July 3, 2018

She pulled uncertainly into the parking lot of the gas station-cum-garage and rolled, confusingly, over the now out-of-date line that rang a bell in the dark bay ahead of her.

“Haven’t heard one of those in decades,” she thought nervously. “Maybe I should wait until I’m back on home turf…”

Too late. From the shadows an overall’ed form was moving toward her. The mechanic was nondescript and plain. He didn’t seem menacing, so she put the car into park and got out.

“Hi,” she said brightly, hoping he wasn’t one of those Neanderthal men who make women feel small for neither knowing nor caring much about the inner workings of the four-stroke combustion engine.

“Help you?” he asked as he wiped his hands on a filthy cloth. (Why bother?, she wondered. His hands can only get dirtier from that.)

“My car has a – well, it’s a shimmy. If I go over about twenty miles an hour, it begins to feel like things are going to fly apart.”

“Uh-huh,” he said flatly and toed a rolling dolly over to the car. Without preamble, he disappeared under the car and she heard him banging around. Knowing he could only see her well-shod feet pacing nervously, she held her questions until (it seemed) eons had passed.

“Can you find anything?”

He rocketed out from under the car and walked to the office. “C’mon,” he said shortly.

“Oh, well…” He ignored her, so she moved ahead but stopped in the doorway, uncertain of the situation. Hedging her bets, her head was inside while her feet were still on the pavement outside.

He was rummaging in a worn metal desk, discarding oily bits of metal and poorly folded road maps as he went. “Here it is,” he muttered. He turned and held out…

…an apple.

Startled, she reached out instinctively and took it from him. Then she regarded the apple with profound suspicion. What the hell was it? Why hadn’t she refused to take it?

“Hold that,” he said. And then there was silence.

“Um – okay.” They regarded each other blankly.

Finally he clarified. “When you drive. Hold that when you drive.”

Words failed her. She shook her head and raised her eyebrows. Her forehead creased.

“Go on,” he said. “Try it. You’ll see.”

“You want me to hold an apple… to fix the shimmy in my car?”

“That’s right.”

“Is it a MAGIC apple?” she asked, not able to bite back the sarcasm.

He grinned. “Once around the block. If it doesn’t work, we’ll try something else. Go on, now.”

Thinking she’d entered a madman’s lair, she scurried back to her car, clutching the apple, and drove off.

“Insane,” she muttered. Then, as the car began its alarming shuddering, she looked suspiciously at the apple, lying innocently in the drink holder. Her frown of contempt became a moue of frustration. “All right!”

She reached out and grabbed the apple – and the shimmying stopped. “What the hell?!?”

She put the apple down and the juddering began; she picked it up and it stopped. I do NOT understand, she thought – but it’s working!

* * * * *

This tale is a parable. A fitness parable. I composed it to explain how WEIRD is the power of Barbara Gallagher Benson at Body Dynamics, and of Gwynn Hegyi, and of Grace Ball – my BDI team of WIZARDS.

Listen: About 18 months ago, I came down with a strange numbness that was diagnosed as Guillain-Barre Syndrome (which I incorrectly call Guillaume Barré because it sounds like an interesting protagonist in a French thriller). For reasons unknown, my own immune system attacked the sheaths around my nerves from the ribs down, leaving me mildly numb.

Some people have quite exciting experiences with Guillaume Barré; I don’t happen to be one of them. Despite being slapped into the hospital for five or six days, I was fine. I was numb and then I slowly got better. My right leg is still a little numb; I barely notice it any more. Not a big deal.

But I (now) know that at some point, I began shifting my weight to the left, which woke up more rapidly. And the muscles on the left got correspondingly stronger. The muscles on the right, relieved of duty, decided to take a break. Everything that was SUPPOSED to be done by those big old glute muscles on the right began to be accomplished by the muscles on the left, except the movements that HAD to come from the right side.

I now know which movements those are, because I have two sets of muscles which have begun to rebel – like colonists throwing tea into Boston Harbor. My adductor magnus runs up the inside of the thigh from knee to groin; the magnificently-named quadratus lumborum sit above the butt muscles like two mainsails.

Mine have been shrieking with increasing fury for the last six weeks or so.

And then Barbara said… “…tighten your glute mede.”

Barbara probably CAN tighten her gluteus medius without engaging minimus and maximus. I can’t – but I can clench a butt cheek in general.

And what happens?

ALL THE PAIN CEASES IMMEDIATELY.

Immediately. I can go from mid-wince to limp-free in the span of time it takes me to flex my ass.

This is VERY WEIRD INDEED – but honey – it’s a freaking blessing.

It is VERY CHALLENGING to see how these things are related, anatomically, but they are. Like solving a car problem by holding an apple. It makes no sense. But Barbara figured it out anyway. And Grace. And Gwynn. They worked my complaints until they solved it. And by damn, they DID solve it. I can’t believe it.

Of course, my glute mede is weak – so to make the parable complete, the apple that makes the car stop shaking has to weigh about twenty pounds; you can’t ALWAYS hold it until you build up some endurance and long-term strength (I have exercises now to add to my Home Exercise Program)… but you can be sure that building endurance is easier to do when NOT doing it causes pain.

