleverly.

“I said – what can’t you eat now?”

“I can eat anything…” (Why burden my son with the “no grains, less dairy, never any sugar” plan?)

“Okay. So, sausage and chicken in orzo, or prosciutto and mozzarella with pesto?”

“Um.”

“Which would you prefer?”

“Is there bread with the prosciutto?”

“Yeah – it’s a sandwich. From ‘Agents of Shield.’”

It can take time to unpack a statement like that and I wasn’t at my best, so I thought of all that illegal bread with the bedhead version of gastronomic lust and picked the sandwich without hesitation. So much for the “no grains” plan.

“Kay. Bye.”

And off he went to the store to buy what he needed, in his car with his credit card, to assuage his burning desire for non-college-cafeteria food. Then he taught me how to sauté (which he says means “jump”) pine nuts in the frying pan to toast them (my boy!) and made his own pesto.

The bread was heaven and the sandwich was AMAZING. “It’s what Simmons made for Fitz. Remember? And he had to dump it in the river so the dogs wouldn’t smell it?”

I got that the names were characters from “Agents of Shield” – Rusty apparently follows a guy on You Tube who makes food from TV shows (we’ve benefitted from a Ron Swanson steak in the past) – but didn’t remember the episode. Nevertheless – “How sad he must have been to throw this sandwich away.”

“No doubt.”

We munched contentedly.

My kitchen is a certified disaster area and the chef has gone upstairs to take a long, soaking bath. I don’t regret a single bite of that bread. All is right with the world.

I thought you’d like to know, since you so kindly expressed concern when I came to what I hope was the nadir of my wet blanket period yesterday!

11.21.17

Last night one of the lenses popped out of my eyeglasses.

No big deal; the screw had just come loose. It was still there – it just needed to be tightened.

The problem was, as everyone around the world knows, when this happens, you hand your glasses to Jonathan and he’ll go to whatever drawer he’s allocated to eyeglass repair and pull out the little eyeglass kit and he’ll fix your glasses. That’s what he does; that is his self-appointed purpose in life.

Except… dead husband.

I couldn’t find the little kit. So I put the glasses in a case and made a mental note to leave a little early for my session with Barbara today at 11 so I could stop by the eye glasses place and get them to repair it. (And what if they couldn’t? How would I choose a new pair of eyeglasses without Jonathan there to critically examine fifty or sixty frames on my face before pronouncing “That’s the one?”)

This morning I got up thinking that I needed to just carve enough time this morning to make a shopping list – I want to make a cake for my sister’s birthday on Thanksgiving (trying something new and just a little bold this time), and Chip had a recipe for mujaddara lentils with spiced yogurt that I think I can put together. If I make my shopping list, I can go to the eyeglasses store and then be at Body Dynamics at 11 for Barbara, and Chad’s stretch class at noon, and then the grocery store, and still be back when Rusty gets home from college this afternoon … and make the cake tomorrow for Thanksgiving on Thursday, and make the lentils – when? I’ll figure it out.

Barbara has me doing the barest rudimentary form of interval training and I HATE it, but despite the fact that I slept for about three hours last night (just couldn’t stay asleep), I know that when my mood is black, exercise really WILL help me feel better, so I was forcing myself to gather up work-out clothes when the phone rang.

My mother, using her “bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed” voice. “I’ll take you to lunch at Tempo and then we’ll go to the wholesale florist to buy gorgeous blooms to make a lovely centerpiece for Thanksgiving!”

“I really can’t – I’m working out at 11 and 12.”

“Well, this won’t take long. Come on.”

“I can’t even get to Tempo until 1:30, and I’ll be in work-out clothes.”

“Oh, they won’t mind!” (It’s not the Tempo staff I worry about, given that my mother has the  most critical eye on the planet.)

“No, I don’t think it will work today.”

(Suddenly near tears.) “Oh. Well. I just need to get OUT.”

And that did it. I said I’d go. I’m a sucker for the near-tears of a crazy old lady. One day she will be gathered to her great reward and I’ll miss even her craziness. And I know what she was saying is “I’m a widow TOO, and I’m too old to keep up with everything and I’m lonely and often confused and I need your help.”

