Fat Lady on a Bike

Peter Pan and the Lost Boys

2011-12-13T14:23:00.000-05:00

On Sunday afternoon, we took Alex (age 7-1/2) and Emma (age almost 6) and their parents to see an amazing, in-the-round production of Peter Pan. It was a wonderful, magical way to introduce kids to the experience of theater, and we all enjoyed it a lot. They particularly liked the flying against a 360-degree panoramic projection of London, while I favored the crocodile -- a huge puppet on wheels propelled by the feet of two strong young men, ticking and roaring in fine fettle.

Thinking about the play itself, however, left me feeling a lot less delighted.

The usual qualms about Peter Pan and its author have to do with whether Barrie had an unnatural interest in little boys, but that isn't what bothered me, at least not primarily. As I watched the story unfold, what struck me was every character's yearning for a mother, even the pirates, and Barrie's apparent urge to turn all little girls into mother figures, with a corresponding lack of understanding that little girls also yearn to have mothers, not just to become them.

As someone who lost my mother at age 13, I could empathize with the lost boys and their stories of being literally "lost" -- abandoned on the street by mothers (where are the fathers?) who in some cases seemed unable to care any longer for their beloved sons and in others simply threw them away. In Peter's case, he returned home from his imaginative flight only to find the window barred against him. Interestingly, in this time period, when death in childbirth was one of the main causes of mortality among young women, no mention is made of the even more likely scenario of being barred from a mother's loving embrace by death. Barrie's issue seems to be all about being rejected. I can empathize with that, as well.

In Peter's (and Barrie's) world, what does motherhood consist of? The main duty of the mother seems to be telling enthralling bedtime stories, followed closely by imposing the order of a bedtime ritual. These seem kind of trivial, until you think about what they represent. The bedtime ritual is fairly obvious, as it represents the safety of having limits set and the physical nurturing from which those limits stem. The story-telling is a little bit more subtle. I think it represents nurturing of the spirit, encouragement of imagination, adventure and fun -- in other words, all the things that being a boy means to Peter.

What place do fathers have in this world? Clearly, they (as men) represent all the things that Peter hates and fears: growing up, getting a job, being responsible, as well as setting more disagreeable limits, such as making Nana sleep outside instead of in the nursery where the children -- and their mother -- want her. But there is an even more sinister implication in the fact that in most productions of the play, Mr. Darling and Captain Hook are played by the same actor. Hook is Peter's arch-enemy, someone who is always trying to kill him, as Mr. Darling is the arch-enemy of his children, always trying to make them grow up and be responsible. He, like Hook, feels he doesn't get any respect and is humored by his family the way Hook is humored by his men. The difference is, of course, that Hook controls them through fear of injury and death, while Mr. Darling is pretty much completely ineffectual, yielding all control of the household to his wife.

One of the ironies of the play is that, despite the focus on girls as mothers, each of the female characters except for Mrs. Darling (the actual mother) saves Peter's life. While you could regard the fierce protectiveness of Tiger Lily, Tinkerbelle and Wendy as maternal instinct, in fact they each behave in ways that are as physically heroic as Peter's own actions. And certainly, Wendy gets to enjoy flying around London as much as either of her brothers. In the strange and wondrous world of Neverland, girls may be mother figures, but that doesn't seem to mean simply waiting on the sidelines waiting for the boys to come home.

On the other hand, it does seem to mean that girls spend all their energy taking care of boys. I would worry about that being the message my granddaughter took away from seeing the play if I weren't convinced that the things she's most likely to remember are the flying and Tinkerbelle's rude behavior!

Still, as a lost girl myself, I find myself feeling sad for all the lost children and wondering what made Barrie so sensitive to that need for nurturing. Perhaps we all need to learn to be our own "mothers" and find ways of nurturing ourselves and providing ourselves a structure in which we can function happily and productively. I know that's what I'm working on.

And who says the theater is not relevant?

A hui hou.

My Sister's House

2011-12-07T13:56:00.000-05:00

I am sitting in my sister's house. We came down here to Fort Myers, FL for Thanksgiving, as we did last year, only this year I stayed on for a couple of weeks to have some extra biking time in the warmth. For the past week, I've been here on my own, as my sister and brother-in-law travelled to Chicago. So I've been here by myself, eating at my sister's table, watching her tv, doing laundry in her washing machine, driving in my brother-in-law's car, and generally making myself at home in her world.

This may not seem like such a big deal. Siblings visit each other all the time, and even borrow each other's dwellings. But when I think how my sister and I were lost to each other for 35 years (for the whole story, see The Story of Princess S), my sitting here in her house is nothing short of miraculous.

Though we have been back in each other's lives for almost three years now, and though I have felt lots of feelings about all aspects of our shared and unshared histories, evidently I can still be sandbagged by anger and grief. Last week, before she left on her trip, my sister and I spent a day hanging out together, talking about everything in our lives, and as it almost inevitably does, at one point the conversation turned to the past. I heard again from her how she had been told that I was the one who chose not to have anything to do with my family, not once, but twice, when in fact I had been twice disowned. We shook our heads sadly together at all the wasted time, and I thought that was it. But I spent the first two days of my solitary sojourn in a fog of depression and emotional eating. It was only on the third morning, as I rode my bike on the beautiful, exotic John Yarbrough Linear Park trail , that I realized that I had been ambushed by grief for all the time we lost and anger at our father and stepmother for their selfish, hurtful actions.

When we talk about the past, my sister often tells me how grateful she is that our reunion has given her back some positive memories of our mother. She's three years younger than I and managed to keep less of the good parts even than I did, in my total blocking out of my past. But since we've reconnected and shared our memories, she's been able to connect also with our mother in some very healing and beautiful ways. She told me that as she finally came to feel some peace with those memories, she started seeing dragonflies everywhere, and the dragonflies reminded her of the sparkly rhinestone jewelry that she loved to look through in our mother's jewelry box. She added that seeing dragonflies now makes her feel at peace and loved.

As I rode along the bike trail in the sunshine and realized that I'd been grieving for my mommy and grieving for the years I did not have my sister in my life, I looked up and there was a beautiful, iridescent green dragonfly above my left shoulder, moving along with me.

I burst into tears.

And so I sit here in my sister's house, or drive around in my brother-in-law's car, feeling at peace, and loved, and very grateful that I have my sister and brother-in-law in my life now. And that beautiful dragonfly is dancing in the sunlight.

A hui hou.

On Turning Sixty

2011-10-05T10:58:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned yesterday, this is a reflective time of year in the Jewish calendar, and I've certainly been in a reflective mood since my birthday at the end of August, on which I entered a new decade.

On August 29, 2001 I turned 50. To celebrate, Carol and I brought all the people whom I counted as my family (having been discarded by my birth family long before) to Hawai'i for a week-long celebration, an opportunity for them to get to know each other (some had never met) and also get to know my very favorite place. It was an amazing time for all of us.

As I approached the 10-year anniversary of that occasion, I realized that my whole life is almost completely different now. 9-11 was still two weeks away. I had yet to acquire my first 78rpm record. I had no grandchildren and only one of my three stepchildren was married. I was still performing with the Wholesale Klezmer Band. I had not yet been to Green Mountain at Fox Run or met the wonderful teacher/counsellor/friend who has helped me through so much of what I've chronicled in this blog. For that matter, I had not ridden a bicycle for over 20 years. I was just starting to work on my first KlezKamp as Associate Director, and had just returned from the very first Aloha Music Camp (and the Mohala Hou Foundation was several years from coming into existence). I had never painted a watercolor. I had not been in contact with my sister in almost 20 years. I had never met either of my nieces and in fact didn't even know of the existence of the younger one and had never heard of my now-beloved brother-in-law. I had never played the 'ukulele or lap steel guitar or studied Hawaiian. I had never been to Madison, Wisconsin or spent much time in Vermont. I had never meditated or done strength training, never bounced on a fitball, and had pretty much stopped dancing. I was not (and could not be) legally married, and had not yet met two of our now closest friends, who came to us as a result of our marriage.

In short, almost everything that occupies my energy now and many of the people and projects closest to my heart were nowhere in the picture.

I am extremely grateful for all the changes of the past decade. Who said you can't teach an old dog new tricks?

A hui hou.

On the New Year

2011-10-04T09:34:00.000-04:00

Last week we celebrated Rosh Hashono, the Jewish new year. I've always thought that celebrating the new year at the same time, more or less, as the beginning of the new school year made a lot more sense than starting in the middle of winter, but on the other hand, it seems kind of odd to be starting up just at the time when the growing season is over. I suppose the best time to celebrate a beginning might be in the spring, but after the summer is over, there is definitely a sense of getting back down to business that makes Rosh Hashono feel, to me, like an appropriate starting point for the year.

Though the Jewish new year is, in pretty much all respects, a much more serious affair than its secular counterpart, the one aspect the two holidays share is that sense of starting over with a clean slate that leads to resolutions. In the Eastern European Jewish tradition, there's an actual ritual for that process, called tashlikh, which is Hebrew for throwing or casting away. On the afternoon of the first day of Rosh Hashono (or any time before the end of Succot, in some traditions), we go to a place of moving water (rivers or oceans) and cast bits of bread, representing our sins, into the stream so that we can be cleansed of them.

This was not something my family did when I was a child. In fact, I first encountered it when I attended services at the place where some of my stepchildren were going to Hebrew School. It seemed kind of fun, and a good excuse to go on a frequently sunny afternoon and be by water, which is something I always enjoy, and sing one of my favorite songs, but I can't say it felt particularly meaningful. In more recent years, when we've celebrated the days of awe in Hawaii, going to do tashlikh led us to discover the beauty of Ala Moana Beach Park, which we had previously seen only from the road, and spend a quiet time with the surf and sea life. But the best iteration has been what we do with some of our grandchildren.

We believe that a big part of our job as grandparents is to weave a connection between the newest generation and the traditions that we love, and the best way to do that, at least while they are all still so young, is to create fun and interesting experiences that they will associate with us and with the Jewish holidays. For the days of awe, which abound with seriousness, the choices for fun and child-friendly activities are rather limited. Apples and challah dipped in honey are always a big hit (our youngest, this year, discovered that he could use his apple slice as a scoop for the honey), and shofar (ram's horn) blowing is another fun activity. But the casting out of sins? That seems a little heavy for their innocent little souls, even if the river and the bread-throwing part seemed like they could be intriguing in the right sort of way.

While the concept of sins didn't seem appropriate, we figured that all kids over the age of 1 understand the notion of bad behavior, or behavior that makes mommy and daddy upset. Over the last few years, we've thrown away whining, not cleaning up the playroom, pushing siblings and a variety of other pre-school "sins." This year, the kids threw away "bad behavior," being messy, and nightmares. And I threw away impatience and despair. It felt very liberating. As I watched the chunks of bread float merrily down the stream and listened to my grandchildren shouting with excitement over something they had found in the water, I felt peaceful and content, and happy to be starting this wonderful new year.

May we all enter this new season full of peace and a sense of adventure.

A hui hou.

Support

2011-09-09T09:46:00.000-04:00

For the past few months I've been thinking a lot about support -- what it is, why we need it, why not having it is so painful. One of the things I've realized is that though there are many different kinds of support, they all seem to have a couple of things in common.

Financial support, clerical/administrative support, emotional support, even the physical support provided by things like sports bras, jock straps and orthotics -- in each instance, what underlies the support itself is acknowledgment of a need, a lack or a place of pain, and what the support does is address that need, fill the lack and say "I know that hurts. I know that's hard."

Support around an issue is not the same as fixing a problem. Just before setting out to write this post, I reread my last entry, which contained a reference to the traditional Jewish mourning practice of sitting on the floor during the week of shiva. The part of that practice that I did not previously mention is that those who come to comfort (ie, "support") the mourner are instructed to come in quietly and sit there, waiting for the mourner to speak or not, as s/he needs. The task is not to make small talk, not to make the person grieving feel better or move past grief, but to acknowledge that grief and give the mourner an opportunity to share memories, to cry, or simply to rest in the company of people who understand. When I was sitting shiva for my father, many friends and colleagues came to be with me, most of whom did not know about that traditional practice. While I appreciated their love and concern, I got the most comfort from the few who simply came in and sat silently on the floor next to me.

Using mourning as an example is particularly fitting, as what I've been going through lately has been very much about the lack of true support I experienced after my mother died. There was so much focus on getting on with life and the need to be "strong" that no one ever acknowledged that the bottom had just dropped out of my world. At the age of 13 I was, in essence, told to be an adult and take on whatever responsibilities were thrown my way without question or protest.

For the past two weeks, we've been living in chaos caused by household renovations, and I have been totally thrown by how disconcerted I've been. Part of me is dealing with it,as I must, but another part of me wants to curl up with a blanket over my head. Part of me wants my mommy. Since that is never going to happen, I have to learn to sit quietly on the floor with my self, acknowledge my feelings and give them -- and myself -- space to breathe.

The other day, when I posted on Facebook a brief comment about feeling overwhelmed, a bunch of friends from all areas of my life posted comments essentially acknowledging what I had said, and it was actually kind of astonishing to me how much better I felt after reading them. How different would my life have been if, 47 years ago, one of the adults in my life had sat next to me, put a hand on my shoulder and said, "I know how sad you are and how scared, and it's okay to feel those things. Life is going to be different now, and maybe it will be hard for a while, but eventually you'll start to feel better. That doesn't mean you didn't love your mommy or that you don't miss her, but you'll start to feel better because life does go on and is full of wonderful experiences"? Would I have avoided needing to be always competent? Would I have avoided stuffing down emotions with food? Would I have had an easier time asking for help?

I don't know the answers to those questions, and in a way, as interesting as they are to contemplate, the answers don't matter. I think that my task, now, is to say those things to my self, to my young self and to my current self, until I come to believe them. I have to be to myself the loving adult who was missing from my life all those years ago.

It isn't easy, inhabiting these deep places of pain. It isn't easy to sit quietly in the face of grief. But I'm very glad to be here.

A hui hou.

Fathers' Day Musings

2011-06-19T16:17:00.000-04:00

Today is Fathers' Day, and Facebook is full of warm and loving tributes to all kinds of fathers, both living and dead, as was the Sunday newspaper. As I read the interesting and often heartwarming tributes, I found myself suddenly catapulted into the dark place I inhabited after my father died, 20+ years ago. In Jewish tradition, a mourner "sits shiva" for seven days after the burial, and it is customary to sit on the floor or a low stool -- not for punishment, but as an outward indication of internal discomfort. I sat on the floor that week and tried to figure out how I could deal with the liturgical presumption of honor and love for a parent when I felt neither of those things for the man who had sired me. I finally figured out that while I felt nothing but anger and bitterness towards my father, who had betrayed me, I could genuinely mourn my daddy, who had given me life, taught me values he couldn't live up to himself, and encouraged me to be myself and stand up for what I believed.

My daddy was a loving man, quick to hug, who loved to play. We spent hours in the back yard, playing catch or badminton, and he seemed to enjoy helping me with school projects. He was funny and outgoing, and loved to argue about ideas with me. He believed that I could do anything I set my mind to accomplish and that the whole world was open to me, not just the parts officially labeled "for girls." He taught me always to tell the truth. He loved me unconditionally, or so I believed.

My father was a weak man, whose supposed principles were subject to considerations of expediency. He had great ideas and intense passions, but never followed through on them for very long. Our basement was littered with remnants of his previously all-consuming projects. He seemed to value a peaceful life above justice and fairness. Under the influence of my wicked stepmother, he stole from his parents. And he disowned me, not once, but twice.

Thank you, Daddy, for giving me life and helping me become the woman I am. On this day of reflection and remembrance, I miss you more than I can easily express, torn away as you were not by distance or death, but by your own misguided choices. I wish I'd had you longer in my life.

A hui hou.

Road Trip!

2011-06-04T18:29:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow, I'm leaving to drive 1300+ 78rpm records out the the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where they are going to be the centerpiece of the Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture. This represents a small fraction of my total collection, so this is only the first of many such drives, I suspect. I've gotten the records loaded into the car (bless MiniMoves and More for their willingness to do such small jobs -- small for them, huge for us!) and all the electronic files safely stored on an external drive. Now all I have to do before leaving tomorrow afternoon is get all my personal stuff together.

I love road trips. Since I was a child, taking pride in helping my dad navigate, following the AAA Trip-Tik and keeping track of the family's expenses, I've loved the feeling of anticipation and adventure of setting out in the car. I could sit for hours (and did), looking out the window, trying to imagine what life was like in all the places we passed. When I became an adult, I loved doing the driving, especially the ability to leave the designated path if something interesting caught my eye. In our travels, Carol and I especially love going to the ends of roads whenever we can. There's something very satisfying about that.

During my younger years, driving also became a supremely comforting activity. During the tumultuous years before Carol and I got together, I would spend hours driving around New England by myself. I'd turn on the radio or listen to tapes and follow the most circuitous, scenic pathways I could find, barely stopping to eat or take care of bodily functions. This was, in fact, pretty much the only time I successfully comforted myself regularly without food. I don't know exactly why it worked, but it did. Then I became a gigging musician, playing with the Wholesale Klezmer Band, which was based in Western Massachusetts, so I had to do a lot of driving for both rehearsals and gigs. While I usually enjoyed the drives to the venues where we performed, the drives home were less thrilling, especially in the middle of the night, and driving kind of lost its charm. Since I quit the band, most of my driving has been strictly functional, and the fact that until last month, our cars were both aged and kind of uncomfortable didn't make the prospect of taking to the roads very appealing.

But now, I'm filled again with that early excitement, and a brand-new, comfortable car with incredible amenities (XM radio, a fully-functional iPod connection, adjustable lumbar support) increases the likelihood that my imaginings will resemble the reality of the ride. I look forward to the long hours by myself, free to listen to whatever catches my attention in a moment, or to be still and think, or not.

In my younger years, when I hit the road, all I had to do was throw some clothes in a bag and walk out the door. Things aren't so simple now. Somewhere along the line I became incredibly high maintenance!

I have to pack all my medicine and nutritional supplements, enough for the whole time I'll be gone. I have to pack my CPAP machine and mask. I have to pack a fairly comprehensive selection of food, since my recently uncovered sensitivities make eating at the roadside service areas, or even most convenient restaurants, next to impossible. It will probably take me 10 minutes to pack my clothes, and 2-3 hours to get everything else ready. I guess that is one of the consequences of aging. I'm trying to feel grateful that I can take care of myself so well on the fly, rather than weighed down by all the restrictions and imperatives. But whatever I feel, tomorrow afternoon, as close to 2pm as I can make it, I'll be behind the wheel, heading west. And I'll be grinning my head off.

A hui hou.

Spiritual Geography

2011-06-02T22:41:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was amazing, meteorologically. I was awakened in the morning by a tremendous clap of thunder, and my bedtime was delayed by one of the loudest, brightest thunderstorms I can remember and some serious concern about the possibility of a tornado. Then this morning dawned clear, sunny, breezy and mild, a perfect early summer day. It was peaceful, pleasant and perfect.

As I drove around doing errands and enjoying the sunlight and the breeze blowing through the window, I found myself musing about how the storm and its aftermath were a great metaphor for the upheavals and accomplishments of the inner work I've been doing. So often it feels as though when I go through the really hard times, the interludes of soul-baring, acknowledging painful feelings and the like, it's like the violence and power and, yes, grandeur of that huge thunderstorm. But when I'm through the soul-baring and the pain, I expect the clarity and sunshine and peace to follow. Often they do, but only for a little while.

In geographical terms, it feels as though the storms of Massachusetts should be followed by a permanent move to the perfection of Hawaii.

Unfortunately, the sunshine and peace never last. Already this afternoon clouds rolled back in and the temperature dropped 15 degrees. And it seems as though the struggle and the learning are never done, either.

The real question is, much as I love Hawaii, would I be happy living there all the time? I enjoy the occasional bluster, and the deep clarity of a cool, autumn day, and the changing leaves. I enjoy the transformation from the bleakness of winter to the blossoming and budding of spring. I enjoy the occasional violent thunderstorm (though in fairness, I have to point out that this year we had a few of those in Hawaii as well, not to mention an annual tsunami warning).

Anyone who has ever been an English major, as I was, is familiar with William Blake's ideas about innocence and experience. Experience, with its harsh reality, always seemed to me preferable to the blandness of innocence. If my journey takes me through the occasional bout of howling darkness, I can embrace that darkness because of what it teaches me. Still, I love waking up every morning in Hawaii knowing that 99 days out of 100 the sun will be bright and the sky clear. And knowing that it will cloud up mid-afternoon, only to be bright and clear again in the cool of sunset. I would love to have that kind of certainty about my life and health right now.

In the end, I guess my two homes suit me very well, both physically and spiritually. As I love them both, perhaps I can learn to be happy whatever my internal climate brings me.

A hui hou.

Where, Oh Where Has My Little Blog Gone?

2011-06-02T12:57:00.000-04:00

You may have noticed that I haven't been writing much of late. I've noticed that, too. As I've thought about why that is, I realized that it's mostly about shame. At first I thought it was about that famous river in Egypt; certainly in the past, I've avoided dealing with unpleasant things, difficulties and challenges by choosing, either consciously or unconsciously, not to acknowledge their existence. But the fact is, in the two months since we've been back from our winter home, I've been very much aware of what's bothering me and actively working to try to make life better. Denial was really not a factor.

And then it struck me that I didn't want to be blogging about what is going on with me for the simple reason that I was mired in shame. During the period this winter when my CPAP mask wasn't functioning properly, I lost the ability to recognize and respond to cues about hunger and fullness and ended up gaining some additional weight, which was not enough to affect me while I was still in warm weather attire, but catapulted me into despondency as I made the transition to long pants and tee shirts. The physical discomfort I was feeling in those clothes, many of which I couldn't wear at all any more and the rest of which were all elastic, overwhelmed me and cast me back into a state of shame and guilt and paralysis that I didn't expect to experience again on this journey. And feeling that shame made me loath to write, which gave those horrible negative feelings all the more power.

You wouldn't think that there would be much I could be ashamed about, given all the feelings and situations I've share in this blog. Clearly, it isn't about the feelings and situations themselves, but how I feel about them, and about myself. The fact is, I wrote the preceding paragraph with a light heart just now, whereas last week I was unable even to look at the bookmark for this page on my browser toolbar.

What changed? I bought some new pants.

This seems like such a small thing to do, a small practical task. But it actually was so much more than that. It was a conscious step away from self-flaggelation and towards kindness to myself, towards acceptance of who and what I am in this moment.

And so, I am back, with much to share and process and celebrate.

A hui hou.

Transitions

2011-04-18T05:19:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about transitions, probably because my life seems to be fraught with them right now. For a start, there was the shift from Hawaiian Standard Time to Eastern Daylight Time, which has been brutal. But that's not the only one; it seems as though every other area of my life, except my family, is currently in a state of flux.

In the work realm, KlezKamp is moving from Living Traditions, Inc. to the Mayrent Insittute for Yiddish Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My other major professional involvement, as a board member of the Mohala Hou Foundation, is also changing, as we take over the administration of Aloha Music Camp in the aftermath of some major personnel upheaval.

In the physical world, diffiicult transitions abound. Moving from wakefulness to sleep, and from sleep to wakefulness, continues to be difficult for me much of the time. And lately, the transition from lying down or sitting to standing has been painful as well. There is also the sometimes elusive transition between hunger and fullness to deal with.

Psychically, things are no better -- I continue to struggle with the transition between the hope I have of accomplishment on any given day to the reality of what I am able to do.

Transitions are difficult. Energetically, the law of inertia applies: it is way easier to keep doing what we have always done than to do something different. Specifically, I seem to need to know where I am and what I am about in order to feel comfortable in the world, and clearly, that is not always possible. Learning to tolerate the ambiguity of flux has been one of the challenges I've been working on as part of my journey towards health and inner peace.

Tonight Passover begins, and at the first seder we sing a hauntingly beautiful song called Karev Yom,which is about the coming of a day which is neither day nor night. I've always loved that song, partly because it is so beautiful, partly because you only get to sing it one night in the whole year, and partly because the imagery is as haunting as the melody. But even beyond the beauty and mystery of the lyric is the psychological rightness of the metaphor. At this hour on this day, our kitchens are turned over from every day to Passover use; the khometz (products made with the five prohibited grains: wheat, rye, oats, barley and spelt) has been either thrown out or segregated for our last non-Passover breakfast, and the special passover foods are waiting for the holiday to begin. We are in the moment which is neither Passover nor not-Passover.

The discomfort of such a moment is both practical and spiritual. In practical terms, there is the huge question of what do we eat for breakfast and lunch. Traditionally, since khometz is allowed until 10am, we always leave out one non-Passover place-setting to be washed and packed away after a normal breakfast, whatever that might be. It is also traditional not to eat matzo until the seder, so we have usually lunched on a bit of chicken from the soup I make for the seder, maybe with some kosher for Passover potato chips and carrots, washed down with a side of Dr. Brown's black cherry soda. But spiritually, it is not a comfortable day, and that is not only or even primarily due to the pre-seder frenzy. The sigh of relief and peace that for me always accompanies the moment we sit down at our seder table is partly because all the work is done but also, I think, because at that moment I once again know where I am and what I am about.

May all of us, whatever we celebrate, find those moments of certainty and learn to live more comfortably with the times of transition.

I wish all my Jewish friends and family a zisn, koshern pesakh (a sweet, kosher Passover).

A hui hou.

Ghrelin and Leptin and Sleep, Oh My!

2011-04-05T15:59:00.000-04:00

One of the most interesting classes I have taken at Green Mountain at Fox Run was one that discussed the "hunger hormones" and how they intereact with insulin and what we eat to regulate hunger, satiety and, ultimately, body weight. I had naturally heard a great deal about insulin over the years, with the threat of diabetes always hovering in my background, but leptin and ghrelin, the two primary hormones that govern hunger and satiety, were totally new to me.

Basically,ghrelin is produced in the stomach and tells the brain that more food is needed, while leptin, which is produced in fat cells, sends the signal that we are full and all is well. When you have too many fat cells, you have too much leptin, which seems to make the receptors insensitive to the signal to stop eating, especially if you have too much insulin floating around and the whole system gets out of balance. (Apologies for gross oversimplification!)

The simplest and most obvious way to regulate this important hormone system is by making sure to eat regularly and include a good balance of foods, especially fiber, fat and protein, at every meal. But quite a lot of recent research has suggested that getting adequate sleep is a huge factor in maintaining hormonal equilibrium. This may be the mechanism by which sleep disorders contribute to obesity.

This week, I experienced strong anecdotal evidence in support of that theory.

A couple of months ago, I started feeling as though the quality of my sleep was getting worse; I was feeling tired again despite spending adequate hours in bed, and felt sluggish and sleepy throughout the day. I wondered whether my CPAP mask was leaking, but I didn't notice anything, at least when I was awake and checking. Yet I had a feeling that the seal of the nasal pillows in my nostrils wasn't as good as it had been and suspected that that might be the source of the problem. I tried using the second set of slightly larger nasal pillows that had come with my mask, and that seemed to help with the sleepiness, but they were too big for my face and I was waking up with a very sore nose. So I contacted my sleep center and asked them to send me a new set of nasal pillows (evidently insurance will pay for a new one every three months, even though my respiratory therapist had assured me that every six months should be fine).

