Oops, I mean Saturday. Promise!

Sorry for the absence the last two weeks, and I promise a catch-up post on Friday. Be well, everyone!

Seriously, just stop.

Remember Susan Powter? My earliest memory of her is from her Stop the Insanity! phase in the early nineties; my cousin brought a copy of the book to our family Thanksgiving and spent the weekend in my grandmother's rocking chair, her nose buried in the book as she gave my family scathing looks anytime someone proffering a bowl of mashed potatoes or wild rice dared to pass within her invisible force field of New Dieter Restraint and sanctimony.

I remember sitting at the dining room table in my grandma's house, spooning forkfuls of the obligatory sweet potatoes with carmelized marshmallow into my mouth and staring at the top of my cousin's blonde head with a mixture of resentment and abject envy. My cousin was SO cool in my eyes...an only child whose coddling was so thorough that by the age of nine she was already a full-fledged uber-bitch. She was the first in the family to own a Nintendo, the only kid I knew who was allowed to go to pop concerts, and who--gasp--owned Madonna's Sex book when she was 12. She also regaled me with stories of making out with junior high school boys and told me what the word "orgasmic" meant over iced hot chocolates at the coffee shop where she liked to hold court and draw abstract graffiti on her jeans with black Sharpie marker. My cousin J was a bona fide badass in my eyes, so anything that caught her interest was all the more exotic and alluring to me as a result.

Since my mother was determined to ensure that I would NOT become an cranky, adolescent sex-kitten like my cousin, she refused to let me buy the Susan Powter book on the grounds that Powter looked "a little like a Nazi" and that it probably didn't say anything that I didn't already know about weight loss. A few years later I checked out the book at the library, and confirmed my mom's suspicions: Susan Powter did, indeed, have an unfortunate buzz cut, and I already basically figured out everything she had to say.

So why is Susan Powter super healthy and I'm getting fatter and fatter by the week?

I guess if you asked me where I've been for the last several days, I'd have a lot of answers. For instance, I've been pausing a lot of live TV(!) with the DVR on my new satellite(!) and then looking triumphantly over at the cats like I just discovered fire or something. I've been trying to figure out what the hell is going on on Big Love because I still haven't seen the first season. I've been frantically getting my room ready for the beginning of the school year (yuck). I've been entertaining houseguests and catching up with old friends (yay). I've been tentatively stepping into the world of tango again, with plans to start classes again with my super-expensive but oh-so-totally-worth-it tango shoes I purchased from the very kind and supportive Veggie B!, and I've been taking stupid pictures of my cats on my cell phone, especially when they're cute and sniff said tango shoe, as seen in the picture below:
So anyway, all those things were great (except for actually having to work for nine whole months in a row again...le sigh), but the real reason I was gone was because I was doing a lot of thinking. And thinking ain't never end up good. I guess last Monday after I stepped on the scale and jumped immediately into my routine of cognitive behavioral therapy wherein I say my litany of "You Really Aren't THAT Fat" affirmations like, "It's just water weight"..."No way could you have eaten five whole pounds of food in one week"..."Maybe you just PMS, like, through the entire month" I sort of hit diet bottom.

And this diet bottom was different from all the other ones I've had where I've eaten a lot and not exercised and ended up a few pounds heavier and then I spend one evening sitting in my bed and pouting and promising desperately to go right back on the diet the next day and to really TRY HARDER and DO BETTER and WHY can't I just get this right just once and WHY am I such a diet failure and what's it going to TAKE and, and, and...

This diet bottom was the realization that I just absolutely cannot do the diet thing any longer. I am sick of totalling up calories, of bargaining with my food journal and figuring out how many calories of exercise (that I'll never do) it'll take to equal out an extra piece of cake, and whether I can go out to eat with friends and still eat the "right foods" and not be tempted by the "bad ones". I realized that even though I'm supposed to take a fairly relaxing mini-vacation with my family this weekend, I am absolutely going to pieces over the idea of maintaining a diet while we're going out to eat and on the road. It shouldn't be STRESSFUL to go enjoy myself. I shouldn't have a bad day or a good day or a bad or good WEEK just because the scale tells me whether I'm good at burning calories or not.

I've been dieting every day since I was nine. I can't do it anymore.