So I cast around for something I could put over my work-out clothes so she wouldn’t look at me at lunch as if I’d just recited Lenny Bruce monologs from the pulpit of St. Paul’s Church. I knew I had one more new pair of long pants to work out in – there they were. But – ech. They’re like grey plastic sweatpants; so hideous. And the long-sleeved workout shirts are all in the laundry (why didn’t I do the wash this weekend? Why am I such a slacker?) and the sleeveless outfit looked like grim death with the grey pants. And I couldn’t find anything to pull over the whole ugly mess so as to appear even slightly acceptable at lunch and at the wholesale florist, wherever that is.

I didn’t like my outfit. So I canceled Barbara and Chad both.

When your husband dies, people say “Be kind to yourself. Don’t try to do too much.”  People also say “Exercise releases endorphins; it regulates mood and will help you feel better.” People really need to get together and agree on one unified school of advice, because I’m not in a good space, logically, and I’m tempted to go back to bed and pull the covers over my head, where – if last night is the pattern – I will stare uselessly at nothing and wish vainly for sleep.

Oh, it’s a pity party today at the Amazing Adventures of A Fat Lady in Fitness Land. Wot laffs!

What a drama queen.

11.20.17

Sometimes I envision my brain as a huge, Matrix-sized field of nothing but electrical wall outlets, waiting for something to come along and plug in something useful.

And what I’ve come to understand is that my outlets that turn on a sense of joy or contentment from exercise? Those outlets are slightly bent. You can force in a plug if you REALLY lean on it, and a small trickle of electricity will come through; enough to power a nightlight, for example…

…while my “massage” receptors are slutty – wide open, eager for use, winking and flirting with every passing plug. Hey, big fella.

I had a massage with Gwynn at Body Dynamics today. Gwynn is, as noted, a wizard. She’s no spa masseuse dilettante in it for the pleasure and the tips; when she goes in, she goes with a purpose. We discussed my lamina groove (can’t give up on that frozen-solid thorax!) (doesn’t a thorax sound like something out of Dr. Seuss?), and my tendency to pack any stress into my neck and shoulder muscles…

…but mostly we examined the aductor magnus in my left thigh.

That muscle runs from the knee to the pelvis; Gwynn says it’s on the back of the thigh (and she would know), but I feel it right up the inseam. My left aductor magnus is oddly tight without any corresponding strength. When I use it – say, Barbara sticks me on a rowing machine to gasp and bitch for ten minutes – it stabs me at the very top of my thigh with every return on the rower.

(This is annoying – however, the pain was enough that Barbara let me off with only six minutes of rowing, not ten… so maybe – don’t fix it?!)

So today Gwynn brought her voodoo skills (that woman can see pain through her fingertips; it’s uncanny) to my adductors and I’m not lying, it HURT. Not more than I could stand, but I spent a lot of time wincing and hissing little inhales and saying “now THAT’S tender” and in other ways attempting uselessly to persuade her away from her mission.

And I STILL got off the table feeling high as a kite.

My brain’s receptors that might be more productively devoted to the joy of exercise are apparently all switched over to massage. Kind massage, determined massage, even painful massage seems to leave me stoned. I advised Gwynn to knock out a wall in her treatment room so she could create a sort of recovery opium den next door where her victims could be stacked up like cordwood as we chased the massage dragon.

I know an ultra-runner – a man who thinks running 100 miles at a time is so much fun that he recently ran 200 miles. I know a woman who believes that if you don’t throw up at least once per workout, it’s not a good session. I’ve seen people biking up mountains in Vermont – apparently voluntarily. On their vacations, fercrissake.

These people are getting something from exercise that I am not getting.

I’m willing to believe that I can retrofit my exercise receptors – that I can become addicted to the exercise endorphins. Hasn’t happened yet, but that doesn’t mean it won’t.

But the massage receptors? Running just fine!

By the way – the adductor magnus actually does feel a bit better. Gwynn grinned and said “Oh, good – we’ll just keep at it, then!” And somehow I’ll drool while she does it, too.

 

11.19.17

That’s not a one-note “I forgot the milk” duh. It’s a multi-note “duh” of contempt – what a fourteen year old girl says to her mother when her mother says “everyone seems to like to text these days.” It’s a “duh” that has a dip in it, like “duh-UH-uh,” which as anyone knows is internationally interpreted as “are you a complete moron?”

I figured out why I’ve been having such a brutal time with sugar of late – and why I’ve lost just about every battle:

I’m not eating enough food.

Duh-UH-uh.

I keep getting caught up in whatever it is I’m doing and I skip lunch. Or I get too busy and then too tired to plot a strategy for a good, healthy dinner. My body – my clever, highly-adept body which is perpetually poised for the next disaster – screams out FAMINE!! Get fast energy NOW! I can store fast energy! WHERE IS THE SUGAR??