The new mask arrived on Friday, and when I went to swap out the old parts, I noticed that indeed, the slightest pressure against the side of the nasal pillows pushed it out of the tubing, thus creating a huge leak. This was actually very exciting to me, as it gave me evidence that I hadn't been imagining the change in sleep status and offered the promise of good sleep again. And for the past three nights I have indeed enjoyed much better sleep, waking earlier and feeling ready to get moving right away.

One of the other problems I've been experiencing this winter has been an evident inability to eat mindfully. While I have managed very well at continuing to eat only those foods that sit well with my body, I've been unable to stop eating, most of the time, at the moment when I first feel satisfied, which is usually also the moment when the food stops actually tasting good. I thought I was just facing another instance of a previously established "corner of the blanket" flapping up as another was dealt with, and wondered what was going on. Was it emotional eating? Was I stuffing down some other deep-seated emotional morass? It was perplexing.

Then, on Saturday, I noticed that I didn't eat everything on my dinner plate, for the first time in a very long time. I thought that was strange, but figured maybe the additional meditating I was doing was having a calming effect. Sunday, the same thing happened, twice. Moreover, when I couldn't fall asleep that night (due to physical discomfort), I felt hunger, ate a small snack, and then stopped eating, which is exactly what I had not been able to do during the previous couple of months.

Suddenly, a light bulb went off -- surely it was no coincidence that the return of my ability to respond to internal signals about hunger and fullness came at exactly the same time as the return of undisrupted sleep.

This realization felt huge. First, it gave me incredibly convincing evidence that I am, in fact, very much in tune with my body and its signals to me. If I wasn't getting the message to stop eating, that was because it wasn't being sent. Second, it meant that my difficulty with eating was not due to some sort of moral failure -- it was simply my body being out of whack. Once the balance was reestablished, I could (and can) make sensible and healthy choices without even thinking about it.

If I hadn't been a total believer in CPAP before, I would surely be now.

A hui hou.

Get Thee Behind Me, Strength Training!

2011-03-31T17:52:00.000-04:00

So there I was yesterday morning, up bright and early and having given myself permission not to worry about strength training till I get home so that I could concentrate on meditating and getting done all that I need to do, and I had a huge urge to lie right back down on the bed and do my lower body routine. And so I did it.

I think I can safely say that I have never felt that kind of intrinsic motivation to do lower body before. Never.

When I first went to Green Mountain at Fox Run, practically the first piece of information I internalized was that strength training is one of the secrets of the universe -- it's the only means of improving our metabolic rate as well as perhaps the most effective way to stave off osteoporosis. And for several years, I kept up a religious routine of alternating upper and lower body, six days a week. Often, that was the only thing I could manage to do in a day. Upper body wasn't so bad, because I could control the amount of weight I used. But lower body, which used my own body weight for resistance, was a killer.

It never seemed fair -- with upper body, when you are least fit, you use the lowest weights. But with lower body, when you are least fit you have the most to move. For a long time, doing lower body was aerobic exercise for me -- it would regularly get my heart rate into target range, despite assurances from the fitness staff that that would not happen. Eventually I learned to limit my range of motion to make the exercises more doable. Yet still I dreaded it, every single day.

At some point, a couple of years ago, I broke my routine because of illness, and I was never able to get back to it again. The demons of lower body, especially, loomed large, and my energies were focused elsewhere. Every so often I would start up again, either because I revisited Green Mountain or because I had a rush of external motivation (ie, a feeling that I ought to be doing strength training because it was good for me), but in a few days or weeks I'd be making excuses again. Even after my long bout with H1N1 and pneumonia, when i knew that strength training was the best way to get back the core strength I had lost (and was sorely missing, "sorely" being the operative word), I couldn't make myself stick to the program.

Then, after all my improvements of this past summer and fall -- the thyroid supplements, elimination diet and CPAP -- I was feeling pretty healthy in a lot of ways that I hadn't felt for a long time, and I decided to make strength training my top priority for this winter. As I had been taught at Green Mountain, I carefully considered the possible obstacles to successfully implementing a regular regimen and strategies I might use to overcome them, and i was able to figure out that the first thing I needed to do was lower the threshold for beginning. When I visualized myself doing alternating upper and lower body, as I had done for all those other years, I was getting stuck in dread and discomfort. That did not bode well.

I had a sudden flash of insight that proved to be the key to getting back on track. I remembered that a couple of summers ago, I had dragged myself to two classes a week of whole body resistance training, and that had been enough to make me feel significantly better. Which meant that I could divide the whole routine into three parts, rather than two, and hit each muscle group twice per week. When I thought about doing upper body one day (six exercises), abs plus glutes, calves and shins the next (six exercises) and the rest of lower body the third (five exercises), it suddenly all seemed possible. I was actually able to start up after only a few days of settling in.

There was still one problem facing me, though. When I did that first session of lower body, trying for the two sets of 15 reps we do at Green Mountain, it was so hard that I burst into tears when I finished. Carol, ever my staunch support, wisely reminded me that there was nothing sacred about the number 15, and that in fact, the guidelines say that you should do 2-3 sets of 10-15 reps with the goal of keeping good form and feeling the burn for the last few reps of the second and third sets. By those standards, I was actually overtraining, so it was no wonder that I hated doing the exercises. I spent my next sessions figuring out exactly the right number of reps for each muscle group, which varied from 2 sets of 8 for quad lifts to 3 sets of 11 for hamstrings, and all of a sudden, I wasn't dreading strength training any more. And imagine my excitement when after a couple of weeks I was able to increase from 8 to 9 quad lifts -- by trying to do more than my body could handle, all those years, I had totally deprived myself of that type of small, yet invaluable, success.

And so, for two months, I kept up my routine, doing it right on the bed most of the time because my knee issues made getting up and down off the floor difficult and painful. Then we had some company that got in the way followed by a painful medical condition that made strength training impossible for a couple of weeks, and I started to get that sinking feeling of dread again. Only to my surprise, when I became able to get going, I did, without much fuss, till last week when my nieces' visit took precedence. And, as I discussed in my last post, I pretty much decided that I wouldn't worry about getting back to that routine for these last two weeks, knowing that packing is a very physically demanding process and that we had a lot to get done.

And then the miracle happened, and I heard my body crying out to do strength training. And it was lower body specifically that it was requesting.

Wow.

So yesterday morning, I gave my body what it needed. And today I did it again.

I don't know what tomorrow will bring. I don't know if this state of awareness and ease will continue. But I'm a firm believer that if you can achieve something once, however fleetingly, you can achieve it again. And again.

A hui hou.

Next Steps

2011-03-29T17:25:00.000-04:00

My break was a bit longer than I expected when last I wrote, and involved spending a glorious week introducing my nieces to Hawaii. We had a wonderful time, and it was fun being pretty much totally on vacation, something that I rarely allow myself to do -- most of the time, even if I'm not actively doing responsible things, I'm worrying about not doing them! And one of the additional benefits of that recreational time was that I realized I may be entering a new phase, particularly with respect to eating and gut health. And that got me thinking about what that might mean and what I need to do to move ahead towards my goal of getting healthy.

As we traveled around the island, we ate out at restaurants more than I have since I began the LEAP protocol last July, and I did fine. I was fairly careful in my choices and definitely felt the limitations caused by the still fairly long list of foods on my reactive list, or those that were not yet tested. But in fact, the only thing I needed to ask about was soy, which made the whole process feel kind of normal. It felt really good to be able to be fairly spontaneous (though I did check menus online for places I did not know well), and clearly no one suffered because of my limitations (including me!). I also learned that I can tolerate small amounts of challenging foods (wheat, asparagus, corn) pretty well, while still needing to avoid them in quantity.

Apart from that realization, I've also been feeling, these past few weeks, as though my intestinal tract has become healthier. Call it a gut feeling (backed by physiologic details I REALLY don't need to go into here), but I'm getting a sense that the huge imbalances that plagued me may be resolving. I also have become aware of feeling much stronger in my core -- it no longer kills my back if I stand while cooking a meal or looking at a museum exhibit. My ankle still limits my mobility, big time, but at least I'm back to where I was before I got H1N1 and lost the ability to stand upright.

On the down side, I don't feel as though I'm sleeping as well as I was a couple of months ago, and that's significantly affecting my ability to be active and feel energetic and good. Could be that my CPAP needs adjusting, or possibly my thyroid dose; fortunately, I have appointments to have both of those things checked right after I get back to Massachusetts. Having experienced the return of energy, I'm not willing to stand its absence again.

So, what next? We have entered our final two weeks here, and I'm a little overwhelmed by all that needs to happen before we leave, as usual, and by all the things I didn't manage to do while we were here -- also as usual. This is perhaps not the best time to spend my energy trying to reestablish a routine that will almost immediately be broken.

The key is mindfulness. I've gotten away from intentional meditation, which was the main tool that got me started on this journey, and I need to take it up again. I need to give myself the time to be focused and grounded, the time to be quiet, and the time to notice where I am, not where I ought to be or where I was. I want to let go of worrying and fretting in favor of appreciating. If I can do all of that, I hope I'll be able to take joy in a little movement and get the most enjoyment I can of these last days (for now) in my beautiful home here.

Excuse me while I go out to sit on the lanai and listen, mindfully, to the ocean and feel the cool breeze on my face.

A hui hou.

T/Making a Break

2011-03-16T18:11:00.000-04:00

When I was last heard from, I was feeling kind of low, mired in feelings of guilt and unsure how to move forward. Then came the tsunami, and somehow, in the aftermath of the fear and confusion of evacuation and a lost night of sleep, I became unmired. Not that anything substantive has changed, or that I now know how to move ahead on my journey. But the tsunami gave me the chance to break the cycle of negative thoughts that I was in, and when we drove back down the slope of Mauna Kea on Friday morning to our beautiful (and, thankfully, untouched) home, I was filled with a great sense of well-being and happiness. and I've been feeling pretty cheerful ever since.

Perhaps it was the threat of natural disaster putting things into perspective for me. Perhaps it was just the break in time and energy. But there was definitely something about inserting a pause into what was going on inside me that changed things for the better.

It's all too easy to get trapped inside an endless cycle of misery. Carol calls it mental highjacking, and I think we all do it. And it's always negative -- nobody ever seems to get caught up in an endless round of happy thoughts! Unfortunately, though it may feel as though dwelling on the bad stuff is useful, it never is. Never. Not that I advocate denial -- been there and done that, and it isn't helpful either. But beating yourself over the head with your alleged shortcomings is likely only to give you a headache.

This is all related to the importance of self-love and self-care. If you've ever been to Marineland or Sea World or the like, you've heard the presenters at the dolphin and whale shows say that the reason they put on those shows is to get people to care about the whales and dolphins, because humans are only likely to try to take care of things (and people) they care about personally. We care about our family and friends, which is why we can be kind to them and supportive of their efforts to change, even when they slip and slide and lose their way. But we are not so forgiving of our own slips and slides, suggesting that perhaps we don't truly love and value our selves as much as we value those close to us.

This lesson is so simple, but so hard. I am not the enemy. My body is not the enemy. Maybe there isn't even an enemy, only challenges to figure out, one at a time.

When we left Puako, in the wee hours of Thursday night, we left the windows open in our house. Our thinking was that if the tsunami generated really big waves, it would be better to allow them to wash through the house than to give them no place to go, since that resistance could end up with our house washed away rather than simply flooded. It strikes me now that that's a really good image to keep in my mind about the futility of resistance and negativity and the value of being open to what washes through.

A hui hou.

Guilt

2011-03-10T21:18:00.000-05:00

I've been trying for over a year to write a letter to my little self, the self before my mother died, the self before psychic and physical pain conspired to slow me down, and I just can't do it. I know how important it is that I write it, as part of the therapy arc first suggested by my reading of Toxic Parents. I know how much my physical and emotional health depend on being able to let go and stop judging myself, and blaming myself for surviving horrible circumstances in the best way I knew how.

Somehow, knowing all of that isn't really helping.

How could I have let things get to this state? How could I have done this to myself? How can I try to take good care of myself when I know that I've spent years making things worse?

I feel paralyzed by guilt and unable to get passed it. I know that I have to rip through the guilt to get out more anger and sadness and who knows what else, in order to heal, but I just can't move right now.

I know that if I were talking to any other friend or family member -- or even a perfect stranger -- I would urge forgiveness and kindness, but I can't muster it up for myself. I know that by being so judgmental I am almost compelling the type of bad decision that I feel guilty about, but I can't seem to stop. I sit quietly with my feelings and sense the space around me grow dark and agitated and can't find my way back to the light. One of my friends, responding to my previous blog post, reminded me that there are a lot worse coping mechanisms I could have chosen, alcohol, painkillers or street drugs, and she's right; any of those things would have hurt the people I love as much or more than they hurt me, and I wouldn't have the years of productivity and good relationships behind me that I do have, and for which I am very grateful.

I know all that, and yet my heart knows nothing.

So what do I say to my little self? How do I apologize? How do I move on? I don't know yet, but I'll keep trying to figure it out. I do trust that if I keep true to my process, I'll get there eventually.

A hui hou.

In the Dark of Night

2011-03-08T03:28:00.000-05:00

In my telephone counseling session last week, it became clear that the feelings of constriction about my current dietary requirements and the sense I have that all the corners of my blanket are flapping in my face indicated a lot of frustration. It also became clear that the frustration seemed to be related to very deep, very old feelings from childhood, though I couldn't quite figure out what those were. So my assignment for this week was to give myself the space and the stillness to let those feelings come up, and to pay attention when they do.

Unfortunately, I'm also dealing with some major pain at the moment -- nothing serious, but bad enough to impinge on both my activities and my joie de vivre. Though I can manage to stay somewhat comfortable during the day, the minute I get into bed, it feels like all hell breaks loose, which means that sleep has been somewhat elusive these past few nights. Last night was particularly difficult.

So there I was, attempting for the third time to fall asleep, lying in the dark listening to myself breathing into my CPAP machine, and I suddenly felt an onrush of incredibly strong emotion. The feelings were so intense that I could barely hold myself still, though at first I didn't even know what I was feeling, only that I was feeling something powerful. I fought the urge to get up (and the associated urge to stuff something into my mouth to try to regain equilibrium) and let myself be there with whatever it was, and after a few moments the usually still, small voice inside me started to yell (silently), "Why can't you take care of ME for a change?" and "I'm tired of always having to take care of myself and everybody else!"

I don't know who I was addressing, but it's pretty clear that my recent awareness of how burdensome it feels to have to be so continuously vigilant about my food choices etc. is related. And then there was the dream I had the night after my session -- a classic frustration dream involving my stepmother, KlezKamp, and my not running through fields, unable to find the place where I was supposed to be teaching until long after class was over. Nobody ever accused my subconscious of being subtle!

What have I learned from all of this? One is that I think I'm making less than optimal food choices from among the "safe" foods perhaps to kick against the fact that I do have to be so vigilant. I have, in the past, also stopped taking my asthma steroids on occasion when I felt overburdened by the need to take medicine for the rest of my life (an obstinacy which, thank goodness, does not seem to have affected my compliance with any of the medicine I'm currently taking for blood pressure, thyroid or gout).

The second thing I've learned is that I seem to have a deep-seated sense of neglect, in some way. I know that I've always been a pretty strong and self-sufficient person (I'm an oldest child), and people have always assumed that I can take care of myself just fine. The one time I ever had a melt-down during my young years was a few weeks before I left home (for good, as it turned out) to go to England. Everybody in my family was very busy with other issues, and no one was paying any attention to the fact that I was about to travel 3,000 miles away to an entirely different continent. When I got hysterical, the response was that it had never occurred to anybody that I might be having a problem with that.

Well, here it is, 35 years later, and I no longer have any trouble admitting that I need help, which is good. But I believe that much of my current angst revolves around feelings that I didn't take very good care of my young self, and yes, perhaps guilt about being the cause of my current health problems.

I don't know how to get through that, right now. But I'm sure I'll learn.

A hui hou.

Living on Borrowed Time

2011-03-05T16:22:00.000-05:00

Living with someone ten years older than I am has caused me to spend more time than I like contemplating mortality in recent years, as have my own increasing health issues. But even contemplating mortality feels distant and abstract in the face of the sudden death of a contemporary.

One of our co-grandmas, our daugher-in-law's mother, failed to wake up the other morning. She was a lively woman, with a big personality and a lot of energy, and about my own age. It was deeply shocking to hear the news, and very sad. But it also intensified the feeling I've had lately that I am living on borrowed time.

I am an extremely patient person. I can read a book to my grandkids five times in a row without more than a token protest, and I listened to my grandpa's stories over and over and over again his whole life. Since I began this journey towards fitness, I embraced Green Mountain's teaching that if you do the things you need to take care of yourself -- eat mindfully, move your body joyfully and safely, replace inner judgment with compassion -- weight loss will come as a welcome side effect. And most of the time, I am content to keep working at those goals, trusting that weight loss will, indeed, come along in time.

But then the sound of the mortality clock ticking becomes louder and louder, and I start to feel afraid that my body is going to weigh down my spirit before I ever get the chance to experience all the benefits of true fitness and health. It's ticking pretty loudly today.

One of the wisest things anyone ever said to me, spoken by one of the behavioral specialists at Green Mountain, was that anxiety is the future (or the past) intruding into the present. Her point was that if you can truly stay in the moment, you can reduce a lot of stress in your life. In this particular moment, I can truly feel the value of that advice, as it also eliminates that looming sense of fear that I'll run out of time. If this moment is all that really concerns me, then all I can do is make the best choice I can, and continue to make the best choices I can in each subsequent moment. Some of those choices will inevitably be less than optimal, and I will have to live with those as I live with the better ones. Certainly, I am much better off and much healthier (though no lighter) today than I was a few years ago. And that is the best that I can do.

I feel especially sad when I think of my grandson, Jake, who will now have such a huge hole in his life without Grandma Andrea. I need to do what I can to try to make sure that he has his Grandma Sherry for a few more years.

A hui hou.

Deprivation ReDux Again

2011-03-03T13:34:00.000-05:00

Back in September, when I was a couple of months into following the LEAP protocol for dealing with food sensitivities, I wrote a post called Deprivation Redux, in which I talked about how I was feeling pretty fine about eating only those foods that don't hurt me. It felt at that moment as though the deprivation corner of my blanket was firmly pegged into the ground.

Since I've been in Hawaii, though, I've been hit in the face more than a few times, but in a slightly different way. It's not that I'm feeling hard done by because I can't eat whole wheat bread, chocolate, cheddar cheese or popcorn -- in fact, I'm generally finding very reasonable substitutes for all of those flavors. And I've been able to add some of my very most favorite Hawaiian foods, without incident: breadfruit, macadamia nuts, taro, opakapaka (pink snapper) and sweet potatoes. Though I did feel sad on my first trips to the grocery store or Costco, seeing all the usual foods that cannot at this time be part of my fare, there have been plenty of other things to provide variety and interest (the Asian snack isle is a wonder of corn- and gluten free choices).

Still, I've been having more and more trouble being really mindful about my food, making poor choices among those that I can eat, eating when I'm not particularly hungry, and not stopping when my palate becomes jaded or my belly is full. In contemplating why that might be, I've considered the very real possibility that I am subconsciously resenting the limitations on my choices (after spending several years learning to give myself permission to choose freely from among all foods and thus depriving them of their power over me); I could be eating more of what I can have to make up for not being able to have some other foods that I really love. And while I do acknowledge that possibility, it doesn't resonate right now. I really don't think that's the answer. The only food I had been seriously longing for was bread (so I could eat a simple tuna sandwich), and a couple of weeks ago I found spelt hamburger buns in the local health food store that taste just like real whole wheat bread, and I tolerate them just fine. On the other hand, that tuna sandwich was probably the single most mindfully consumed food item in my recent past, so maybe there is more at play behind the scenes than I know.

The other possible explanation that has occurred to me is that I am living in a culture here where not only am I faced every day with the limitations governing my food choices, but where those limitations make it next to impossible to be normally "sociable." Hawaiian contemporary cuisine is very much Asian, and Asian food is dominated by soy, which is one of the few foods that make me frankly ill. This means that we can't eat out (except in one restaurant that neither of us finds terribly appealing), that we can't go to the many day-long festivals without a lot of prior planning, and that if we have guests, I have to cook three meals a day, every day.

In the great scheme of life, none of that is a horrible hardship. I've been enjoying all the cooking I've done, especially when we've had guests, and I can't say I've particularly missed going out to eat. I do miss being able to use soy sauce and ginger in my stir frying, but I can live with that. Still, handcuffs are not particularly enjoyable or comfortable, even if they are lined with fleece. I suspect that the chafing is getting to me, and I don't know what to do about that.

As I write all of this, I realize that none of what I'm talking about is rational. Put me on the rational plane and I can do anything. It's the emotional netherworld that trips me up, every time. I don't know exactly what the lesson is here, only that I clearly haven't learned it yet.

A hui hou.

Blankets in the Wind

2011-03-01T22:32:00.000-05:00

Have you ever had the experience of trying to spread out a picnic blanket or beach towel in a high wind? It's not a pretty sight. You manage to get one or two corners down and just as you go for the third the wind picks up and messes up the whole arrangement. So you patiently get that third or fourth corner set and go back to re-establish mastery over the first two. You may even find yourself spread-eagled across the whole blanket in a vain attempt to get all four corners down at once.

Sometimes, dealing with a blanket in the wind is a perfect metaphor for what it feels like when you try to change your life. You deal with one issue, then another, then another, and just when you think you're finally getting it all under control, the first issue pops up again and you are hit with a face full of blanket. Only with life changes, there seem to be many more than four corners, so that even the clumsy possibility of spread-eagling is not an option.

This has been my life over the past year -- actually, ever since I first went to Green Mountain. First, I put physical activity back into my life. Then came a couple of years of miserable respiratory health that finally got the better of me. Then I dealt with the ravages of deprivation. Then I learned to deal with the stress in my life. Then I dealt with the deep-seated feelings of anger towards my father. Then I faced the reality of the toll of my recent life on my body. Then I dealt with my feelings about my mother. All of that made the need to be active flap in the wind. Then I dealt with food sensitivities, which I think have gotten the deprivation issues all roused again. Then I got my CPAP machine. Then I started doing strength training again with great regularity, and the need to eat mindfully has flapped up again, rather violently.

Sigh. I really believe, perhaps naively, that if only I could all the corners of the blanket to stay put for even just a little while, I could actually lose some of my excess weight and experience the benefits that would bring. But the wind is gusty and the flapping is so loud it's sometimes hard to hear anything else.

Still, what can I do but keep on trying?

A hui hou.

Another Day, Another Two Months Gone

2011-03-01T16:08:00.000-05:00

Unbelievably, today is the first of March, and it has been another two months since I last posted. Gaps like that are potentially fatal for bloggers, but I am hopeful that those of you who read this will forgive me the lapse and continue to accompany me on my sometimes convoluted and difficult journey.

I have a tendency, when things get difficult, to withdraw into myself and neither seek help nor share my struggle. Since the whole point of starting this blog, just over a year ago, was to do both those things, it has been totally counterproductive of me to turn away from writing just at the time I need it most. But in the spirit of self-compassion, I am acknowledging that and letting it go. What was, was. What will be, I hope, will be regular posting again as I start moving forward once more.

Thanks to those of you who have told me that you've missed my posts, and that you value what I have to say. I appreciate that deeply.

Imua! (Forward!)

Happy 2011!

2011-01-01T14:06:00.000-05:00

Looking back, it is astonishing to me that I last posted here mid-October. I guess that these past two months, I have been more involved trying to live my life than even thinking about it. During that interval, I stepped carefully away from the LEAP food sensitivity protocol to begin to add additional foods back into my diet (with limited success: still can't eat wheat, though spelt is fine, and I can't quite tell about green beans), I made good friends with my CPAP machine and feel as though I've gotten my sense of self back, and my overall health is sufficiently improved that when I do get colds (such as the one I came home with from KlezKamp), they are just colds and not major illnesses. These are all wonderful signs of progress.

On the negative side of the balance sheet, my ankle, back and knees still hurt when I walk or stand too much, I have yet to get back into a strength training routine, and I still turn too quickly to food for comfort.

I'd say that the positives way outweigh the negatives. And that is a very good thing.

So here, on the cusp of this new year, I know what to work on next and have more energy to do so than I can remember in recent history.

I am grateful to all of you who have followed my story so far and expressed support and compassion.

May we all have much love, laughter, and interesting adventures in 2011.

A hui hou.

Taking It On the Road

2010-10-19T18:27:00.000-04:00

I'm sitting at a hotel in Madison, Wisconsin, on the brink of several days of meetings, followed by a weekend family visit, contemplating with much curiosity and a little trepidation what it means to have taken my current array of medical concerns on the road.

It started this morning, at the TSA checkpoint, where I didn't know that I was supposed to take the CPAP machine out of its case so it could be specially screened. Actually, it started before that, when I had to shlep the additional carry-on with the machine, mask, hoses and cords. I try to travel really light with respect to what I carry on, so this was a major shift, and one that I felt, literally, as I trudged around the airport. Maybe this means that in future I can't bring my computer backpack, but should go with a wheeled carry-on. Sigh.

I stuffed a little cooler into my backpack with lunch, since I was traveling at noon, and that was fine. When I got to Madison, I immediately went to Whole Foods Market to get some supplies, and was dismayed to find that they don't sell a couple of key items that I'd been counting on, like the American cheese that has been a mainstay for me since day one. Sigh.

Then I got to the Doubletree and was handed the famous warm chocolate-chip cookie of welcome. Sigh.

No question, it's going to be a challenge. I've never been a particularly demanding diner; in fact, I've always thought that people who demand changes and substitutions are kind of a pain in the neck, or elsewhere. But meet me, newly minted pain in the neck, or elsewhere. It's not going to be easy for me to be so assertive about food; as a life-long fat person, I've generally tried to disappear into the woodwork when it comes to making food choices in public. I've also taken for granted that I can pretty much go anywhere and eat anything. Not any more. I'm hoping for steak houses and salad bars, places where I know I can get plain foods on my permitted list. Goodbye to the Afghani and Nepalese restaurants, the Jewish deli, and the cheese curds and fish fries of previous trips. Sigh.

On the positive side, I have a fridge in my room, which now contains some wonderful organic Fuji apples, some organic cottage cheese, some baby cucumbers, sourdough rye bread that I plan to bring down to breakfast, and the rest of the American cheese I brought from home. On the shelf above the fridge are my Wasa Rye crackers, my Brown Rice Snaps, and a jar of almond butter. In my suitcase are the peanuts and cashews I brought with me. I won't starve, a thought that is incredibly comforting.

And tonight, when I get ready for bed, I can fill my CPAP humidifier with the distilled water I bought, put on my nasal pillows, and feel as cozy and comfortable as I do at home.

