Oct. 5, 2017

Remarkably, I’m about to finish up my first jar of wheat germ.

Pumpkin seeds? I go back to Whole Foods regularly to replenish my stock; THEY know who’s in charge.

In my youth, my sister Twig would get bored of carving pumpkins at Halloween. She would meticulously sift through the goo and tease out pumpkin seeds, which she would bake on trays in the oven while my younger sister and I were still arguing over whether we could carve our own pumpkins, or if Mum or Dad had to wield the knife. Then Twig would appear with hot, salty pumpkin seeds, which we ate because they were there. Pumpkin seeds, while never prominent, are in my realm of experience.

But wheat germ? No way. That’s Euell Gibbons time. That’s for seriously crunchy granola types in granny glasses and clogs. That’s for communes and hippies and odd stores with creaky wooden floors smelling of Patchouli.

So to discover that I have somehow consumed, one tablespoon at a time in my morning yogurt, an entire jar of wheat germ is… surprising.

Maybe I need to go pin an Indian print bedspread to my wall and dance around a bonfire in the moonlight. The bonfire part sounds like fun, actually!

I raise my nearly-empty jar of wheat germ to you in a toast. To your good health – and mine!

 

 

Oct. 4, 2017

As I groaned and yipped and complained yesterday, I was thinking about George Bailey… or rather, about Clarence, George’s not-very-competent angel in “It’s A Wonderful Life.”

You know the story. Clarence is sent to a despairing Jimmy Stewart, to show him what life WOULD have been like if Jimmy hadn’t been there to “aw, shucks” his way through life.

I was wishing for a Clarence because Chad, the stretch class teacher at Body Dynamics in Falls Church, VA, had found a new place on some aging bodies where he could extract the groans and yips of discomfort that he, a strange new breed of vampire, secretly feeds on to stay looking so fit and young.

The new place was what he called “the TFL.” He’ll tell you what that stands for, if you care; I decided it stood for “Too… Long to be lying in this position on the foam roller.”

Lie on your belly. Cant one hip up far enough to shove one end of the foam roller under you, so the foam roller sticks out to your side like a child’s drawing of a spear to the belly. Get the edge right under your hip. Roll around a little; experience every possible nuance of agony you can wrench out. “Good stuff!” says Chad, rubbing his hands together and visibly getting younger as he bathes in the moans.

Why do I need to anger some never-before angry part of my body? What would happen if I never rolled a TFL to which I had never previously been introduced? Would anything be different??

And that’s when George Bailey’s angel Clarence ghosted in and sat cross-legged on the floor beside me.

In his mild little almost-British voice, he told me an “It’s a Wonderful Life” story about my TFLs. Clarence knows even less than I do about anatomy, but he still had a lesson to share.

“When you were younger, Prudence – when you were fresh and springy and still under factory warrantee – your TFLs (and shame on you for the “too… long” comment) were broad, stretchy rubber bands.

“But then you got older, and spent all your time sitting in front of a computer. Don’t glare at me, my girl; I know that’s the nature of modern life.

“Your TFLs slowly thickened, like a nice broadcloth shirt ironed with too much starch. And then the starch solidified. That’s fine right now, because your over-starched TFLs are as long as you need them. For now.”

Clarence watched me curiously as Chad had us switch to the other hip, and fresh groans filled the room.

“But when you’re 82,” Clarence the ghost angel went on, “you’re going to trip over your son’s pet bear, Jedediah. Yes, he gets the bear. Pay attention.

“You’re going to trip over Jedediah, stretched sleeping on the rug in front of the plasma fire, and you’re going to fall. And your TFLs, so starchy and stiff, aren’t going to give when you need them to give, and you’re going to break your hip.

“No, Jedediah won’t eat you as you lie there. But that is the beginning of the end for you. You’ll never be quite the same, and from then on, the old age that COULD have been vibrant and entertaining and filled with grandchildren and grandbears and the opportunity to become a concert pianist and the author of a noted series of very steamy bodice-ripper novels (shame on you) – that’s gone. Your future is pretty much sitting around waiting for the Grim Reaper.

“Now. Are you really willing to give all that up because you don’t want to feed that perfectly nice vampire man over there? Roll that TFL – roll it, I say!”

And so I rolled it.

