Diet Another Day
Diet
Old Habits
I’m enough of a yo-yo artiste that I know bad habits don’t die, they just wait for winter to regroup. Case in point, the last few weeks I’ve been treating my body like a bit of an amusement park, and I can’t be too shocked when I feel like I’m looking into a funhouse mirror.
Still, when, in honor of spring and impending swimsuit season (which, for me, is a misnomer as I rarely wear a swimsuit anywhere), I stepped on the scale this morning, I realized it’s time to get back on the wagon.
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The Things I’ve Lost
Tuesday was momentous. I finished cleaning out my office. You can now enter the room without signing a waiver of liability in the event that one of my stacks of books or supplies or other-crap-that-gets-tossed-in-the-office-when-we-don’t-have-time-to-find-the-right-place-for-it.
Wednesday my office became a multi-purpose work and workout room when I moved a weight bench into the briefly empty space along the back wall. About 5 minutes into setting it up, however, I realized it was missing something very important – weights. I added their acquisition to the to do list for the next morning.
Thursday, I stepped on the scale, hoping I’d hit the forty pound mark, and I crowed. Forty-one point six (I do count the points). Then I headed to the grocery store for necessities and capped of my trip to town with a visit to Kmart, hoping they’d sell the round weight plates I’d need. I only wanted a pair of pairs of 5 and 10 pound weights – Schwarzenegger I’m not – but the only thing that came close was a 40 pound box of round weights on sale for $25.
I grabbed the plastic tape that was holding the box together and hoisted it to the top of the shopping cart. It wasn’t back-breakingly heavy, but I couldn’t imagine carrying it from the back of the store to the front. I slid the box from the top of the cart to the bottom, setting down my load and laughed, ignoring the puzzled look of the nearby stock clerk.
I still carry plenty of stuff in my head wherever I go, but thinking about the plastic tape-wrapped box I’d lost kept me smiling through the rest of the day.
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Comfort
What is it about the colder days that makes bread need butter to be nourishing? What is it about the roads littered with leaves that sparks the craving for something hot and chocolatey?
I’ve been so good all summer, and while I’m still kicking it up on the exercise wagon, the numbers on the scale refused to budge for the last week or two. It’s no great mystery. I’ve been indulging. Cottage cream ice cream over apple crumb pie to celebrate the Big Guy’s birthday, a few days of stress-induced gluttony, and the only thing keeping the numbers on the scale from climbing is the fact that my exercise plan is often my only downtime – a fact that keeps it alive and well.
It’s another part of the game. The exercise is easy. It feels good when you’re doing it. If feels good when you’ve done it. It’s kind of like sex without consequences. But keeping up the calorie count – is there ever a time when it feels good when you’re doing it?
There are recipes that can make you think the calorie counting feels good because it tastes good, but the fretting is only rewarded on the scale in the morning. When it’s still dark at 5:30 in the morning, it’s hard to see those numbers at all, and the aroma wafting from that calorie-laden bowl of peanut-butter oatmeal wraps around me like a hug – softly strangling my willpower.
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Back on the Horse
Last weekend I fell of the wagon and fell hard.
Knowing there was a party at the end of the day, I decided to take a day off from fitness and counting calories and label reading. I’ve been pretty good for most of the last month, and even though I told myself not to say never-ever to treats, ever was supposed to be limited to three bites. Saturday I took three huge bites.
The first bite was the veggie breakfast burrito which could only be considered healthy because of the word vegetable in it. The second was a hiatus from any exercise. And the third was an evening devoted to eating local corn dogs and fries at the dairy bar and then from the freezer case at the local country store.
My three non-regulation sized bites left me with a whopping hangover, making me all too-aware of the fact that ice cream would not be a performance enhancing drug for my morning workout. But I knew I had to workout. My sister has already signed us up for a 5K in Connecticut at the end of the summer, and, even though I’m doing the 3 miles regularly now, I know I need to keep doing those three miles if I want to not come in second to last (it has happened).
Getting back on the diet wagon always seems harder than getting back on the fitness wagon. I’ve been doing South Beach and then found my way to the Forks Over Knives plant-based way of eating, and the recipes on both have been phenomenal. I can’t really say my taste buds been deprived the last few months, but empty calories can be so darned delicious, and my new morning meal, usually so satisfying, didn’t have quite the same appeal on Sunday morning.
