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New Day

It’s really hard to believe how one can feel SO DOWN one day and then the next day, it’s all new and different. (one of the great things about life, right?) Yesterday was truly a huge low. But it caused me to really dig INTO that lowness, to feel it and try to understand it and to make some changes.

One thing that changed immediately is that I vowed (with the help of my spouse AND my friend) to go to bed earlier. I am such a night owl but staying up until 1am was just not feeling good. So last night I went to bed early. And it made it so much easier to get up early (6am WITHOUT the alarm clock!). Mr. McBody and I went for a beautiful sunrise walk/run in the park near our house. It was so nice.

The weight that I was so freaked out about has left me, making me think it was probably restaurant-induced water retention from sodium. So I’m back to where I’ve been basically all year. Whew.

And my blood glucose? Not so great right now. But I’m going to see my doc next week and we’ll get to the bottom of it. I don’t feel like I’m the world’s most epic fail, like I did yesterday. I’m just ready to deal with it.

5

A Hand Up

So my little downward spiral continued to have its way with me until I landed with a huge THUNK this morning and ended up sobbing my brains out in my car. I guess you could call that a pretty “rock bottom” point. I really felt unbelievably hopeless, helpless and also shocked that I had gotten into this state, so quickly.

This was set off in part by my taking my blood glucose this morning and finding it HIGHER than it has been since I was even diagnosed. This stunned me. Then I went to the lab to get my blood drawn for my appointment this week. I was mortified. Here my endocrinologist came to my SHOW last week, and I’ll all woo-hoo-look-at-me!! Poster Star Diabetic Patient!! OMG how BOGUS can I be?!?!?

I sent off a flurry of desperate texts to a friend who sent me a ton of support which I could only partially receive given the pit of self-loathing sludge I was drowning in. But I did hear a little bit of it and of course the one thing I heard was, “If this was me you would not be beating me up,” or something along those lines. It was so true.

I made my way to my trainer’s gym. He asked me how I was when I walked in the door. I burst into tears. We spent the entire session stretching out my incredibly tense and misaligned body. Which was necessary. He was also extremely kind to me. Which didn’t hurt either. After I finished there, I felt like I reallllllllly needed to sweat, so I went up to the gym and killed the AMT machine (elliptical-thingie) on level TWENTY (the highest) for 30 minutes. The sweat felt good, really good.

Briefly ran into my spouse. Who had read my blog post from yesterday and offered to 1) support me in going to bed earlier so I am not so freaking EXHAUSTED and 2) take a walk with me early in the morning.  Now that’s what I call spousal support.

Went to work. Brought my new ball which is going to function as my new chair. We’ll see how this goes. Allegedly sitting on a ball is a hundred times better than a chair, and burns a lot more calories. My DirectLife was not WILDLY impressed, but I do think the little green spikes were higher than my chair-sitting hours.

Went to Weight Watchers. I sort of slunk in there, feeling like, WHO THE HECK ARE YOU to be doing this, when you are so completely messed up?!? Well. I’ll tell ya.

A member came in. She had gained (less than me). She burst into tears. Then she told me about the VERY BIG THINGS she has been dealing with lately. I said to her, “If this was one of your dearest friends in this same situation, would you be beating them up and berating them?” (Hmm, sound familiar?) I gave her some Kleenex. I almost started crying myself. It was the biggest mirror ever. In fact, it turned me right around. When she left later on, I felt like she was going to go home and be nicer to herself.

After the meeting, I met with another good friend.  She asked me how I was doing. Amazingly, I did NOT start sobbing my face off. I told her. She listened. It was so good. She told me some stuff back. We pledged to support each other. Once again, honesty (especially in the hardest times) rules.

I am so very very fortunate for my friends and community. The church I (occasionally) go to has a prayer that says “we are weaving a tapestry of love we call community” and that is how I feel about the people who are surrounding me and holding me up on this journey.  Thank you.

6

A Little Downward Spiral

WOW I had a crazy tough week last week. Why do I always get surprised by hard times?

So the week started out sad because after my very exciting and fun weekend with Shannon, she went home. I went back to my hugely packed work schedule.

My fabulous trainer was out of town for the week. Instead of planning for alternate forms of exercise, I just said, “Oh well,” and I ended up just letting that time get absorbed by more work.

I was so stressed. My new job is a huge learning curve, a lot of new information and also straining to remember old information that is tucked away in some brain wrinkles that haven’t been activated in almost 20 years. I even broke down and cried at my desk on Thursday. That was a real low point.