I don’t know how those geniuses keep doing it, but I’m damned glad I’ve got them in my corner!

“Oh – here’s your problem: Your ass is totally weak on the right side. Think of it as a bad boot around the CV joint, got it?”

6.24.18

I had an uncharacteristically Biblical thought yesterday.

I’m not much of a gardener. I mostly kept up with the weeding until I saw a long, lazy, benevolent black snake in the garden. Then I screamed like a 1950s sitcom and refused to go into the yard for months; let the snake weed.

(This was an unsuccessful weeding policy, as it turns out, and the yard quickly began to assume a jungle-like air of neglect that only felt more alarmingly snaky.)

But when I discovered a (quite large) turtle in my tiny, man-made pond, I was restored to the natural world. (From this experience we see that the fear of a snake is JUST SLIGHTLY outweighed by the delight in a turtle. Mathematically, snake < turtle.)

I hired a landscaping company to create a turtle paradise; the result is so stunning that I can’t imagine Yertle isn’t blissed in his groovy bachelor pad. I rather hope he’s on TurtleMatch.com, finding himself a little honey to enjoy Eastern Slider Eden. One of the things the landscaping lady did was fill my little turtle pond with all kinds of luscious water plants. (Some of which sit on low tables made of slate on stone legs, under which GOLDFISH would be happy to hide! I’m going to buy Yertle his pets this week.)

And one of the plant varieties is a bulrush.

Bulrushes, it turns out, are lovely. They have pretty, oblate leaves, and they stand tall and wave gently in the breeze. They have pretty lavender flowers growing shyly from their stalks.

But of course the most immediately awesome thing about the bulrush is its place in literature (or history or religion, depending on your interpretation), as it was among the bulrushes that the Pharaoh’s daughter found tiny baby Moses. (I pointedly omit a wealth of commentary about family planning and societal shame and the unlikelihood of babies drifting, carefree and untethered, among tall reeds in a wetland.)

So I heart my bulrushes big-big, and occasionally look to see if any baskets have fetched up among them. Nothing so far.

But a big wind did come roaring through. It pushed over one of the cattails and one of the bulrushes, and I bravely took my bare feet to the distant side of the pond (where, one might reasonably assume, a snake could possibly be enjoying a poolside sunbath) to stand up my reclining plants.

Once I was safely back in the kitchen, I looked with satisfaction at my pond. It was perhaps the biblical nature of the bulrushes that made me think to myself, “I have restored the habitat to order; I am the god of the turtle pond.”

Any time you decide you’re a god, it’s a good opportunity to slap yourself in the face and shake that thought loose. I don’t follow a formalized religion, but I do believe in karma, and if you decide you’re the god of ANYTHING, the actual god of that thing will make a point of proving just how wrong you are.

(I follow no formalized religion, but there are gods everywhere in my world, and it’s best not to piss any of them off. Be grateful. Be humble. You never know when a deity is paying attention.)

But before I lost the image of me as a god entirely, I felt an electrical pull that meant an analogy was inbound. Annnnnnd…. It’s here! Listen:

I’m a bad gardener, but a landscaper with a green thumb and a love of growing things has put me on the path. She’s given me the bare rudiments of knowledge to be the goddess of the turtle pond.

I’ve been a poor manager of my health for my entire life. Now a fitness trainer with a knowledge of musculature and an understanding of my emotional barriers has given me the bare rudiments of knowledge to … No, too blasphemous to say I’m the goddess of my health. But really – the analogy holds true. I have the ability now to be a good steward.

This analogy is pretty sound, even without the biblical value of a garden. I have a garden; I can ignore it or I can tend it. There’s a snake in the garden – not Satan, in this case; I think my snake is sugar – but it won’t hurt me if I don’t hurt it. I just have to accept that it’s a part of my garden, and work around it.

If you don’t weed a little every day, things get away from you, and what could be magnificent instead looks like a rental property, where no one cares what happens to the shrubs or trees or – yes – bulrushes. That’s how people get to looking tatty and worn out before they need to. I was treating my body like a rental property. (Whoops – switched analogies there. Let’s try again.)

I was treating my body as if I was only going to look at it from the kitchen – but you can’t see the turtle from the kitchen, or the goldfish. You can’t see the blooms on the exotic water lily, which only blooms at twilight. (How cool is that?) You can distantly hear the frogs croaking, but you can’t get the full effect until you get out there.

A stint on the elliptical (or – help me, Rhonda – jogging a mile with Barbara) is like weeding. It’s annoying and hot and I dread it beforehand. But once it’s done, I feel better. I look better. And the bulrushes offering their surprising lavender flowers is like (and you’ll have to take my word for this, as I will NOT post a photo) the nascent little crease that is developing between my thigh and my butt. It’s not just one large slab of flaccid any more; I’m getting enough muscle definition that things are starting (just barely, but it’s a start) to look less embarrassing.

Bulrushes. There’s so much they can teach us.

That’s a fitness blog entry of 23 paragraphs, and only the last five have anything at all to do with fitness. This seems like a LONG way around a pretty simple point. You’re very patient!