By about the middle of my strength training, however, I had found my way back onto the fitness wagon, and there’s a reason for this. There’s something about running and lifting weights that gives you instant satisfaction in a way that eating less simply can’t. The farther you run or swim or climb, the harder you push, the more your body becomes a temple, and the better you want to treat it. Right now, mine still looks a lot like a temple to a paunchy goddess of vice, but it gets a little more solid every day, but it isn’t the penance at the scale that keeps me going.
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The Numbers Game
243 was the number on the scale Monday May 25, 2013.
1412 was the number of calories to eat each day to lose 2 1/2 pounds each week.
15 seconds was the longest I could run without stopping.
22 was the number on the label inside my jeans.
6 is the number of times I had to run day 1 of my fitness program before I could finish it.
2 is the number of kids who were depending on me to be strong enough to take care of them.
24 is the number of runs I’ve done since the first time I actually got through a routine.
9 is the number of weeks I’ve been counting calories.
12 is the number of days I slipped up on a vacation 14 days long, and
18 is the number of days in the last month I behaved – for the most part.
3.68 is the number of miles I ran yesterday without stopping.
1282 was the number of calories allowed on the calorie counter yesterday, and
209 may still be a big number on a frame that’s only 63 inches high, but it’s the sum of a summer of small but meaningful successes.
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The Pack
At the beginning of the summer, I could barely walk up the hill of our 900 hundred foot driveway without stopping to get more air. For most of the spring, I rationalized my 'performance' with the excuse that I had started the year with pneumonia. Knowing that not moving was worsening my lung condition didn't get me off the couch until late night chest pains sent me to the hospital for stress tests.
The long-tern lung infection was to blame for the chest pain, but I knew my deep and gorgeous hunger (as Cary Grant might describe it) and less gorgeous physical sloth were not helping my lungs get any better. So, as I sat in the doctor's office, watching him tap a place on my chart where I had been about 50 pounds lighter, I got to my tipping point.
A few years ago, I had another similar moment of Zen that led to a summer of good nutrition and walking. I let myself get stymied at the end (something I've already moved to prevent this year) by shortening days and a bad attitude, but I remembered that the biggest changes began when I started running. This time around, I decided to start the running with the eating plan, and taking the two roads together has made all the difference, and in a way I never would have expected.
I started very slowly using a plan that had worked three summers earlier (C25K from Runner's World – try it, it works). The plan starts you with 30 second runs followed by 90 second walks and repeats until you've been run/walking for 30-35 minutes. I am not proud to say that at the beginning of the summer, I had trouble making it once around our house or even trotting for 30 seconds. Yesterday (a few days before Labor Day), I ran 3.68 miles with hills and no stopping. Part of me wishes I could say I did it all by myself, but along the way I discovered something even more valuable than my little app. I discovered encouragement.
My first runs were always on our sloping driveway and around our bumpy yard. I was embarrassed to have anyone see how slowly I ran. Then I mentioned my new plan to my sister who's currently getting ready for a 20K. She didn't ask my times. She didn't ask if I thought I could do it. She just gave me a verbal pat on the back and said, “Keep going. I'll get us signed up for the Labor Day 5K.”
We've run the the 5K together before, and, to her credit, she ran with me the first time – giving encouragement the whole way. Then, I was very conscious of the faster runners that seemed to flow around us like gazelles cutting swaths around a slow-moving elephant. Now, I barely notice it.
In the last few months, I've begun to notice more runners on the road. I've seen them in all shapes and sizes. I see slower ones and faster ones. When I'm running, we wave at each other. When I'm driving, sometimes I'll honk or yell, “Go for it!” at them whether the windows are up or down.
They're all doing it, and when I talk with other people I know who've been running or even just started, we never compare times. We talk about going the distance. We talk about how far we've come. The women who've traveled farther share their acquired wisdom with those of us who are at the beginning of the journey. The times matter, but I never feel like I'm competing with someone else – I'm only competing with my old time.
So, if you're running (or walking) on the road, and a strange lady passes you, shouting at you to keep up the good work, she is nuts. But I've decided that if you've started your journey – no matter where you are on it – you are doing good work. And that deserves encouragement, so I'm passing it on.
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What You Don’t See
Dear Mr. Retailer,
You carry my old size, but you never carry it in the store because you see my wallet, but, apparently you don't want to see me (or the other thousands of American women who you ask to order online rather than come in your store to shop). But I'm eating better and working out, and my body's getting stronger and tighter. Now I even wear one of the coveted sizes you do carry in the store, but I don't think I'll be back.