You can’t prove a negative; you can’t say “I definitely avoided THIS because I went to stretch class today.” But you can do what you can to live long enough to see a grandbear. And I DO have the vague outline of a pretty steamy series of bodice rippers in mind. So I’m following Clarence. And Chad.

Oct. 3, 2017

In “The Right Stuff,” Tom Wolfe said that when yet another test pilot would inevitably auger into the earth in an extremely lethal program, all the other pilots would discuss it to reason out why it happened – and to find the logic that proved it wouldn’t happen to THEM, too.

“He lost his cool. He didn’t try A or B or C. He didn’t have the right stuff.”

I think I’m guilty of the same whistling past the graveyard. I see what happens to other people and I figure out what I can do to avoid the same. I’ll work on my health so THAT won’t happen to ME. (You can swap in any number of scenarios for “that;” it’s not ALL my husband ignoring his own health. We’re all getting older and body parts are wont to break down over time.)

And then people who did nothing wrong – people who just wanted to gather together to hear some country music – are slaughtered. I confess, I suffer from defeatism. Why fuss over pelvic alignment when a bullet can shatter a body no matter how fit or toned or flexible it is?

Then Tom Petty died (in a very similar fashion to my husband six months ago, including the turning off of life support and then waiting, grimly, for a tenacious spirit to get the message to let go), and it seems like some basic goodness has spiraled out of life like water through the bathtub drain.

I’m going to Body Dynamics today. I have Barbara at 11 and Chad’s stretch class at noon. I’m hoping the endogenous morphine (ie, “endorphins”) that exercise brings will help. I know it couldn’t hurt.

But I’m a little defeated today.

October 1, 2017

I have been to the mountaintop. Literally.

I drove from Virginia to New Hampshire and back again in the last five days. 1,200 miles, three charming and nutritionally-superior hostesses, and one small dent in the hood of my new car that my handsome friend Gerry Whitaker estimates will cost about $4,000 for someone else’s insurance to repair. (The other two cars in the three-car accident on a highway in northern Massachusetts had to be towed away, so believe me when I say that I consider myself extremely fortunate.)

Now I’m home again and all my muscles are singing faintly, sympathetic vibrations from 11 hours in the car, and I’m here to report about the ever-present question of ROAD FOOD.

Is it possible to eat pumpkin seeds on a road trip?

In a word, no. Not for me.

Yes, for Chip; I’m sure he packs his own.

But I equipped myself only with TWO water bottles and made my round trip with the one essential without which no solo-driver car trip can be safely contemplated:

Full-sugar, full-caffeine Coca-Cola.

Yes, I know it’s not even sugar – it’s corn syrup. And on the way up, when I stopped at Burger King (because there is NO use trying to pretend one drive-up window is any better nutritionally than any other), and they asked me “Small-medium-large?” I said “Medium” out of habit and they handed me a SWIMMING POOL filled with Coke.

“My lord,” I gasped. “How many ounces IS this?”

The counter girls gapes at me and then at each other. A supervisor bustled over. “Yes?”

“Oh – I’m just wondering: How many ounces is this soda?”

“Um… well… yeah, I think the medium is 32 ounces and the large is 48.”

A quick flip over to Google tells me that a gallon is 128 ounces, so I’d been given a quarter of a gallon of Coke. ONE QUARTER OF A GALLON. That’s a lot of Coke.

I sipped it nervously for the rest of my journey up and dumped most of it down my hostess’ drain when I arrived. After a few months of eating pumpkin seeds and drinking water, I thought a Coke would taste WONDERFUL; instead it tasted like… a whole swimming pool filled with false promises.

The drive home was my marathon – the whole trip in one day. I got Combos (which really cheese your hunger away, I’m told) and a packet of Bordeaux cookies. A TERRIBLE choice. But I had 585 miles to go, so you can judge someone else.

And a Coke, which I didn’t open for 200 miles.

For a very late lunch, I had a Caprese sandwich (mozzarella, tomato, pesto, and a whole field of arugula on a ciabatta role) from somewhere a long way down the New Jersey Turnpike; it was incredibly good. And I bought a Snickers bar, out of weakness.

For dinner, I got a 20-ounce cup of hot Earl Grey with lots of sugar and milk from the Delaware House. That’s where I threw out a few left-over Combos, the empty Bordeaux bag (nom, nom – delicious), and about half the Coke.