June 18, 2018

I was at my 40^th high school reunion, tired from two days of chatting with people I hadn’t known for decades (which is fun but exhausting). I was sitting lumpishly on a sofa listening, delighted, as a guy I barely spoke to in high school – Phil Clark – told a fantastic rabble-rousing story that ended up explaining why he hadn’t been allowed to walk with his graduating class at college.

I was digging Phil Clark big-big, and I decided that if someone had said “Let Phil hold your baby for a while, there,” I would have done it, handing over my infant son to a relative stranger who told a good story, had a glorious mop of leonine hair, and the ability to wear a sports coat with an undefinable brio, and all I would have thought was “I hope my baby is cool enough for Phil Clark.”

Of course, my baby is now 6’4” and dwarfs the magnetic Phil Clark, but this fantasy-on-the-fly made me think about the nature of beauty.

There are lots of studies about how much better handsome people are treated than homely people. (I’m just a slacker blogger; go look ‘em up yourself.) Of course, these studies aren’t just about women thrusting their infant sons into the arms of bejacketed men with Andrew Jackson hair. They’re more scientific – something like most of the Fortune 500 CEOs are taller than average and more than usually good-looking; things just happen for pretty people that don’t happen for the ugly.

Then I wondered: DO things happen for handsome people because of cheek bones and slim hips? Or is it the confidence that comes from cheek bones and slim hips?? If you took identical twins and spent a lifetime praising one’s beauty and berating the other’s homeliness, you’d end up with one successful person and one guy who lives in a van down by the river.

In high school, Phil Clark was just a guy. I don’t remember even having a crush on him, and I had a crush on EVERYONE. Somehow, in the intervening 40 years, Phil uncovered a well of self-confidence, and it made him – technical term coming up here – yummy.

So then I swiveled my regard onto my own experience. By objective measures, I’m now more attractive than I’ve been in decades. I’ve carved inches off my eminent posterior, I hacked off my hair to a more stylish length, and my movements are powered by muscles that have been regularly exercised. Was I having a better reunion than normal?

Well, I always have a good time at my reunion. That’s no measure.

None of my former crushes swept me into manly embraces and confessed a lifelong yen for me that caused them to turn away from their fathers’ highly profitable tradition of stock brokerage and instead subsumed their life essence into an artistic career involving chain saws and large statues of bears. So I’m not sure how to score that.

I suppose the answer is – I felt more confident. And so I had an even more enjoyable time.

And I’m expecting a love letter from Phil Clark any day now.

See? Andrew Jackson, although a horrible bigot and a bloodthirsty bastard, had very nice hair.

6.6.18

Here’s a life lesson for you: Wherever your physical or mental pain is?? That’s possibly NOT the problem site.

Mind you, there are exceptions. If you’ve sliced your finger with a kitchen knife or chopped off your foot with a poorly-wielded ax, by all means: Direct pressure and elevate. Hurry.

But when things are not quite as overt (or horrific), just be aware that if you’re clutching at an owie-spot, you might have been distracted from the actual source of your pain. Shall I explain? (Oh please, do.)

I have this muscle in my right thigh that regularly sings to me. There’s a collection of long, tough thigh muscles called the adductors. (Sit with a ball between your knees. Try to pop the ball with your thighs, like Bond villain Xenia Onatopp attempting to crush Pierce Brosnan’s handsome torso. Those muscles are your adductors. Xenia Onatopp’s are stronger than yours.)

(Holy smokes! I had to IMDB that Bond movie, Golden Eye, to see what Onatopp’s first name was, and you know who played her? You know who attempted to pop Remington Steel’s steel core like a squished grape? JEAN GRAY from the XMen movies. Famke Janssen. Didn’t see THAT one coming!)

Dang it – where was I?

Right – the three or four muscles that make up the adductors. One of them, appealingly, is called the adductor magnus (which sounds very Roman Legion – or maybe like Monty Python doing the Roman Legion. Adductor Magnus is right next to Biggus Dickus.).

Adductor magnus goes from the inside edge of your knee right up the inside of the thigh and hooks onto the pubic bone, exactly where you don’t want to point when you say “It hurts HERE.”

Mine has been angry for a few months now, and mutters with such vigor on occasion that I actually limp for a few steps, usually hissing and cursing at the same time. Walking pigeon-toed helps a bit, but that seems like a short-term solution where I need resolution.

There are no fewer than FOUR fitness brains working on this with me. Barbara, of course – my wizard at Body Dynamics in Falls Church, VA. Grace, the ballet dancer Pilates expert who works with Barbara. Josh, the physical therapist who rapidly identified two exercises that stretch the adductor magnus. And Gwynn, the Body Dynamics therapeutic masseuse.

And what is the source of my right leg’s angry adductor magnus?

Left hip, of course. Duh.

It turns out that there’s something going on in my left hip that affects my left knee and my left heel. I had no idea there was anything interesting happening because my right leg was compensating – and it was compensating by running a high-tension electrical line through my adductor magnus, which was being asked to provide pelvic stability it was not intended to provide.

Well, damn.

So it hurts HERE but the problem is HERE?

This is like the fifth time I’ve seen this pattern. Say I go see Gwynn for a massage and she says “What’s up? How do you feel?” And I think – it would feel great to have my back muscles massaged, so I say “My back is really tight.”