And as much as I admire sisu, that grim determination is simply no match for hundreds of thousands of years of DNA-level instinct. STORE ENERGY NOW.

The answer is – eat more. More protein. More fat. Fewer grains. No dairy. Wrest control back! I’m going to the grocery store.

Observations on sugars:

1. Honey in tea is simply a non-starter. Those without a sugar jones can put a teaspoon of honey – or even a bold, living-la-vida-loca tablespoon – into a large mug of tea and it will be enough. I cleared the honey bear’s head entirely and my tea STILL wasn’t sweet enough. I’m just going to give up tea forever. It’s going to be a long, cold winter.
2. Maple syrup is dreamy in plain full-fat Greek yogurt. Bliss. Doesn’t take much. That really is just a drizzle… while honey? I’m left thinking, “yeah – where’s the honey?”
3. Most sweet desserts are what my friend Laura Yager rightly calls “a high-caloric waste.” They look better than they are. You eat them because – there they are. But for the most part, if we were going by flavor and not DNA-instinct and habit, meh. My personal exceptions: A one-scoop sundae at Arties (don’t get the coffee ice cream), and the chocolate cheesecake at Tempo. Those are every bit as spiritually satisfying as they look.

Time to make my shopping list… and drink some water!

 

11.17.17

My sister Lexie is horse-mad. In my youth, all she wanted to do was become an outstanding dressage rider. All summer long, she spent her days in the sweaty Virginia sun atop a very large beast, riding “on point” and swallowing dust so thick that the ice cold Dr. Pepper at lunchtime would make you wince with both pain and joy.

I know this because my mother, no fool, figured that if she was hauling one kid out to the boonies for horseback riding lessons, she might as well haul two – so I was generally in the next ring over, swallowing dust and marveling when the Concorde would fly overhead (we were very near Dulles Airport).

I didn’t mind; unlike my sister, I see horses as really big dogs you can ride on, and I was just as happy to commune with a horse as almost anything else. (Exception: I would have rather been in an air-conditioned room nose-deep in a novel, but riding had the advantages of seeming moderately romantic – plus it smells of warm leather, which is a glorious perfume.)

Sometimes the instructors would get antsy and lead us out of the ring and onto a trail ride. Occasionally we’d ride bareback, which was terribly brave of us.

The good students (tiny little Lexie at the front of the pack) would be in the front, and the slackers who thought of horses as dogs followed along. Sometimes we would trot.

That is to say, the dog (I mean horse) would trot, and I would attempt to stay on board.

Trotting is bouncy and uncomfortable; if you have stirrups, you can kind of crouch over the horse and absorb the bounce in your knees. If you’re bareback – ah, that’s when thinking a horse is a big dog really breaks down.

From the very first jolt, I’d get thrown slightly off center.

Every succeeding bounce would send me farther and farther to one side, until my knee was where my butt should have been and my boot was brushing the Queen Anne’s lace – all the while rendered helpless by laughter, because a slow-motion involuntary descent from a really, really big dog is riotous.

Eventually I’d give up trying to haul it back on board and I’d just slide off. If there wasn’t a nearby log or rock, I’d walk back to the barn, my big dog’s nose occasionally urging me on with a bump to the shoulder – because there was no way in hell I was going to manage to clamber back up without a stirrup.

I remember that sensation today – a very slow, very undeniable descent – because I seem to be attempting to achieve fitness bareback, and my horse has begun to trot.

I missed the chance to go to Artie’s for an ice cream sundae on Tuesday, so I had a far-inferior sundae at Spartans. And then I got to go to Artie’s on Wednesday after all, and I was still jonesing for the real thing, so I had dessert for the second day in a row. (Ew – the coffee ice cream was laced with espresso beans – crunchy and bitter where everything should be smooth and sweet. Fail.) (I ate it, of course.)

On Thursday, my mother and I went to lunch, and she wanted dessert – so she looked at me. She likes it when I order something sweet to eat, so she can pretend she doesn’t eat desserts. And I weakly fell back into old habits and ordered the chocolate cheesecake. Then I tried my best to resist it – but I’d gotten off center on Tuesday evening and was sliding inexorably towards an ignominious dismount.

All day today, I’ve been craving something doughy. I wanted all those bad carbs I’ve been successfully avoiding. I had a big omelet for lunch in the hopes that this would satisfy my craving, but no dice. Just didn’t taste very good… so tonight I had pizza. A lot of pizza. Five-eighths of a pizza.