I've been reading Intuitive Eating, the book that a lot of people I know who've recovered from eating disorders have recommended to me when I talk about those same issues. I've been resistant for a long time, because the nature of the book makes it sound like you have to have a lot of faith in yourself, and I don't think there's ever been a day where I've trusted myself around food, ever. I have to admit, the book is boring as sin, but it does reassure me on a lot of different issues, especially the part that recovering the natural balance in your body between hunger and satiety is a long process that will involve lots and lots of trial and error. I'm actually, surprisingly, okay with all of that.

Anyway, I guess there'll be a lot of things to talk about in the coming weeks, especially as I attempt to figure out what the hell I'm going to do. But I do know that tonight, as I clicked open my nutrition journal/calorie counter out of habit, felt the familiar, nauseating wave of dread pass through my body, and then said "fuck you" to my computer screen and clicked out, that that was the nicest feeling I've had in a long, long time.

And it kind of makes the phrase "Stop the insanity!" take on a whole new meaning for me in the process.

Ch-ch-changes..

Right now a burly man named Dearl (the self-control it took to resist asking him whether it was pronounced "Darryl" or "Pearl with a d" was monumental, I assure you) is ruining my privacy fence by hammering a large satellite disk into the wood, and I must admit I couldn't be more thrilled. I really thought I wouldn't mind only having five and a half semi-watchable television channels for the rest of my life, but when I realized that the reception was getting increasingly poor (interestingly, whenever there's a full moon it's the worst) and that my little streaming Internet TV resource wasn't quite as reliable with getting the shows up as it used to be I succumbed to my dark fantasies of spending Sunday afternoons catching up on all the shows I DVR'd over the course of the week and making sure that every single word uttered by the ridiculous Jonathan Antin was captured for my amusement for the rest of my life.

So I signed my life away to Dish TV and now for the value price of fifty-something dollars a month, I, too, can complain every week that there is absolutely nothing of value to watch on my 200 channels+HBO like a good, honest American ought to. I am so beyond stoked, and as soon as Dearl comes into the house and finishes hooking everything up I'm going to tip him twenty bucks to sit on my couch and eat popcorn and watch the last five minutes of The View with me in HDTV (every wrinkle on Barbara's face!) and let me call him anything other than Dearl and then promise to never, ever speak of it again.

And then the other, equally embarrassing in a different way update for today is that it appears I'm going to have to become quasi-vegan again, and this time for legitimate purposes.

A few years ago, I was really sick for several months whenever I ate red meat. As in, my husband and I would go for lunch at a restaurant and I'd chance a bite of his hamburger just for a taste and then three hours later I'd be crumpled on the floor of my bathroom with tremendous stomach pains and nowhere for the food to go but...out. (Sorry) Doctors thought the enzyme required to digest beef had somehow gone missing because I wasn't really eating a lot of meat at that point, and that basically if I endured the nastiness of reacquiring the enzyme I'd be fine. And I was, and it was all good. But then this last year I started having the same symptoms again, even though I had been eating red meat with abandon and there was no reason for it at all. So I just decided to give up on meat in general, especially after watching Fast Food Nation at home, alone, with half of a Quarter Pounder chewed up and sitting in my mouth because I was afraid to swallow what I had just seen being slaughtered on the TV screen in front of me.

So yeah, I buy into the big, crunchy, vegetarian philosophy of not putting rotting flesh into my body anymore and I feel all the better for it. It was an easy switch to make because I'm an odd soul who really likes the taste of tofu and soy meat, and I only very rarely feel like I'm missing out on food except when I pass buy a BBQ restaurant or have to hang around a bonfire with a Boca hot dog kind of flopping on my stick while everyone else proudly brandishes their plumping, juicy weiners (snicker) around the fire.

And so while the meat intolerance issues are really no big thang for me, finding out that I'm lactose, or at least cheese, intolerant kind of is. I arrived at this through a series of incidents over the last month or two where eating anything involving lots and lots of dairy (ice cream, pizza, nachos...sob) would cause my body to say, "Bitch, please" and then I'd end up spooning the toilet for a few hours just like I did with the meat. So, while I'm praying to whoever's listening at this point that I don't become completely environmentally allergic and end up living on a sustainable commune and trading my organic beets for undyed cotton muumuus with my Old Order Mennonite neighbors like the lady in My Life Among the Amish did (actually a really cool book that inexplicably found our way to my house when I was a teenager) I've realized I need to make some major changes in the way I eat so my body doesn't feel quite so ravaged by its own distaste for really satisfying junk food.