Well, that’s an automatic backfire, because she’ll start me out lying on my back and she’ll start digging into psoas muscles over the edge of my hip and down into the abdominal cavity, or have me lay on my side and work on lats or curl into a pretzel position with one leg thrown off the side of the table entirely. But damned if I don’t get off the table with my back feeling supple and content. She might never touch a back muscle, and she gets them to loosen.

The location of the pain just never seems to be a good identifier of where the problem is… unless you know enough to know how pain refers.

Oddly, this is NOT just a physical thing. Regina, the ace biofeedback counselor, hears about a problem and the first thing she does is ignore it for now and start fishing around for what ELSE is going on… and DAMN. She’s RIGHT. I’d totally lost track of THAT stressor because THIS one was using up all my oxygen.

In fact, Regina has asked me to be aware of certain patterns. When I find myself in the grocery store up to my elbows in the ice cream case, I’m to ask myself what else is going on in my life that I suddenly can’t resist either Ben or Jerry. And she’s right. I’m almost always able to identify something that’s eaten up all my will power or discipline or internal strength that I hadn’t even considered when the gravitational pull of organic Greek whole milk no sugar plain yogurt is suddenly so weak that I veer abruptly away and into the frozen desserts section.

So I offer you this for your consideration: Very often, the location of the pain is only distracting you from the actual problem. Something to be aware of.

Here, Xenia Onatopp demonstrates an excellent adductor magnus exercise.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6.5.18

Barbara is very subtle with her phone when we run. She holds it in her hand so very casually – nothing to see here.

Of course, I know she sets the timer when we leave Body Dynamics (Falls Church, VA). She’s mapped out a loop that is “about a mile” (this is the kind of statement that defines the difference between a marathon runner and a professional couch-sitter. I have not yet grabbed her by her slim, strong shoulders and shaken her with the mass of my far larger body, shouting “MORE than a mile? Less? Tell me precisely. I NEED TO KNOW” but that may yet be coming…).

She starts the timer at the corner; if you’re not watching, you’ll miss that she’s doing anything at all.

Today I ran a little farther than last time; I’m down to three (or is it four?) spells of walking in between plodding along. My endurance is definitely increasing, but I think my speed is slowing down. (Of course; I know it’s going to be longer until I allow myself to walk again.)

“Soldier, I’ve noticed that you’re always last.”  “I’m pacing myself, sir.” From the Book of “Stripes” – the wisdom of Bill Murray.

When we got back to the “about a mile” corner, THIS time Barbara acknowledged the timer she held. “Fourteen minutes! That’s almost a minute faster!”

(Barbara sometimes puts on Facebook the training runs or actual races she does; she regularly maintains a pace of eight-minute miles over such long distances that if you were following her in a car you’d need to pull over and get gas, so for her to be pleased with a 14-minute pace just proves how exceptionally kind and encouraging she is.)

I was pleased with the feedback. I can’t yet run for a solid mile, but I think that day is coming… and I don’t think a 14-minute mile is much to be proud of, but it’s far better than it was a few months ago. So I got my feedback today, and found it edible.

Then, because sessions with Barbara are 60 minutes long, I had to do another three-quarters of an hour with her in the gym. This seems unfair; my instinct is that if I manage to get across “about a mile” of distance, I should immediately be shown to a soft couch and handed the remote control; isn’t that enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, after all?

But no. Today we worked on squat-type exercises, while I dripped with sweat. (I astonish myself with my profound sweatiness during exercise. I’m surrounded by people who are also working out; they have perfectly dry skin and look lovely. I’m red-faced and sometimes the beads of sweat amass so much matter that they go rolling down my face to splash disgustingly on the mat or bench or whatever. Who knew I was so sweaty??)

Barbara had me focus on stepping up onto a bench while my weight was in my HEEL. (This is my cheat: Everything for me is a quad exercise. I stand on my toes. If you stand on your heel, you have to use your glutes. After a lifetime of toe-standing, my quads are mighty and my glutes are astonished at the exercises they’re being asked to accomplish. It’s a constant battle.)

The fact that she’d strapped a broad belt around my hips (exactly like the Yves Saint Laurent Russian Peasant styles of the late 1970s, but with a pendulous belly) and hooked me to resistance made the action far more challenging than simply stepping up. We did this for two or three years, interspersed with some triceps exercises and some modified push-ups.

When the governor finally called and offered me the reprieve (that is, the clock finally ticked over to noon), Barbara said “You’re done. How do you feel?”

“Glad we’re finished!”

She gave me her Barbara smile, and it suddenly occurred to me: SHE needs feedback, too – and more than me simply bitching with every new exercise.

“And,” I added, “We worked out muscles that I would NEVER have gone near, and when I’m 80 I know I’ll be grateful to you – so let me thank you 22 years in advance. I’m going to feel great!”

“THAT’S what I was hoping for,” she grinned.

So today’s lessons are: (1) Weight in your heels. And (2) everyone benefits from feedback.

“We all have one thing in common: We were all STUPID enough to sign up for this.”