I’m about at the point where my knee is where my butt should be. I’m not laughing this time, but the crash is coming. Thank God I’ve got Barbara and Gwynn and Grace and Chad and Chip at Body Dynamics to get me back on the horse once I come off, because I’m not sure I could do it alone.

(Worst truth? That pizza tasted SO DAMNED GOOD!)

Lexie and Spirit of Flame in the Long Long Ago. Neither of them ever had the slightest problem with bareback riding; the kid is doing so in this photo. How annoying of her!

11.15.17

If you see a woman walking down the street with that vacant look in her eye (like the way people look when they’re on the phone – the eyes are still there taking in input, but they’re not the primary sense on deck), it could be that she’s focused on her gait.

Me, for instance. Thanks to Barbara, Grace, and Gwynn at Body Dynamics in Falls Church, VA  (personal trainers and therapeutic masseuse; and they TALK to each other, which is sort of disconcerting when I think I can get away with something with one that the other doesn’t know about…) (they always know), this is the evolution of my gait:

Pre-Body Dynamics: I’m walking. I’m walking. I wish I wasn’t walking. My lower back feels like it’s going to start spasming or cramping. Christ I hate to walk.

Barbara plus two months: I’m walking. Grip the low abs. GRRRRIP. Tilt the hips, tilt the hips, tilt the hips, damn, this feels weird… but my back feels a little better.

Barbara plus four months: I’m walking. Pelvis up, ribs down. Up. Down. My back doesn’t hurt but I feel constipated from my collar bones to my knees. How long can I keep this up?

Barbara plus Grace (ten months in): Neutral pelvis. Neutral. Where the hell is neutral? Rock the hips all the way up – now all the way back – now in between, that’s neutral. Oh, excuse me – I didn’t see you there. Yes, I was doing a rather odd dance. My apologies; I’ll pay more attention.

Barbara plus Grace (one year in): Neutral pelvis. Ribs down. Glutes. GLUTES. Where are the glutes? I can’t feel anything in my butt.

Barbara plus Grace plus Gwynn (one year, two weeks in): Extennnnnnd through the hip. Extennnnnd through the hip. Hey – butt muscles! Oops – neutral pelvis. Ribs down. Extennnnnd through the hips. I’m walking! Lookit me walking!

Barbara plus Grace plus Gwynn (fifteen months in): Obliques. Shoulders opposite hips. Twist from the waist. Tight abs. Neutral pelvis. Ribs DOWN – down, I say! Extennnnnd through the hips. Damn it – where did the obliques go?

Barbara plus Grace plus Gwynn (eighteen months in; today): Imagine a magnet between my thighs, drawing my aductors magnus together. Turn off the big glutes max that pull me splay-footed; let the feet fall straighter by focusing on the inner thighs. Stand up TALL. Neutral pelvis. Ribs down. Obliques do the twisting. Extennnnnd through the hips. Now move the LEFT foot.

The struggle to correct my gait now takes in so many muscle groups that I must either be getting smarter or some of this is becoming automatic; I suspect the later! Grace added the adductor magnets today. I walk like a robot.

No, that’s not true; I lost that constipated, rigid feeling pretty early (and not just because of Chip’s beneficial effect on my diet!), and when I move, I feel like I’m swinging pretty easily.

And now my back NEVER hurts… but you can see it in my eyes that I’m not really watching what’s in front of me when I walk; instead I’m chanting a litany of commands to my willful, wayward body and focusing on improving my gait.

So take pity on me if you see me on the street and give me a wide berth; there’s a whole lot of concentration going on!

Joshua Nava Arts. Used without permission, but lots of admiration.

11.13.17

I don’t love shopping. In my family, Jonathan, my recently-deceased husband, was the one who loved to venture forth to see what treasures he could glean from the world. The man could tell you where the frilled cocktail toothpicks were in every grocery store in a twenty-mile radius.

Not me. The bigger the store, the more fatigued I feel. (Home Depot just makes me dizzy.) I plot my course through these places with precision, like a diver with low oxygen. I need THESE THREE THINGS and let’s hope no one gets in my way…

So I hadn’t been to Target since I began working with Chip, the nutritionist at Body Dynamics in Falls Church, VA, maybe four or five months ago. And I had to go yesterday (because I’ll Amazon Prime a lot of things, but two modest soap dispensers for the kitchen seemed beyond the pale somehow).

And I was astonished.