My eating went a little haywire, off and on during the week. This ended up (of course) in a gain. I first realized this on Sunday RIGHT BEFORE I was going to the theater for my show. NICE! I felt like, oh my god, what an idiot, what a fraud, what a… freaking EXPLETIVE and who do I think I am, etc etc etc.

I woke up Sunday morning with one of my big toes all swollen and red and hot from an ingrown toenail. My mind went into freak-out overdrive and immediately I thought, “My diabetes! It’s gonna get infected! They’re gonna amputate my foot!” and the like. Thank GOODNESS in that moment for Twitter. I reached out to my dear friend Dr. Mo, who just happens to be a podiatrist. She was both concerned and reassuring in the right mixture.

I got through the show without completely melting down. I think my heightened emotions may have helped, in fact. My mom and my trainer and my doctor all came, plus some great friends.

But I’ve been feeling kinda shaky. And it scared me (as it always does) to realize how little it takes for me to “go there.”

There’s a scene in my show where I’m sort of scoffing at these Other diabetic people who have just let themselves go all to hell and they have every medical complication in the book. But this week I had a tinge of that. Some panic mixed with failure/shame/giving up. It was terrible. I even, for the first time in YEARS, almost pulled into an IHOP. I wanted pancakes. Big, fluffy white-flour pancakes dripping with syrup! I mean, it was crazy. The good thing was that I did not actually enter the IHOP *or* eat the pancakes. But the mere fact that I *wanted* to, made me upset. And it made me see how people can get into that spiral and just.. give up.

Tomorrow I see my trainer again. I have the feeling I’m gonna cry with relief. It’s going to tip back in a good way, and I’ll start climbing up those steps again. But man. I don’t like weeks like this.

18

Other People Saying Awesome Things

photo by Christine Zilka

It’s a crazy week. I’m so so so excited that Superwoman Spirit Shannon is coming to visit me TOMORRRRRRRRROOOOOWWWWWW! and will be here through my show on Sunday night. Life is a whirl. I don’t have time to blog a fraction of the things going through my head, but I’ve been reading some awesomeness out there this week.

I’d like to bring your attention to two particularly great blogs I read recently.

Dave Kirchhoff, the incredibly amazing CEO of Weight Watchers International, wrote a blog post this week that just knocked me out of the water. Last week he wrote about his “Guilt-o-meter,” and I was like, What Dave? WHAT? WE ain’t peddling guilt at WW! and he just addressed it all in the most honest and thoughtful way. Read it and wow.

Old Me:  “I completely screwed up this week, and I’m up five pounds.  I am a lowly person.  I deserve to be pelted with rocks and garbage.  I shall flog myself furiously with a Cat o’ nine tails in the form of a spartan healthy meal regimen.  That will show me.”  New Me might say:  “Well, that wasn’t the smartest way to spend last week.  I know I feel better when I’m eating healthily/moderately and exercising lots.  Therefore if I will start making those better choices, and I can look forward to feeling great.”

Then, my friend Christine wrote an equally mindblowing post about her relationship with her body. Wow. Just wow. Think about it. What is the relationship with YOUR body? How has it evolved and changed over the years? Think about it. Then maybe write your own.

My body was the cause of psychic pain: in grade school, a very ungifted child at any form of athletics (except hula-hooping, and I’ll get to that later), I was always picked last. When you get picked last time after time, you learn to divorce yourself from the source of that pain, and that pain was my body. There are students who fail in school, and after awhile, they remove any self esteem from academic success.

This is the kind of deep thoughtful work that makes life changes.

1

A Year Ago… (aka Living Maintenance)

Mother's Day dinner, 2009

I’m at my daughter’s annual big crew race this weekend. I think about last year. I went running along the lake during down time at the races. Many people were beginning to remark about my lost weight, and I was wearing new shorts and tank tops for the first time. I was moving close towards my goal weight and really feeling like it was going to happen. (and it did: in June? July?) It was all so new then. I had completed my first 5k race and was feeling pretty giddy about the whole thing.

But also I had no belief it would last.

I feel like when I’ve said “a year ago…” it was a way of demonstrating how far I’d come. But now “a year ago” does not look dramatically different than where I’m at right now. So this must be maintenance! and in a way it’s even more stunning to realize that I’ve been in this place for almost a year, than the fact that I made the change(s) in the first place.