Enough of sighing. Enough of trepidation. I'm looking forward to my dinner.

A hui hou.

Ups and Downs

2010-10-12T09:44:00.000-04:00

Sunday I went with a friend to an aqua fitness class at the Newton Boston Sports Club (thanks, Alesia!). The class was fun, and a good workout, but I mention it because of the amazing pool in which class was held. There is a moveable wall that can create a class space, while leaving lanes for lap swimming (though much shorter than usual), and there is a movable floor to that class space, so that it can adjust for the heights of the students or be raised level with the sides so that people with mobility issues can get in and out comfortably.

When I first heard about that floor, I couldn't quite get my mind around the concept. Where did the water go? What would it feel like? Now that I've experienced it, I still don't understand quite how the water gets around the floor, but I do know that feeling the bottom adjust, gradually feeling on firmer footing, is a perfect metaphor for so much about my life now.

Ups and downs: it's all about ups and downs, treading in deep water and sometimes feeling the bottom solidify beneath my feet. And occasionally swallowing water and sputtering when I can't quite find my footing or slip a little on the tiles.

In the food department, I've had my moments of less than supportive choices (see Oops, my last post), but the other evening, when I was scheduled to add mint via some Haagen Dazs Five ice cream, when the moment came, what I really wanted was an apple. So that's what I had, and I enjoyed it enormously. I ended up having the ice cream in the wee hours when I couldn't sleep and was actually hungry, and enjoyed it enormously then. Both of those decisions were definitely an "up" moment.

In the sleep realm, my ups are that I find the CPAP mask generally comfortable and the machine incredibly quiet, and I don't have any trouble wearing it all night. But the downs are that I still have significant trouble falling asleep, and that I am not really sleeping very restfully -- lots more moments of conscious wakefulness, probably due to not being used to being tethered, than I had with the apnea. I assume that the bottom of that particular pool will slowly, slowly rise until one day in the near future I will be waking refreshed and restored from a good night's sleep.

In the area of physical activity, the up is that I am starting to be more active. The downs are that I am feeling more joint pain and am usually exhausted after I exercise. I know that both of those things will get better as I keep going, but sometimes the feeling of treading water in an uncomfortable pool makes it hard to stay in the water, let alone move ahead. Still, I know that persisting through the discomfort is the only way to lessen it, and so I continue to agitate hands and feet, metaphorically speaking, to keep my head above the water.

May we all feel the reassuring solidity of the floor under our feet.

A hui hou.

Oops

2010-10-08T11:12:00.000-04:00

In the interests of honesty and full disclosure, I want to write about last night, which was not my finest hour. After so much positiveness, I suppose a small step back was inevitable. That doesn't make it any easier to experience, unfortunately.

I was ravenous yesterday. I got up late and had to rush out of the house to meet a friend for a physical activity date, so all I had time for was a banana on the way down to the garage. When I got home at noon, I had exactly an hour to eat breakfast/lunch and get ready to go get my hair cut, so I shoveled in some cottage cheese with pineapple (one of my favorites) and a couple of WASA crackers with some butter. I enjoyed that, but didn't have the time to fully appreciate my meal. When I got home a couple of hours later, hungry again, I hurriedly ate lunch. I enjoyed that, too -- especially the lettuce -- but even when I was finished, I didn't feel particularly satisfied, which was odd, because I had had more than enough food by any standard. Dinner was a hurried affair during "Grandma Thursday" -- never an occasion for eating particularly mindfully, with various grandchildren clamoring for attention, and when we got home at 9:30, I was hungry again.

Being hungry is not bad. Eating when hungry is not bad. If I had only eaten a snack or small meal in response to that hunger, I would not be writing this post.

But I was tired, I was aching (both my sore ankle and my arthritic knees have been causing me much pain the past few days), and I was, I think, feeling the cumulative effects of rushing around mindlessly most of the day. So I had one snack. And then another. And a little later another.

Any one of them would have been a fine choice. Any one of them would have left me feeling comfortable, both physically and emotionally. Instead, by the time I'd finished the last spoonful of cereal (the third and final snack), I was feeling incredibly stuffed and a little nauseated. That was interesting in itself, because the fact is that the total quantity of food I consumed was way less than I might have in the bad old days; I think I have finally gotten used to eating the smaller amounts that are more appropriate for my current age and activity level. But feeling that uncomfortable also made it very clear why overeating was not a very useful technique for managing whatever it was that I was trying to manage.

The bottom line was that I was still tired and still aching, only now I was also feeling sick. Bleah. So I finally did what I should have done in the first place and put myself to bed.

I write this not as a public mea culpa. I don't feel guilty, only a little sorry that I didn't make a healthier choice. Mostly, I found the experience extremely interesting and perhaps indicative of how far I have come. And possibly of how far I have left to go.

Onward!

A hui hou.

Lettuce Rejoice!

2010-10-07T15:38:00.000-04:00

So far, my fears about sugar seem to have been unfounded, and I am happy to report that yesterday's new food, which was lettuce, led to one of my more astonishing experiences.

I decided to add lettuce, even before some of the more interesting vegetables that I love, like zucchini and eggplant and cabbage, because I figured that when I go out of town in a couple of weeks and have to eat in restaurants, lettuce would give me access to a whole bunch of choices that will make my life much easier. It's a rare restaurant that doesn't offer a Caesar salad with grilled chicken, fish or steak -- I never eat the croutons anyway, don't need the parmesan and usually prefer to have it without dressing, so if they can give me the protein without seasoning, I'll be fine.

Now, like most perennial dieters, I have long had a love-hate (sometimes even a hate-hate) relationship with salad. For the 4-5 years I followed the Carb Addict's Diet, a hefty salad was a required prelude to each "reward meal" -- the one where you could actually have carbs. When I did low-calorie programs or old-style Weight Watchers, salads were the "free" food, the one you almost didn't have to count, unless you used a lot of dressing, which I never did, by choice. Even at Green Mountain, where the program emphasizes the joys of eating rather than restriction and deprivation, salad is an ever-present entity, usually a planned part of every lunch and always a choice if you are still hungry after finishing lunch or dinner. Though Carol thinks of salad (and also raw fish!) as comfort food, salad never did it for me. Ever.

But yesterday, I can't tell you how excited I was as I picked out some succulent hearts of Romaine to have as the new food of the day, the accompaniment to grilled salmon and boiled Yukon Gold potatoes. The excitement built as I assembled my salad -- tearing up the romaine, slicing some cucumber, washing a handful of super sweet grape tomatoes, and cutting some black olives in half to add a salty contrast. And when I ate the first bite, I felt as though I had never tasted anything so delicious.

Salad.

I'd have to say that I enjoyed that salad significantly more than the long-awaited almond horns I added on Sunday evening. And I enjoyed the lettuce again an hour ago as I munched my way through the remaining leaves with my lunch.

Is this a simple case of absence making the taste buds grow fonder? Or have I really changed in some very fundamental way in my relationship with food?

Only time will tell.

A hui hou.

SUGAR!!

2010-10-04T09:19:00.000-04:00

I've been quiet this past week as dealing with a new physical pain drove out the psychic pain of waiting for my CPAP. But I have not stopped my progress with the LEAP protocol, continuing to add a new food from my non-reactive list every other day. Though I have mostly been going in order, according to the phases provided by the LEAP lab, I decided (with dietitian support) to jump ahead a little bit with certain foods that will enable me to eat out with a bit more ease when I travel on business in a couple of weeks. So I skipped a bunch of fruit and cabbage in order to get to eggs, beef and lettuce. But last night, as an extra special treat, my added food of choice was cane sugar.

It felt kind of dangerous and scary. Adding sugar, after the addition of eggs, means that the world of baked goods is opening up, albeit gluten free. Specifically, I ate two little gluten-free almond horns (courtesy of Aleia's), and I thoroughly enjoyed them. As I opened the bag to share with my dining companions, I wondered whether I was actually opening a dietary Pandora's box.

So far my experience with the LEAP protocol has been nothing short of amazing. I have simply had no desire to eat any of the foods to which I tested as sensitive, and also have had no desire to jump the gun on any late-stage foods before their time. Though I've occasionally had urges to eat salty/crunchy (usually satisfied by organic American cheese on sesame-rice crackers) or sweet (cashew butter with a little honey or maple syrup mixed in or some freeze-dried fruit), they have been momentary urges only and easily satisfied. There was no "bag of cookies" option. And while it has felt as though those particular cravings departed when I finally dealt with the buried feelings about my mother and her death (see my blog posts from June), being without emotional impetuses to eat is still an extremely new experience for me, and one that I'm having a little trouble trusting.

On the one hand, those almond horns sat on the counter for four days, waiting for me to pack them up for our trip to Vermont, without once calling out to me seductively.

On the other hand, sugar was not yet a permissible food. Now it is.

Will things change now? I don't think so, and I certainly hope not, but only time will tell.

A hui hou.

What if.....?

2010-09-27T11:02:00.000-04:00

The problem with not living mindfully in the moment is that there are no limits to where your imagination can take you. If you are truly mindful, accepting each moment as the only reality, there is structure; the only things or people or forces or problems that you have to deal with are what is right there in the moment with you. The issues are concrete, in a way -- they are what is present and only what is present.

Take away the time boundary and all hell breaks loose. You can worry about what might happen. You can worry about what happened last time you were in a similar situation. You can worry about the things that you don't even know enough to worry about specifically. There is no end.

I've always occupied a funny sort of middle ground. I almost never worry or get nervous about things that I understand and have experienced before. When I first joined the Wholesale Klezmer Band, my first public performance was a free dance workshop at a local folk festival, and I was so nervous I nearly threw up, because while I had played many a classical concert, I had never played a klezmer gig before. A year later, when we had the privilege of playing at the 100th birthday of Carnegie Hall with all the famous folk performers I had grown up with, everyone else in the group was throwing up, but I was calm as a cucumber; I knew how to do klezmer concerts.

Similarly, most of the time when I'm facing a difficult situation, I have been able to defer worrying until I knew there was actually something to worry about. Carol, on the other hand, practices what has been called "defensive pessimism" -- going to the worst possible eventuality beforehand so as to work through all the possibilities and get comfortable with them before actually having to face them. Though that isn't my way, I have, to an extent, learned to appreciate it as a valid coping mechanism.

But right now, in the limbo between my apnea diagnosis and the appointment that will give me access to treatment, I am inhabiting the vast vortex of uncertainty and it is driving me crazy.

What if the mask hurts my nose? What if breathing through nasal tubes every night exacerbates the dryness and swelling of my mucus membranes that always plague me in the New England winter? What if they don't offer me a really quiet machine? And the kicker: what if the CPAP doesn't help and I'm still tired all the time?

About once a day, when I am on my computer doing something actually useful, I find myself drifting over to Google to look up something else about CPAP use. Engaging with information seems to calm me down, if only for the minutes I spend reading. I've learned that there are lots of potential solutions to most of the problems CPAP newbies seem to experience, and I do trust my health care providers, who have a good track record of staying on top of issues until they get resolved. There really isn't anything objective to be worried about.

So what's the problem?

I think it's more about the waiting than about the specifics. I feel as though I am simply marking time, that my "real" life and routine cannot start until I can wake up in the morning with some energy and focus. And that feeling of being in limbo is driving me crazy. Before I knew about the apnea, I figured the fatigue was simply one of the factors I have to deal with right now, like ankle pain or asthma. Knowing that there is a good chance that it will disappear in a couple of weeks makes dealing with it now almost intolerable.

And so I sit back, take a deep breath, and try to center myself in the current moment. And the next one. And the next one. October 8th can't come soon enough.

A hui hou.

Remembering My Biking Triumph

2010-09-26T11:59:00.000-04:00

Today, thousands of bicyclists are riding the annual Hub On Wheels event, an annual ride around Boston's neighborhoods to raise money for computers in the classrooms of Boston Public Schools. Three years ago, for the first and only time, I rode in the 26-mile version of that event; in fact, the picture that heads this blog is from that momentous day. I was training to do it again last summer, but a major respiratory infection that began last Labor Day weekend put an end to that dream, and this year, my continuing health problems similarly made participation impossible, so I am left staring out the window, remembering.

Here's what I wrote to family and friends a few days after the event:

So, there I was, last Sunday morning at 7:15, feeling extremely excited and kind of sick, watching my fellow bicyclists lining up for the 8am start of the Hub on Wheels ride around Boston. Supposedly there were 4000 riders registered for the event; 3800 lean, sleek cyclists, 197 regular people, and 3 really large people, of which I might have been the largest. I had a moment of wondering what on earth I was doing there, but then the still, small voice I've been learning to listen to during the past couple of months of coaching sessions with Teri from Green Mountain took over and said I am what I am and I'm doing the ride anyway.

It finally got to be 8am, and off we went. It was a perfect day to be out on a bike, and absolutely awesome to be riding down the middle of several of Boston's main streets with a police escort and no traffic! Riding up the ramp to Storrow Drive was amazing and exhilarating, only I almost immediately slipped my chain off the derailleur. But even that was amazing, since one of the riding marshalls rode up with his little bag of tools and not only helped me get it back on, but adjusted something so it wouldn't happen again. When else in life does that happen?

The first 7 miles or so were pure joy, though riding home afterwards I realized I hadn't taken in a lot of specifics about where we were riding, at least then. But then we got to the Jamaicaway, which had a fairly narrow bike path that was really neat until I realized that it was a steady uphill pull.

Let me stop a second and explain the physical difficulties I was facing. For starters, the day before the ride had been Yom Kippur, when, among other things, Jews are supposed to abstain from food and drink from sundown to sundown. I had actually had to break my fast in the afternoon because of really bad asthma, which can happen if I use my inhaler in the absence of liquids. So, I was starting out with something of a deficit. Then on Sunday morning, I was so excited/nervous/agitated I couldn't eat. I knew I needed to and I tried, several times, but I just couldn't do it. I knew I'd pay the price, but there really was nothing I could do.

Back to the Jamaicaway, in the absence of glycogen stores. I was tired, but Carol was waiting along this part of the route, and so were Dan and Nathan, to cheer me on, which I much appreciated. After I got to the top of that incline, slowly but surely, there was an exhilarating downhill dash into the Arnold Arboretum, and that's when things got tough. There was a hill. I pedaled and pedaled, and finally I had to get off and walk the bike up to the top. People were very encouraging, as they rode by, which was nice, but let me tell, you, pushing a bike up hill isn't so very much easier than riding it! But finally I got to the top, and then there was a rest area but I wanted to push on. I was drinking from my personal hydration system and eating my Sports Beans (jelly beans specially formulated with electrolytes, etc.), and didn't want to stop if I didn't have to.

And then there was Forest Hills Cemetery. Another long uphill. It was very hot at this point, and no shade, and I stopped and called Carol for an encouraging word. I told her my dilemma and that I had no energy and that at least if I died it would be convenient because I was already in the cemetery. She laughed and said I could do it, so I did hung up and did it. And just before the gate out of the cemetery, I did stop at the rest area and sucked on some oranges -- I still couldn't stomach the idea of eating anything more substantial than the Sports Beans, even though they had all kinds of things there. I did take a mini Cliff Bar in case I needed it later, and I tried to find out if there were more hills coming up, but nobody really knew. So I flung myself back into the fray.

Fortunately, there weren't any really bad hills, but I was so exhausted (this was about 11 miles in) that quite a few of the inclines along the route got the better of me, even though they might not have under normal circumstances. I really enjoyed pedaling along through Franklin Park, where my family was again waiting to cheer me on, and through Roxbury and Dorchester. It was especially fun to suddenly recognize an intersection that I had driven through, seeing it from a totally different perspective. It was hard, though, and I was getting more and more tired, but I just kept pedaling. Most of the time there were other riders around, especially at the major intersections (where there were marshals and occasionally police or rangers to stop traffic for us), but quite regularly I was chugging along on my own. It made me feel a little better to see other folks occasionally stopping or walking uphill, and I was leap-frogging with a whole group who were faster than I but stopping more often.

Finally, at about 16 miles or so, I reached the waterfront and knew that the rest of the route was along the shore, which meant no more hills. But I was horrified to realize that I was only able to get up about 7mph on a totally flat path! This was NOT GOOD, so I stopped on a bench overlooking a gorgeous harbor view and choked down that mini Cliff Bar I had snagged from the rest stop. It tasted like sawdust, but I knew I needed some fuel. I have no idea how long I actually sat there trying to finish that lump of food; I intended to stop for only a few minutes, as I was planning to take a longer break at the next rest area, which was coming up, but I actually sat there for about 45. It was, at least, a beautiful place to sit and contemplate the water.

Eventually, I got back on the bike and slogged along the mile or so to the rest area at Carson Beach. I sucked down some oranges again (I had always wondered why they always gave out orange wedges at the Boston Marathon, since they didn't seem like they'd give you enough of either liquid or calories to do you much good, but now I GET IT), took a banana (which I absolutely did NOT want to eat) and refilled my water reservoir (I'd just finished the half gallon I'd started with), collapsed on the curb of the parking lot and called Carol to see if they were nearby. She was, though they were just getting ready to leave, thinking they had missed me (due to my unanticipated stop); so they came over and Nathan came running up the wonderful way he has and flung himself at me -- all the other bikers in the parking lot said "aaaawwwwwwwwww" as if on cue -- and Carol got me more water and made me eat the banana. I stayed there for about half an hour -- Holly, who had just been swimming with the girls, drove over, too, and gave me a much needed pep talk. Nathan also kept finding interesting rocks to give me; after the first two, which I put in my back pack for luck, I had him give them to Carol to hold. Left to himself, I think he would have emptied the parking lot for me!

The best moment of my rest stop was when Nathan looked at my bike, furrowed his brow and asked, "But where does the gas go?"

So, it was now 12pm and I'd completed 20 miles, with six miles to go. I didn't think I could do it, but with encouragement from my wonderful family and a promise to myself that I'd stop every mile if I needed to, I got back on the bike and started off. To my amazement, the next four miles were totally enjoyable (must have been those calories!). Then, all of a sudden, with just under two miles to go, my butt went numb and my feet went numb on the pedals and I had to get off the bike that very minute. So I found a congenial bench on Fan Pier and stretched a bit and got back on the bike for the final push home.

The last mile or so was the scariest of the whole ride -- on Atlantic Avenue with all the traffic, and having to turn left across all those lanes with only one marshal to show us the way, but no one to make it safe. Then, on State Street, with the end in sight, I was making my way between a bus on one side and parked cars on the other, and feeling a bit apprehensive about that, but then all of a sudden the road opened out and there were Hub on Wheels volunteers yelling and ringing cow bells and making me smile so I rode across the finish grinning as widely as when I started. I called Carol, who was just parking the car, and told her where to meet me, and then found a place to sit and collapsed, barely containing the emotions welling up inside until she and Nathan got there. Poor Nathan; when I was done sobbing I tried to explain to him how grown-ups were kind of strange sometimes and cried when they were really happy. He was looking really distressed, since in his world you only cry when you're sad or you have a boo-boo.

We parked my bike at the bike valet and I collected my free lunch from Redbones (the best barbecue place in Boston and a great supporter of biking), which I actually managed to eat about half of, with some enjoyment. About every 10 minutes, Nathan asked me if I had won, and I would patiently explain to him that everyone who had done the ride won, that there were lots of ways of winning, that it wasn't a race, etc. etc. And 10 minutes later he would ask me again, "Sherry, did you win?" Finally, I just said "YES", and that was the truth, too.

I still can't believe I did it.

And I can't believe how much I've been learning from the experience. New ways of looking at food. How my body reacts to extreme physical stress (I didn't actually feel hunger until Tuesday lunchtime, then went through two days of getting ravenous every few hours all night long, and I kept falling asleep Monday and Wednesday, and even today (Friday) I'm feeling totally unenergetic.) How it feels to set a goal and train for it -- something I've done in other areas of my life, but not in terms of physical activity. How much I love riding my bike -- I rode for an hour yesterday and enjoyed it enormously, though I realized I have no reserves still, and couldn't push myself to reach my normal riding speeds. How much I want to do this again next year, and how I might train for the hills.

It was an amazing journey. 26.3 miles, in 3.5 hours of riding time (not quite 5 hours by the clock). I'm grateful that I was able to do it, and even more grateful for everyone's support and good wishes.

Looking back on that event now, the lessons that I've taken from that whole experience are a little bit different than what I reported at the time. For one thing, the post-ride week was really the first time in my adult life when I really paid close attention to what my body was signaling about its physiologic needs, and that I gave myself complete permission to satisfy them. During the first 48 hours after I got home, while I was mostly sleeping, all I could stomach was a little bit of sharp cheddar with a challah roll -- I think the contrasting sweet and salt tastes were what made that palatable. On Tuesday, when I experienced actual hunger, I got a message as clear as a neon sign that what I needed was protein, so I downed a can of tuna fish, nothing else. Then for the 48 hours after that, when I was ravenous every couple of hours, all I wanted was carbs -- crackers, pretzels, cereal, bread. After that I went back to normal. It all made sense, and it all felt fine.

The second important lesson was the nature of the training I did. I was basically following two of the programs set out in a wonderful little book called How To Get Wheely Fit. The first four week plan took me from first mount-up to riding 60 minutes straight, and the second from one hour at a time to two hours. Each plan called for specific length rides on four days per week. So each week I would figure put in the ideal schedule -- in pencil -- and then figure out what I could actually manage that would be close to that ideal. Sometimes I did exactly what the book said, but often I couldn't. But if I couldn't ride enough to advance to the next week's level, I made sure to do enough to maintain where I was, with the result that the Tuesday before the ride, I made a glorious 18-mile circuit on the bike paths along both sides of the Charles River, passing through four different towns in the process. Somehow, I've never managed yet to be that flexible with myself in any of my other endeavors, though I've consciously looked to that as a model for how it can be done.

I still love riding my bike more than any other physical activity I do, and I don't doubt that I will sign up for Hub on Wheels again. Maybe even next year. I look forward to seeing what I will learn from that experience.

A hui hou.

Waiting....

2010-09-24T12:49:00.000-04:00

I am generally a patient woman. Ask anyone. I am content to read the same story to my grandchildren six times in a row; listening to my grandparents tell the same stories over and over again was actually a pleasure. As my fifth year anniversary post attests, most of the time, I am content to sit back and see what unfolds.

Not now.

I still have two weeks to wait until I go for my follow-up appointment and get outfitted for CPAP, and the waiting is driving me crazy.

Every morning, I wake up in a fog of fatigue, and every afternoon I have to struggle to keep awake and alert. The effort I'm expending to stay moderately functional is more than I can spare, and I can't seem to find the inner resources to get myself on a better schedule. Knowing that help is in sight, but still at a distance, is torturing me.

Apart from the physical discomfort of being tired all the time and moping along through days that might otherwise be envigorating, the major dilemma I face is this: Do I spend time and energy now on trying to deal with adapting to a less than optimal schedule, or do I simply wait to see if the difficulties I face go away once I am (I hope!) getting more restful sleep?

I am, despite my current apnea issues, basically a morning person. Morning is the only time I can work effectively. Morning is also the only time I can comfortably and effectively exercise. Obviously, this makes the morning hours prime temporal real estate for me. And now, with my horrible sleep patterns and the constant exhaustion I feel upon waking, those hours have been whittled away till I'm lucky if I get moving by noon, leaving me with, at most three useful hours before my brain fuzzes over completely.

If I could only wake at 6am, ready to hit the floor moving, I'd be able to enjoy the best part of the day and probably find it much easier to get myself to do the strength training that is so important. There is simply no way that that is realistic right now. Maybe that will be possible once I'm sleeping better; I hope so. But for the moment, what do I do? I need to impose some structure on my life, but can I do it now? Should I? Or do I just muddle through until I know what I am finally dealing with.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

October 8th can't get here soon enough.

Back in the Saddle

2010-09-23T15:42:00.000-04:00

Back in June, when I had my functional medicine evaluation, one of the things that I learned was that my adrenal system was on the edge of collapse. While my cortisol levels were technically normal, they were the lowest they could possibly be and still qualify. My doctor explained that I seemed to be able to produce sufficient hormones, but that my system was not draining them away adequately after the moment of need was past. This seems to be, at least in part, a function of the constant state of stress most of us are in these days. The adrenal system was designed, as it were, to deal with fight or flight situations, which in the very old days came along only very occasionally, when our hunter-gatherer ancestors ran up against creatures that might like them for dinner. The body would produce adrenaline to enable said ancestors to get the hell out of town, and then drain the excess away once the danger was over.

In the modern world, while we rarely have to face errant saber-tooth tigers, we live in such a way that small stress is piled on small stress until our systems are in a near constant state of red alert. One of the first things I learned at Green Mountain was the need to provide some respite, through deep breathing or meditation, or even through a mindful walk, throughout the day. But as my test results showed, those techniques were not getting me to where I needed to be. So my doctor prescribed some supplements to support my adrenal system, advised me to get adequate sleep, and also gave me an exercise prescription. To promote adrenal healing, stretching and strength training are key, as is keeping aerobic exercise at low and moderate levels only.

I confess, I was dismayed at hearing that last part. As regular readers of this blog know, biking is both my cardio activity of choice and my joy, and the idea that it was not actually good for me was too horrifying to contemplate. When I raised this to my doctor, she said I could keep biking if not doing so would be more stressful than the actual biking and suggested that I lower my gears a notch or two to keep at a lower level of exertion. That seemed okay, though I figured it might be hard. I like to pedal at a certain rate, and biking is the one activity I do where I don't mind working at the vigorous level.

Shortly after that evaluation, I embarked upon two months of pretty solid traveling, so I never did get back on my bike. It felt a little scary, to be honest, so I didn't make any extraordinary efforts to ride, even when I could. When the travel ceased, I tried swimming, which had been recommended as an every day activity, but though I like swimming and used to be a major lap swimmer. I didn't manage to get into it in any meaningful way. So, finally, earlier this week, I got back on my bike and decided that I would do whatever I had to in order to keep riding.

It wasn't bad. I suppose that from a biker point of view, what I need to do now might be considered wimping out, as I drop down in gears at the first sign of an incline, however small. And every now and then, despite my best efforts, I end up on a course where I have to peddle harder than might be ideal. But I feel so good on the bike, I think it's worth it. I love all the sensory aspects of biking, I love moving through space, and I love being a person who bikes.

So I'm back in the saddle again. And very grateful to be there.

A hui hou.

Knitting Up the Ravelled Sleave

2010-09-22T12:03:00.001-04:00

When I came home after my first semester of college, my parents took one look at me and offered to rush me to the doctor. I was deathly pale, had huge bags under my eyes, and presented a generally dull and lackluster affect. I told them I was fine, but that I had been getting by on about two hours of sleep a night. It wasn't that I was a partyer -- on the contrary, I was studying and talking into the wee hours, not wanting to miss a single moment of the intense experience.

That was the last time I so cavalierly tossed away opportunities to sleep.