You see there were places that did want me as well as my business when I was bigger. They saw not only a person who was fighting the battle of the bulge and needed a uniform, they saw something more. They saw the person that can afford to buy your plus sizes because she has an income. They saw the person who finances the wardrobes of her non-plus-sized kids in the same store. They saw a person worth doing business with.
So, now that I can get into your clothes, it's tempting to be part of the crowd you do see – that part of the crowd that doesn't have to special order the sizes you're too embarrassed to carry in the store because someone 'unfit' might be caught browsing there. But while your clothes may hang better on my body, a retailer who couldn't see me as a person when I was larger, just isn't a good fit for me now that I'm getting smaller.
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A Banner Routine
I wasn’t exactly pudgy in high school. I doubt any of my friends would have called me fat, but I doubt I was the only girl who looked in the mirror and wished they were skinnier, taller, more like the faces staring out from the magazines. I was hardly model height or weight or anything else, but looking back, I can hardly believe how hard I was on myself. I’m sure I wasn’t alone there either.
Decades later, standards have changed, but so have I. There are now petite models, plus-size models, and, if they ever start looking for a petite, plus-sized model shaped roughly like an orange, I’ll be in serious demand. So, even though I’ve lost twenty-seven pounds since the beginning of the summer, I still have a long way to go.
I’ve been traveling a good part of that road on foot on the make-shift track I’ve formed in the tenth of a mile of grass and gravel that surrounds our house like a wavy running track. This morning, after a bad fall from grace the night before, I got up and greeted the apple tree between the house and garden thirty-two times, I glanced at the soon-to-expire inspection tag on the front of my car thirty-two times, and I said hello to my puzzled dog thirty-two times.
It was routine again after the second lap, and there’s something comforting in routine. My legs no longer feel tired on every lap. I’m not out of breath after each lap. When my music program ends on my iPod, I keep going for a few more minutes because I can. A few more songs and it’s no longer about the weight but about going the distance. It’s about making taking care of myself part of my routine. It’s the same mentality that helped me make writing a part of my routine last summer.
Anyone who’s been reading this blog since last summer knows that my posts have gone from being daily and even twice daily to weekly or semi-weekly on good weeks. I can blame some of the lapse on a little more chaotic work schedule and the kids being home from school all summer. But the reality is that at the beginning of the summer, I had to make some hard decisions about which battles I needed to fight the hardest for a while.
In the middle of May, chest pains sent me to the hospital for a stress test. It was the culmination of a winter of health neglect that coincided with a fairly serious bout with depression. The chest pain turned out to be a very bad lung infection, but it was a wakeup call. So I started walking.
Eating right takes more time than opening a box of Shake’n’Bake. Exercising takes more time than sitting down on the couch for another book. Fitting those things into my life, however, was a battle that I knew I had to fight for me.
At first I thought it was selfish and destructive. I wanted to write. I had committed to it. I needed to take care of my job and my house (in that order). But I knew I needed to take care of me. Then I stumbled on a quote by Michele Obama that, whether you love her or love to hate her, had a lot of truth in it.
She said, “You’d get up at four in the morning to get to a job. You’d get up a half hour earlier in the morning to take care of your kids, so why shouldn’t you take a little extra time to take care of yourself.” That hit me like two tons of liposucked lipids.
I get up at five in the morning to work on email or fix a file for a customer. I spent most nights for the better part of 2 years and then 3 with an infant glued to my breast because they needed it. So why, I asked myself, wasn’t I willing to do that for myself. Now I do because I’ve come to the recognition that it’s okay for a mom to do something for herself. You are doing it for them. You’re doing it to be there for them for the long haul and to be an example, but it’s okay to do it for yourself.
Now I feel I’m starting to feel like I’m winning the battle, even if it will never end. But it’s not an uphill fight, and it’s giving me the gumption to take up the writing banner that has meant almost as much as my health. There have been spurts and fits trying to get the routine back, but the challenge now is to find a way to make those two battles one.
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Climb Any Mountain
The road from our driveway down to the main road winds around our hill, creating an idyllic s-curve framed by the trees that line the horse farm near the bottom of the hill. Since the bridge at that bottom closed, I haven't seen my favorite S-Curve much, but a few days ago, I took it into my head to incorporate more hills into my run and, instead of running the quarter mile laps around our house, I walked to the top of the driveway and then down the road. It's hardly the path not taken, but it's rarely done on foot, let alone at a decent pace, and that made all the difference.