6.2.18

Barbara held her cupped hand at about chin height and her other fist an inch or two below, like someone trying (but failing) to make the “Ultraman” gesture – or a combo of the black power salute with a “hide your light under a bushel” movement.

“This is your hip socket,” she said of her cupped hand, “and this is your femur.”

She waggled the vertical forearm.

“If your hip socket is perfectly aligned to factory specifications, it fits in such a way that you can do squats while standing on your toes.”

(Barbara, my guiding star and primary trainer at Body Dynamics in Falls Church, VA, didn’t use the “factory specs” language; she said all this in trainer-speak – but the message got through even if the words fell useless beneath the crushing weight of my ignorance.)

Then she began to wiggle things. Her fist came a little forward below her cupped hand, and then back; it went from side to side – and she began to rotate her wrist so sometimes I could see her fingers and sometimes the side of her hand.

“But not every femur head fits into the hip socket in the same way. There’s nothing wrong with that. You can move, you can bend, you can do all the things you’re supposed to be able to do with a ball-and-socket joint. But if your hip is a bit different, maybe you can’t do things on your toes without your knees hurting.”

A light went on in the dim, cobwebby reaches of my brain. (My brain looks a bit like an attic crawlspace. I don’t go up there much; it’s kind of hot, and only a few cross-boards indifferently laid protect me from plunging through the ceiling if I misstep when walking from rafter to rafter.)

“So if I’m hunkered down on my haunches and go to stand up…”

“Can you hunker with your feet flat, like kids can?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Then your knees are going to hurt.”

“They DO hurt!”

She nodded. Barbara has an uncanny understanding of body movement; she’s a savant even without the evidence of working with me for the last year and a half. She knew I couldn’t get up from a crouch comfortably; she’s seen me go through my giraffe-at-the-watering-hole movement to go from the floor to standing.

(Do you know that move? Get on your hands and knees and push one leg out straight behind you. Follow with the other one until you’re in an ugly version of down dog. Walk your hands towards your feet until your weight is back far enough to stand up. Lions would definitely attack during this very ungainly series, were there any lions running loose in the Washington, DC suburbs. Nature abhors a vacuum; I feel sure there will be soon packs of wild dogs preying on pudgy women with misshapen hip sockets as they struggle to regain verticality.)

All of this explained why my knee had argued with me while I was working out with Grace, who is a ballet dancer of such extraordinary suppleness that she could do the giraffe-at-the-watering-hole move and you’d burst into spontaneous applause at her beauty.

“So people who DO have factory-spec hip sockets…”

Barbara nodded to encourage the line of thought.

“…they become dancers?”

Barbara did a few classic pliés. “They can do this all day long. They DO do this all day long. But it hurts MY knees.”

This made me feel absurdly better. I can’t stand up from a crouch without feeling vulnerable to the attack of a predator (or the humiliation of sticking my posterior too far into someone else’s space)… but no-one could possibly expect me to share joint structures with professional dancers. It’s not a moral failing; it’s just the way the bones are formed. Yay!

The next day, I met with Grace again and explained to her that I needed to do her exercises in positions where my heels were down. Grace looked at me with great affection. “Your heels WERE down when your knees were hurting – remember?” “Oh, hell.”

The moral of the story? I have no idea. Just that trainers know SO MUCH MORE than me; I am astonished I tried for so long (and with so little success) to be healthy without a guide!

Ultraman, not at ALL doing the cupped-hand-with-raised-fist gesture. Image may be subject to copyright laws. Like I need another reason to feel paranoid about stealing blog photos.

6.1.18

Yesterday I happened upon a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. This is a beautiful woman with innate grace; she moves like an athlete. Predisposed as we all are by evolution to favor attractive people, you’d like her immediately. (You’d be right to do it, too – she’s very nice.)

She was pleasingly complimentary about my progress in achieving a healthier body; that was nice. Then I asked her how she was doing with not running.

(This is how different she and I are; she loves to run. It makes her feel right. She’d run in the blazing steam bath that is Virginia in summer; you’d HAVE to love it to do that.)

She found out about a year ago that her hip was wearing out; her doctor forbade any more running. It was a shock for her, and even though I would have greeted such a pronouncement with barely suppressed glee, I can see that it would be a terrible state of affairs for her.

“Awful,” she said, “I can’t bear it. Do you know? I weigh almost 170 pounds.”

She swallowed the words, as if they tasted particularly nasty in her mouth. I heard the self-contempt, and THAT I recognized.

“I weigh two-thirty,” I replied. Success – she was fully distracted.

“Now?” she asked incredulously. “You weigh two-thirty NOW?”

“Yep,” I replied. I didn’t add that I’m feeling pretty good about that weight, too, since all I have to do is look in the mirror to see that below the layer of fluffy, I’m developing a pretty ripped musculature – and muscle is heavier than fat.

So we went our separate ways, one beautiful athlete feeling bad about herself and one overweight book-reader feeling pretty good about herself. And what sense does that make?

To weigh 170 pounds isn’t a sin; in fact, it’s the golden dream of many people. She STILL looks stunning; she still moves like an athlete; she’s still a woman you’d naturally gravitate towards… but she’s decided that weighing 170 is a failure.