My real love-hate relationship with this most essential activity began in my early thirties, when I developed asthma. For more years than I like to contemplate, I was up until 3-4am every day, hacking my guts out. It was partly a side effect of taking theophylline (a close cousin of caffeine), and partly the result of the disease itself, which tends to be more active nocturnally.

Eventually, my asthma got better controlled and I went off theophylline, but that was about the same time that I became a gigging musician, with a band out in Western Massachusetts. At least once a week (for rehearsals), but often two or three times, depending on our gig schedule, I was driving home in those same sleepless wee hours, totally disrupting any chance of having a reasonable sleep schedule. I felt as though I was always catching up, trying to fill a deficit that never stayed filled for more than a day or two.

When I finally got to the point where I couldn't deal with that any more, I began staying at motels after gigs so I wouldn't have to lose so much sleep. That was fine, until menopause struck. That brought me two years of 3am awakenings. These weren't the usual, sleepy arousals that usually lead peacefully back to bed; these were springing into action awakenings. I thought I would go mad, as I tried to deal with that in the context of trying to maintain a "normal" schedule. Eventually, I consulted a therapist, who advised me to get up and do my work at 3am, if that was when I was awake, and take naps in the afternoon. Duh. That advice got me through the hormone frenzy.

I had a few peaceful years. But for the past couple of years, I have had the worst sleep problems of all. Half the time I can't fall asleep, even though there's nothing particularly urgent on my mind. It's partly discomfort from my various physical aches and pains, and, to be honest, partly anxiety about sleeping. The other half of the time I sleep for many hours, but I wake up feeling exhausted. The result is that I'm tired all the time. It takes me forever to get moving in the morning, and I'm often too tired to sleep when I do go to bed.

For a long time, I thought that I was deliberately keeping myself awake past the time I first felt sleepy so that I could have the house to myself for private eating. Night time was always worst for me in that regard. But since I cleared out the emotional mess that was behind most of my inappropriate eating, I've still been unable simply to put myself to bed at the first yawn. Despite fairly rigorous exploration of other possible motives for me to keep myself up, I've come to the conclusion that sometimes I just can't sleep. Of course, the most frustrating part of all is that even when I do sleep, it doesn't seem to do any good.

Lately, I've spent some time researching insomnia, everything I've read suggests that the best way to deal with it is "good sleep hygiene," by which they mean going to bed and getting up at the same time every day. The trouble with that, of course, is that if I get up really early after a night of insomnia, I'm useless for the entire day. And if I go to bed at the designated bedtime and can't sleep, I have to keep getting out of bed until I get sleepy, which does away with the whole notion of a standard bed time.

Fortunately, the physician's assistant who provides most of my primary care is a very smart and supportive person who believes that her job is to keep me safe while I work my way through to better health and fitness. At my annual physical in August, she again suggested that I have a sleep study to see if I had a disorder. Last year, when she suggested that, I put her off, since my experience of Carol's severe sleep apnea didn't seem to resonate at all. But this year, she convinced me that an undiagnosed disorder could be putting additional stress on my heart and lungs, and I agreed that checking it out would be prudent.

Lo and behold -- I have sleep apnea. It's on the mild side, but still significant. I had a second study done to titrate appropriate CPAP levels and am now waiting -- impatiently -- for the follow-up appointment at which I will get my equipment. Interestingly, though the night of the second sleep study was not exactly restorative, in the sense that I went to sleep later than usual and got up way earlier, I felt much more refreshed than after the first sleep study and the next night definitely felt sad that I didn't have the CPAP to put on. I interpreted that as my body telling me that it liked the experience.

So, I am in a month-long limbo, knowing that relief is coming and feeling its lack even more intensely than before I knew that it was possible. I have learned that in addition to fatigue, apnea can adversely affect both blood pressure and muscle/join achiness. October 8th looms large as my day of salvation. And then I worry that having the CPAP won't really help and I'll be stuck in this cloud of tiredness forever.

Clearly, the best thing for me right now is to go with the flow and try to stay as functional as I can. Trying to get on a reasonable bedtime/waking schedule certainly won't hurt, and it might prepare me for the good things to come. And worrying never helps. Maybe if I say that out loud enough times, I'll actually believe it!

A hui hou, and sweet dreams!

Five Years on the Path

2010-09-21T09:57:00.000-04:00

It was exactly five years ago this week that I first crossed the threshold of Green Mountain at Fox Run, the amazing women's health and fitness retreat that has so profoundly changed my life for the better. That was also a year when the Jewish High Holidays were in September, and I deliberately planned my trip to coincide with them, partly because it was a time when the band I was in did not have gigs, and partly because it felt fitting to spend those deeply introspective holidays learning to take care of myself. Before I left home for my month-long sojourn, I made two promises to myself:

1. I would try everything the program offered, every class, every therapy, every form of physical activity.

2. If I felt that the program made sense, I would keep on coming back to Green Mountain as many times as it took to get me to my goal of fit and healthy.

I kept the first promise easily. I did try everything and learned that I loved cardio on the fitball and that I could dance my heart out without being afraid of reinjuring my knee. I also learned that I hated Pilates and found yoga way too difficult and painful to be enjoyable, at least for the present. I had my very first massage, which was moderately enjoyable, but discovered that I liked Reiki way better. I also learned that despite my usual linear thinking, I responded readily to both art and movement therapy.

I've also kept the second promise. Most years I have gone back to what feels like my country home in both the spring and the fall, and when I got really sick during my visit last fall, I ended up doing most of my active recuperating there. Each time I have learned the next important issue to work on or the next technique I needed to adopt, in the same way that when we hike over lava in the dark we have to use our flashlights to find the next segment of the path. That first trip, what I took back with me was a reconnection between my head and my body; I had not realized before how much I was living from the neck up, not so much out of shame, but because I was constantly afraid of injury. Other trips got me involved more in intuitive eating, intrinsic motivation, guided imagery for stress management, and, most recently, functional medicine.

When a new crop of participants converge on Green Mountain every Sunday, the second thing people ask each other, after establishing where they come from, is whether this is one's first visit to the program. Over the years, I've seen the flicker of dismay in my questioner's eyes when I reply that this is my 3rd, or 7th or 12th visit. Mostly, the flicker stays a flicker, and they she goes on to say something like, "you must really like it here." I usually answer both the spoken and the unspoken question by saying that my whole life has changed, even though I haven't lost any weight yet.

Some people get it; they understand, even before completing their first day in the program, that this isn't going to be a quick fix. All of us who deal with weight management issues know how complex the problem is. Others are politely noncommittal. Only once did anyone actually manifest scorn; I avoided her for the rest of her time there.

For five years, I have steadily and steadfastly pursued my goals of increased health and fitness, believing with my whole heart that, as the program taught me, if I did what I needed to do to take better care of myself, I would lose weight, eventually, as a welcome side effect of my efforts. I became again a person who moves, who enjoys being active whenever orthopedic or respiratory issues don't get in the way. I've become calmer and more mindful, not just about hunger and satiety, but about everything. I've learned to turn the compassion and patience I have for every other person on the planet towards myself and stop thinking of my body as my enemy, even when it keeps me from doing what I want or need to do. I've continually dredged the pits of unacknowledged feelings that were driving me to eat for reasons other than hunger and finally cleared out what I believe to be the deepest one.

And I still weigh pretty much exactly what I weighed on my very first visit.

Does this bother me? Sure, I wish I weighed a hundred pounds less. Or even 20. But most of the time, I'm content to be patient because I know that I'm doing what I need and want to be doing to take care of myself. And I'm not depriving myself of anything or twisting my life into some unnatural, ultimately unsustainable round of rigors, so there is really nothing to do but what I am doing. I trust that if I keep doing it, and keep learning what "it" is, eventually the weight will let go, and let me go. If I didn't also feel the onrush of impending mortality (I turn 60 next year), I'd be perfectly happy to let things take their course without a panicky moment.

And the really good news is that I think that I am finally moving, albeit slowly, towards a lighter body and better health. Between purging myself of the guilt and grief that kept me stuffing my emotions down, dealing with low thyroid, metabolic imbalances, food sensitivities and, most recently, sleep apnea, I am finally starting to see movement on the scale, without actively trying to limit my portions or "exercise." Since the day I had my functional medicine evaluation, back in May, I've lost about 8 pounds. While the current lack of strength training in my life has meant that I don't feel that absence in any meaningful way, I know that this is huge for me, and the harbinger of many good things to come.

So, happy anniversary to me, and thank you from the bottom of my heart to everyone at Green Mountain. And, as they say in Hawaii, imua -- forward!

A hui hou.

The Year in Review

2010-09-10T12:27:00.000-04:00

Every year, in December, newspapers and magazines are filled with retrospectives, lists of events or musings on what took place during the previous year. We Jews tend to do this in September/October, the time of our new year and a period devoted to introspection and making one's peace with both people and what may be defined variously as God, one's higher power, or one's own conscience. Though I began this new year in a frenzy of childcare, which didn't leave a whole lot of time for introspection (or anything else!), I was struck by how intensely I felt the presence of a threshold between the new year and the one that was about to end.

Since I tend to pay attention when my emotions get that intense, I thought it might be helpful to do a retrospective on my own year as I step over the threshold into 5771.

This was the year I had H1N1 and pneumonia, spending 8 days in the hospital and six months recovering.

This was the year that Carol and I endowed the Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, making several of my dreams come true: a permanent home for KlezKamp (the Yiddish folk arts program of which I am associate director) and my collection of Yiddish 78rpm recordings and a partner (the Mills Music Library) willing to make those recordings available online to anyone wanting to hear them.

This was the year I co-produced a 3-CD boxed set of recordings from my collection, to great critical acclaim and enormous personal satisfaction.

This was the year I discovered how badly my body has been beaten up by the life I've led, and also how to fix it.

This was the year I finally came to terms with the ravages of my childhood.

This was the year I got my mother back, in a small but extremely powerful way.

This was the year I got to introduce my sister and brother-in-law to most of my grandchildren.

This was the year I finally started to feel some peace around food.

This year was one of the hardest I've ever experienced, but also one of the most rewarding and meaningful.

In a way, stepping across into the coming year is similar to the journey one takes across the vast distance between the intensity of mourning and the return of "ordinary" life after sitting shiva, the week of mourning when a parent or other close relative dies. Jewish tradition wisely has friends accompany the mourner in a walk around the perimeter of the house on that last day of mourning, girding the day as a chassid girds his waist to separate the spiritual head and heart from the worldly loins. I remember when my father died, how disconcerted I was at the end of shiva, and how grateful and relieved I was to begin preparing for Passover, another intense, spiritual event, just a few days later.

Perhaps I need to go walk around my building.

Leshana tova -- a happy, sweet, healthy new year to all of you, and peace to everyone as we celebrate this birth day of the world.

A hui hou.

Deprivation Redux

2010-09-07T10:56:00.000-04:00

This morning marks the seven-week anniversary of my starting the LEAP protocol to deal with food sensitivity. It's been an interesting journey, so far, and I would say a very successful one. My body seems to be very happy eating this way, and I'm finding the challenges of cooking with a limited universe of foods interesting and fun. Because of a bunch of other factors, I've been moving really slowly through the addition of foods phases -- I'm still technically in phase two, but about to jump into phase 3 with the introduction of chicken tomorrow night for Rosh Hashono dinner.

I think that perhaps the most amazing aspect of this adventure has been the extent to which I am perfectly content with my limited food choices. On the whole, I have not spent a lot of time and energy missing the things I can't have, and have reveled and delighted in the ones that I can. This seems like a very useful paradigm for life.

This is not to say that I have never felt a wish for ano of those other foods. Sometimes when Carol makes toast for her lunchtime sandwich, I breathe deeply the bread aroma and remember yeastier times.

The past two weekends, I've been on my own; Carol has been off having adventures of her own, leaving me to my own devices. Always before, her departure would have signaled the beginning of self-indulgence -- bringing secret eating out in the open. This time, while I didn't have that particular need, I did spend the time grazing rather than making "proper" meals, but my food choices were fine.

What was interesting, though, was that I was tired and not feeling particularly great, and I did find myself thinking more about the foods I am not (yet) eating. As I watched pizza commercials, I could momentarily taste the contrast between the salty cheese and the tang of tomato sauce, or between the creamy cheese and the crunchy crust. I vicariously enjoyed turkey sandwiches, hamburgers, and popcorn. It was amazing how vivid the flashes of sensory memory of those foods were.

But the really amazing thing was that, with the whole universe of food available to me and not a soul watching, it never even crossed my mind to eat any of those restricted foods. Not even once.

Clearly, I'm not in Kansas any more.

After 50 years of both behaving and thinking in certain ways about food, finding myself behaving and thinking in totally different ways is both stunning and exhilarating. Does this sea change mean that I will never struggle with food again? I doubt it. But every day that passes with my choosing only those foods which make me feel healthy and content strengthens my ability to make that same choice again, so I am hopeful that any future struggles will be less intense and shorter lived.

Deprivation, I think I've finally got the upper hand.

A hui hou.

Life with Lydia

2010-08-26T16:44:00.000-04:00

Recently, I got a Droid phone, which I have been enjoying immensely. One of the best things is the navigation feature of Google Maps and the associated programs that locate coffee shops, places of interest, etc. near where you are travelling. Last month we put it through its paces on a road trip down to Virginia, and really enjoyed it, so much so that we felt moved to name the calm, female voice of the program, and the name we decided on was Lydia.

Lydia is a near perfect companion. She is never ruffled, never loses her temper, and is immediately responsive to changes in the route. Unlike some GPS units we've experienced, she is very willing to follow your lead if you ignore one of her instructions and come up with the route you had in mind rather than the one she had worked out for you. Without losing a beat, she tells you the next thing to do along the path you've chosen.

Yesterday, I persistently ignored her instructions on the way to the house of a friend. I basically knew how to get there, except for exactly where on the street my friend's house was located. For once, Lydia's chosen route made no sense to me, so I went my normal way, and at every turn, she very calmly gave me the next instruction to get to her route, which was parallel to the one I was taking, until at last she gave up and went with the flow. But at no time did she raise her voice or admonish me for not sticking to the plan.

It occurred to me, as this was happening, that what I was experiencing in my relationship with Lydia was a useful life lesson. I am a planner, in general, and specifically at this moment in my life I am focusing a lot of energy into planning: my time, my food, my activities. Only it seems as though every time I decide on something, be it an activity or a schedule or the next food to add, something happens to get in my way and make that decision impossible to follow. Unfortunately, I don't have Lydia's equanimity and I sometimes do give myself a hard time when thwarted by circumstance. I would be much better off if I could do as she does and just quickly re-evaluate my situation and adapt to the new route.

I look forward to spending more time with this delightful guide and learning from her worthy example.

A hui hou.

Trying

2010-08-18T06:47:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, as part of my plan to get back into regular physical activity, I went to my health club for the first time in well over a year. They have a really nice lap pool, and I determined that I need to be swimming right now. I figured that as a start, I just try to swim as many lengths as I could, since I've had trouble getting into the Zen of swimming of late, and see if I could find some joy in it. I figured I'd do maybe twice up and back. Instead, I did 10 lengths and felt pretty good -- a lot of stretching helped, and I didn't push to swim without stopping, and I believe I did find some meditative joy.

That was the good part of the experience. The rest of it was incredibly difficult and led to my feeling as though as hard as I am trying to take better care of myself and do the things that are right for my body and spirit, the world right now is a very difficult place to be.

First, there was parking on the sixth floor of the garage and walking down six flights of stairs, which I did because the elevator was all the way on the other side of the garage and is kind of slow. Then, there was the fact that though my Reefs had just about fit my very wide foot when I arrived at the pool, somehow during the swim my right foot had swollen and wouldn't fit all the way in, so my heel was hanging out at the back. This made walking kind of awkward, but the real problem was in the shower -- I keep my shoes on there as the mats etc. that they use for drainage hurt my feet -- they don't hurt normal weight people, but my body pressed the soles down into the bumps more. And balancing on the edge of one shoe while trying to shower was not fun. In fact, it felt like a core workout!

Then there is getting dressed. I hate getting dressed in locker rooms, not so much out of modesty, but because it's hard to get dry. And my Green Mountain buddies will know what I mean when I say that trying to insert one's damp body into a sports bra requires contortions fit for Barnum and Bailey. My arms are short and my torso is wide, so I can't reach back very far. Oy.

And then, when I got to the elevator, already exhausted, I discovered that the one up to the sixth floor was out of order, so I would have to go to five and walk up the rest of the way. This felt like the last straw.

I try to keep a positive attitude in life. And I try not to feel as though the universe is out to get me, since most of the time I feel that it treats me with incredible care and generosity. But yesterday, all I felt was that it was trying -- trying my patience, trying my good attitude, and trying to make it harder for me to do what I need to do. I felt like crying.

But I dragged myself up the stairs between 5 and 6 and dragged myself home, where Carol and I brainstormed about how I could alleviate some of the obstacles I had encountered.

Today is another day, and I will try again.

A hui hou.

The Best-Laid Plans

2010-08-16T19:09:00.000-04:00

I have always been a planner. Maybe I learned it from my father, who carefully planned our family road trips and taught me to be his navigator and expense-recorder; I know I grew up enjoying my own road trips twice, first in the planning and then in the doing. I don't think I'm rigid about sticking to my plans, most of the time, and one of the things I love, especially when traveling, is deciding in the moment to take a side trip to see something that sounds interesting or drive to the end of a road just to see where it goes.

Unfortunately, this open and adventurous attitude has often seemed to fly out the window when I contemplate anything having to do with self-care. Somehow, I feel that unless I make some very detailed plan for myself, I'm not in control and destined to failure. Whether in the realm of exercise or food, having a set plan and following it has always seemed like the secret of success, and if I can't get it together to plan my meals or follow the schedule I've set for myself, I am a loser and not worthy of taking care of.

Needless to say, this is not an attitude that has helped me much in my recent struggles to get healthy and fit. I am the Queen of Impossible Expectations, or at least I have been, and every time I don't manage to stick to the program, I've landed in a slough of despond.

Fortunately, I think that all the thinking about and practicing with mindfulness that I've been doing has started to bear fruit, and I use that metaphor deliberately.

Last Friday, the third opportunity I had to add a new food to my current restricted fare, I had planned to have broccoli, as I was sorely feeling the want of variety among my vegetable choices. I went to the grocery store, fully intending to purchase said broccoli, and looking forward to steaming it for dinner that evening. But when I stepped through the doors of my local Whole Foods Market, there, in rosy, succulent glory, was a mound of gorgeous apricots. Apricots were also on my Phase 2 list, but I didn't feel in a rush to add them because I felt perfectly fine in the fruit department. But as I stood, riveted by their sensuous beauty, I thought how the apricot season is so short, and I immediately jettisoned the broccoli. That evening, I enjoyed my steamed cauliflower and had three tiny, perfect apricots for dessert. And I felt just fine about having to redo my entire plan.

A hui hou.

Craving Cucumbers

2010-08-11T13:09:00.000-04:00

The yogurt I added on Monday caused no ripples in my well-being, so this morning I stand on the brink of adding cucumbers and am contemplating what it means to crave a simple vegetable.

In physical/taste-bud terms, it means that I am longing for the slightly bitter, slightly sweet, crunchy, juicy properties of cold cucumber slices or spears, a welcome relief from the sweetness of red peppers. Unfortunately, I don't particularly enjoy raw celery, except in tuna salad, and green pepper goes too far over the bitter line. Cucumbers are just right, the perfect foil (and conveyor) for smoked salmon or cheese or (be still my heart!) the hummus I plan to make next week when I've added chickpeas, sesame and garlic.

I've learned, these past two weeks, that I do crave variety in my foods, particularly at dinner. Though I'm perfectly happy having the same exact breakfast six days out of seven, and fairly content to have the same thing for lunch for quite a few days in a row, when my dinners get monotonous I start feeling as though food has become simple fuel and not the pleasure it often is. And without that source of pleasure in my life, I feel like I'm living behind a scrim, with everything looking dulled and washed out. I'm speculating that this feeling comes up in relation to dinner more than the other meals because those other meals, functionally, are much more about fueling the activities of my day. Dinner is the transition time to leisure, whatever that means to someone who's self-employed and self-driven. Dinner is a moment to pause and appreciate life, so much more than a simple pit-stop.

As important as that insight feels, it isn't the most important thing I've learned from my cucumber cravings. "Cravings" is a loaded word -- so often we tend to look at the things we most yearn for in a negative light. "Craving attention" is generally a pejorative description of someone, and "food cravings" most often pop up in discussions of how to eliminate, ignore or otherwise get the better of them.

In truth, cravings can be a positive tool, a way of hearing directly from your body what it needs. Though I have had my share of the less than helpful kind of food cravings, the ones that stand out in my mind are the times I've craved healthy things, like the time I was on the Atkins diet, when even carbs from low-calorie vegetables were verboten, and I found myself rooted to the floor in front of a pyramid of succulent Brussels sprouts in a sensuous reverie imagining how their sweetness and slight bitterness would contrast with the tang of mustard-mayonnaise. More recently, during my travels this summer, I realized I was absolutely longing for a salad one evening and realized that the previous three days had brought me nothing but sandwiches and fried food, with nary a vegetable in sight. And now, with my vegetables severely limited during these early weeks, I long for the variety of tastes and textures and colors they add.

I've also recognized that sometimes cravings can come from your spirit and tell you just as clearly what you need to nourish your soul. The other morning I was writing an email to my sister in which I was describing my longing just to sit somewhere for a while with no demands, when I suddenly realized I could satisfy that longing by beginning again to meditate regularly. At other moments I have craved sleep with an urgency that made me feel as though I would die if I didn't immediately lie down. And with increasing frequency, I find myself yearning to be out on my bike or in the pool, moving.

With cravings representing such primal wisdom, why do they have such a bad reputation? Perhaps because so many of us are oblivious to anything but the most obvious cues and don't pay attention until it's almost too late for satisfying those needs to do any good. But more likely it has to do with the fact that most of us don't seem to feel that we deserve to satisfy ourselves, to nurture ourselves and give ourselves what we truly need.

I'll be thinking more about this as I enjoy my cucumbers at lunch.

A hui hou.

Freedom in Restriction

2010-08-09T21:19:00.000-04:00

For the past two weeks, I have been following the first phase of something called the LEAP protocol, which is basically an elimination diet based on elaborate food sensitivity testing. That testing was done as part of my functional medicine evaluation. In phase one, you basically eat the 12-15 foods to which you produce the least antigens while your body gets rid of those that have been produced by the foods in your normal diet to which you do react. In phase two you add the next least reactive foods back, one at a time, and so on for five phases, during which you monitor for bad reactions. When you are done with that, you've basically added back all the foods that tested in the "green" or low reactivity zone. After that you can experiment with adding untested foods, in the hopes that after 4-6 months, possibly longer, you might even be able to try again some of the foods to which you did react.

The underlying idea is that by removing foods to which your body has developed a sensitivity, you rest your system and let it heal. Ironically, the LEAP material explains that people often find that the foods they crave are precisely the ones that cause the strongest antigen production in their systems. My pre-catharsis cravings had been for popcorn, and sure enough, corn was one of the things I tested highest for within the "yellow" or moderately reactive zone.

Back in May, when I blogged about my evaluation, I wrote about the "specter of deprivation" and how it made me feel to contemplate possibly giving up some of my favorite foods. This was well before my major emotional catharsis, and it was not easy, at that point, to face that specter. Still, I figured that maybe it would be okay, since I would be giving up only those things that were scientifically proven to cause me unpleasantness.

In fact, I've spent the last two weeks not dodging shadows but basking in the sunshine.

Fortunately, I had only four items in the "red" zone -- goat's milk, raspberries, lima beans and sorbic acid. While I love raspberries and chevre, I often go months without eating them, so that was all fine. Some of my very favorite foods were, however, in the "yellow" zone. In addition to corn, I also react to wheat and cheddar cheese. Not so good. But surprisingly, when I sat down with the detailed outline of what to eat when, I found myself focusing on all the really good things I could have at any given point. Amazing! And I was lucky that some of my very favorite foods were also the lowest in antigen production. Imagine the hardship of being told to eat mangoes and cherries, or salmon.

I am working with a dietitian who is certified in the LEAP protocol, who changed things around to make better sense of the choices nutritionally (in cases where two items were equally non-reactive, they had been assigned to phases in alphabetical order rather than according to any more sensible reason) and ensure that I got enough variety to make the first phase livable. Here is the entire list of acceptable ingredients on which I have been living for the last two weeks:

Protein: salmon, lentils, American cheese (preservative free), Mozarella
Starches: potatoes, rice, quinoa
Fruits: mangoes, cherries, bananas, pineapple
Vegetables: celery, bell peppers, cauliflower
Nuts/oils: almond, cashew
Flavor enhancers: basil, honey

That's it. 18 ingredients, from which I have had to construct an entire bill of fare.

Back in the poetry-writing days of my youth, when everyone around me was wandering through the Iowa corn fields and emoting in free verse, I was writing sonnets, sestinas and villanelles. I found that my creativity thrived on the constraints of these intricate forms. I've found myself thinking often of those days during the past two weeks, and experiencing again the absolute exhilaration of coming up with something interesting and exciting in spite (or because) of the imposed limitations. And I've learned a lot in the process.

If I hadn't been barred from eating bread, would I ever have discovered how much I really love rice crackers? Had tomatoes not been taken off the table, would I ever have realized that sauteed red peppers function, taste-wise, in exactly the same way in a pasta dish? Less spectacularly, with broccoli, green beans and asparagus out of the picture, would I ever have remembered how delicious simple steamed cauliflower can be?

Sadly, I have not yet experienced the marked improvement in symptoms the protocol is supposed to induce, but my booklet says that the more messed up your system has been, the longer it can take to clean itself out, so I remain hopeful. And today I added yogurt, entering into phase 2 of this next great adventure.

A hui hou.

The Next Stage

2010-08-08T16:42:00.000-04:00

To all of you who were following my story, thank you for your support, and my apologies for disappearing from cyberspace for the past two months. After the enormous catharsis that my previous 4-5 posts represented, I needed to take some time to let it all assimilate and figure out what the next stage of my journey needs to be. This probably took longer than one might expect because during that entire time, I never spent more than 8 nights in the same bed! But I'm home to stay for a couple of months now, and ready to begin whatever the next work turns out to be.

During those first weeks, I was continually amazed at the near-total absence of impulses to eat emotionally. And when I did find myself having thoughts of food when I was tired or frustrated or anxious, it was very easy to talk myself out of them. Sometimes all I had to do was look at the picture of my mother on my dresser and take a deep breath. This transformation of my inner dialogue has felt almost magical, though in fact it's the result of five years of concentrated work.

Unfortunately, changing the inner dialogue is not the only thing necessary to achieving better health. I still have to deal with making my health a priority in all the ways that require attention, and that continues to be a challenge. On the up side: the thyroid supplements have really improved my energy levels and taken away a low-level depression that I hadn't even been aware of until it stopped, and at my recent physical, all the numbers that had been indicating imminent breakdown of my metabolism have retreated into the safety zone. On the down side: I've embarked on the elimination diet protocol recommended by the functional medical practitioner I saw, which involved stopping all the supplements I had been taking, and my gut is not happy. I'm still trying to figure out what to do about that.