And it's funny, because while the meat thing never fazed me once, when I first attempted to reconcile myself with the reality of possibly not having cheese again, I almost started crying. My darling grandma once told me that back in the 50's her doctor told her she needed to lose her baby weight, and that the best way to do it would be to walk around the block a few times each day and avoid lots of butter and sugar. So, being the diligent woman she was, she dutifully made her constitutional around her neighborhood block 8 times each day and cut the fat out of her diet. She told me, though, that she didn't know that corn on the cob--her favorite food ever--could be eaten without butter and salt, and so when she served it to her family she had to leave the house and go sit on the back porch and cry because she missed it so much. And while it always makes me laugh to think about that sort of naivete, I completely sympathize because the idea of living in a world without cheese and ice cream was just devastating to me for the first few days I thought about it. I'd look at a veggie burger and think I'm missing out when I avoided the obligatory slice of Muenster or Cheddar. I grumpily sat through veggie fajitas at a Mexican restaurant with friends because I couldn't pile on the sour cream or dip my chips in the heavenly spinach queso they serve there. I started envisioning my post-dinner evenings as bleak, endless torture sessions where my nighttime TV rituals were turned into stoic meditations because I couldn't have my dish of ice cream with my hour-long dramedies. And I went on and on feeling totally conflicted and wrecked and sad about this lactose thing until I finally had enough cheese incidents that even the idea of having my stomach revolt so violently makes me want to avert my gaze whenever I see a cow.

But, like, isn't it funny how we have emotional attachments to the foods we eat? How, in some cases, the presence of the perfect birthday cake or the pile of cheese fries at Happy Hour can be more important to a special occasion than the things we do or the people we experience it with? I mean, what are we really missing out on when we give up foods that don't treat our body right? Because, honestly, if I hadn't had the physiological motivation to say goodbye to cheese,I probably would still be piling it on everything I made and wondering why the fat content of my food was so high. I honestly believe, as silly as it sounds, that I am addicted to cheese and ice cream and stuff like that. I miss the way it tastes, the way it makes food more interesting, the way it pulls apart from a pizza and stretches all the way from the plate to your mouth...it's every bit as insidious as drugs or porn or things like that. And all just because some silly animal byproduct makes me feel soooo good. Food really shouldn't have the power to do that.

A lot of people have suggested getting those Lactaid tabs and dealing with it in that way, but I sort of don't want to. My body is telling me that this food isn't going to be tolerated any longer, and I want to use it as a reason to make another step away from eating shit and embracing a lifestyle that includes more vegetables, more wholesome foods, less fat and oils and stomach pillaging. I don't know a great deal about listening to your body or intuitive eating, but I figure if in its natural state, my body is saying in its John Turturro voice, "DO NOT SEEK THE CHEDDAR" I should probably heed the warning and not try to circumvent it with more chemicals.

And I really think if I'm moving this far towards veganism on the food spectrum, it also gives me license to stop shaving my legs or wear makeup. Or at least, you know, have a token Phish song on my iPod or something.

Let your freak flag fly, comrades.

We gonna drink Bacardi like it's mah burfday...

Last year my birthday was kind of a comedy of errors, as my grandmother's cancer tests came back to confirm that the whistling in her lungs was due to a rapidly growing tumor, my husband decided to finally move out, but trashed our house as a final birthday present, and because of all of this everyone seemed to forget I was having a birthday until my mother remembered mid-Hamburger Helper preparations, and asked if fried ice cream at the local Mexican place counted instead. Since he knew I was down, my favorite person sent me a note that said something like, "I expect that by the time you're 27 you will be fabulous". And I chuckled, and imagined a future full of mani-pedis and size 8 couture (well, Old Navy couture...but the FABULOUS kind) and strings of male admirers who could make sardonic jokes about Proust and had never, ever been near the Bates County Mud Run.

So, 365 days later I have to chuckle, because by those standards I've failed miserably. Well, except for the scads of Old Navy clothing I seem to collect on a monthly basis. A girl can never have too many jungle green scoop-necked tees and grey hoodies in her closet. Being 26 going on 27 was hard...maybe the toughest year I've had yet, because while the intense emotions of a failing marriage and a separation were behind me, the rebuilding was yet to be done. And there was the new job, and the new singlehood, and the no friends, and all that stuff. And as you've read in this blog, the all important quest towards Getting Better has been pretty fumbling for me, even though I've learned an immense amount in the process. I do think I grew up a ton in the last year, and I'm proud of that....much more so than if I had spent the year running through boyfriends and partying and being tanorexic and stylish and superficial like I tried so hard to be at the beginning of 26. I'm really, really glad I didn't go down that path, because I don't quite think I'm the kind of chick who can pull off fabulous.