I respect her right to regret her weight; everyone does. But I know that our society does a pretty good job of making everyone feel crappy if they don’t look like a 17-year-old waif. Even 17-year-old waifs feel bad about themselves.

So I thought: I’m in a really safe and easy place to “come out” about my weight, and about what a body looks like when it weighs 228 pounds. It’s not at all as courageous to do so as it was for gay men to come out of the closet before this age of enlightenment (well, some gay men still risk a lot) – but it is a ghostly shadow of the same fear.

We hide our weight. We sigh over it. We roll our eyes and put ourselves down more firmly than the cattiest clutch of mean girls could ever do. And we think that 170 is failure.

So here I am, in my underwear, weighing 228 pounds. I would have committed violence at the thought of doing this when I weighed 260 (when it was ALL fat, no muscle) – but now I think I’m ready to say:

Good, decent, honorable, funny, sexy women weigh 228 pounds and even more. Your weight doesn’t have to define you. It won’t if you don’t let it. Your goal is health, not a dress size. I hope you won’t put yourself down so much any more – and I salute your good efforts.

I still don’t like to run, though.

What kind of idiot posts a picture of themselves in their underwear on the internet? Jeez, I hope this doesn’t backfire! I’m thinking less of creepy rape vans circling the block and more of someone saying “Well, we were GOING to hire you for the job, but then we saw…”

5.31.18

It’s all Chip’s fault.

I’ve been eating… not badly, but let’s say CASUALLY of late. After months of being mindful of what I ate, I’d been pretty much munching on whatever came to hand without too much thought.

(Still drinking lots of water; still exercising regularly – but why NOT have a sandwich instead of a salad? And once you hit that point, what’s a little ice cream going to hurt?)

So my guru goddess Barbara suggested I have a refresher session with the ace Body Dynamics nutritionist; a “Come To Chip,” if you will. (I won’t frown at your deities, you don’t frown at mine.)

Chip is such a nice guy. We get to talking and he makes all sorts of things seem possible. This is critical, because as you and I both know, you simply can’t make something happen if you’re sure you can’t do it – but if you are persuaded this might work, you might just pull it off.

(“Hey, Skipper! I’m up here!” “Gilligan! How are you… but you can’t fly!” “I can’t?” “No!” “Oh.” Thump.)

Chip offered me a simple challenge: I was to cook a chicken.

Nothing fancy; just buy a whole chicken and roast it. Tuck in some onions and carrots and little red potatoes around the carcass and let them roast in the goozle. It sounded so EASY. I said I’d do it.

I bought the chicken. I bought the veggies. I did NOT buy radishes, which apparently the Barefoot Contessa told Chip can be roasted with all the other vegetables. “Delicious,” pronounced Chip, and it sounded so easy. Still, there’s only so far out of my comfort zone I’m willing to go, and radishes were a step too far.

“Roasting a chicken?” said my friend Susan, “You won’t believe me, but that’s totally easy.”

“To roast a chicken,” said my son, “go online to ‘Basics with Babish: Chicken.’ It’s easy.”

So I watched an eight-minute video in which a man spay-cotched or splat-grabbed or spoof-cocked a chicken. (I don’t remember the word.) This means taking large kitchen shears and cutting the spine out of the bird. “Then we make a little snip here at the breast bone to open the bird up. We’re butterflying our chicken so it will cook faster and more evenly.”

By the end of the video, I was filled with blackness and anxiety. My shoulders had risen up around my ears, and the piece of paper I was taking notes on was filled with profanities, like “Well, what am I supposed to do with my roasting vegetables, you elegant fuck?”

Rusty came in and took one look at me and immediately hugged me. “It’s okay! You don’t have to do it! Want me to cook the chicken?”

Rusty, like every other human in his family tree, regards cooking as a little in-home adventure; he greets the concept with joy. Since he’s been home, he’s made a chicken/sausage/rice dish, and he’s twice cooked mussels succotash for his friends (the second time after popular demand). He’s fearless, and next to him – next to ANY cook – I feel small and pathetic and contemptible.

So of course I got angry. “NO!” I cried. “You will NOT cook that chicken. I will cook that damned chicken! Now get out of the kitchen, pretend you can’t see me, leave me alone!”

The “basic” recipe was utterly disgusting. I’m sure Babish, whoever he is, has kitchen shears designed for Thor the God of Thunder, as well as great big man hands – I have neither. MY kitchen shears didn’t slice through the bird quite as easily as his did in the video. I was left hacking away at rib bones and God knows what else – and you can’t put your hand out to apply stress to make the cutting easier because you’d be grabbing on to a lot of broken bones.

Once I’d hacked my way through the back of what I was determined to believe had NEVER been a living thing (two hacking passes, mind you – you have to cut on both sides of the spine, of course, to get it out), ol’ “basic” Babish told me I should reserve the spine to make chicken stock with. If a look could fry electronics, I would have killed my iPad. Straight into the refuse bag, along with the perfectly REVOLTING bag of gizzards.

Gizzards. Guh.

The purported “little snip” at the breastbone to butterfly the bird was a complete mystery; I’m more likely to uncover the lost city of Atlantis than I was to identify the location of the “little snip.” I just took both sides of the bird in either hand and applied pressure until something cracked. Do grave robbers feel this same slimy sense of horror?