The good news is that even after two weeks of being confined to only a dozen or so foods, I'm still eating mindfully and not feeling particularly deprived. This says a lot, to me, of the power of clearing out the emotional debris and unwanted baggage from the closet of my psyche. I was also very pleased that the physician's assistant who is my primary care provider and has been working with me since before I started this journey, was really pleased that I had done that work and recognized its ultimate value, even if I haven't lost actual weight. She said she sees people who are following various weight management programs, including the one they run at my HMO, cycle and recycle through her office, and through dozens of pounds, because they are losing only weight, and not dealing with the underlying causes. That was incredibly validating, since her attitude is far from common in the medical profession.

So, here I am, waiting to see what this next stage holds. As my 59th birthday approaches, I find myself starting to believe that when I land on the brink of 60 next year, I may be in my best shape ever, in all senses of that word.

A hui hou.

My Letter to My Mother

2010-06-18T09:38:00.000-04:00

When I started this blog, I knew that one of the things I needed in order to heal was to bring my struggle with food and weight out into the light, to talk out loud (as it were) about the things about which I felt shame and guilt, the issues with which I struggled. It is partly in that spirit that I am about to share the letter I wrote to my mother as part of my recent therapeutic activities.

But I also want to share it because getting back my mother's memory and a sense of her existence in the world is so important to my healing. And putting her picture and my letter to her out into that world feels like an essential step. She existed, people -- she lived and loved and made mistakes, and she died too soon. And I miss her. But now I have her back, and an empty place inside me feels filled again.

Dear Mommy,

I remember you. Despite being so young when you died, and despite the hideous betrayal of the adults around me then, the conspiracy to blot you out of my life, I remember you.

I remember how you sang to me, about the Milky Way, and how you and Audrey and I would ride in the car with Auntie Rella, Stuart and Eileen and sing as we rode through the evening. I remember your playing the ppiano, and how I figured out how to play "Danse Macabre" and Morton Gould's "Pavane" because your playing them so intrigued me, and how I used to love looking at the music in the piano bench. Music has always been part of my life, a gift from you.

I remember how you loved to read. Some of my most precious possessions are the few Frank G. Slaughter novels you shared with me. I remember the "Screen Stories" magazines you read -- I read them, too. And a love of reading and movies has been another gift from you. do you remember taking me to see "the Birds"? When we came home and you opened the screen door, a moth flew out at us and we yelped, and then laughed and laughed because we were so scared.

I remember your cooking and how you taught me how to do it. i remember how good your fried chicken was, and have never had anything like it since. Shortly after you died, I had a dream that I was standing at the stove making chicken as you did, and feeling overwhelmed because I really didn't know how. But I still make -- and love -- beef stew the way you showed me. And I remember loving the spaghetti you used to make with ketchup in the sauce -- so 1950s. I love to cook -- another gift from you.

There are a few other, physical gifts I have, and have cherished, as well. Your topaz pendant was something I wore for many years and treasured as a link to you -- I gave it to my stepdaughter on her wedding day. Another pendant of yours with a lovely purple stone I gave to Audrey last year when we were finally reunited. I still have my baby book, and over the years have sometimes reread what you wrote to me there about the day I was born, and I have carried your love for me deep in my heart, even when I was unaware of it. I believe that's partly why I was able to become the good, loving woman that I am.

I remember how you used to embroider, and how you taught me running stitches and French knots, and made sure I knew that the reverse side should always be as neat as the front. I've enjoyed embroidery through the years, feeling close to you when I did it. I embroidered a unicorn on a deep blue fabric for Lou, my one and only boyfriend, and I embroidered a pattern of ohia lehua as part of a patchwork khupe [wedding canopy] for my dear friend Richie. Even now, there is a nearly finished piece of a humuhumunukunukuapua'a sitting in my embroidery box. Another gift you shared with me.

When you died and everyone told me to be strong and get on with my life, I didn't know how to do that and still keep you present. And when Daddy married M---- and she set out to excise you from our lives completely, I went along because I so desperately wanted her to love me and be my mother. I didn't know any better, and none of the grown-ups apparently knew how to help me mourn you and honor your memory in a healthy way. But you were, and are, my mother, my first and deepest love, and my most fundamental core couldn't abandon and betray you, even as the rest of me seemed to. In some strange way -- subversive, Carol called it -- I kept you with me by taking on your pain and your way of handling it. I ate and grew heavy, and my body grew more and more to resemble yours. I stuffed down my sorrow and frustrations even as you did, and in that way kept you close even when I was not permitted to say, or even think, your name.

I understand now that that was the only way open to me, given the craziness, the fear and inadequacy of the people closest to me. I understand now that I did what I needed to do to survive, as children do, even without understanding what that was. And I did survive, and even thrived in a lot of ways. You would be proud of me, proud of my accomplishments, proud of my kindness and compassion, proud of my integrity.

through all these years, I thought that I had forgotten you and that the only part of you I carried was the weight. But now I know that's not true. I carry your musical talent and your love of reading. I carry your skill at cooking and embroidering, your joy in singing and laughing. I carry your smile, so obvious in the picture I printed out of you and placed around my house last night. And I carry your love for me, your joy at giving birth to me, your firstborn daughter.

Please, Mommy -- let me go now. Let me let you go. I carry you inside me, in every aspect of who I am. I can't carry you physically any more.

I love you and I am grateful for all your gifts to me. I hope I do honor to them and to you in the way that I live my life. Now I've put your picture up, to have a constant physical reminder of you everywhere I live.

Help me, Mommy. Help me let you go so I can keep you in your rightful place. Your life was cut short -- help me get healthy, so that I can be around for my grandchildren, your great grandchildren.

I carry your heart -- I carry it in my heart.

Your loving daughter,

Sherry

My Life as a Hitchcock Hero

2010-06-17T09:11:00.000-04:00

These last few weeks have taken me on quite the wild ride; to change metaphors, I've been feeling a bit like Gregory Peck in Spellbound, an amazing Hitchcock psychological thriller where the revelations about the truth of the hero's experience come faster and more furiously as the movie progresses.

As those of you who followed "The Story of Princess S" will have learned, I had a difficult childhood. My mother died when I was 13, my father remarried almost immediately, and my stepmother basically to wipe my mother's memory off the face of the planet. I was never allowed to mourn her. Later on, I was disowned, twice, and except for my paternal grandparents, also disowned by my father, their son, had no contact at all with my family of origin for most of my adult life. In my early 30's, my first round of therapy (precipitated by my inability to lose weight) allowed me to start mourning my mother and recovering my ability to express my feelings rather than stuffing them down. My second round of therapy, in my 40's, enabled me to break through the thick wall of denial about how much losing my whole family had hurt me. Two years ago, my work at Green Mountain enabled me to know and express my anger at my father for his abominable betrayal of me.

And yet, I still wasn't able to lose weight.

When I reconnected with my sister last year, she told me about a book that had helped her deal with some of the same issues, Toxic Parents by Susan Forward (thanks, Princess A!). I read it at the time, and was interested to discover that while all of it felt relevant, the part of the book that resonated most strongly was the section on incest. While I didn't have that particular nightmare to deal with, I think that in some ways the utter betrayal of the parent-child bond of being discarded finally and forever is in some ways closest to the betrayal that sexual abuse represents. In any event, Dr. Forward's primary therapeutic technique for those who have experienced incest is a series of letters, to the offending parent, the non-offending parent and one's little self, followed by telling one's story as a fairy tale (hence my previous three posts). I knew when I read that that I had to write a letter to young Sherry, and I knew that it had to be about reassuring myself that none of what happened was my fault, but I couldn't do it. I knew the words but couldn't access the feelings.

Fast forward to four weeks ago, and the beginning of the cinematic period of my recovery.

It began the morning I got the results of a glucose tolerance test suggesting that I am seriously pre-diabetic. Though this wasn't exactly news, I started to freak out, which is not something I generally do. The next day, I told my wonderful, healing therapist about this, and when she said some reassuring things, I said, "I know all that. My adult self knows it, but I feel like there's a little girl inside me lying on the floor kicking and screaming, terrified." She responded by asking me what I would say to that little girl, and I was, for once in my life, totally dumbstruck. This was odd, because, as she reminded me, if it were any other child in the universe, I would have been right there hugging and comforting her. I knew then that I had to write that letter.

Unfortunately, I still didn't know what to say. I knew even more clearly than a year before that none of what had happened was really my fault and that I had only done what I needed to do in order to survive, but I was feeling so much to blame, I was totally paralyzed. Then I realized that I had to start by writing a letter to my sister. When I had visited her just before this episode began, she had told me about her recent struggles to deal with her own anger and pain, and I think that hearing all of that, most of which I had not known about as it was happening, Somehow, I felt I needed to apologize to her for not protecting her, not knowing what she was going through -- essentially, for not being her parent. I know this was irrational, but I needed to say it, so I wrote the letter.

And that precipitated a week of getting in touch with my anger at our stepmother, to whom I wrote my second letter. I also screamed out loud and pounded the wall of the shower with my fist, neither of was something I had ever done before. In some ways, that was the most terrifying experience of all; I had no idea that I was so scared of getting angry.

At that point, I started to write the fairy tale, which I think was a very wise choice, as it enabled me to understand, viscerally, the extent of what had been done to me and how I had had so few options available to survive. Another therapy session precipitated the climactic revelation; my wise healer asked me to consider what the food was doing for me beyond allowing me to stuff down feelings. And in that instant I knew that it was keeping my mother alive within me, and that I needed to let her go in order to be healthy. That was truly a Hitchcock moment.

Of course, in the movies, they never show you what the hapless hero has to do to recover from the moment of revelation. Fortunately, in addition to my healer I also have my wife, who is a very wise woman who knows me very well. She suggested two things: that I write about my memories of my mother, and that I put up her picture. The picture I posted on Facebook, which turned out to be a wonderful gift to myself (and will be the subject of an upcoming post). The letter proved to be the catalyst for a profound catharsis; in writing it, I was again 13 years old and just learning that my mother had died. It enabled me to mourn her from the depths of my soul and, I think, finally to begin to heal from that loss.

I would like to share that letter here as my next post.

A hui hou.

The Story of Princess S -- Part III

2010-06-12T17:39:00.000-04:00

Fortunately for Princess S, she had fallen in love (as princesses do) with the Queen of a neighboring realm. Queen C was loving and wise, and helped Princess S through the sad, dark days that followed her banishment. They would often visit the dowager queen and the old King in the kingdom of the south, and they tried to comfort each other for the calamity that had befallen them.

Then one afternoon, the knight who had married Princess A sent a message to Princess S from her ancestral kingdom to inform her that the King had died. Though Princess S was sore afraid of confronting Lady M and Princess A, she knew that she had to mourn for the King in the way that was proper, as she had never been allowed to mourn for her mother, the Queen. With Queen C at her side she traveled to her ancestral home to attend her father's funeral. Lady M was courteous, even in her grief, but Princess A ran to her sister and embraced her. Princess S returned the embrace and yearned for her sister, but knew that as long as Princess A remained in the kingdom of their birth, Lady M would punish her for communicating with Princess S. So she and Queen C traveled back to their home to observe the mourning customs of their faith.

Twenty years passed as life went on. Prince H died, an angry, bitter man, and the old King and Queen grew ever more bitter, mourning the loss of both their children and all their other grandchildren, even though Princess S and Queen C visited them often. Eventually they died as well. Queen C's children grew up, married and had children of their own, wonderful grandchildren for her and Princess S, who loved them with an unbounding love. Princess S accomplished many good works and was beloved by Queen C, their children and grandchildren, and the people in her adopted land. Her life was good and worthy and she was grateful every day for all the gifts that life had given her.

And yet, all was not well in the kingdom of her heart. Food continued to be her comfort, solace for griefs she did not even recognize. As her body grew older, she could no longer fend off the ill effects of carrying so much extra weight, and she sought desperately for a remedy. Hearing of a magical kingdom to the north whose inhabitants possessed much wisdom, she traveled there to see what she could learn. She met many healers who taught her their secrets, and she took them to be her own, following the path they recommended even when it was difficult to navigate and took her through frightening, dark places.

Slowly, Princess S began to heal. Slowly, she began to realize the enormity of the evil that had befallen her at Lady M's hands. Slowly, she began to understand that she had taken care of herself the only way she knew how.

One day, as she traveled through the kingdom of Facebook, she recognized a friend from the days of her childhood. "Have you news of Princess A?" she asked. "Do you think she might want to hear from me?" "Yes, she would," her friend replied. "She asked me that same question about you." So Princess S sent a message to Princess A, whose heart was gladdened, and they were reunited. Princess A had experienced great hardships during the lost years, but had found healers who helped her with their wisdom, and she had come to see Lady M for what she was. And so the sisters were united, and there was much joy in both their lands.

And yet, Princess S's heart was still heavy, as was her body. She kept following the path shown to her by the healers from the North until at last she came to a deep, dark forest. Though she longed for the light, Princess S knew that it was in the deep, dark forest that the secret to healing lay, so she sat beneath the trees and waited to see what would come to her. She sat for a long time, and storms of rage and grief blew through her, and those storms were so strong and terrible that she did not think she would ever see the light again.

When she had been sitting for what felt like eons, Princess S at last came to realize that she had been holding her mother, the Queen, inside her for all those years, and that the food she had used to fill the emptiness inside her was also a way to feel close the the mother she had lost. As she had that realization, a shaft of light, warm and bright, penetrated the gloom of the forest and caressed her face through her tears. She got up and returned to her castle, where she told Queen C what had been revealed. Queen C, ever loving and wise, said "You kept your mother close in the only way you were allowed," and then she said, "We must put a picture of the Queen in our home for you to see whenever you wish, so that you may let go of what you have held inside so painfully for all these years."

And they lived happily ever after, surrounded by their loving friends and family.

The Story of Princess S -- Part II

2010-06-04T17:03:00.000-04:00

Despite those scattered weeks of deprivation and dread, Princess S thrived at college. She questioned and learned and took delight in all the world around her. Eventually she fell in love, as princesses do, not with a prince or knight, as was the norm in her day, but with another princess. And she felt the need to keep quiet about her love until she understood what this would mean for her kingdom.

When college was over, she planned a long journey across the sea to England. No one knew that she was leaving behind her lady love, and she was very sad. But off she went, and was very excited to be in the home of the literature she loved. She made new friends and had adventures. But one day, she received a scroll from the King, telling her that he had found out about her lady love, and soon came a message from Lady M, telling her that she was unworthy to return to the kingdom. Even Princess A sent a scroll accusing Princess S of causing hurt and havoc in the kingdom. She was banished from her homeland.

Princess S was sick at heart. The only members of the royal family who communicated with her were the dowager Queen and the old King, her father's parents. For this she was grateful. Though she knew that she was a good and worthy princess, her heart was heavy, and she alternated between eating to fill the new empty place inside her and depriving herself, so that she might someday be allowed to return home.

The years passed, and when her sojourn in England was over, Princess S traveled over the vast ocean to Boston, where she made her new home. She made friends and found work, and tried to free herself from the terrible bondage that eating to fill the empty spaces had become. When she continued to be unsuccessful, her wise counselor suggested that she see a healer to find whether it was heartsickness that stood in her way.

The healer helped Princess S explore the empty sad place inside her that had grown there when she was not allowed to grieve for her mother, the Queen. Princess S cried and grieved, moaned and mourned, until the healer agreed that she was ready to try again to go forth in health.

Then Princess S received another scroll from the King, informing her that he and Lady M were selling the ancestral castle and asking what to do with her belongings that were stored there. Princess S replied, and then there were other scrolls exchanged between her and her estranged family. Soon, she was invited to visit the new castle, and something resembling normalcy returned to their relations. She was even asked to attend Princess A's wedding, though when she did, Lady M made sure that she was not permitted to take full part in the festivities, much to the dismay of the old King and Queen. But Princess S was grateful to be part of the family once again. Her exile appeared to be over.

Then trouble came again to the kingdom. The King renounced his father and mother and renounced his brother, Prince H, who had joined him in business. Harsh words were spoken and a judgment against the King was issued in the court of the land. But the King, instigated by Lady M, evaded paying the judgment and banished his parents and his brother to exile in the south.

Princess S was sick at heart. The old king and queen had always loved her and cared for her, even through her long exile. When Lady M would try to tell her of their perfidy, Princess S refused to listen. And that was the act that led to her second and final banishment from the kingdom of her birth.

To be continued....

The Story of Princess S -- Part I

2010-06-04T10:19:00.000-04:00

It's been over two weeks since I last posted, for which I apologize; I have been in the midst of a major emotional breakthrough and felt that it was more important to feel my feelings than think or write about them.

Let me tell you all a story.

Once upon a time, in a kingdom in the midwest, there lived a king and queen and their three daughters. The oldest daugher, Princess S, was a bright and happy child, beloved by her parents, full of curiosity, energy and imagination. She loved her sister, the middle daughter, Princess A, and frequently led them into interesting adventures.

As Princess S grew older, she realized that her mother was getting sadder and sadder, and would stay up late into the night reading novels and movie magazines and eating junk food. Sometimes Princess S would share her books and magazines, and sometimes she would share her mother's food as well. In the mornings, she and Princess A would get themselves off to school because the Queen would still be in bed, and sometimes the two older princesses would huddle together in fear as they listened to the King and Queen quarrel. But most of the time, life was good and interesting, and Princess S felt that she could grow up and do anything she could imagine.

Then one day, when Princess S was 13 years old, she arrived home from school to discover the Queen dead on the bathroom floor. She ran to find a neighboring queen and stayed at her castle with the littlest princess and the neighbor prince, and later Princess A, watching the flashing lights from the ambulance and fire trucks and police cars in front of her castle, until her father came to get her. "What will become of us?" she cried, as she flung herself into the King's arms. "How do we go on?"

Everyone told Princess S that as the oldest, she had to be strong and take care of her sisters and set a good example. Everyone told Princess S that everything would be all right. Everyone told Princess S not to cry.

And so she didn't. She remembered her mother, the Queen, growing sadder and sadder and eating junk food. And Princess S began to eat, too; she began stuff food into her empty place, trying to keep the sadness and grief and fear from bubbling up and overwhelming her.

The months passed, and life went on. And the King began to court Lady M, who soon became the new queen. Everyone thought that the kingdom would prosper with Lady M as the new queen. The little princesses loved her, and the King loved her and she seemed to love them all with a large and welcoming heart.

But inside, that heart was black as the foulest night, and Lady M nurtured her desire to rule not just the kingdom but the entire empire with a heavy hand and iron fist. "I AM YOUR MOTHER," she cried, "AND YOU HAD NO OTHER BEFORE ME." Like Abraham destroying the idols, she lay waste to all memories and traces of the Queen. Using her wiles and insidious charm, she manipulated Princess S into banishing the late Queen's mother and sister, convincing her that they did not have the best interests of the princesses at heart, since they suspected Lady M's evil core. She rules the kingdom with fear and withholding love, forcing the princesses to curry favor or run the risk of banishment to the coldest reaches of the castle. Princess S and Princess A often huddled together, trying to figure out when the axe of Lady M's wrath would next fall, and on whom. These were dark days in the kingdom.

And yet, to themselves as to all the rest of the world, it seemed a happy family. There was laughter and there were family gatherings, school concerts and vacations and trips to the movies. Lady M, who had been overweight much of her life, saw that Princess S was growing heavy and put her on a diet, not letting her eat the foods she loved, the foods that reminded her of her mother the Queen, and making her feel shame about her body. But Princess S longed for Lady M's love and approval, so she followed diets, and quaked every time she had to step on a scale, since the wrong number could bring down upon her the wrath of Lady M. When she went off to college, she was free at last to eat what she wanted, but would starve herself in the weeks before Parents' Weekend or winter break, dreading the moment of inspection when she came again into Lady M's presence.

To be continued....

Quantity vs. Quality

2010-05-17T15:00:00.000-04:00

Carol and I just spent that weekend at a conference which took place at the Penninsula Hotel in Chicago, which is supposedly the best hotel in the United States. I can believe that. The rooms were extremely comfortable, the bathroom was the size of many New York City apartments, and the staff were beyond attentive. Since we were attending a very tightly scheduled conference, we had the opportunity to eat all our meals at the hotel, and the food was exquisite, very good quality ingredients beautifully prepared and presented. Then yesterday we drove to the northern suburbs to go out to dinner with my sister, brother-in-law and niece. We had a very pleasant and tasty dinner at Uno's Chicago Grill.

This was a very interesting and informative juxtaposition. The meals at the Penninsula were, well, small. All the portions were pretty much exactly the sizes we are served at Green Mountain, what dietitians would call "normal." In contrast, the portions at Uno's were gargantuan, what the American public might call "normal." The one good thing about the Uno's menu is that it offers three "mini dessert" choices that are actually the size of a "normal" dessert rather than the feast for three size of most chain restaurant finales.

This got me thinking. I enjoyed all the meals at both places, and I mindfully removed more than half of my entree to a take-out box for my niece to take home before I dug in, so I probably had something close to the same amount of food. But for complexity and subtlety of flavor, Uno's wasn't even close to being able to compete with the Penninsula's fare.

Have restaurant portions increased because the quality of the ingredients and the ability of the culinary staff to cook them properly have declined? As economic considerations and mass production values have affected the hospitality industry, did those on the tiers beneath the very top have to make up in quantity what they are not able to provide in quality? It would seem so.

And that leads to an even more important question for those of us on the quest for improved health. Do we, as eaters, make up in quantity for a lack of quality in our food choices? I know from my own experience that if I'm eating really good ice cream, I can be happy with much, much less than if I eat store-brand ice milk. In fact, paying attention to the quality of food so that one can feel satisfied is an essential principle of mindful eating. But is it as true for beef tenderloin (our dinner Saturday night) as it is for ice cream or chocolate? Or for fruit or vegetables? Again, I think so.

Good things coming in small packages seems to be a very relevant truism.

A hui hou.

A Week of Limbo

2010-05-14T08:26:00.000-04:00

This has been a strange, interesting and frustrating week. Coming home from Green Mountain always feels a little strange and challenging, and this time was no exception. In addition to still dealing with a hacking cough and accompanying low energy level, I spent the week dealing with getting all the tests arranged and samples taken for my functional medicine evaluation, seeing my grandchildren, fleetingly, and getting ready for a 10-day trip to the midwest, which will be starting in about an hour. To say that I actually unpacked would be extremely kind; it was more like flinging the contents of the suitcase around the room in order to make room for the new contents. I'm not proud of it, but it was the best I could manage in my current physical state.

It's taxing, trying to stay in the moment without judgment. I'm sure that if I were truly mindful, being in the moment would be calming and peaceful; instead, it often feels like I'm rushing haphazardly from moment to moment. I'm not sure that's an improvement over my non-mindful state, except that I do believe the anxiety is less with the judging voice somewhat muted.

Food took a definite back seat this week. Since we would be home for less than a week before leaving for 10 days and had at least 2 dinner engagements, it didn't seem worth the effort and expense of doing a major shopping, so the choices at hand were severely limited. I'm not proud of that either, but it was the best I could manage in my current physical state. Ditto exercise, or lack thereof. I did do some walking, but each time ended in paroxysms of coughing. I hold out some hope that I'll be able to swim in the hotel pools, and I packed my spry tube. If I can do something physical even once, I'll feel like I'm back on my way.

So, off I go. Wish me luck.

A hui hou.

The Specter of Deprivation

2010-05-07T23:37:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, I spent most of the afternoon going to an appointment with a wonderful doctor who specializes in functional medicine and works with participants from Green Mountain at Fox Run when the folks here think it would be appropriate. Last week I went to a class here about functional medicine and how it might help us in our quest to become fit and healthy, and something about what I learned resonated. Specifically, one of the points presented was that this approach, which deals with systemic imbalances in gut flora and hormones can explain difficulty losing weight and eating in a way that feels like emotional eating but can't be associated with any specific emotion. I figured that I've been working so hard on this process for the past four and a half years that I really owed it to myself to check out this possibility, especially since it feels as though my immune system is currently teetering on some brink.

It was a very interesting, informative, and possibly overwhelming visit; I find that despite feeling at the time that I understood everything I was being told, now, a day later, a lot of it seems to have flown out of my head. When I get back home, I have to have a bunch of blood tests done and collect spit and stool samples to send in and get some blood drawn to send off for food sensitivity testing. All of those tests should give the doctor a better sense of what's going on in my digestive tract and with my insulin, thyroid and cortisol hormones as well as helping her figure out what to do next.

The functional medicine approach, at least as my doctor explained it, involves the 4 Rs:

Removing from my digestive system any toxins, bacteria or other bad stuff that might be causing problems

Replacing anything digestive requirements missing or present in less than optimal levels , through supplementation

Reinoculation with good bacteria, by taking probiotic supplements

Repairing the damage and imbalances in the digestive system by eating healthy foods and avoiding those to which I might be sensitive.

Of course, after my years of working very hard to get out from under the specter of deprivation, the idea of needing to restrict my food choices, even for reasons of promoting good health, made me a little anxious. That anxiety blossomed into full-blown dismay when the doctor told me that her preferred clinical tool for assessing food sensitivity is having patients follow an elimination diet, which involves a few weeks eating from a fairly limited list of food groups and then gradually reintroducing them one at a time to assess any reactions. This is where the advantage of working with someone who knows the Green Mountain program becomes very clear. I told her of my concern about undoing the progress I had made in eliminating deprivation as a motivator to non-hunger eating, and we agreed that I would do the food sensitivity testing instead.

As if to prove my point, when I stopped for gas on my way back to Green Mountain, I felt the junk food calling to me from the attached convenience store, and it was immediately clear that that was because of my fear of feeling deprived during this whole process. So I told myself to get a grip, since I wasn't going to be doing random deprivation but rather only avoiding things proven to have an ill effect on my health. After the test results are in, I'll have to work with a dietician to add foods back gradually based on my degree of reactivity, but at least I won't have to give up anything that doesn't seem to be a problem. I seem to be able bear restriction if it has a direct effect on how I feel physically. The hope is that if I can give my GI system time to heal and reset itself, I may be able to reintroduce some of those foods to which I had developed a sensitivity.

This feels like a new adventure, and it's a little scary, but something about it feels right as well. This just makes sense to me. Call it a "gut feeling."

I'll let you know how it goes.

A hui hou.

Dancing for Joy

2010-05-02T11:10:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was a beautiful day here in Vermont, and I drove down to Brattleboro to have lunch with friends. I arrived at the restaurant quite early and got too hot listening to the radio in the car, so I found a shady step to sit on and commenced enjoying the surroundings. Almost immediately I noticed a little green wormy bug flying down, probably from the tree I was sitting under, on an invisible thread. I watched it blowing back and forth in the wind for a while, until it finally landed on the pavement. To my delight, it started doing a very rhythmic dance that looked quite a bit like some of the moves from Friday's Zumba class, dipping first in one direction and then the other. It was amazing to watch, and to my anthropomorphic eyes it seemed as though that little bug was having a wonderful time.