Recently in WW we had a meeting topic about habits.  There was a chart about the “Stages of Change” with a series of nested circles. On the outside was “Environment” which is the most superficial thing to change, and the first way we make a change. We clear out our cupboards, we start purchasing better foods. We join a gym. The next circle in is “behavior.” Because it’s one thing to change the food in our kitchen, and another thing to actually behave differently in relationship to it. In and in and in and in, and the innermost circle is “Identity.”

A year ago, I felt like my identity was A Person Who Had Lost Some Weight, for like a minute. I had NO experience or belief that it would endure. In fact I used to have feelings of deep sadness and grief/loss for that person, whom I was sure was going to vanish at any moment. Well, I’m amazed that I’m still here. But my identity is gelling, and I’m beginning to believe that it’s not as transient as I’d feared.

May I have another year like this. And another.

(photo above from last year’s Mother’s Day dinner – that’s my cute Mr. McBody!)

4

Spanxed!!

I received a package in the mail this week that had me feeling even more guilty than the donut I ate. It was a box of Spanx. I opened it with a combination of hope, anticipation, fear, embarrassment and self-loathing. Strains of Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” floated through my head.

How did I get here? Recently I received a DVD of my solo performance show, which I’ve been studying in order to improve it. I remember choosing my outfit for that show so carefully. A bright colored Tshirt and black workout pants. I remember feeling good! and looking in the mirror backstage before heading on. Yeah! I looked good!

From the front.

Underneath the shirt, I was wearing a sports bra. What I didn’t realize until I looked at the video is that the sports bra created all sorts of (ack!!!!!!!!) bumps and bulges and hills and lumps in my… BACK FAT. What?!?! Who knew?? I didn’t know!! And the first thought I had was, OMG I have to throw away that shirt! I have to never wear that sports bra again! I have to… BUY SOME SPANX!

Now, I already own one pair of panty-spanx that I have worn on a couple of occasions (weddings). But it never occurred to me, until I saw myself From The Back, that I would need to get the TOP kind of Spanx.

Spanx seems to be a controversial sort of item. Are they a godsend, or a hideous re-enactment of the days of Scarlett O’Hara and her corset?

I asked the Twitterverse what they thought about Spanx yesterday, and got these responses.

  • i only wear spanx/corset when i’m at a family wedding, wearing a slimfitting dress. otherwise, flowy waistline. it’s torture.
  • Haven’t tried Spanx yet. Can’t imagine where all my “junk” would be stuffed! LOL
  • I lose my shape when I wear spanx…i get misshappen, not to mention uncomfortable
  • Absolutely NOT. All that does for me is squash my fat UP past the waist line so I have a quad rack! Not appealing!
  • Spanx? I love mine!
  • I like spanx, but I love the Flexees long tanks even more. A good undergarment is essential…:-)
  • Spanx = ouch. If I can help it, I’ll never wear ’em again. Jiggles ‘R’ Us.
  • My thoughts aren’t deep…I heart Spanx!
  • Spill out the top. I hate them. Inspire me to exercise. Plus, they are uncomfortably hot.
  • I always feel my fat is just squeezed out the top and bottom when I wear spanx.

So. There are a lot of various opinions out there. I hated to feel like I was bowing to the vanity gods, but I tentatively tried the thing on. It was a bear to GET on, but once I did.. um…. I liked it. I really, really liked it! I put on my performance shirt and yes, it looked totally different. Better, in my opinion. So that’s it. It’s not something I care about for Everyday use, but on that stage, I’m telling you, I’m wearing the Spanx.

Is that crazy? Ironic? Hypocritical? I don’t know. Today I saw a Facebook update by Fit to the Finish. She wrote,

As I was getting my hair cut yesterday I thought about the past. When I was morbidly obese I stopped trying to look good. I stopped wearing make-up, wore my glasses instead of contacts, and never had cute clothes. I tried not to care.

So true! That just hit me like a punch in the gut. I thought of the days when all I wore was baggy stretch pants. So how far do we take this “caring”? Is it excessive to wear contacts instead of glasses? (I am personally extremely attached to my glasses) What about cosmetic surgery? Hair color? Botox? Makeup?  Personally, I find makeup MUCH more oppressive than Spanx. For some reason I find it upsetting. I will wear it on occasion, but it always makes me feel so false and unnatural. I do get my hair colored. For how long I’ll continue doing that, I don’t know.

