The Duck's Nest: online home of mizducky

My return to healthy weight management

I really was going great guns for a couple of years there. Took off over a hundred pounds, got a lot more mobile, a lot less bothered by pain, rediscovered the joy of dancing--and the ability to dance for nearly an hour without stopping ... So what the hell happened? And what am I doing differently?

Well, what I realized happened in hindsight was that I didn't have the right kind of support. Sure I was blogging about my weight loss program like crazy--but it was lone-ranger blogging, and almost despite my best intentions I got overly invested in being the Healthy Weight Loss Hero. It became challenging to my pride to talk, in this very public medium, about the troubles I was starting to have--not only with food, but with other areas of my life, some of which I will still refrain from going into in detail here because of matters of privacy.

What I needed--and what I was seriously lacking--was a confidential, even anonymous support venue where it was okay for me to just let down, be a mess, and vent about all sorts of things that were deeply upsetting me, both on the weight loss front and in other areas of my life. I had started off my previous weight loss adventure with something of the sort--a weight management program through my HMO. But it was a finite-duration program, and then finances forced me to drop the HMO, and that was the end of that. (Yes, as I think I mentioned earlier, financial/employment insecurity was another of the issues that began to drag me down.)

So now I was on my own with the weight thing, and everything was looking good, but two landmines started to mess with things. One was that, as I got closer to my goal weight, I began to hit the Dreaded Plateau. This is where a person doing weight loss reaches an equilibrium between their calories in via food and calories out via activity level. There was actually nothing wrong, at least on paper, with the quantity and quality of food in--in fact, cutting it much would not have been healthy. But I was running headlong at last into the ever-neglected exercise part of the picture. Yes, I could dance all night--but I only did it one night a week. Not enough.

The other landmine that got me was more insidious. It was my lizard-brain, which I had once boasted so egotistically of having tamed, sneaking up on me and almost literally biting me in the ass. See this article by James Thornton for the most succinct explanation I have yet found of the triune brain model of human consciousness and the lizard brain's role in it. The superfast capsule: while we humans have our vaunted neocortex in which we reason, plan, and set goals, it exists side by side with less rational brain structures that are the seat of emotions (the limbic system, the so-called dog brain), and of basic "primitive" survival instincts (the lizard brain). I like to say that the lizard brain is in charge of the Four Fs: fighting, feeding, flight, and ... let's call it fornication.

I love the following paragraph from Thornton's article so much I'm going to quote it here:

Have you ever wondered why you reach for that pile of hot greasy fries while you tell yourself you are on a diet? The answer is that you have three brains, and the older brains were wired to put on weight long ago when food was scarce. Your old brains are not easily controlled by your fancy new brain hardware that reads diet books."

I had believed I had mastered my lizard brain in the area of weight management through the strength of my commitment to a new way of life. Unfortunately, I was in denial about the holes in my commitment--such as my never having gotten the exercise part of the project on a firm footing, and having lost a strong, unconditionally accepting support system, as opposed to one in which I had ego-investment in looking like I had my act together. And then I started having life troubles... disruptions to job, finances, living situation ... and without the right kind of support, my resolve began to crumble, and the lizard slithered out of its cage going "danger danger eat like crazy" ... and it only took a year for me to completely undo all the progress I had made.

The resulting Slough of Despond was seriously Not Pretty. In fact, I can only blog about it objectively now, having put the worst of it some three to six months behind me. But I did climb out of it, and part of how I did it was by finding a community that offered the right kind of help--the confidentiality/anonymity, the specialization around weight management issues, the practical tools, the unconditional acceptance, the optimum mix of tough love and unabashed cheering section. It happens to be SparkPeople.com -- and no, I'm not going to tell you my username on there. But I do want to let you all know that it exists, and that it is no-cost--which means it does have a bunch of ads that can admittedly get a bit annoying; but the resources it offers, and the huge and active community in its forums, are worth braving a few obnoxious ads.

So--I have returned, a humbler and hopefully wiser person, to this project of taking care of my health through good nutrition and sensible weight management. I still have a long way to go--again the exercise part of the program is lagging, but I am taking baby steps in that direction, so to speak. Mainly I'm making sure I am asking for help, taking advantage of the fact that I now have a safe online space where I can let down when I'm feeling like a screaming mess, without fear that it is somehow going to be held against me. Because those are the moments that are going to torpedo my precious weight management plans and any other plans I have going for getting my life back together.