There was Bad Choices food EVERYWHERE.

Simply masses of it, and in places where you might expect you’d be safe. Capping aisles. Spilling into the travel lanes. Heaped on shelves.

Sugar. Chocolate. Pretzels glistening on their little carousel. Their tiny hands reached out imploringly, wistful smiles hiding those baboon fang grins. “You remember us! Don’t you love us any more? Just slip a few of us into your basket – you know you want to!”

I walked through that place like Van Helsing with a cross.

(Not handsome Hugh Jackman Van Helsing in an improbable Stetson/Fedora hybrid – no, more like nervous Anthony Hopkins Van Helsing.)

I made it out without being lured into the hypnotic gaze of vampiric sugar, but it was a near thing. How can all that stuff be just OUT there?? How can we – the Chip followers of the world – allow our fellow citizens to be thrown to the sugar wolves like that?!

Here’s a photo of Hugh as Van Helsing. I have a photo of the last round of groceries I bought at Whole Foods, but Lordy, it’s boring. Wouldn’t you rather look at Hugh? Sure. Who wouldn’t? You can bet HE doesn’t eat a lot of Bad Choice foods.

Bonus for nerds: Do you recognize Hugh’s funny, goofy sidekick Carl? That’s David Wenham, the guy who played noble, upright Faramir in the Lord of the Rings movies. Couldja DIE? Good character actor!

11.12.17

She trudged wearily onward across the frozen lake. With numb fingers, she tried to close her collar a little tighter, but the cruel wind slipped inside anyway, stealing her warmth and leaving a bone-deep chill. The arctic sun hung on the horizon, touching the world with the weakest noontime sunlight; that was all the illumination the day was going to bring.

Even with little hope, she kept going. The message MUST get through.

The Finns have this gorgeous word – sisu. It means courage, determination, a refusal to give up even when the entire Russian army is just over that hill and about to invade.

In a John Wayne movie, it would be called true grit.

In a Jewish deli, it would be called chutzpah.

I’ve kind of talked myself into a bind here, because my need for sisu is not in resistance to an invading army or the quest to uncover a murderer or the wholesale slaughter of a people…

…my need for sisu is based on the size of my butt.

Feels sort of weak and self-aggrandizing, huh??

A few days ago (see the post “Unflinching”) I posted a photo of my butt in the hopes that I’d be able to own my truth and be proud of who I am. Many kind people said supportive things and you’d think that would be enough – and yet I’m so vain and self-centered that I discovered I was demoralized by the reality of me squeezed into unattractive Spandex… especially in a part of the body I’ve been very good at ignoring in the past. Oh – a three-way mirror? No thank you!

But the reality of any quest – including the quest for health and fitness – is that there are slogging, plodding, demoralizing times as well as exciting, I-just-shrunk-two-pants-sizes times. I can either give up and sit down on that frozen lake and pull out a pint of Ben and Jerry’s (oh, dear – that’s a BAD choice for the frozen lake scene)…

…or I can keep going, relying on sisu to pull me ahead when everything in me says “Damn – let’s go back to pretending that posterior isn’t so alarming.”

And actually, I have to add to my imagery of the lonely frozen lake trudge, because in my case, there are at least five sturdy ropes tied to my waist, leading forward into the arctic gloom – and at the end of each rope are champions who are straining with all their might to pull me on, for I do NOT make this journey alone.

There’s Barbara on the lead rope – my trainer at Body Dynamics in Falls Church, VA, who just smiles at me when I want to quit and makes me do “three more!”

Flanking her are Grace, also a Body Dynamics trainer, and Gwynn, my therapeutic masseuse. Grace and Gwynn are between them unlocking the muscles of my thorax. I didn’t even know they were locked up.

On the wings are Chad – stretch class teacher grimly muttering “Good stuff!” as he pulls even harder – and Chip, nutritional guru, who trots back to me periodically as I trudge across the lake to give me pumpkin seeds for life-restoring zinc.

There are SO MANY people attempting to tease and flatter and threaten and coerce me across the frozen lake; SURELY the message will get through: A nicer ass is waiting right over there. Don’t stop now. Keep going!

I’m so grateful to have a team to help me. How DARE I be demoralized?! Team Sisu to the rescue!

A photo by Johan Kleventoft that comes up if you put “Laatokka winter” into Google images. Lake Laatokka is where the vastly-outnumbered Finns held off invading Russia in the Winter War of 1940; that’s where the rest of the world came to recognize the Finnish concept of sisu.