Then I had to loosen the skin over the breast and along the thigh and into the drumstick, so I could “spoon in” a paste of butter and herbs. “There’s a little membrane here that we have to just get past to get in,” he said. “FASCIA,” I shouted at the screen. “I know what that is; it’s fascia, you utter butthead, and now you’re REALLY making me sick because *I* have fascia and you’d have to break through it to skim a coating of butter and herbs over my meat.”

Cooking is disgusting.

Babish was using tidy little disposable gloves to butter up his flayed chicken carcass under the skin; I didn’t have any gloves. I did it with my own lily whites, and I did it with the grim determination of the stretcher crew picking up dead bodies after the battle.

I put my desecrated bird on a wire rack on a foil-lined pan, as Babish did – and then I despairingly tucked my veggies in around the carcass, hoping at least some of the fat would drip on to them temporarily before draining through the rack to the pan below. Then I threw it in the oven.

“Forty-five minutes should do it,” Babish cheerfully assured me, “Or until the breast is 155 degrees and the thighs are 175.”

I told Rusty it was now safe to come back into the kitchen, and began the de-chickening process. (I’m paranoid about raw chicken. I’m rarely driven to actually clean; I’m a mop-clean-with-a-wet-dishcloth kind of person, but I haul out the 409 for raw chicken and clean EVERYTHING.)

After 45 minutes, the thigh was up to 180 and the breast was 145. Well, shit. NOW what?

Rusty soothingly said “Let the thighs be overcooked. You want the breast meat to come up to 155. Don’t take it out yet.”

I turned on the convection oven; that ought to help. I set the timer for four minutes.

(Why four? Why not five? Because five seemed like TOO MUCH – an amateur length of time that would result in little chicken-flavored charcoal briquets.)

At the end of four minutes, the breast meat was the same temperature, but the thighs had cooled down to 174. WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT??

Four more minutes.  Then four more. By the time the 45-minute-bird had been in the oven for a full hour, Rusty and I agreed we’d just pull it out. And then what do you suppose happened?

It tasted like chicken.

I was exhausted, physically and emotionally. The vegetables were not tender and delicious; they were dessicated and lightly charred. The further we got into the chicken, the pinker it got. We began to be suspicious. “I think my stomach feels wiggy,” said the boy nervously.

“Wiggy?!” I said in a panic. “For chrissake, stop eating!”

It was nerves; we neither of us got sick – but every burp or fart was regarded with profound suspicion. We threw the whole thing out. With a certain doomsday relief, I must say.

Then we went out and bought ice cream. So all in all – backfire.

If you THINK you can’t cook, then rest assured: You can’t.

Spatch-cocked. That was the word. Looked pretty, didn’t it?

 

 

 

 

 

5.20.18

I have a very firm grasp of the 26 letters. The ten digits, not so much.

In fact, the largest number I instinctively grasp is three – in that three is understandable as being “first,” “middle,” and “last.”

I’m not an idiot; I can count. I keep score at Scrabble. I can work the puzzles printed on the placemat in the local Greek family-style restaurant (the ONLY place in my life when algebra actually has value). It’s just that I’m better with letter, that’s all.

(Maybe I AM an idiot, though. I love to play blackjack, but I’ve discovered that while I can add the point value of two cards together without a thought, when that third card slaps down, my brain goes into vapor lock and addition becomes utterly impossible. Someone has to say “That’s fourteen,” for which I am pathetically grateful.)

My inability to trust numbers comes to the fore when I trot thuddingly up and down the stairs, my at-home cardio. I’m absolutely sure I’ve got the count right for the first three circuits (“first,” “next,” and “this one”), but after that I find myself beset by doubts.

Did I really count the fourth one? Or is this number five and I just THINK it’s number four?

By the time I get to seven, I’m paranoid. Maybe this is really number six. Even worse, what if this is really number EIGHT and I’m stupidly trotting up and down the stairs one time too many? Or is it TWO times too many?! God, I’m tired.

I’ve tried various methods. I’ve said the lap number out loud, telling a print of two willowy Chinese ladies on the landing how far I’ve gone. (They are above it all; sublimely disinterested in my mundane and distasteful sweating.) I’ve curled another finger into my palm at the top of the second flight, slowly forming fists as I go up and down. I’ve kept a piece of paper and a pen at the top to make a tick mark as I go flying by. (Well, not flying – but moving too rapidly for a tick mark to be anything other than awkward.)

The best method I’ve found is to gather up a handful of highlighters on my way down the stairs the first time. I leave them on a table in the basement, and every time I go up, I grab one. Just one. Then I leave it at the top. By the way, this is an exceptionally inefficient way to move highlighters from one part of the house to the other. By lap seven, I automatically think of how much more sensible it would be to gather up ALL the remaining markers and take them back upstairs together. Like – duh. Taking just one is an offense to efficiency. But I do it.

I saw a video on Facebook of actors from superhero movies working out; what those highly-paid and instinctively athletic people do regularly absolutely dwarfs my efforts, but I still find it inspirational. As I run up the stairs, I think about Hugh Jackman standing upright on top of a very large exercise ball and then squatting all the way down without falling. Jeesh. Core strength.