And I'm not really sure why I'm typing this...it's not to extract birthday wishes or pats on the back from anyone (although, by all means...)

But I guess it was partially an explanation of why I haven't posted any weigh-related progress this week. I haven't eaten poorly, but I've eaten too much and at odd times, and it's all related to a long story involving vomiting cats and finally breaking down after watching too many episodes of The View where the antenna reception makes horizontal lines crawl across Joy Behar's face and ordering satellite TV and now I'm going to be able to record every word, nay every BREATH, Kathy Griffin takes on television because it comes with free DVR and how I had had a torturous half hour of trying to decide between Netflix and Blockbuster Online and how I ended up leaving Netflix for the better deal and writing an "It's not you, it's me" note in the "reason for cancellation" box in all seriousness and I felt really bad until I saw they had charged me twice this month and now it's on, bitches, and how I think I might seriously be lactose intolerant except maybe just with cheese, and, and, and....

And also because my brother's boyfriend informed me that since I'm turning 27 on the 27th, and also that I'm turning 27 on 7-27-07 that folk logic says I'm having a golden birthday and that means something special should happen. And I started kind of looking for the specialness to kick in around Tuesday and since nothing did I started thinking instead...about a lot of stuff, really. Like how I wish my life had more outward direction, more focus on other people and on things that don't only affect me. I wish I weren't such a consumer...that I bothered the environment less with the way I lived, and that I was more careful about how much energy I'm using, how much trash I'm producing each week.

Basically, for my 27th birthday, I want to seek more purpose in my life. More self-discipline. More compelling reasons for doing what I'm doing. Why am I obsessing over scales and calories and exercise if the sole reason is to just look better...be more attractive? Really, what's the point if it's only for me and only for those specific reasons? I need to think about all this stuff more...each subject could easily be a tediously long blog post on it's own (lucky you guys!)

The 94 year old great aunt has requested my presence in the hometown for a birthday fete this weekend, so I must go collect my finery and prepare for a weekend of speaking loudly into hearing aids and trying to avoid cramming seventeen pieces of chocolate cake down my throat.

Here's to being fabulous in a more productive way...I hope.

Grr...arrgh...mmph.

The numbers on the scale were trending downward in a major way this week. I head steady in the mid 219s all the way through Thursday, flirted with the 218s on Friday and then between Saturday and today I magically appear to have gained back around three pounds. I think the cats are attaching me to a salt lick IV drip while I sleep.

Actually, it's what happened to me this time last week too. I ate a bunch of junk food crap on Saturday and Sunday and filled up with sodium and fat and regretted it on Monday and I didn't drink any water and the only exercise I had was softball.

So, first I obviously need to get over the slacking. I didn't think I was doing SO badly, but maybe cutting corners adds up. And if I want pizza next week I'm only going to get it if I make it, so it'll be personal sized and sans copious amount of oil.

But also, I'm going to start weighing in on Thursdays from now on, because dammit...I deserve to post a loss. I think it's going to be unavoidable that I will eat more calories and fat and salt on the weekends, even if I make sure to curtail it from now on, so I'll wait until my body stops feeling like a giant sodium blimp each week to get a better picture, and I'm going to hold off on weighing this week too.

Just sticking that in there for posterity so next week when I look longingly at the Domino's on the drive home from work I'll remember it's not really worth it.

Damn the man.

I have a confession to make.

And I normally wouldn't have ever really written about this because I feel like such a douche for saying it, but I finally got to see that episode of A Different World where Dwayne Wayne becomes an afterschool mentor for rival gang members played by those adorable boys from Kriss Kross and I spent a fantastic seven minutes daydreaming while they rapped about how "bangin' is a shame, and gangs are to blame" that Whitley and Denise Huxtable transported me back to 1992 so I could lavish myself in their collections of New Kids on the Block Hats and kicky print vests over tuxedo shirts, so I'm feeling like I'm in a pretty good place emotionally right now.

My first weight loss blogs? Not this one, but the four before this that all have about three entries apiece and then found their way to the Great Blog Campmeetin' in the Promised Land? They were all written for a guy.