And when I finally pulled into my own parking place, 11 hours and 4 minutes after setting off, I ceremoniously threw away the untouched Snickers bar.

So we see some poor choices and some not-so-poor choices. We see no sleepiness on the journey. We see one dent in the hood and a great deal of gratitude for that being the only visible damage from my trip.

I’m getting pretty good at eating well at home. Now I need a few lessons from Chip, my Body Dynamics nutritional guru, on how to be smart when the road trip mentality clicks into gear.

Glad to be home!

Photo note: I got detoured all the way into Manhattan, which was both exciting and very annoying – and look at what my new car’s GPS looks like in the Big City. Is that not the coolest??

 

Sept. 30, 2017

Many women of my acquaintance, it seems, share a common fantasy. While this tends to be the pipe dream of the demographic gracefully called by the French “a woman of a certain age” (which is so much nicer than saying “middle aged and heading for the barn”), I note that it is not exclusive to females in their 50s – so be warned, gentlemen!

If you propose a “feminary,” you’ll get involuntary toe-wiggling in bliss.

“I just want to live,” I say, “in a small cabin in a pretty place.”

“Hm,” they say, thinking “What – away from Starbucks?”

“On a hillside dotted with cottages, where my friends live,”

(Yes, they think – that’s better.)

“And there’s a common dining hall and a fire pit for sing-along hootenannies.”

(I love a hootenanny. Who doesn’t?)

“And the women who just love to cook do the cooking.”

(I don’t have to cook?/I could spend my days cooking?)

“And everyone contributes something, but mostly you have your own little place and all the friends you want but only when you want them.”

(There’s where the toe-wiggling begins. Oooh.)

My dinner companion last night, also une jolie dame d’un certain age, embroidered (as we are wont to do). “And young, partially-clothed men would sometimes come to mow the lawn.”

More toe wiggling.

We don’t want to bed the lawn-mowing men or even talk to them; let them go on their way to their trucks and their dirty dishes and what must certainly be a bedroom ankle-deep in discarded socks since The Little Missus gave up and came to live at the feminary. We just want some nice art to look at before turning with a happy sigh back to our gardening or baking or writing or other form of fulfilling, satisfying artistry.

Don’t quibble with me about mortgage payments or oil filters or car inspections; we’re all entirely capable and we’ll figure it out. And it’s not that we don’t like the male of the species. There just comes a day when we realize it would be toe-wriggling to live in a little cabin on a hillside, stone alone. Except for the friends scattered about nearby.

You in?

Sept. 28, 2017

Stop the presses Henry – incredible breaking news, worthy of a spinning old-timey newspaper graphic!

Today I actually did my HEP.

HEP is Barbara-speak for the Home Exercise Program. I prefer to think of it in the Dobie Gillis sense, in which people in berets will watch me do “sit to stands” twenty times and then they’ll snap their fingers in groovy coffee house applause.

It’s surprising for me to do the HEP; Barbara assigned me specific exercises (entirely remedial; anyone watching me would snort and say “You come up with excuses to skip THOSE?”) when I first started working with her, and for a few weeks I did them…

(Barbara kept coming up with more and better exercises that she added to my HEP until I was overwhelmed and gave up entirely – at least, that’s the way I prefer to remember it…)

…but for months now, I’ve been ignoring the HEP. I wasn’t hep.

Today I pulled out the foam roller and the five-pound weights and I HEP’ped. Absolutely nothing changed. Except I felt a tiny little five-pound-weight glow of pride.

And tomorrow? I’ll do it AGAIN.

Probably…

September 27, 2017

If you’re being hunted by an evil “The Most Dangerous Game” type down jungle paths, light striped through the dense trees, you’d be smart to watch for tiger traps – pits filled with spears and covered with what looks like palm fronds over solid ground.

Want to know what my tiger trap is? The danger that lies unseen in my way?

It’s not eating ENOUGH.

Every fat lady knows this. You go through the day counting lettuce leaves with lemon, rigid in your determination to force that fat off by force of will, and then night falls and all hell breaks loose. Unsweetened baking chocolate is not safe. Decades-old French fries lost in the unplumbed depths of the freezer are fair game. A midnight run to Mickey D’s is not out of the question.