I think of that little Spiderman, whose workout routine is surprisingly impressive. He’s just a kid and look at what HE’s doing – damn, Sam! I can’t even explain it; it’s like he’s going up stairs that aren’t there, just hanging from two pegs.

I think of Wonder Woman doing spectacular chin-ups, and Thor in an extra-beefy body harness chaining him to the wall as he throws a medicine ball from all over a basketball court, and pretty Ryan Reynolds doing reverse crunches on an inclined plane. Oh, it’s a GOOD video.

Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool is my favorite, so the red highlighter is always the last one I run up the stairs in his honor. (Don’t tell me about Deadpool 2; my son and I had tickets yesterday and I stupidly lounged through the start. Just utterly lost track of time and missed the movie, damn it. I AM an idiot. We’ll try again tomorrow.)

I keep thinking I should assign a superhero to each color; it would give me something good to think about as I trotted. The Hulk clearly gets the green one. But then I run into Iron Man in HIS red suit, and Deadpool already owns the red one, and my lungs are full to bursting and I’m sweating and NEVER MIND just get me more oxygen – keep going.

Counting by highlighter. Whatever works.

Sometimes I run them up the stairs in ROY G BIV order; sometimes I grab whichever one is nearest at hand. The black one was added when Barbara made me add a tenth lap; doesn’t matter if I carry it first or middle or towards the end, I always think that the black marker lap is the extra one, and I am resentful. But it’s over soon, and my heart gets its workout and now I can go read bad novels with a clear conscience. Yay!

5.14.18

Truly, deeply lazy people will grab at any excuse. I know because – well, voila.

Last week I was unable to summon the energy – the determination – the sisu to make my regular Tuesday appointment with Barbara, High Wizard Trainer of the Most Glorious Order of Balance and Sweat.

NO, I said, with petulant, toddler-like determination – and unlike a toddler, I now have a foot big enough that, when planted, even Barbara cannot budge.

Instead, I wrote a whining, complaining blog post about how much exercise I’d undertaken in the last week (which, in truth, was a pretty typical week). In response, Barbara said the most glorious thing EVER – she said:

Who told you to do all that? You’re working out too hard. No wonder you’re tired.

I’m going to learn to needlepoint, and when I can do it, I’m going to needlepoint that on a long bolster pillow and then I’m going to lay that pillow across my bed and then I’m going to drape myself across the pillow and EAT BONBONS.

Barbara and I exchanged e-communications; she said she was going to revise my work-out schedule. I heaved a great, happy sigh – and then deliberately, consciously, went as silent as a bunny under the shadow of a soaring hawk. Don’t move. Not a whisker. If you move, she’ll notice!

I worked out with Grace on Wednesday, and I saw Barbara at Balance Class on Thursday; she said she was working on my revised schedule. I nodded with as little movement as possible…

…because as long as she didn’t tell me the revised schedule, I DIDN’T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING.

No cardio. No jogging around the lake, no elliptical, no thudding up and down the stairs. No HEP (Home Exercise Program) – no stretching. And proving that if you give me an inch I shall most certainly take a mile or more, NO EATING RIGHT EITHER, because all efforts to live healthfully are all part and parcel of the same plan, right??

So I did not ask Barbara for the new plan. Instead I did nothing on Friday. On Saturday, I consumed most of a loaf of Snappy Sourdough but expended not one erg of energy that wasn’t absolutely necessary. On Sunday I drove fifteen hours to pick up the brat from college, and made sure to sample every fast food restaurant I went past.

(Look – they all suck. I don’t know what Body Dynamics has done to my taste buds, but I think I might rather do my taxes than eat anything from McDonalds. I’m ruined.)

And when I woke up this morning, I stood up without grimacing. The deep, growling pain from my adductor magnus is completely gone; I no longer limp for the first ten feet. My low back is flexible and happy again. If I go upstairs to get some writing done only to realize I’ve left the (now barking) dog in the back yard, I can buzz downstairs to let him in without feeling like I then need a nap.

I feel great.

I realize that leading a slothful life is bad for me long-term. I know that every idle moment now is costing me five at a time of life when I’m going to be REALLY interested in avoiding the grim reaper. I’m aware that flexibility and strength is important enough to work for…

…but a three-day hiatus is some kind of delicious.

And now I can share all this with Barbara so as we revise my schedule tomorrow, we can make intelligent choices about what I can and can’t – and could but shouldn’t – do in my quest for improved health.

And we’ll have that conversation tomorrow, at our regularly-scheduled Tuesday appointment, when I shall take up again the burden of health. I’m not giving up. But I think I’m a little smarter now, about moving forward not just for today but also in creating a plan I can live with every day.

Including the occasional hiatus!

This is a photo of hyacinth. The words “hyacinth” and “hiatus” don’t even share the same roots, but somehow they’re associated in my mind. A hiatus sounds like a fresh, small, purple bloom amid lush greenery. Glorious but low, holding close to the ground and hiding from the shadow of the hawk’s wing. Deliciously scented, fleeting in bloom, something to be treasured. Ah, spring!