I know that creatures on the lower tiers of the biological ladder usually have some survival or reproductive reason for everything they do, but I didn't see it eating anything, and there were no other little green worms around to be impressed by my little guy's prowess. I couldn't think of a single reason why it would be dancing except that it felt good.

This observation naturally started me thinking about how here at Green Mountain we are learning that what works best is to find physical activities that give us pleasure, that we want to do, and to enjoy moving our bodies more, as they were designed to move. And that got me remembering a dance center in Cambridge in the early 80s that was called the Joy of Movement Center. Apart from biking, there is no more joyous activity, for me and many others, than dancing. Any kind of dancing. Moving rhythmically in response to music seems to be a basic human drive. This little worm was telling me, or so I thought, that maybe that impulse went beyond humans. When humpback whales leap out of the water or slap their pectoral fins or tails, it looks to humans as though they are playing, and in fact, nobody has been able to figure out any more scientific reason for those behaviors.

During this past week, as I've been getting back to strength training and becoming generally more active, I've also become much more mindful of my body and how it feels in any given moment. Mindfulness is a key aspect of the program here, in all the spheres: eating behavior, physical activity, and all the psychological elements we deal with. I think I now understand more than before how being mindful of how I feel, even when that involves noticing aches and pains, is actually a powerful way of living in the moment and being/accepting who I am. I welcome that insight, and I think it will help me as I move forward.

I was feeling pretty happy about all these thoughts, as I sat there in the comfortable shade waiting for my friends, when I noticed that my little green friend was no longer on the pavement. I looked around and saw the worm back in the air, flying again on its invisible thread. It tried to land a few times, but never found a place to settle, until it finally came to rest and again began its interesting dance. As I watched, I suddenly realized that it was probably trying to get free of the thread so it could go off and conduct worm business. The dance that I had been interpreting as an expression of joy was also a technique for bursting out of bondage.

And I thought, yes, that's exactly what we are doing, too.

A hui hou.

Instant Gratification, Long-Term Joy

2010-04-30T20:01:00.000-04:00

It's Friday today, almost the end of my first week here at Green Mountain, and I am reminded of something I figured out a long time ago. If you want instant gratification, a constant sense of progress and achievement, there is no better endeavor than strength training.

Most people with weight management issues focus exclusively on the scale, which is a recipe (pardon the food reference) for disaster. We have absolutely no control over how our body metabolizes what we feed it, or the schedule by which it eliminates waste products and stores or utilizes fat. We do have control of our actions. So, right off the bat (pardon the exercise reference), physical activity represents a much better arena in which to measure progress than what we eat. And while aerobic activities can also provide a steady sense of accomplishment, there is nothing like feeling your muscles get stronger and more flexible by the day, doing an addition repetition or going up in weight, or simply feeling better able to do those reps without huffing and puffing and turning purple.

For the first three years after my first visit to Green Mountain, I embraced strength training almost religiously, clinging to it when everything else was falling apart. There were good reasons for this. For one thing, I had learned that strength training is just about the only way a short, middle-aged female can increase her metabolic rate. For another, I can usually manage strength training even when my asthma and/or orthopedic issues make cardiovascular effort too difficult or painful. So I did my alternating upper- and lower-body conditioning routines every morning almost without fail, despite various kinds of tendonitis and a medication adjustment that left me with 8 weeks of intense fatigue until my body got used to it.

Sometimes it would take me all day to complete the lower body routine, as I could manage only about one exercise per hour and would lie on the floor staring upside down out the window at the palm tree next door (this was in Hawaii) until I could muster up the will and the energy to go on to the next muscle group. It would take me several hours, but I would do it. I felt stronger, I was fitting better into clothes, and I felt really good about myself.

Then I suddenly found myself unable to bridge whatever the hurdles were, and I began dreading strength training with an intense, consuming dread that left me paralyzed. Every morning I would dress in my fetching exercise attire and mope around the house, feeling as though I couldn't do anything else until I completed my strength training for the day, yet not being able to bring myself to do it. This meant, of course, that I never got anything at all done, which increased my stress level and flooded my brain with negative self-talk, so that the next day I dreaded the strength training even more. And on and on and on.

Since my major illness last fall, I have had no problem getting to be more active; I rely on my joy in bicycling to motivate me to ride as often as I can. But I've been waiting, in vain, for similar intrinsic motivation to strike me regarding the strength training piece. On the other hand, what led me to sign up for these two weeks at Green Mountain was feeling so weakened at my core and yearning for the feeling that exercising my muscles gives me.

I am happy to report that after 5 days, I feel like a different person. I still find the exercises, especially lower body, hard and occasional uncomfortable, but I'm starting to feel a kind of delight in doing them, as they allow me to feel my body getting stronger by the day. By the time I leave next Saturday, this ember of pleasure will, I hope, have been fanned into a flame of enthusiasm so that I can keep things up after I get home, even while traveling. Perhaps that is all that intrinsic motivation needs to be. Perhaps one day soon I will long to do quad lifts and biceps curls the way I now long to be on my bike.

A hui hou.

Knitting Up the Ravelled Sleeve

2010-04-29T16:43:00.000-04:00

I never used to have sleep problems, not that I remember, anyway. But when I developed asthma, in my thirties, for about a year and half I was up till 3 or 4 in the morning coughing and hacking, until we finally hit on the right regimen to manage it. Then after that, I was up till 3 or 4 in the morning because I was taking theophylline, which is in the same pharmaceutical family as caffeine, with similar effects. Then I became a gigging musician who frequently had to drive home after midnight; while I have the welcome ability to stay awake while driving, even when I'm tired, when I get home from such a drive it takes me a long time to reverse the effects of whatever it was that allows me to stay alert. Then came menopause, and nearly 3 years of springing totally wide awake at 3am, no matter what time I went to sleep. Now, my ability to fall asleep is frequently compromised by aches and pains and gout as well as respiratory infections, so all in all, I do not have an easy relationship with Morpheus.

But that's not the only problem.

I've always been a secret eater, much to my great shame. I remember the most humiliating moment of my young life being when the cleaning lady found a paper bag with empty cookie boxes in my closet and told my parents, who took away my allowance and made me come right home after school so I couldn't buy extraneous food. In my adult life, I've done most of my eating for other than hunger reasons late at night, waiting till everyone else in the house is asleep. This frequently means staying up well past the point at which my body wants to go to sleep.

Over the past five years, as I've dealt with a lot of the underlying issues that have kept me from successful weight management, my urge to eat inappropriately has lessened a great deal, and as a result I've been able to sleep much better and more easily. But there are times still when I get into bed at a very reasonable time, feeling tired and ready to sleep, but the minute I hit the mattress, my knee and my ankle and my toes all start to hurt, and/or I start coughing, and within minutes I'm wide awake and feeling anxious and completely stressed out about not being able to fall asleep. Meditating and listening to soothing music don't help, nor does focusing on my breath, so I end up feeling like a rotisserie chicken until I finally feel compelled to get out of bed and head for the kitchen. Food still soothes, most of the time, and quiets something in my brain (something about seratonin) so that I can finally fall asleep. If it doesn't soothe, it helps pass the time until I get so tired I can't help but fall asleep.

This is obviously not an optimal situation. Recent research has suggested that lack of sufficient sleep can contribute to weight gain (or failure to lose weight) through a number of mechanisms. Sleep deprivation can also contribute to feelings of stress, and hamper one's ability to problem solve or be mindful. And last night I got first-hand knowledge of another benefit of a decent night's sleep.

I've been plagued, since I arrived on Sunday, with a lot of ankle pain and pain in my knee, presumably the result of being much more active, especially on stairs. I've also had some break-out gout pain in my big toes, and some asthma. The net result is that when I lie down in bed, everything starts to hurt. And, as I described above, I start to agitate about not being able to sleep or wake up early and can't fall back to sleep, etc. etc.

Of course, since I have been doing a lot of strength training since I've been here, I had acquired a whole lot more aches and pains and stiffness. In fact, by dinnertime last night, I could barely get up out of my chair to hobble back to my room. So when bedtime came around, I decided to take a tramalol, which is one of the few painkillers I can take that doesn't interact adversely with my blood pressure. I usually take it only when I am in such discomfort that I can't sleep, and it seems to allow my muscles all to relax. Consequently, I slept really well, and this morning it was like magic -- all the muscle aches and pains were gone. Better living through chemistry!

Clearly, I need to do something about my difficulties with sleep. While I don't see a clear way ahead at this particular moment, I am confident that with the help of the folks here and my own prodigious problem-solving skills, I'll figure it out eventually. Until then, I have to do whatever I can to keep the sleeve of care from ravelling further.

A hui hou.

Plan B and Beyond

2010-04-27T20:13:00.000-04:00

Here I am, back at Green Mountain at Fox Run, which has truly become my home away from home over the past four and a half years. I could go on and on about how wonderful and transformative the program is, how knowledgeable and compassionate the staff all are, the delicious meals and the beautiful surroundings, and maybe I will in another post. But today I want to focus on one aspect of the Green Mountain experience that I most appreciate, which is the empowering attitude of always finding a way to deal with (and get around) impediments.

One of the main reasons I came here in the first place, in September 2005, was that the program literature promised a safe environment in which women with physical challenges could learn how to become active without hurting themselves. This was essential for me, given my old knee injury and frequent tendonitis in my foot, not to mention my asthma. I figured I could try out all kinds of physical activity and find ones that I didn't hate too much, at the very least, and learn to do them without injuring myself further.

I was a total tomboy as a child, and all through college remained quite physically active despite not being the fastest runner. I was great at softball (having spent my childhood playing catch in the backyard), could swish baskets on demand, rode my bike all over the place, and do just about any other sport involving good hand-eye coordination. Yes, I was overweight, but I was strong and loved moving. Then when I was in England I was following a public footpath home from a Slimming Club meeting (just another example of diets being bad for your health!) and ended up going over a wall that was twice as far down on the other side, landing in a deserted monastery garden and tearing the cartilage in my left knee. Back then no one even said the words "physical therapy," so I was left with a chronically weak joint that would get reinjured just about every time I played tennis or ran across the street or even landed funny on that leg. Ten years later I developed asthma, and that really put an end to my active life as I had known it.

By the time I arrived at Green Mountain, in addition to living pretty much entirely in my head (as dealing with my body was no fun at all), I had also become afraid to move, especially if it involved raising a foot off the floor. Walking was manageable, but dancing was out of the question, and going up and down stairs was the bane of my life.

What I discovered when I started the program here was that being physically active is the closest thing to a magic bullet for all sorts of issues, not just weight management, and that there is always a way to exercise all the muscles of the body, including the heart (ie, aerobic activity), even if you are orthopedically or medically challenged. I also learned that while being active may be hard, at first, if it hurts that means you aren't doing the activity correctly or are doing too much of it.

LynnAnn Covell, who was fitness director at that time and currently manages the lifestyle coaching program here, is one of the most inspirational people I have ever encountered, and one of the first things she said to my class of Green Mountain newbies was that if Plan A didn't work for us, she would come up with Plan B, and if that still didn't work, she would come up with plans C through Z, until she found a way for each of us to exercise comfortably and in a way that would allow us to become more fit and more comfortable in ourselves. And I've learned that she was telling the truth. If you can't do quad lifts on the floor, you can do them standing up or in a chair or on a fitball or in bed or in the pool. If you can't walk, you can swim or bounce on a fitball or ride a bike. If you can't dance on your feet, you can dance sitting in a chair or on a fitball and feel the joy in moving with the music.

This approach works for other aspects of life as well. If you can't meditate on your own, you can listen to a recording of affirmations, or do some guided imagery, or a walking meditation or simply take a mindful walk in a beautiful place. If you can't bear the thought of giving up eating in front of the television you can eat a meal there and set a timer to tell you when food needs to go back to the kitchen so you don't end up eating mindlessly for hours. If you can't make a healthy lunch every day you can cook a whole bunch of things on the weekend or buy prepared foods that fit into how you want to eat or bring a stock of such foods into your work environment or figure out how to make healthier restaurant choices. There is no one perfect answer, and searching for it can get in the way of finding a functional solution.

The trick to making this work is not letting disappointment and frustration at being unable to carry out Plan A get in the way of recognizing plan B and beyond.

A hui hou.

Finding My Heart Space

2010-04-24T13:14:00.000-04:00

Part of my journey to increased calm and healthfulness has involved learning to meditate. I started with guided imagery as part of the Green Mountain at Fox Run program, and then started doing actual meditation when I began phone coaching sessions with one of the behavioral specialists there. Being the perfectionist that I was/am, I spent much of the first weeks trying to figure out if I was doing it right, and really concerned that I wasn't. Eventually I got over that and became much more comfortable with the notion that meditation is a practice, in the same sense of that word as I am familiar with from my musical life; there's no way to be perfect, but the repetition makes the whole process occur with a greater sense of ease.

Then my coach started talking about getting into my "heart space," breathing into it, feeling and acting from it, and I was lost. I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. Three years later, I still didn't, not really, but had made enough progress so that I was no longer worrying about why I was "failing" at this piece of my task. I guess that eventually I started to believe that I was probably there, whatever that meant, but simply unable to feel what that meant.

Fast forward to our time in San Francisco, where at Carol's meeting she learned about a company that makes a product called "emWave" -- a combination of software and sensor that helps train you to achieve what they refer to as "coherence," a synchronization of your heart rate with your autonomic nervous system. This sounded intriguing, so we saw a demonstration of the desktop computer program and promptly bought a system to try at home. The program suggests that you "focus your attention in the area of the heart and pretend you are breathing in and out through the heart area." Since I had never been able to do that in any reliable way, I thought using the software might help me attain that connection, which seems to be pretty important to inner peace.

I installed the software when we got home and have now had several sessions. I think this is just the tool that I need. I'll try to describe what a session entails.

After opening the program, you attach a sensor to your earlobe; the other end plugs into a little unit that plugs into a USB port. It looks a lot like a thumb drive. Then you press start and your session begins. For the first 30 seconds or so, the unit calibrates your heart rate, and you can check whether the sensor is well-placed to get a good signal. Once it has calibrated, you start hearing a chiming every five seconds to tell you how your state of coherence is. Here's a rather fuzzy screen shot of a basic session:

The squiggle along the top represents your heart rhythm. You are shooting for a smooth and regular pattern rather than something that looks like High Sierra. The three bars in the lower right are the three levels of coherence: red is low, blue is medium and green is high. The greater percentage of the time you spend is blue or green, the more relaxed and centered you are.

The default has a low bonging for low coherence, a medium chiming for medium coherence, and a spritely high ringing for high coherence. I found that I wasn't budging off the low level and thought it might be because I find the low bonging quite restful, so I reversed the low and high sounds assigned by the program and have had much better luck. It's very helpful to have the immediate feedback, and it's getting easier for me to bring myself back out of the low level by focusing on my heart space, so I guess I've already done better at finding it than I ever did before.

The program also has interesting visualizations to help you stay focused and motivated, as well as three games that you control by keeping yourself in the more desirable states of coherence. I'm looking forward to spending more time with these as I practice centering myself with this interesting and helpful tool. Maybe future posts will actually originate from my heart space. One can but hope.

A hui hou.

Getting Ready for the Next Round

2010-04-23T16:54:00.000-04:00

After our intense, exhausting time in San Francisco, capped by a seriously uncomfortable overnight flight home to Boston, I am now getting ready to go back to Green Mountain at Fox Run for two weeks, starting Sunday. The part of me that has to unpack and repack and get organized is feeling a little overwhelmed, but the part of me that is yearning to be healthier is excited and eager.

I love Green Mountain. I love the vastness and solidity of Okemo Mountain, which watches over our days there. I love the staff, who have become practically family after all the time I've spent there, and I love the other women who take part in the program. Being able to spend the bulk of my days taking care of myself and making my health my top priority is a wonderful gift, and one that I appreciate deeply.

It is a place where mindfulness comes easily. The clarity and quiet of the Vermont air form a magnificent backdrop for the act of paying attention. Sometimes, when I am meditating at home, I can hear my feet crunching on the track as I walk my laps, a gentle, rhythmic sound that I find enormously grounding. I look forward, always, to the wonderful meals so lovingly prepared by chefs Jon and Lisa, who are so generous in sharing their knowledge with us in the hopes that we can learn to cook mindfully and with joy. If I want quiet and solitude, I can spend hours by myself, coming out of my room only for the occasional class and meals. If I want company, there is always someone interesting to talk to or to provide a hug, an encouraging word or a little commiseration.

I'm looking forward to my time there as an oasis in a very busy spring. I'm just above the weight where I feel comfortable in my skin, and the two weeks in Vermont should get me back to a more tolerable level, in addition to helping me figure out what my next focus needs to be. I hope that two weeks of regularly engaging in strength training will help make that a routine again, and that two weeks of upping my cardio and walking (of necessity) up and down stairs many times a day will make moving a little easier. And finally, I am planning to use my various physical therapy aids regularly, so that my ankle pain will recede to a more manageable level.

Of course, the dangers of having expectations are always lurking. If I get there and have a flare-up of orthopedic issues or asthma, I won't be able to do all the activities I've been imagining, and that will be disappointing. But I've never been there without learning the next thing I needed to work on, so I am confident that this will be a good use of my time, whatever I take away from it.

I'm also planning to try to post every day while I'm at Green Mountain, so that I can share what I learn and help solidify it in my mind.

A hui hou.

I Am What I Am

2010-04-18T13:41:00.000-04:00

Have you ever been sitting in an overheated room or car or airplane wearing too many layers? And when you get to where you can finally shed the excess, have you ripped off the heavy, damp garmets and exposed your skin to the cool air and felt so much lighter, and so relieved to be comfortable again? I had that experience just last night, walking back to our hotel from a wonderful dinner. When I got to the room, I ripped off my sweater and my shirt and flopped down on the bed, experiencing, for just a moment, delicious relief.

Then it occurred to me that I craved an even deeper level of relief. I wished I could unzip my skin and peel off the extra layers of me the way I removed my clothes.

Being here in San Francisco, where we need to walk everywhere, is a challenging experience. When I'm at home, I can ride my bike, which doesn't hurt or stress my body overmuch. Here, I have to walk, which, in addition to the strain of moving my heavy body through space, also aggravates my ankle problem and until this morning my gout as well. So I'm not exactly a happy camper walking around, as much as I may enjoy being outside in a beautiful, interesting place. The night we arrived, as I forced myself to walk along to dinner and back, I was feeling exhausted (it was 3am, body time) and disheartened by how hard it felt, but from somewhere deep inside I mustered up the will to mutter to Carol, "I am what I am."

"I Am What I Am" is the name of a very sweet song by Roy Sakuma, a teacher and ukulele advocate in Hawaii, who wrote it to inspire and encourage people, especially kids, to love themselves as they are. I first came across the song this past winter in Aunty Marjie's ukulele class, where Aunty Marjie shared how she feels that the song is an anthem for her as she joyously walks her own path in life.

When I said that to Carol the other night, she very sweetly replied, "And I love what you are." I wasn't feeling love for myself at that moment. At least not for my physical self. Yet if I can't love my body and treat it with compassion, I won't be able to do what I need to get healthy. It's a conundrum.

And so today, I'll go out into the warm sunshine again and walk the city, wishing I could be flying along on my bike, trying to make peace with the effort and the discomfort and the struggle that are so much a part of what I am right now.

I am what I am. Right now. In this moment.

A hui hou.

When an Old Friend Lets You Down

2010-04-16T13:28:00.000-04:00

One of the most startling ideas presented to me as part of the Green Mountain at Fox Run program was that I should be grateful to my fat, and to my overeating, for taking care of me all those years. Obviously it did something positive for me, by way of comfort and/or protection, at some point in my life. Certainly, food equals comfort for many of us, beginning with our time as infants when all of life is either eating or sleeping. In my own history, I have used food to stuff down grief and anger, and I've used my fat both as a buffer against a notion of femininity which was totally foreign to me and a grand gesture of defiance, daring the world to see me for the beautiful, sensual, sensitive woman I am.

I've never drunk alcohol, smoked, or used recreational pharmaceuticals, but I've used food the way an addict shoots up, seeking numbness and calm. During the difficult, painful days of my youth and young adulthood, the oblivion came quickly and worked well, and for that I am grateful. As I've grown older and wiser, and as my life has gotten easier and more satisfying, the triggers that have sent me back to my habitual comforts have gotten smaller and more subtle. Instead of eating to numb myself against crushing grief, I now eat to allay the momentary anxieties of a difficult task or a deadline; instead of tamping down anger with calories, I now use them as others might use a sleeping pill, to help my mind grow calm enough for sleep. Food is my oldest and most trusted friend, celebrating the good times and helping me through the bad.

So what do I do when my old friend lets me down?

Twice since I've gotten back from Hawaii, I've deliberately turned to food to help me deal with some discomfort and disappointment (see yesterday's post on Expectations for a discussion of one episode), and twice it has not helped. Not even a little. Maybe it's because I'm more mindful of how I really feel and what I really need, but when I ate the last chip or put away the bag of cookies, I was an anxious, agitated and uncomfortable as I was when I started. And unlike the addict seeking ever larger doses in pursuit of the high, I knew that eating more would only make me feel worse.

Those of you who have never struggled with food in this way probably won't understand how totally, devastatingly shocking this was. Obviously, in the great scheme of life, the eating never really helps and in fact contributes to my problems; nevertheless, in the moment, it has always seemed to calm me down and make it possible for me to take the next step. Even though I have been actively working to learn other tools to deal with the feelings and situations that have always led me to food, I guess it had never occurred to me that at some point my standby would cease to function. I thought that foresaking food would be my choice, not a necessity.

Unfortunately, now that that day seems to have arrived, I don't yet feel equipped to deal with this new reality. I don't have my new arsenal in place; while I've come up with a list of lots of possibilities, so far nothing has resonated for me with the same calming effects as eating. And that scares me. I feel abandoned, bereft, and extremely vulnerable.

And yet maybe that vulnerability is a good thing. Perhaps if I sit with the fear and the grief at having lost my old friend, I'll be able to reach out in other directions, to healthier and more supportive companions.

Wish me luck!

A hui hou.

Expectations

2010-04-15T13:09:00.000-04:00

This past week, I've been trying to pay attention to what sets off the negative feelings that lead me to eat inappropriately. I know that being tired is a big one for me, and that my sleep issues are a major arena that I have yet to deal with successfully. But beyond turning to food rather than sleep when I am exhausted, what is it that drives me to attempt to drug myself with food?

I think I've discovered a clue. So often when I feel the urge to eat when I'm not hungry, I have just bumped up against a reality that differs from my expectations. Yesterday was a great opportunity to have this realization, as I spent most of the day reeling from those collisions.

It started in the morning. All week, the weather forecasters had been saying that Wednesday would be the warmest, sunniest day of the week, and I'd been looking forward to taking a longer-than-usual bike ride. But I slept later than I had hoped and had a couple of things I absolutely had to take care of before I could take off, so it was almost 3pm before I left the house. Since we had somewhere to be at 5pm, I couldn't go ride where I had wanted. Moreover, three pm is the worst time of day for me, energetically speaking, so I found the ride that I did harder than usual. Then, when I got home, I learned that I would not be able to go to Green Mountain at Fox Run for the two weeks that I had just decided I really, really needed because they didn't have space for me.

The net result of all this frustration was the worst episode of night eating I've had in months.

Looking a little deeper into what had happened, I realized that having expectations at all is a dangerous thing to do, because it not only sets you up for frustration and/or failure, but it takes you out of the moment and into the future. Mindfulness is all about being in the present moment, accepting it for what it is, appreciating it, learning from it, and not looking beyond it. Straying from mindfulness is, at least for me, a prelude to trouble.

My explorations of mindfulness these past few years have led me to make a lot of changes with respect to expectations. I can see them most clearly in relation to my winter sojourn in Hawaii. I used to send or bring tons of stuff to Hawaii to work on during my time there and would spend most of the winter not doing those projects and feeling bad about that. And when I had to shlep or ship all of it back to Massachusetts in the spring, the feelings of frustration and failure would overwhelm my homecoming and cause me to start out my time back east feeling like I was already in a huge hole with no obvious way out. Eventually, I came to understand that my expectations for the few months I spend in Hawaii were totally unrealistic, especially given that I often arrive there totally depleted from the very intense week of KlezKamp if not actually ill.

This year, I took very little with me and had nothing more on my agenda than continuing to recover from my bout with H1N1 and pneumonia, and as a result was more productive and happier than I have been in many years.

When I first encountered the idea of non-striving as part of the mindfulness practice taught at Green Mountain, I didn't understand it. In fact, the idea that ceasing to push myself could actually help me get done the things that I felt unable to accomplish was completely counterintuitive. Yet I have experienced, over and over again, that this is so. Which is why I have been taking a laid back approach to biking this season: not training for Hub on Wheels, not following a specific program, but going out to ride as often as feels comfortable and desirable and finding that, when I'm healthy, that's pretty much every day.

I am reminded of the famous line from Pope's "Essay on Man": "Whatever is, is right." Surely, that is a rallying cry for mindfulness. Yes as someone who feels compelled to try to make the world (and herself) better, how can I actually believe that? If whatever is were right, wouldn't I be content with my fat, hypertensive, arthritic body?

The task, I believe, is to find a balancing point between a long-term, global expectation of growth and improvement and an active embracing of what exists in the moment. In Lifetime Channel terms, this amounts to the truism that until you learn to love yourself as you are, you won't be able to change. In mindfulness terms, I think it means not getting too attached to any vision of the way you think things ought to be so that you can stay focused on what actually is there, learn from it or let it go, and move on to the next moment.

A hui hou.

Who Do I Think I Am?

2010-04-09T12:20:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was a strange and disturbing day. I don't know if it was simply that I overdid things physically the day before, that I didn't get enough sleep, or the drastic change in barometric pressure, but I felt seriously compromised physically, and that led, as it so often does, to a drastic disturbance in my mental state. I hate when that happens. I've been trying to stay out of that particular set of well-worn ruts in my thinking, with a fair amount of success, but during times of stress, the wheels always want to return to the familiar.

Here's what happened. Feeling too ill to ride my bike, especially given the cold air, I decided to explore bike trails in Chicago in preparation for getting a bike to keep at my sister's house. On the surface, this seems like a healthy, relatively positive alternative to actually biking. And as I was reading about the various trails and bike paths, I started to visualize myself riding along them, as I often do. Usually I can feel the wind in my face and feel the sun on my skin as I fly along the miles, and these feelings are a source of comfort and pleasure to me, but for some reason, the image went dark and I found myself in the middle of the following internal dialog:

"Who are you kidding? You aren't a real cyclist. Everybody else is getting out and riding 15 miles the first nice day, and you have to struggle to keep going for 3."

"Yeah, but I can work my way up to 15 miles, or even more. And I love it."

"You'll probably get that bike and it will sit around in your sister's garage, the same way you've never used the pool at the place you stay when you visit."