Starvation is a TERRIBLE thing to do to a body’s health.

It’s counterintuitive but absolutely true: To avoid overeating, you have to eat more food.

And, as Chip at Body Dynamics says, you have to make better choices about that food.

That way, when night falls and the siren lure of Oreos lures you toward the rocks, you have the strength to tie yourself to the mast and fill your ears with wax. (How did I get here from jungles filled with tiger pits?)

When I’m hungry after dinner, I know I haven’t eaten enough during the day. Fortunately, past frenzies have stripped my house of anything even remotely interesting, including an entire jar of my brother-in-law’s insanely good and salty chocolate sauce, eaten by the spoonful while standing by the sink. Tomorrow I must eat more food!

 

Sept 26, 2017

A quick update: HAH!

My blood work is back, and it is RIGHTEOUS. I am doing a Victorious Warrior Dance and I invite you to join me; we are dancing a thumping, aggressive circle around the fallen bodies of my poor health; we shake bottles of water fiercely and menace the corpses with foam rollers!

Look:

In March, my fasting blood sugar was 126. That’s high; it’s supposed to be between 65 and 99.

Today it is 94. NORMAL.

My A1C (which looks at blood sugar over the last few months) is 5.7. This allows the grumpy nurse to look at me in triumph. “Normal is 4.8 to 5.6. YOU ARE PRE-DIABETIC.”

My reply? “Nerts to you, Betty Lou. Don’t get so excited. Watch me.”

What else? Ah – cholesterol. It was 255 in March. (Normal is 100 to 199, now that they have drugs that can lower cholesterol artificially; before those drugs existed, the safety line was 240, but let us not diverge into a bitch session about who owns or influences the FDA.)

Today it’s 189.

GrumpyNurse is at pains to point out that my good cholesterol still isn’t high enough and my bad cholesterol isn’t low enough, but I put up the shame-deflecting Hand of Chip. “Don’t even,” I said. “Let’s take a moment to admire that 189, shall we?”

Everything else is improved and in the “normal” range except my calcium (which is one-tenth of one percent below normal; clearly my body adjusting to the dramatic decline in ice cream!) and vitamin D, which while low is still twice what it was in March. I’m going to take vitamin D supplements for eight weeks. They’re the prettiest clear cobalt blue pills you ever saw; like swallowing fine jewelry.

That’s my report. Join me in a war whoop?

 

 

 

Sept. 26, 2017

I thought it was my fault that I was fat.

I thought the saddle bags on my hips were a moral failing – like I didn’t have enough will power or self control to look like all the pretty girls. I wasn’t trying hard enough, I was lazy, I was greedy.

So I was filled, from my earliest moments of awareness, with shame.

That’s a pretty big burden to put on a kid… and it wears a track in your brain that gets set in there good and deep – a track that says “stand in the back for the group photo” and “don’t look in that mirror; it won’t make you feel any better” and “cute clothes are for the pretty girls.” It gets to being like the hum of a fluorescent light; you pretty quickly forget that it’s even there as it goes about its business of draining your vitality and joy.

Well, NO MORE.

I’m up to HERE with feeling ashamed, and I’ve come to see that I have been MISINFORMED about how to care for my body. I’m not weak, lazy, or greedy; I just wasn’t getting the help I needed to make a change.

And here’s what made the difference: After a lifetime of unsuccessful (and ultimately harmful) diets and quickly-abandoned self-guided attempts at exercise, I’ve discovered that I needed a better, smarter guide – and a guide who comes with teammates.

For me, I found this at Body Dynamics, a small medically-focused gym in Falls Church, Virginia, where no one wants to weigh me and everyone agrees that the number on the scale is just a number; it’s not necessarily an indication of health.

How big a team does it take to overcome a lifetime of shame? Big. I work with…

Barbara, my trainer. Uncanny smart and extremely kind and endlessly fascinated in how to persuade my muscles to work together. She also teaches balance class. Barbara is my guide, my leader, the wellspring of my progress.

Grace, my OTHER trainer. I see Grace because I hold my hips tilted downward and Grace is a pilates expert; she’s working together with Barbara to engage the muscles that take the awkwardness and discomfort out of exercising.