Swinging my arms, music turned off so I could hear the woods around me, I marched down the hill at a good clip. There's a fallen tree in front of the defunct bridge at the bottom of the hill, and I decided it was a good place to turn around.
Katy, my wonder dog (she wonders about everything), had run our trail back and forth several times and wagged her tail as I started back up the hill. She bounded up the first swell in the road, stopping at the orange barrels and 'Road Closed' sign just as the sun climbed high enough in the sky to begin casting long purple shadows on the road. Shadows still covered my part of the dirt road, but Katy was now silhouetted in silvery gold, and the mountain behind her was completely illuminated. I couldn't see the rest of the hill I had to climb, and as I started back, I felt as though I was entering new territory.
This is a place where I make time for fitness and where fitness propels the other things in my life that matter. It's a place where I take the time to savor the simple things around me.
By the time I walked back to the middle of the hill where our driveway begins, I was huffing and puffing, but I was still climbing. The climbs have gotten easier each day, and each day I add a little more hill and a little more road to the routine.
I still do my dance at the scale – finding triumph or shame on any given day. On any given day, I may find Katy, neighbor's dogs, sweltering heat or soothing cool morning air on the trail, but I always find some reason for triumph. And I never find a reason for shame.
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Sinner on the Tread of an Angry Scale
Some mornings I feel like I’ve joined a cult. Every morning I step on the scale, hoping to see the digital digits in decline The amount of decline, however, can vary with the time of day or what I’m wearing or even where on the scale I step as I try to disperse my weight over the greatest possible surface area. I perform my ritual dance – tap to zero, step up, step down, repeat as needed to produce desired results. Sometimes the ritual can last as many as five minutes, but most mornings my devotions are rewarded.
There are a more than a few days, however, when I creep to the altar. Like a penitent kneeling in the confessional, I slough off every possible bit of mass before stepping, naked, onto the scale. Sometimes I think I can hear it speak to me.
“You seem troubled…”
“Forgive me, it’s been three days since my last weigh-in.”
“So I see. Have you anything to confess?”
“I’m too embarrassed.”
“There’s nothing to fear. Step closer. After all, you know you can’t hide your sins from me.”
“No. Well, I have sinned. It started with this pint of Ben and Jerry’s. See, I was trying to eat local and – ”
“Everyone makes mistakes once in a while. Except for me, of course. I’m 100% accurate. Just step on and see.”
“Yes, well there were several once-in-a-whiles this weekend. It’s a bit of a blur.”
“Step on and we’ll see what your penance will be.”
I do a mental rundown of my sins in the last twenty-four hours, wondering what the penalty will be and quietly greatful the scale doesn’t come with a buzzer or alarm of any kind. I tap-to-zero and then step on the pads between the outlines I’d drawn years ago. My penance began immediately and painfully as the numbers climbed by whole numbers. I dance a little longer, but the number only increases with my rationalizations and excuses.
A few minutes later, chastened, I creep from the treads of my angry scale. But unlike an unburdened magdalen, I don’t leave the shame with my confessor. It follows me, gnawing at my faith in the possibility of another possibility. But, while my faith is shaken, fear of the numbers will bring me crawling back in another day.
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The Family That Plays Together
The diet is mine. Fitness is a bit of a family affair – or at least it’s a team effort as far as my life coach and son, six-year-old SuperDude (he really does have super powers), is concerned. Trailing me on my morning runs up and down the driveway and around the parking circle, his endless chatter and questions distract me from any aches or exhaustion.
We walked and ran this road a few years ago when I was on my last diet. Pound after pound, SuperDude chased me around my makeshift track, hugged me, and greeted the morning sun with me as we Downward Dogged and Mountain Posed our way through the summer.
He’s older now, but while wisdom threatens to peel some of the fantasies from his vision, his primary power is stronger than ever. Even as I sit down to write and draw, he’s at the video cabinet finding the perfect routine for tomorrow morning. And in the morning he’ll cajole and pull me off the couch. He’s half my size and his chirping and chattering will be powerful enough remind me once again that every gram of muscle I rend from my own fat is not converted just for my own sake.
Picking My Battles 