"Yeah, but if I don't have the bike there, I'll never ride it. And besides, I love biking even more than jumping around in water, and I really want to be able to share riding with my sister and my Chicago friends and my niece."

"You think you are a cyclist. Huh! You're fat and slow and no one is going to want to ride with you because you can't keep up. And besides, Chicago is a big, scary place."

"Yeah, but I have a cell phone and my friends and family love me."

"Just who the hell do you think you are?"

So, feeling bad and having no answer, I shrank quietly into misery, where I moped for the rest of the day.

I knew how irrational I was being. I knew that I really am an active person, in between bouts of illness and orthopedic challenge. That was the first lesson I learned at Green Mountain, and the one that has perhaps done the most for me during the past few years. But I just couldn't feel it.

It's hard, when injury strikes or your body just isn't working right, to feel in touch with the child in all of us who would rather run than talk, eat or sleep, but getting in touch with that joyous, active soul is, I believe, my first responsibility as someone who is trying to become healthy and fit. My bike usually gives me the best and quickest access to that soul, and I find myself longing to be out on it even when I can barely breathe. Those visions that I have of myself flying over the pavement are very real and feel incredibly important in this process of transforming myself. If I can feel it, truly feel it, I can be it. And so when the doubts hit, as they did yesterday, I have to learn to let them wash over me and dissipate into the ether.

Who the hell do I think I am?

I'm a fat lady on a bike and don't you forget it!

A hui hou.

The Passing of Passover

2010-04-07T22:00:00.000-04:00

The passing of Passover, with its dietary rules, has got me thinking again about something that I read when I first got back here from Hawaii. Last fall, I had gotten a book called Food for the Soul: Traditional Jewish Wisdom for Healthy Eating, but hadn't yet had a chance to read it, so I picked it up in the wee hours of my jet lag.

Before going on, let me interrupt myself to give a little background for those of you who aren't familiar with the kosher laws and what they mean. Observant Jews have a lot of rules of about what and how to eat: though I am not Orthodox, when Carol and I moved to our apartments in Watertown, we decided to keep our home kosher, partly as a way of connecting with our traditions and exploring what they might mean, and partly as a way to organize our life, which is spread out over three units on two separate floors of the building (hey, it sounds crazy, but it works!). Two of the main rules of keeping kosher are not eating pork or shellfish and not mixing meat and dairy products. And then, of course, there is the whole prohibition against leavened grain products (and anything that might remind you of such products) during Passover.

Truth be told, I don't find most of this a problem, despite all my various issues about deprivation. While my family did not keep kosher when I was a child, it was definitely kosher style, and I simply never got into the habit of eating pork products or shell fish, and when I tried them later on, I simply didn't like them, except for bacon, but I'm just as happy eating the vegetarian version of that. The meat and cheese thing is a little more of a sacrifice, but most of the time I don't have a problem with that either. And I quite happily trade in my bread and pasta for matzo during the week of Passover. No big deal. I just do it and don't usually feel deprived at all.

So in Food for the Soul there was a chapter about eating for good health where the author likened the act of making healthy choices about what to eat to following the laws of kashrut. She said that just as an observant Jew would not allow herself to be tempted or pressured to eat a bacon cheeseburger but simply and matter-of-factly say "no, thank you," a healthy, mindful eater could use that same, matter-of-fact discipline to decline second helpings or overlarge portions, etc.

Reading this was a revelation to me. In my efforts to combat the evil effects of deprivation and too much diet mentality thinkiing, I had been feeling that the answer for me was somehow going to involve only being extremely mindful of what I wanted and needed rather than having to impose any sort of discipline. I had already been thinking beyond that notion, as I mentioned in one of my earlier blog posts (Pathology or Punishment - Part Two), due to some gastrointestinal issues, but it wasn't until I read the passage in Food for the Soul that I really understood something about what this might really mean on a day-to-day basis. It was just a glimmer, but I get the feeling that there is something to be learned here.

Interestingly, this is the first Passover in as long as I can remember by the end of which I wasn't absolutely longing for some of the "forbidden" foods. Perhaps because I was trying to be so much more mindful of my bodily needs during the week, especially during my illness, perhaps because I was feeling so much calmer about food in general, when the holiday ended last night, I just ate some more matzo and cheese and went to sleep, ate some more matzo for breakfast this morning, and then for lunch made some salmon, boiled potatoes and spinach, all of which would have been perfectly acceptable on a Passover table. We did some shopping on the way home from an evening with grandchildren so now have "normal" food in the house, but there was really no urgency about it. Usually I'd have been longing for pizza or a doughnut or ice cream or something on the prohibited list. That seems significant also, though again, I'm not exactly sure of the specifics yet.

Have I reached some sort of turning point? Maybe. Or maybe I'm just sojourning in a calm, lovely valley before I get to the next mountain. Whatever this landscape is, I'm enjoying it.

A hui hou.

My Lifetime Movie Moment

2010-04-03T22:18:00.000-04:00

As soon as we got through the first seder, the incipient crud that was causing me problems last week turned into the full-blown respiratory infection I thought it would, and by Thursday I was in the throes of a full-blown asthma attack as well. Yesterday I went to the health center and came home with drugs and am feeling much better now. But I spent most of this glorious day not out on my bicycle, as I had hoped, but nestled in my recliner appreciating the breeze coming through the wide open window and watching television.

When I ran out of things I wanted to watch from my DV-R list, I ended up on Lifetime, the channel for women, watching Queen Sized, which purported to be a typical feel-good movie of the week kind of offering from this particular outlet. But I was feeling kind of bleah and not up for any more substantial choice and the premise was at least vaguely interesting: a fat girl (Maggie) gets nominated for homecoming queen by the very cruel popular clique as a joke and goes on to win both the contest and the day, transforming herself in the process. Little did I know that watching this made for tv movie would lead to a moment of painful, blinding insight.

Don't worry; I have no intention of relating the details of the entire plot -- if you have questions you can check out the link above. About three-quarters through the film, there is a scene between the main character's mother and her plus-sized colleague (they are both social workers), where the friend essentially calls the mother out for not being much different from the cruel, daughter-bullying popular kids at school. She says to the mother that she has basically made Maggie feel bad about herself by always focusing on her weight, even if she was doing so out of health concerns, and that was leading Maggie to feel as though nothing she did could ever be good enough. When I heard those words, I felt as though someone had stabbed a knife into my heart and I started to cry. That reaction is always a clue that I need to pay attention.

A couple of years ago, towards the beginning of this journey, my wonderful therapist/life coach was helping me see what a perfectionist, all-or-nothing thinker and merciless taskmaster I am to myself, and she asked me where I thought my extreme expectations had come from. I told her I thought they had come from myself, that I didn't believe I had been under pressure from my parents, since my ambitions for myself were always much higher than theirs. Last year, when I reconnected with my younger sister after an estrangement of 35 years (and a lot of suppressed memories), she told me that it always seemed to her as though they did put a lot of pressure on me, but I still couldn't reconcile that with what I did remember, which was being supported in any endeavor I undertook and valued for my many academic and creative achievements.

But tonight, watching that scene on the television, what came to me in the same instant as the heart ache and tears, was that maybe the need I've always had to do more and do everything to the very best of my ability was the result of feeling that if I did enough, maybe they would stop feeling disappointed in me for not being able to control my weight or my relationship with food. Because I realized in that flash of insight that I had felt (and maybe still feel) that that one area of failure trumps all my many successes, that nothing that I do will ever be good enough unless and untill I can lose weight.

I'm still a bit dazed by this. It feels like an important piece of my personal puzzle, and one that I will be examining more in the days to come. And to think, I owe it all to Lifetime.

A hui hou.

Another Stumbling Block

2010-03-30T11:00:00.000-04:00

The first seder went very well last night, despite the lack of stuffed mushrooms. It was more than a bit chaotic, with 8 kids aged 6 or less, three of whom were under 2, and when everyone left, it looked a little like the aftermath of a hurricane, but everyone seemed to have a great time, and the food was just fine and more than enough, despite my pre-event worries. This was, of course, totally predictable. The seder starts when it starts, and at that moment whatever we have done is, by definition, enough.

Unfortunately, by the end of the evening, the background congestion in my head that I'd been dealing with all week had morphed into a burning, scratching drip at the back of my throat, which is often how colds and bronchitis start with me. I was (and am) not happy about this. It feels like another stumbling block set before the blind. Drip or not, I still have matzo balls to make as well as another round of mushroom-almond pate. I'm waiting patiently for the impetus to come to me, but given how under the weather I feel (and the weather today is pretty low -- gloomy, unrelenting rain), I'm not sure it ever will. Which means I will have to muster up a reserve from somewhere -- we have 16 more guests coming tonight. And I have to lead the singing.

As long as I've been working on all this inner peace, non-striving stuff, I still have a problem with what to do when physical challenge meets immutable deadline. Something clearly has to give. I can't exactly postpone what is, after all, a time-anchored holiday just because I don't feel well (though obviously, if I were seriously ill, we would have to cancel). On the other hand, I've been trying very hard not to push myself to do things at moments when my whole being is in revolt against them.

I suppose the answer is, as always, patience and trust. I may not feel like getting out of my rocking chair right this minute and mixing up the next batch of whatever, but the chances are that sometime before the absolute last possible minute, I will. And the chances also are that if I wait until that moment of willingness arrives, I'll do a better job and enjoy it more than if I rush in there now and force myself. There's a little voice asking what I'll do if the moment never comes, but I'm trying very hard not to listen. I guess I can always force myself later, if need be. But trusting feels like the better and more compassionate option right now, and not just because I know that's the "right" way to feel.

I'll let you all know how it turns out.

A hui hou.

Food and Holidays

2010-03-28T23:03:00.000-04:00

I'm a big believer in showing love through food. Nothing gives me quite the same pleasure as having a large table filled with people I love eating what I've cooked for them.

The last few days I've been offline preparing for our two 20-person Passover seders. We always come back from Hawaii about 10 days before the first seder, which theoretically gives us time enough to reconnect with family and friends, do the shopping, supervise the cleaning and changing over of dishes (in a kosher home, two separate sets of dairy and meat dishes are required, one for the eight days of Passover, and one for the rest of the year), and doing all the cooking. This schedule works in concept, but there is always jet lag and often a cold and/or orthopedic issues to deal with, and now that we have so many grandchildren (eight and counting), there doesn't seem to be quite as much time to prepare as there used to be.

My response this year has been to cut back a few items from what has been pretty much a set menu for at least the past 12 years, and while the part of me that is trying very hard to take care of myself thinks this is a fine idea, the part of me that loves presiding at that table is struggling.

Of course, the point of the holiday is not really about the food, but about the sense of tradition and closeness that the food helps to engender. On the other hand, the whole point of ritual and tradition is to provide a sense of security through the repetition of what is known and familiar. Which is why once I had discovered a bunch of dishes that my family (and my seder "family") liked, I stopped experimenting. I'm telling myself that the people at my table would probably prefer to have me sitting with them with a couple fewer dishes to choose from than to have the full complement and a sick, miserable host. I even believe that. And yet, part of me is feeling bad for not living up to my expectation of myself, not to mention what those others have come to expect.

So, I hereby declare that whatever may or may not appear on the table tomorrow and Tuesday nights, I love you all just as much as ever, if not more, and am doing my best to get healthier so that next year or the year after all those dishes may reappear at our seders and be enjoyed for many years to come.

A zisn, koshern pesakh (a sweet, kosher Passover) to all who celebrate the holiday.

A hui hou.

Going With the Flow

2010-03-23T21:25:00.000-04:00

Thanks to everyone who responded to yesterday's cri de coeur. I was feeling pretty low when I posted that, and it was wonderful to read all your words of wisdom and perspective. I set up the humidifier in the bedroom last night, and that also made a huge difference. So, despite today's continued gloom and cold, I am feeling much better.

One of the reasons for my improved outlook is that last night, after tossing and turning miserably for an hour at 10pm, I finally decided just to give in to what my body was demanding, which was to get out of bed, and not try to force myself into what was obviously an uncongenial schedule. I also very consciously made the decision to eat, even though at the time I decided I wasn't entirely sure whether I was physically hungry or just miserable enough to want the quick comfort. As it turned out, I think I was probably hungry, because I ate only a large snack and didn't go after everything in the kitchen. Which is not to say that I didn't get great comfort from the food as well. I wish it weren't such an effective "drug."

Then, this morning, I let myself sleep until 9:30, and lay meditatively in bed for another half hour, allowing myself to come gradually to alertness. I think that made a huge difference in my ability to function the rest of the day, and I actually got a lot done. I planned my tasks for the rest of the week until the first Passover seder, made shopping lists for the various stores I need to visit, and did the first round of shopping (with Carol's help, of course). Life feels much calmer again, and if I need to be baking matzo kugel in the middle of the night, so be it.

How many times do I have to experience it before I learn the lesson that forcing things never works for me? I'm not used to thinking of myself as a slow learner, but this particular insight keeps drifting elusively back into the ether.

At least I do keep learning it again, and always a little bit faster.

A hui hou.

Reflections on a Gray Day

2010-03-22T12:49:00.000-04:00

Well, the glow of homecoming is gone, the sun is gone, the warmth is gone, but the jet lag persists, made worse by the swift deterioration of my respiratory system in the dry New England air. Under these circumstances, I find my joie de vivre to be somewhat elusive. With the need to focus on Passover preparations increasing by the hour (our two large seders are happening next Monday and Tuesday), it's becoming increasingly difficult for me to stay grounded and calm.

So, what do I do? Do I sleep by day and work by night? Do I sleep by day and sleep by night? Do I try to coax (urge/force) my body into sleeping and being hungry in Eastern Daylight time or continue to let the change evolve naturally, on the assumption that it will, eventually, happen? Do I freak out? Do I close my eyes and pretend I'm somewhere else? If I do that, will it work?

Today I have no answers, no insights. If any of you reading this have any advice or words of encouragement, I'd love to hear them.

Mindful Jet Lag

2010-03-20T17:50:00.000-04:00

We left Hawaii at 10pm Wednesday night, arriving in Boston at 4pm the next day, though really it was 10am body time, with half a day vanished into the ether. The transition seems particularly more difficult now that Daylight Savings Time starts so early, as the six-hour time loss seems significantly more challenging to accommodate than a five-hour loss. This year, being generally in a more mindful state of being, and healthier (watch as I spit three times) than usual, I'm finding the experience of being out of kilter extremely interesting.

Usually, the only thing I notice about being back in Eastern time is that I can't fall asleep till 3 or 4 in the morning, which would be bedtime in Hawaii. I always try to get up at a reasonable hour, on the assumption that that will help me adjust, so I'm tired a lot, but I can't ever seem to get to sleep at a reasonable time for the first week or so that I'm back here. This year, I decided to go more with the flow of my body's cues. I'm not sure it's a better way to handle the jet lag, but it's certainly interesting.

For one thing, I'm paying attention to when I feel like sleeping and, most of the time, giving myself permission to sleep then. This means a nap or two during the day, but it also means that I'm going to bed before midnight, which is much closer to a normal bedtime, and waking at close to my usual time. Unfortunately, it also means that there isn't more than an hour in the early afternoon when I have any energy at all, but I'm hopeful that that will pass in another day or two.

The second really interesting thing is that I'm conscious of being ravenous a lot, often at what would have been meal times in Hawaii -- this means wanting to have what amounts to another dinner at about 10pm. I'm feeding myself carefully in response to this hunger, not freaking out about it. If I feel like eating a bit more than usual, I'm eating a bit more, confident that it is a response to a bodily cue and not either emotionally triggered or an inappropriate response to being tired (remember how I said I was letting myself sleep when I felt like it? This is why.).

The third aspect to all of this is that I am finding very little energy for riding my bike. I went out yesterday for 20 minutes and felt good about that, though it felt like peddling through molasses. Today, I haven't been able to bring myself to get out there, as much as I want to, and as much as I want to take advantage of 70 degree weather, which will gone by tomorrow. I've had more trouble giving myself permission to choose sleep over biking than anything else, but I think I've finally started to trust that my desire to be active is so strong that when I can, I will. Maybe tomorrow, maybe this evening, maybe not until after the Passover frenzy of the coming week, but I'll know the feeling when it comes and respond to it with joy and alacrity.

These are all big successes for me, and big changes from previous years. I've been reading some other fitness and weight loss blogs during the past week, and I have been interested to note how many of the authors are rather narrowly focused on pounds, clothing size, or very specific exercise goals. I am SO not interested in any of that, at this point in my journey. For me, it's all about making small changes that have a huge effect on my state of being, particularly on my sense of balance in the world, what the Hawaiians call pono. The doctor that I see when I'm on the Big Island has her office in a medical office complex called Hale Ola Pono, which can be translated as House of Balanced Life or Building for Balanced Health. I love the idea of looking at health and fitness in that way and acknowledging that it's never just about my body or just about my mental state.

Now it's off to an early dinner and more healing sleep.

A hui hou.

Eating Scary Foods

2010-03-15T18:18:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite classes at Green Mountain is "Eating Scary Foods." I remember so vividly how I felt when I first saw it on the schedule, during my very first day of my very first trip. It was offered for people not in their first week, and I thought to myself, "I hope they offer that again, because I really, really need it."

On the phone to Carol that night, when I mentioned that I'd seen the class title and hoped it would come around again during my month there, I discovered one of the eternal, absolute dicotomies in life. There are two kinds of people in the world: those who think "scary foods" are things like snakes and insects (like Carol), and those (like me and all the other women who go to Green Mountain) who know that "scary foods" are those comestibles which call out to you from behind closed refrigerator and cabinet doors, the foods that you are afraid to start eating because you are sure that you will never stop, the foods of which you can never get enough.

I don't want to give away any trade secrets or spoil the class for anyone who plans to take it, but I will say that it involves interacting with such foods mindfully at a time when you are not hungry, and really, truly experiencing them, for better or worse. And the way to take the power of those foods away is to give yourself permission to eat them.

During that first trip, I knew that ice cream was the scariest food in my life, and part of the eating plan I went home with was including a serving of ice cream with my dinner each night. I bought a cute little bowl that held just half a cup (knowing that I could have more if I wanted), got my favorite flavors of the best ice cream and proceeded to enjoy ice cream every single night. After a few months, I realized one day that I hadn't had ice cream for over a week, and didn't really want it any more. The ice cream was no longer scary. Now, I enjoy it sometimes, but always and effortlessly in "normal" portions and can go for months without the urge.

There were other foods that shriek and hiss and call out in the night, and though I tried the daily dose approach with them, I was never as successful as I had been with the ice cream. During a subsequent stay at Green Mountain, I realized that though I thought I was giving myself permission to eat those things, I had gotten all rigid and judgmental again. In a class called "Exploring Normal Eating," I learned about Intuitive Eating by Tribole and Resch, and immediately knew that I had to delve into this issue further, as I discussed in my blog post Pathology or Punishment, Part Two.

So, I made my list of foods that beckoned and foods I felt I'd never get enough of and began to work my way through it. Never mind the foods being scary -- this process was terrifying, as I knew from my reading that it could lead, in the short term, to gaining more weight, and there was always the possibility that I would discover a desire for something which would actually never be satisfied. But I trusted the program and trusted myself and began that next stage of my journey.

Interestingly, the food I decided to start with was not one that I regularly craved, but the one with probably the most emotional power for me -- halvah. Specifically, bulk marble halvah from the local kosher grocer. For those of you unfamiliar with this delicacy, it is an incredibly rich, uniquely flavored, nut-based confection that we had had only on very special occasions when I was a child, primarily because it was considered fattening beyond all other desserts. I remember my father being the keeper of the halvah, unwrapping the white deli paper and doling out thin slivers of the treat to all of us. I also remember feeling as though I would never be allowed to have as much as I wanted.

One of the tenets of all the programs that teach overcoming overeating through permission is that once you've decided to neutralize the power of a food, you need to have on hand several times as much food as you could ever physically consume in a sitting. The rationale is that you need to be able to feel that you can absolutely have as much as you want without being limited by running out, and as soon as you eat some, you have to replace it so it will be abundantly available the next time you want it. If you want to have it for breakfast, lunch and dinner, you should have it at all those meals and eat it mindfully, sensuously and, most important, openly. So I bought a couple of pounds of marble halvah and proceeded to have it whenever I wanted, usually eating a lot more than the slivers I remember from my youth, but not nearly as much, at a single sitting, as I feared. I began that process in early November and brought three packages with me to Hawaii two months later, just so they would be there if I needed them (as you can imagine, halvah is not big on the Big Island). And I threw them out, untouched, when we packed up to leave that April.

There were other foods and other revelations, but they will have to wait till my next post.

A hui hou.

Seasons

2010-03-14T15:32:00.000-04:00

People who grow up in areas where there are obvious distinctions between winter and summer and then move to places without them often complain that they miss the seasons. This suggests that if you don't have snow and sweltering heat, blazing foliage and a transition from sticks to buds, there are no variations by season.

The fact is, if you live in a temperate or tropical clime and pay attention, there is quite a bit of variation by season and even by day in aspects of climate and flora other than gross weather patterns. Native Hawaiians have a traditional moon calendar that outlines subtle changes based on moon phase over the course of a month. The ocean is very different from day to day, depending on storms on the other side of the world, and there are definite seasonal distinctions in likelihood of high surf depending on what part of the island you are on. And though plants in general flourish here all year long, there are definite growing seasons for individual plants: our breadfruit tree offers ripe fruit starting in March, while our Tahitian limes are falling off the tree when we arrive in January, and pineapples ripen only in June. And I feel sad that yellow ginger blossoms appear all over only at a time when we are usually not here to see them in the fall.

Focusing only on the big picture, the differences in temperature and precipitation, and missing all those smaller yet very present indications of seasonality remind me of viewing success and failure only in absolute terms, in the attaining or not achieving of ultimate goals. In both instances, all or nothing thinking keeps one from noticing and enjoying what is actually going on.

The past few days, we have started packing up our house in preparation for leaving for Massachusetts on Wednesday. This process always promotes a valedictory mood in me, an urge to reflect on and evaluate my time here and contemplate the transition back to our mainland life. Most years, these reflections are kind of painful, as I measure what I have accomplished against what I had planned and hoped to do and discover how much I have not done. This year, for a lot of reasons, I have been reveling in what a great time of growth this winter has been for me and how much I have enjoyed it, and I am looking forward to staying in this state of being even while changing geographic states.

When I arrived here in January, I was still suffering significant deficits in both body and concentration from my bout this past fall with H1N1 and pneumonia. Though I was obviously much better than when I first got out of the hospital, I was still unable to accomplish more than one focused task per day, whether that was physical or mental. I could go shopping for groceries or I could cook dinner; I could have a conference call or I could go for a bike ride. I noticed this past week that I was able to be productive for a full 8-hour day again, and could do it several days in a row before needing to back off and recharge. Similarly, when I first got on my bike, I could ride for about 10 minutes before butt pain and jelly legs set in, and now I can go happily for 30-35 minutes. And when I first made it to the end of the road, back in January, I had to shift down to the lowest gear on my middle gear ring (2-1) to struggle up the little slope just before I turn around; this morning, without even thinking about it, I got up it at pretty close to my normal cruising gear (2-4). And yesterday I was able to go for the first time up the first hill at the other end of the road -- and I did it in gear 2-2!

These felt like huge accomplishments to me, like the first glimmering of spring after a miserable winter, though in the great scheme of things they are probably more like subtle variations in wave height or wind direction. I believe that my enjoyment and appreciation of them will help me keep going and growing as I make the transition back to New England.

A hui hou.

... Or Is It Me?

2010-03-10T20:09:00.000-05:00

Everyone who either is or spends time with a menopausal woman knows the classic question, "Is it hot in here, or is it me?" While this query can be viewed as a somewhat humorous response to the vagaries of hormonal fluctuation, it can also be seen as a symptom of how much we, especially women, mistrust the cues that our bodies send us.

A few days ago, I posted on Facebook that I during my morning bike ride, it had felt like I was riding into the wind in both directions, and a friend responded with what he called "The laws of wind and bicycles:

1. The wind is always in your face.
2. When the wind is at your back, you think you are strong, not that the wind is at the back.
3. Be strong."

(Thanks, Bob!) I thought that this was funny and true, kind of like the "is it hot or is it me" question. But this morning as I was riding down my road with the wind definitely in my face in one direction and at my back in the other, I suddenly realized that for me, and perhaps for others, that second "law" was inside out. I tend to believe that when the wind is in my face, or the pavement runs slightly but imperceptibly uphill, so that I am going slower than my usual speed, there is something wrong with me. I remember one ride on the Minuteman Trail in Bedford, where the start of the trail is a very long, very slight slope, when I spent the first 20 minutes worrying that I was coming down with something or devolving into laziness, until the slope evened out and my bike computer was again registering 10 mph. Crisis over.

One would think that having to work a little harder to maintain speed (or to keep cool during a hot flash) would be a totally neutral occurrence. Winds and slopes (and hot flashes) happen; they are an immutable fact of our physical environment and not the result of divine punishment or moral turpitude. But somehow, my inner judge manages to twist things around so that a physical circumstance becomes a critical comment on my value as a human being.

As I felt the wind in my face, I immediately felt the truth of this observation about myself, but I felt a bit puzzled as well. If you had asked me a few years ago whether I had any self esteem issues, I would have swiftly and definitively replied in the negative. Despite being fat my whole adult life, I had never let my size or how I felt about it stop me from doing anything I really wanted to do, either physically or intellectually. I had never been afraid of intimacy, nor did I refuse to go swimming or to do any other activity that required wearing skimpy clothing. I have always felt that I could do or achieve anything I put my mind to (except losing weight!), and that people would accept me on my own terms if I accepted myself. So the discovery of the inner judge, who is neither forgiving nor compassionate, was a bit of a shock.

An inner judge is not at all helpful -- quite the contrary, in fact. Criticism tends to make our spirits shrivel and clench, a position in which it is very hard to do anything but shrivel and clench. I'd much rather have an inner therapist, who would ask "How do you feel about that?" instead of criticizing. In the work I've been doing with my outer therapist, I think I've been getting closer to banishing the judge and inviting in the therapist. But best of all would be to have an inner mommy, who would say "Good try," and "You'll be able to do a little better another time."

Having an inner mommy is having the ability to self-soothe, which is what I am very busy exploring right now. If I could do that, I wouldn't have to use food to comfort myself. I could unclench and unfurl, open-hearted and ready to take in whatever life threw my way and learn from it or let it go. I'm not quite there yet, but I'm getting closer all the time. And next time the going gets a little hard, I'm going to chalk it up to the wind in my face and switch to a lower gear.

A hui hou.

Patience

2010-03-09T02:06:00.000-05:00

I've always been a very patient person. I'm happy to read the same book to my grandchildren 10 times in a row or listen to elderly people's stories a zillion times. Back in my days on the Carbohydrate Addicts' Diet (CAD) in the mid-1990s, I earned the reputation on a CAD listserv as being an unwavering advocate of patience. My mantra back then was "You can only control what you put in your mouth; you can't control what your body does with it," brought out largely in response to people who didn't lose any pounds for a few days and were hysterical about being on a plateau. If I wrote that once, I wrote it a hundred times to different people in the group. I even believed it. I had faith that if I worked the program, everything would come around eventually.