Gwynn, the massage therapist. She talks to Barbara and Grace about how we can manually lengthen and strengthen the muscles that are now waking up – and Gwynn educates me, teaching me in the quiet moments about the inner workings of the body.

Chip, the nutritionist. What a revelation Chip has been! All those “healthy” diet rules I’ve been following all my life? Turns out there are much better and tastier choices!

Chad, who teaches stretch class. (That’s far too passive a name for the class Chad leads, which is as much of a workout as any of the others!)

Patrick, the physical therapist. Getting a baseline evaluation from Patrick provided Barbara with the expert advice I was never going to be able to intuit by myself.

Jorge, the shoe guru. Jorge has another role at Body Dynamics, but he stood with Barbara for fifteen minutes critically watching the way I walk; then he told me the shoes I needed to get. It was like going through transactional analysis with the world’s best shrink.

Devin, the zoomba teacher, who grins at me from the front desk when I check in and who offers the chance to sweat pure joy in her class.

Jenn and Mario, the unseen hands on the wheel who run the place so it’s welcoming, approachable, and not at all intimidating, even for 57-year-old fat ladies who have tried and failed at other gyms before.

That’s a lot of people… but my health challenges deserve no less! I’ve been going there for a little more than a year. I’ve lost somewhere between 22 and 26 pounds without TOO much effort, and I can use an elliptical for 12 minutes and wish I had more time on it. My body works better; I can walk without discomfort and my muscles slide agreeably against each other.

I know I’m just at the beginning of my health journey. But at last I feel like I’m making progress. As for shame in my life? NO MORE.

See the girl near the back with her eyes closed? That’s me. Second grade. Say, 1966. Probably the very last photo ever taken when I wasn’t thinking “Please don’t take my picture.”

September 25, 2017

The desert stretched in every direction, as far as the dewy-eyed heroine could see. Her guide led her across trackless wastes; by what unseen compass did he navigate? Somehow he led her unerringly across a wilderness, always finding at the last possible moment a rocky outcropping that hid in its depths both precious shade and a tepid swallow of brackish water.

She saw, with horror, that her camel’s broad foot landed very nearly on a domed skull, shining white in the glare, a pair of aviator sunglasses still wrapped atop flesh that had long since been melted by the abrading sand. Panicked, she looked to her guide and found him regarding her impassively.

“They gave up,” is all he said coldly. “Will you?”

This Saturday afternoon French Foreign Legion black-and-white adventure vignette brought to you by the fact that I have gained four pounds in the last two days. Do I have the stamina to keep going?

I’ll tell you what powers our heroine to persist in her quest. It’s not a “keep your eyes on the prize” motivation, for dear Papa is not locked in the mountain fortress by an evil warlord who must be overthrown. There is no GOAL here; there is only a journey.

(That is, I won’t ever reach some impossible number on the scale or blood test result that allows me at last to fall into the crystalline pool at the casbah and possibly into the arms of the dark-eyed guide, and give up my weary troubles. No; my quest for health is not a destination; there is no “finished!” until I go toe-up.)

Instead, what drives me today are two ill-defined sensations.

First, I can feel muscles over my low ribs. I don’t actually know where the intercostals are, but I have decided that the muscles I’m feeling must be the intercostals. They feel like a brand-new rubber band; taut and odd and pretty entertaining.

The second sensation comes from my sit-downery. Despite having an entirely broad posterior, it turns out (who knew?) that I never used my glutes; I did all my movement from my low back and the fronts of my thighs. Since that’s not the way the body was designed, I wore out quickly.

But now I’m using (and know the location of) my gluteus maximus, medius, and minimus. I know that below that are the “go-gos” and the para-somethings. I know in what direction they stretch, and remarkably, I can feel them engaging. Those muscles are actually mildly sore most of the time; they’re big bastards and need to do a lot of stretching and muttering and getting coffee as they wake up.

So despite what the rudest measure of health (the scale) reports this morning, I shoulder my own rifle and glare arrogantly back at the clever, seasoned guide. (Yes, in this scenario, Barbara at Body Dynamics is my guide and that means I am destined to fall back into HER arms in the pool at the oasis, but blur your eyes and ignore this unconventional French Foreign Legion casting choice; she’s an awesome hero for my journey.) “Keep going,” I say. “I’m made of sterner stuff than THAT.”