And this guy is actually not a horrible person, on balance. He has a great job, cares about the environment, makes me laugh, likes the same music I did, and made hours-long conversation seem like an absolute joy every time we talked. But this guy had a little problem...he wasn't into fatties. And as he told me this after a long period of being a fantastic friend during my marriage, I felt that instinctive shrinking in that I do when someone around me who I like has a disdain for weight. So I made jokes, and I made excuses for him...I said it wasn't his fault that he was only into thin women, because "it was biological". I told him it was just fine that he felt ashamed for being attracted to me, but only from the neck up. I preened whenever he said no other female connected with me like I did, and that I had a gorgeous face and a great sense of humor and that he had real feelings for me. And I tried to ignore the fact he said all these things through text messages at 3:00 am when he was riding home from some bar or concert and bummed out that he hadn't left with a girl on his arm.

And our relationship reached a real low point when I agreed to write an online personals ad so he could meet women. He called me his "sexretary", and he sent me the login information so I could weed out the unacceptable women and write back to the promising ones. He said that we should make a deal: that he would get all the sleeping around out of his system (I think the euphemism "wild oats" was used several times), and I would lose enough weight to fit into a size 8 and then maybe we could be a real couple.

And Internets, this is where you get to question my character as a human being, because I was all for it.

And so I started to follow the diet he recommended, and I let him berate me for eating cheese on my salad, and I got so neurotic and anxious about sending him pictures of my body and weighing in that I actually began to GAIN weight. I still have a cache of emails from me to him in my outbox, and every single one of them begins with "I'm so sorry, but...". And so after about six weeks of this, of him pushing for progress and me defiantly giving him excuses, we just dropped it entirely. And we started arguing a lot more than we talked and now our interactions are limited to brief hellos and how are yous and I spend a little time every day looking at his icon on my messenger and wishing we could have just one more decent conversation as a way to say goodbye.

And I'm posting this not out of a need for any sort of emotional catharsis, but as an explanation mostly. A, a different male friend of mine recently started reading this blog, and had a few questions about women's body-image and self-esteem and all the emotional reasons why we're doing what we're doing, and I'm afraid I didn't really give him great answers, as I tend to be flippant in the face of emotionally raw stuff.

We were discussing my last big post where I questioned the need for separating physical appearance from physical health as a motivation for eating right and working out, and he asked me if it was ever possible to just lose or gain weight for health reasons only. And I told him I didn't think it was...that for every woman trying to change her body and her life, there probably was the voice of at least one man in the back of her head that would always push her to run further, sweat more, eat less stuff. And I think that's where our wires got crossed, because A took that to mean that for every woman losing weight, there's a man she wants to attain as a result. And I know why he thinks that, at least in my case, because we spend a lot of time discussing dating and relationships and sex, and I often lampoon myself as a husband-seeking , sex-crazed coquette because I assumed he knew that's pretty much the opposite of who I've become. I guess facetiousness gets lost in translation somewhere between the keyboard and the IM window, and I need to be more aware of that.

But to answer A...when I say there's a man's voice in every woman's head, I was generalizing the basic desire that anyone feels to be adored, accepted, beloved for who she is. And it may not necessarily be just an old boyfriend or a thoughtless teenage boy in high school or whatever...it could be a mother, or a girlfriend, or even just a stranger on the street who made a snide comment in passing...but those voices exist, and it takes a lot of strength to rise above the basic sentiment of you're not good enough for me. Sometimes it takes hundreds of days of failing, thousands of miles on the elliptical...it takes pain and sweat and tears and that exquisitely painful process of breaking yourself down, looking at all the pieces, and then putting yourself back together again to make someone recognizable and yet stronger. I'm trying to say the emotional reasons for losing weight never really go all the way away, even though most of us evolve to a level where working and out and eating right for the sake of feeling good is a much more viable option for our lives.

And am I saying that anyone who chooses to lose weight hates themselves? No. I'm also not saying that I was immune from seeking out external motivation for changing my life at first, even though I can honestly say it's not the case anymore. I have four dead blogs of food journals, apologies, and self-loathing to prove it. And I was worried initially that this blog would go by the wayside too because all I wanted to do was get thin and get revenge...I'm very thankful I ended up realizing there were much more rewarding reasons for writing here, and trying these things in my real life.

But when I weigh-in once a week, or when I decide whether or not it's worth it for me to have a bowl of ice cream with a friend, do I hear that guy's voice in my head? Absolutely. And as much as I hope it'll fade the more time and healing I put between us, I doubt he'll ever completely go away.