Unfortunately, that didn't happen. I had a 2-year plateau, probably caused by the shift in metabolism that seems to come with middle age, and despite (or perhaps because of) my increasing restriction of what I ate, I never lost another pound and finally gave up in despair.

Fast forward to September, 2005 when I first arrived at Green Mountain, feeling desperate to get healthy and promising myself that if seemed like their program would be a good fit for me, I'd hang in there with it as long as it took and keep coming back till I reached my goal. It was and I have, but I confess to having some dark moments along the way.

The Green Mountain program is a non-dieting approach to weight management, using techniques of mindfulness to do away with most of the causes of overeating, encouraging the rediscovery of the person we all had inside us who would rather run around than eat, exploring negative attitudes that affect body image and self esteem, and teaching stress management strategies to make it possible to do everything else. I believe wholeheartedly that the program works and is right for me, and in fact my whole life has changed radically since I began it, but I haven't lost any weight, per se. Not permanently, anyway.

As you can imagine, this is occasionally very frustrating.

I have a lot of baggage around deprivation and restriction, and a long history of self-comforting with food. And that's all on top of a bunch of emotional issues that were getting in my way and have now been dealt with successfully. So it isn't surprising that it's taking me a while to get to the point where I can make healthy choices with ease and lose fat. But it is, occasionally, very frustrating.

One afternoon last week I immersed myself in back issues of the Nutrition Action Health Letter, a publication of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which a paddling buddy of my wife, Carol, had sent over to me. This friend has found great relief from chronic pain by altering her diet in various ways, and when she heard that I had developed gout, she started sending home various resources for me to explore. This particular newsletter was especially interesting and informative, and had good scientific evidence to back up the claims in its articles, and a number of members of its advisory board are epidemiologists I used to work with at Harvard Medical School in my research associate days. So it was a very interesting afternoon, but by the end of it, I had worked myself into a state of considerable agitation.

The message, hammered home in article after article, is that the extra weight I carry is doing me serious harm. This isn't news, of course, but it was difficult and disturbing to read it over and over again, along with various restrictions and limitations and recommendations about what a person should eat and avoid eating in order to be healthy. I was left with a sense of urgency that was almost enough to throw me off course. Almost.

Ten years ago, it was a lot easier to be patient. I didn't have high blood pressure; I didn't have gout; I wasn't on medicine to optimize my cholesterol profile; and my orthopedic problems were much more intermittent. I was also 10 years younger and not feeling my mortality quite so much. And, quite honestly, in many ways my life wasn't nearly so interesting and satisfying as it is now -- I have so much more to lose by not being more fit.

Maybe I could "go on a diet" and lose a bunch of pounds much more quickly. I've certainly done it before. But I don't want to do it again. I especially don't want to lose pounds only to regain them. Again. I want to fix whatever is out of balance in me so that I can get out of the rut I've been in most of my life. And to do that, I have to trust that the work I am doing now will get me to where I need to be.

So I took a few deep breaths and reminded myself that I am walking the path I need to be on. I'm walking it slowly and carefully, as befits someone of my age and physical condition, and I'm taking the time to observe and appreciate everything that I pass by on my way. And I remember that I am, after all, a very patient person.

A hui hou.

Mindful Biking

2010-03-07T02:04:00.000-05:00

The past couple of days I've been reading a lot about mindfulness, specifically as it relates to dealing with overeating. Living in the moment is something of a cliche, but nevertheless, being truly mindful and paying attention to each moment as it goes by seems to be one of those secrets of the universe that can make just about anything better. That lesson was among the earliest I learned at Green Mountain, as it forms the foundation of their entire approach to getting and staying healthy, but while I have made great strides in being more mindful, I clearly have much to learn.

Two books that I just started reading are promising to be very helpful in this next stage of my journey. The first, Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time, has a lot of very practical advice and exercises that I plan to use (and will no doubt write about) in the weeks to come. I am particularly intrigued by the idea of setting up a "cravings chair" to sit in comfortably when the urge to eat when I'm not hungry hits. The second book, 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food, is a bit more philosophical but also seems to have quite a few practical exercises that might help. I spent much of the past 48 hours wandering through their pages, and as a result was feeling in a particularly mindful state when I went out this morning for a bike ride.

I have also been thinking recently about why I find biking so easy to make a priority and strength training or any other physical activity so much more difficult. I love swimming and always have, since I was very young, and the time I was most fit in my entire life was probably the period, in my late 20's, when I swam for 45 minutes 5 mornings a week. Yet somehow, during the past few years, much as I enjoy being in the pool, I haven't yet been able to get back into enjoying doing laps, even though that would be a great way both to exercise and to achieve a meditative state. Similarly, I love the feeling of getting stronger and even of the sweat on my arms when I lift free weights, but I don't seem to be able, right now, to translate that into any enthusiasm for doing strength training regularly, despite having done so religiously for three years.

But though in some ways, biking is the most intensive of the activities that I do, cardiovascularly speaking, it's the one I long for, the one I visualize myself doing when I'm ill and work at systematically when I'm well. It seemed to me, as I headed for the garage this morning in my heightened state of mindfulness, that spending some energy trying to understand why might be helpful to me. So I strapped on my helmet, mounted up and set out to notice as much as I could about how I felt and what I experienced as I pedaled up and down the road.

The first thing I noticed was that I started to smile immediately. I think the physical feeling of being on a bike reminds me of being a joyous, curious, energetic little girl, who not only used to ride all the time, but jumped off swings and played softball and loved running around the back yard playing badminton and catch with her daddy. It also fills me with a sense of power and strength, since I know I can fly through the world with the greatest of ease. This is in stark contrast, these days, to how little and how slowly I can move on foot. When I ride my bike, I can cover miles and miles, and really feel that I am going somewhere. It's incredibly liberating.

The next thing I noticed was how much I love the feeling of the air rushing past my face as I ride. Even when the weather is hot and humid, I'm pretty much always comfortable when I'm actually riding because of that air movement. But the sensation of air moving against my skin was so sensuous today, it was as pleasurable as drinking cool, pure water when I'm thirsty. I even enjoyed the wind, which was pretty strong at times, to the point where I almost felt like I was pedaling in place for a moment or two. On one section of the road, where there are no houses and very few trees, I was conscious of the heat radiating up from the pavement, even so early in the morning. My legs felt the heat while my head and shoulders were surrounded by the cool wind; it was an intense, interesting and enjoyable sensation.

Along with the air rushing past, there are fragrances drifting by as I ride. Here in Hawaii, I can smell tiare (Tahitian gardenia), plumeria, and lots of wonderful greenery that I can't yet distinguish, along with bacon and coffee wafting from the houses I pass. And, of course, there are all the morning sounds: cardinals, doves, and francolins; leaf blowers and lawn mowers; the clicking of a dog's paws as it trots past; the flapping of a runner's sneakers. I noticed also how much I enjoy exchanging smiles, waves and greetings with the other folks walking, skating, running and biking up and down the road with me; there is a sense of shared pleasure that seems to vibrate the air between us as we pass each other, and an appreciation of the beautiful day.

I love feeling my leg muscles working. I love looking at all the gardens that I pass, and the houses, and the signs of what people are doing in and around them. I love looking beyond the houses to the mountains on one side and the ocean on the other; back in Boston, I often ride next to the Charles River, which offers me a similar experience of being in nature in a way that I find deeply satisfying. This morning I was very aware of the creaking and clicking of my bike as I rode, comforting sounds that I associate with the very pleasant work of pushing the pedals.

As I was noticing all of those sensations and observations, I realized that I don't get to stop and look at the things and places I'm passing in detail, as I can and do when I walk. I remembered one previous winter when I walked up and down the road almost every day watching the Kamehameha caterpillars (similar to Monarchs) build their cocoons, which are black, silver and gold and look like jewelry, in the crown flower bushes. Even though I couldn't relive that experience as I rode along, my memory allowed me to add it as an overlay to the other sights, sounds and smells of the morning.

It was a wonderful ride.

I don't yet have an answer to why I love biking so much and do it so easily and why engaging in those other activities remains so much a challenge. But perhaps if I can bring that same mindfulness and curiousity to swimming, strength training, and any other physical pursuits in which I may engage, those activities will become less of a challenge and more of a pleasure.

A hui hou.

Pathology or Punishment? - Part Two

2010-03-05T21:31:00.000-05:00

Two summers ago, I woke up in the middle of the night in the throes of a pretty severe bacterial infection in my gut. I spent several weeks eating nothing but rice, white toast, apple juice, broth, and a little boiled chicken, and several more avoiding all dietary fiber. This meant no fruit, no sweet corn, no cantaloup, no tomatoes, or any of the other delights of summer.

This pestilence was visited upon me in the middle of a process of exploring intuitive eating, which involved allowing myself to eat foods that I had not allowed myself to eat "out loud" for decades because they were "bad" for me. Of course, I had guiltily eaten most of them anyway, but one of the most important tenets of the Green Mountain program is giving yourself permission to eat anything, so long as you enjoy it mindfully and stop when you are no longer hungry. I read Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, Overcoming Overeating by Jane R. Hirschmann and Carol H. Munter, and all of Geneen Roth's books, and was finding the process incredibly liberating.

Then the infection hit, and I was thrown into a situation that demanded that I move beyond being merely mindful of what I ate to being vigilantly restrictive in order to avoid extremely unpleasant consequences. In essence, I was eating the opposite of how I had been learning to eat: no fruits or vegetables, no whole grains, no dairy of any sort, no legumes. And my permission to eat previously forbidden foods was rescinded again, at least temporarily. It was disconcerting, and I confess that there were quite a few moments (particularly as my whole family chowed down on sweet corn and watermelon) when it really felt as though I were being punished.

One thing I've learned about myself in the past four years is that I don't do well when I feel I'm being deprived. And yet during my illness and recovery, if I didn't deprive myself of most of the foods I enjoy, I would be doing myself significant and immediate harm. A conundrum, to be sure.

All these thoughts came back to me last week, when a couple of instances of eating more than I needed were almost immediately followed by periods of gut-wrenching discomfort and worse. To take care of myself, I simply stopped eating, upped my probiotic dose and reduced my fiber intake till things got in balance again. That felt prudent and nurturing, not punitive, and it suddenly dawned on me that this experience was what the gurus mean when they talk about choosing the healthy food option because it makes you feel good, not because it represented a food choice that was morally superior.

Wow.

I am encouraged by the thought that if I can feel that once, I can feel it again. Maybe someday. Maybe this afternoon. Another small step along my path.

A hui hou (till next time).

Pathology or Punishment?

2010-03-02T23:14:00.000-05:00

My plans to write have been waylaid, as so often happens, by some health challenges (though the tsunami evacuation that took up most of Saturday was another thing entirely), which is kind of ironic, since what I wanted to write about was exactly those challenges and how I respond to them.

For most of my life, the weakest systems in my body have been respiratory and gastrointestinal. Whenever I get too stressed out, or a major stressful period ends, and sometimes for no apparent reason, one of those things goes wrong. Add to that my various orthopedic issues, all stemming from a torn knee cartilage 30 years ago, and most recently, gout, not to mention the various aches and pains of aging, and the situation is ripe for a misreading.

I confess, I spent a good many years feeling as though my body was my enemy, and I hated it for that. It felt that all of these recurring challenges were a deliberate punishment from an uncaring Providence. Crazy as that sounds, there seem to be plenty of people who believe that AIDS, lung cancer and various other diseases are punishments visited upon their sufferers because of bad behaviors, or perhaps visited on innocent bystanders because of the sinful behavior of their neighbors. For better or worse, my feelings were not religious in origin. To me, it seemed more as though someone or something was out to get me, to trip me up and thwart my plans. In fact, it was my attitude that tripped me up, as it effectively separated me from my physical self for a long time.

Getting reintegrated was the first and perhaps the most important lesson I learned at Green Mountain 4-1/2 years ago. We had been introduced to Belleruth Naperstek's Guided Imagery for Weight Loss in a class one afternoon, and I had reacted very emotionally, which always is a sign to me that I need to further explore something, so I bought the CD. In addition to the guided imagery track, there was also a track of affirmations, which I decided to listen to one morning as I got dressed. My thought was that affirmations would be a cheerful way to start the day.

Oy. Was I mistaken.

Unlike the "today is the first day of the rest of your life" genre that I was expecting, these affirmations were actually designed to reprogram negative self talk, and most of them seemed to be about how my body is my oldest friend and most constant companion and how I need to take care of it, etc.

Well, I started to cry within 15 seconds of starting to play the track and by the end was sobbing uncontrollably. That felt like an important clue, indeed, and I've made great strides in feeling more gratitude and less resentment towards my body, focusing more on what I can do physically, and less than what I can't. Insofar as I succeed, I am calmer and much more productive in my life.

There do remain some issues, particular relating to food and GI disturbances, but I will save them for my next post.

"I'm On a Diet of Love"

2010-02-24T15:59:00.000-05:00

I collect 78rpm records, specifically Yiddish and Hawaiian records, but part of that work is reviewing general auction lists, and I take great delight in some of the song titles I encounter there from the 1920's-1940's. Today my attention was caught by "I'm On a Diet of Love," a fox trot recorded by George Olson in 1929.

Let me begin my musings with a disclaimer. Green Mountain at Fox Run teaches a non-diet approach to weight management. By discussing this song title, I am NOT advocating any sort of "diet" -- heaven forfend. I have NOT gone back over to the dark side!

In fact, this song uses "diet" in its original sense of "habitual nourishment" and includes lines such as, "Breakfast kisses by the bunch, sweet as raisins for your lunch." This is certainly not about deprivation; in fact, it is about the very opposite of emotional eating. (Though the song does play on the other definition of diet. The next line is "One thing that makes it great, you can eat more than your share, it won't affect your weight.")

Much has been written on all the reasons people eat that aren't physical hunger: to stuff down feelings, to comfort, to fill an emotional or spiritual emptiness, to feel in control, to reward oneself for a job well done, to console oneself for an opportunity lost, etc. etc. I've experienced them all, at various times in my life. I think that a lot of my life-long difficulties with weight management were the result, first, of seeing my mother use food in all the ways I just listed and second, of using food to stuff down my grief after she died when I was 13 and not allowed, encouraged or helped to mourn her. It took a round of therapy to get past that one. Later, I also stuffed down feelings of anger and betrayal after being disowned by my father and stepmother. I was finally able to exorcise that demon during one of my visits to Green Mountain. I've used food as a buffer against the shame and hurt of rejection, the frustration of dealing with the fallout from having a partner with undiagnosed attention-deficit disorder, and countless slings and arrows that have flown my way during the course of living a fairly interesting life. I've been working hard to deal with all of those issues in ways that don't involve eating when I'm not hungry, with some considerable success.

Yet here I am, grappling on a daily basis with strong compulsions to put food in my mouth when I don't need it for energy.

My life is full and fortunate; I am much loved and appreciated by my wife, my family, my friends and my colleagues, and I have a list of passions that I am able to pursue with much greater ease than most of the people I know. Probing into the nooks and crannies of my mind, heart and spirit, I find no hidden voids, no cluttered closets needing attention. So what exactly is going on?

I've been thinking about this question and meditating on it and discussing it in counseling sessions for a few weeks now, and I think the problem is that I need to be on a diet of love, or at least of connection. My tendency, when things aren't going so well, is to turn inward, go back into my shell, circle the wagons, and every other metaphor that paints a picture of willful isolation. And that isolation feeds on itself; the more cut off I am, the worse I feel and the less likely to reach out to connect with a warm hand that can help pull me out of the hole I've dug for myself. Recognizing that tendency in myself was one of the reasons I decided to start this blog. It means more to me than I can express to know that people from all the corners of my life are reading my words, responding to my feelings and experiences and reaching back to me with love.

To change metaphors: Yesterday, Carol and I went to Auntie Marjie Spenser's Advanced Ukulele Class at www.tutushouse.org in Waimea, as we usually do on Tuesday morning, and Auntie Marjie began by telling us that, to put it simply, she loves and needs her students. "I think of you, I see your faces, and each one of you is a rose in my heart," she said. "I love to spend time in that garden."

Personally, I prefer the tiare (Tahitian gardenia) to the rose. You are all tiare in my heart, and I need to spend time in that garden.

Momona, Zaftig or Fat?

2010-02-22T16:29:00.000-05:00

This weekend I hosted a meeting/retreat for the board of the Mohala Hou Foundation, on which I am privileged to serve. One of our tasks was to review a video about Aloha Music Camp, which is one of our major programs and a place where people from all over can come to Hawaii and experience not only the arts and culture of the islands, but that ineffable gift that is the Aloha Spirit. In the course of our discussion about the film, someone brought up the point about wanting to use images of some very large people dancing hula, even if they might be somewhat off-putting to potential campers. That got me thinking about the place that being in Hawaii has played in dealing with my own feelings of shame and self-loathing about my body. And that got me thinking about the words we use and the power they have over us.

I am very fortunate in that the two non-mainstream cultures I know best are both much less narrow about body size and beauty than the Western norm. Here in North America we call people fat, but that word is not permitted to be the simple, neutral descriptor that it actually is. In contrast, one of the Yiddish words to describe a curvy, larger than "normal" woman is zaftig, which literally means "juicy." The images that spring to mind are, on the one hand, the juices that run from a ripe, delicious piece of fruit or the juices that drip from a nicely marbled piece of meat roasting on a rotisserie -- both, I think, positive images, as the juiciness is a quality that makes each of those foods more delicious and desirable.

In Hawaiian, there is an even more positive word: momona. It means, literally, "fat," but more in the sense "fat of the land," and is often translated as "rich" or "fertile." It can also have the sense of culinary richness, that quality in food that makes you smack your lips and feel satisfied, and if you add the prefix "ho'o," which means to make something become whatever word you add it to, ho'omomona means "to sweeten." These are all very positive qualities, and if you call a person momona, it is definitely not an insult.

A few years ago I was studying Hawaiian using a wonderful book, Ka Lei Ha'aheo by Alberta Pualani Hopkins, and at the end of the third lesson came across the following passage, which astonished and delighted me:

In the first two lessons you have learned the words u'i (handsome, beautiful) and momona (fat, sweet, fertile). But what makes a person handsome or beautiful to an English speaker's eyes might not be the same as being u'i to a Hawaiian's eyes. In the same way, fat and momona may refer to different weights, depending on the cultural context. Someone who is fat in a haole [Caucasian] setting may not be considered momona in a Hawaiian community. Beyond that, whether it is good or bad to be fat or momona also depends on cultural values. It is "bad" to be fat in a haole world, but to be momona in a Hawaiian world is a desirable quality. (p. 17)

Here in the islands, momona people dance hula, are admired as beautiful and attractive, and dress in ways that are comfortable and appropriate for the climate even if it means exposing parts of their bodies that they would be humiliated for exposing in a mainstream American context. They give themselves permission, as I said in my last post, to live. When we first started coming to the islands, in 1988, I was often in that weird state of magical thinking where I believed that if I dressed in a certain way, no one would notice my size. Being here and seeing those wonderfully momona local people walking proudly through their lives helped bring me back to a much more compassionate and livable reality.

As Popeye says, I yam what I yam, and what I yam is fat, zaftig and momona.

Shame and Permission

2010-02-19T02:51:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking about shame a lot today, after a Facebook friend linked to an article about discrimination against fat people by airlines. The author wrote about feeling not only embarrassed, but humiliated and ashamed, for taking up more than his share of space on a plane. I've certainly experienced my share of feeling those emotions, but I think the distinctions among them are important to consider.

Embarrassment arises, I think, from the sense of having one's shortcomings obviously displayed in public. We are embarrassed when we belch or sneeze during a quiet moment, when we drop food on our bosom (my own personal nemesis), when we need a seatbelt extender, when we trip, and the like. Humiliation comes, generally, from someone else's lack of compassion and empathy. We feel humiliated when someone else points out our shortcomings, often in public and with malicious intent. Bullies know all about humiliation. Both of those emotions are real and unpleasant, but in my opinion, they can't inflict nearly as much damage as shame.

Shame is, at least in this context, about not feeling entitled to do whatever it is one feels ashamed about, or even to exist. In my various times at Green Mountain, I've met many women who feel too much shame to allow themselves to dance or go swimming or enjoy any activity that would require them to expose themselves physically, even though most of us there have similar issues to deal with. The kicker is that many of those women are often what the world would consider "normal" size. And it isn't just weight that makes people feel shame; many of us have other things that make us feel we have no right to enjoy life.

What's even worse is that shame often drives us to do things in secret. Thought the things we feel shame about might be obvious for all to see, the behaviors that result often take place in the dark, or when we are alone, or when we are alone in the dark. I've struggled for years with secret, nighttime eating, an act of which I have been profoundly ashamed. Sure, part of the secrecy was a kind of denial, maybe even a guilty kind of pleasure. But I think it mostly stemmed from my feeling, very deep inside, that I didn't have the right to feed myself well. Part of the healing process for me has been trying to keep eating out in the open, because whatever my size, I have a right to nurture myself and take pleasure in the food I choose to eat. Just as I am entitled to be comfortable when I ride my bike, even if it means wearing clinging bike gear that may not be wonderfully flattering but prevents chafing and blisters. And I have the right to dance my fool head off, even if that means shaking the rafters of the house.

It's all about giving ourselves permission to be who we are and live our lives as safely, comfortably and joyously as possible.

One of Those Days

2010-02-17T16:09:00.000-05:00

One of the things I've had to grapple with increasingly lately is my inability to make things happen the way I think they ought. For the past couple of years in particular I have been trying to make peace with listening to my body and accepting my limitations. This was hard enough when it involved only physical limitations, but has gotten even harder since this fall, when I was felled by a pretty serious H1N1-asthma-pneumonia combo that caused my physical limitations to affect my ability to focus and concentrate.

I spent many years clothed in cape and tights -- first as office superhero, then as band superhero. I confess, it was a role I relished. I loved everything about it: the feeling of competence, the way others could (and did) count on my to make things happen, the praise, even the exhaustion after a task was completed. As I moved into the brain fog of menopause, the cape got really tattered and the tights became riddled with snags and ladders, and a couple of years ago I had to throw them both away, leaving myself feeling incredibly naked and vulnerable. With a lot of help and support, I've been trying to find a more comfortable outfit, one that is suitable for both work and play.

Today is one of those days when all my plans have to go out the window. Last night I had visualized myself waking early and going out for a sunrise bike ride, then eating breakfast on the lanai and getting a bunch more work done before Carol and I headed into Kona to do some errands. Unfortunately, though I woke up early, I couldn't bring myself to get out of bed till after 7, and then when I did get up I immediately started coughing asthmatically. Eventually the coughing stopped, but neither meds nor coffee have yet fully cleared opened up my bronchial tubes, and I'm sitting here thinking I probably won't go into town with Carol. Unless this clears up by evening, I probably won't ride today, either, and the chances of my getting any meaningful work done (apart from this post) are also pretty slim.

Wonder of wonders, I think I'm okay with that.

I can't tell you how many hours of angst, meditation, and therapy have gone into that simple statement. But I'm finally understanding, feeling in my very core, that tomorrow is another day, and nothing that I have to do, either personal or professional, is so terribly urgent that I need to push myself beyond what feels comfortable today. I've also had ample proof, time and again, that if I try to push past and do the things I feel I have to do, I don't do them very well or very easily, but if I wait till I feel okay, they come to me as easily as they ever did.

So instead of riding my bike today, perhaps I'll strum my ukulele on the lanai and watch for whales. And enjoy feeling okay with that.

In Case You Were Wondering....

2010-02-17T02:06:00.000-05:00

I thought tonight I would write about why I chose "Fat Lady on a Bike" as the name for this blog. It was in my mind as a name long before I actually contemplated writing a blog and came to me without thought, but there are actually quite a few reasons why it resonates so profoundly for me.

First, using the word "fat", which I (like so many of us who struggle) have studiously avoided most of my life, feels like an important step to taking its power away, and the shame. I try now to think of it as a mere descriptor. When my young grandchildren comment on things that they notice about the physical world, including people's appearance, for the most part they use words as purely descriptive without any baggage or negativity attached, and I'd love to be able to do the same.

Saying "lady" rather than woman, with the circus overtones, seemed to offer a bit of whimsy and humor, both of which felt very important to me. Before I decided to go with my picture from Hub on Wheels, I actually tried to find a cartoonish clip art image of a fat lady on a bicycle. But then I thought the real thing would be a more powerful image, especially in contrast to the cartoonish title.

Why the bike? I don't plan this to be a chronicle of my various rides or even of my training regimen, so why feature it so prominently? Two reasons, really. The first is that my bike has led me back to joy in movement and activity, and to pursuing, systematically yet flexibly, a long-term fitness goal. But beyond that, my relationship with my bike is a wonderful metaphor for the way I want to live my life. If you told me to walk as fast as I could down the street, even on a flat surface, I'd resent you, and walking, and be in pain both physically and psychically before too long. But put me on the bike and point me down the road, and I function quite happily at the upper end of my target heart rate, loving the feeling of the wind in my hair and the sun or mist on my face. Being on the bike, for me, is living life with joy, working hard at what I love and savoring the delight of it.

I didn't have time to go for a ride this morning, as I woke up full of energy to do a bunch of tasks I haven't been able to manage for the past week or two, which was delightful in itself. But you can bet that I'll be out there tomorrow.

Introductions

2010-02-15T20:42:00.000-05:00

Aloha, everybody. I am writing from my winter home on the Big Island of Hawaii, where I will be till mid-March when I return to Massachusetts.

Does the world really need another weight management/physical activity/spiritual journey blog? Maybe not, but I need to write it and I'm hoping that along the way my struggles, insights and achievements may be of interest and/or help to others.

I've had weight/food issues my whole life (I'm currently 58) and done the usual merry-go-round of diets etc., to no avail. In September 2005 I took the first step on one of the most important and most interesting adventures of my life by attending, for the first time, Green Mountain at Fox Run (www.fitwoman.com), a woman's health and fitness retreat in Ludlow, Vermont. Their approach towards weight management and fitness is holistic, realistic and compassionate -- check out their web site and wonderful blog (www.aweightlifted.com) for more on the program. Though I have not lost pounds permanently yet, for a variety of reasons which I will inevitably discuss as we move along this phase of the journey, my whole life has been profoundly transformed. I continue to work the program and discover things about myself and my attitudes every day.

One of the most amazing changes was that after allowing a series of injuries and illnesses to turn me almost completely sedentary, Green Mountain transformed me back into an active woman and helped me rediscover my joy in that activity, especially biking. The picture at the top of this page was from the exhilarating time, in September 2007, that I rode in the 26-mile Hub on Wheels bike ride around Boston. I had never done anything like that before, and it was as satisfying and informative as it was difficult. I continue to grapple with both illness and orthopedic problems, but I continue to ride my bike as often as I can.

Enough for now. Thanks for joining me on this journey.