I think that most people care how they look. And everyone has their own comfort zone of what they find acceptable, endurable, in the name of “beauty” or looking good. I do know that for many many years, like Fit to the Finish, I DID NOT CARE. (or pretended I didn’t) Now that I do care (more), it’s a tricky and interesting new territory to navigate.

Thoughts? 🙂




21

Gollum and the Donut

It’s hard getting off track. Or rather, it’s hard getting back ON track after being off track.

I went away last week and I felt pretty good about how things went while I was gone. I wasn’t “perfect” but I did enjoy myself. I went out to dinner quite a bit (and tried to make good choices, based on portion control and other factors). I took one good walk and had one good workout at the hotel gym (elliptical plus some weights). I didn’t feel like things were out of control… at first. But I was attending a very intense and emotional conference which definitely pushed a bunch of my buttons. I found myself eating more sugar than usual, ie picking up a few cookies from the lunch table. This is not something I’d normally do, especially since they weren’t particularly GREAT cookies. And then drinking more than I normally do (which is next to nothing). I heard myself saying in my head, “I need this.” (yeah right?!?)

I was only gone four days. Man! It’s not very long. But then when I got home I found myself continuing to procrastinate getting back on my routine. I blamed jetlag for not going to workout in the mornings. (even though I was waking up earlier!)

And then yesterday. Yesterday I ate a donut.

Now, one of the things I love about Weight Watchers is that things like donuts are not inherently evil. They CAN work on your plan in various ways – if you plan for it, if you work it into your overall plan, if you’re active, etc., a donut can be NO BIG DEAL. But yesterday it was a big deal. Because of the way I ate it.

In the car. (even that is not necessarily inherently “bad”) And I realized that as I was eating it, I felt like Gollum. You know, the EVIL Gollum that tries to murder people in their sleep. Not the wimpy-sad pathetic Gollum OR the human he once was. I was like… in that BAD PLACE.

Let me tell you, that shook me up. Just realizing that. And I realize that I’d gotten myself into an emotional state and not really done everything necessary to take care of myself in non-food, non-alcohol ways. I started using those little methods of self-soothing during the weekend, and then it kind of snowballed, and then I turned into Gollum eating a donut.

So. Today I am going to my trainer, even though it means going into work late. I need it. I need a hand up to get back on the path.

Whew.

12

Chicken-Ito

…is what my mother (yes, my own mother!) used to call me when I was in junior high and high school. Because I was pretty scared of anything having to do with sports or athletics. It had to do with a combination of stories but one she liked to repeat was when I went on some school-sponsored ski trip, and ended up on an expert slope (which I was SO NOT). I was wearing blue jeans, and I was so terrified I ended up taking off my skies, holding them in my lap and sliding, or scooching down the hill on my butt, leaving a long wiggly blue streak on the snow. Or so the legend goes. My mother loved that story, and loved repeating it, and loved calling me Chicken Ito. Which I would respond to with some sort of weak smile, but inside it just made me shrivel.

Because I was also terrified of any sport involving a ball. She signed me up for years (WAS it years? It felt like it) of private tennis lessons, and I never got beyond using the racket as a sort of face-shield. I was petrified of volleyball and basketball and softball, ANYthing that involved a ball coming anywhere near my body. Dodgeball? Utter terror. I was the one always cowering in the corner with my hands over my face. Maybe because I wore glasses. And orthopedic shoes. Ack.

Was she the one who came up with that name for me, or did she just perpetuate it? I don’t know. At any rate, if you mention it to her now, she will still get the chuckles. Ha ha.

She was always the jock in our family. She played tennis or racquetball several times a week, and was known to slam the ball at people so hard they’d get huge bruises. It scared me.

When our church group went to the YMCA down the street to play basketball after church, my mother always got picked for teams ahead of me. Always. She was four foot ten. I was five foot four. But I was notoriously afraid of any ball and she was fearless.

Chicken Ito will raise (or hide) her chickeny little head whenever I contemplate the word “exercise,” or worse, SPORT. Bak-bak-bak. Thus, it has the top position on my list of Excuses.

13

Excuses, Excuses: Why I Can’t/Won’t Exercise

There’s a story behind each of these things (bet you can’t wait to hear about Chicken-Ito, right??) but no time to write them. But I was inspired to do this great challenge posted by the fantastic MizFitOnline and I encourage each of you to do it too. If you don’t have time for the actual shirt and Sharpies, please tell me YOUR excuses in the comments. Hopefully I’ll have more time to elaborate later.

15

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