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.

 

 

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!