 

 

I've been feeling this song a whole lot lately. Mostly I've been hearing it in my head in the a capella nigun form we sang together during Shabbat services at the havurah I belonged to in the Boston area in the 1980s. There seems to be a lot of return going on in my life right now, both profound and prosaic:

• After majorly falling off the wagon of my healthy weight loss adventure, regaining all the weight I had taken off and then some, and re-inflicting on myself all the accompanying chronic pain and restricted mobility, I have as of this past June once again returned to a healthy weight loss regimen. Hopefully, this time I will do it with a lot more support, and a lot more humility.
• After going on two years of under/unemployment and scary financial times, the kind so many people have been facing these days, I am slowly pulling myself out of the hole via a job I landed in March, and returning to some modest sense of financial security.
• After the emotional slough of despond caused by those first two items, I am slowly returning to my more normal cheerful self.
• Perhaps because of these changes, perhaps for other reasons yet to become clear to me, I am returning mentally to memories of my childhood and youth, trying yet again to sort out the family-of-origin psychodramas and maybe make some peace with them.
• And there are other returnings going on, but these are already plenty to start with, yes?

In any case, when I saw that NaBloPoMo's theme for this month was "Return," I knew I needed to sign up, return to this long-dorman blog of mine, and make the commitment to blog every day and see what came up. Of course not every post I'll make in September is going to be about return--but as they say in so many writing programs, when you simply make the commitment to show up at the page every day, you make it possible for interesting things to wind up on that page.

Oh, and it hasn't escaped my notice that the Jewish High Holy Days, with their major theme of teshuvah (literally, return), fall at the end of September this year. Whether I will literally return to a synogogue or havurah this year, or perhaps make a more personal journey of slichot (reconciliation) on my own, remains to be seen. But there it is, waiting to be explored.

The song, by the way, was written by the famous Singing Rabbi and pioneer of the baal teshuva movement, Reb Shlomo Carlebach, and is performed in this video by his daughter and protege Neschama Carlebach, with the Green Pastures Baptist Choir under the direction of Reverend Roger Hembrick. The lyrics:

Return to what you are,
Return to who you are,
Return to where you are born and reborn again

Return again, return again,
Return to the land of your soul
Return again, return again,
Return to the land of your soul.

Greening up my world yet again

I've been trying to re-kickstart my life for the past several months--only this time my life-motor seems to be having a bit more difficult time than usual turning over. I think at least some of this is due to the crappy economy--it's a little harder to revamp the work and the living situations when the regional financial weather makes the choices a lot harder. I confess I'm also finding it just a tiny bit harder turning the physical health habits and mental attitude around--one gets a little older, a little tireder, a little more "oh hell, not again?!?" ... especially in light of the economic weirdnesses.

But I've also had the Fate Goddess hand me a couple of lucky windfalls recently, for which I am incredibly grateful -- one of which includes a new living situation which I will be moving into over the next couple of weeks -- so I want to take advantage of that momentum, and see if I can turn a bunch of other stuff around.

Blogging's been a tool for that kind of self-motivation thing for me in the past, so I went and checked out National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) to see what this month's theme was. And interestingly, it turned out to be "Green." Now, NaBloPoMo allows one to be very liberal in interpreting their themes, and I could already see several interpretations that could fit my current situation.

Green is the color of growth and renewal, and one could definitely say that I am currently in the situation of re-greening my life once again. Green, to be much more literal, is the color of vegetables, and one thing I desperately need to re-green is my whole healthy-eating regimen, which has frankly been in the trash-hopper for so long that I've basically put back on almost all the weight I took off a few years ago.

And a third, pragmatic interpretation of green is ... the color of money. I continue to work at fixing The Job Situation--especially since I am in the process of letting go one job position that is just not working out. So I need at the very least to replace that job, and ideally to acquire a more long-term career solution.

So--green things green things! Every day on this blog for the month of August. Cheerleading the need for more green in my life, on all these levels and probably a bunch more that will occur to me as I go along. Let's hear it for the power of green!

Body go gesproingit

One of the things that I did yesterday that made me feel really good about the day was that I got a bunch of walking in. One of the things which I did today which didn't feel so good was entertaining a bunch of body pain from yesterday's walking. I dunno if it's my arthritis, or being out of shape, or both that are responsible for this sorry state of affairs. Actually, on reflection I do think it's both--hard to be enthusiastic about any kind of exercise when it tends to bring on pain, but hard to make any headway against the pain unless I get some exercise.

One reason why yesterday's walking was such a success was that I was wandering around in the middle of Hillcrest, San Diego's LGBT neighborhood, which is a fun place to explore on foot. If I'm motivated to walk by something interesting to me, it's easier to transcend the physical discomfort. Sure beats trying to transcend the pain in a boring gym on some buring exercise equipment.

Right now, there's nothing for it but to tough out the current discomfort. I've done the hot bath thing, and a few other things, and those have helped. But now it's getting to the point where I should try just sleeping it off. Boy, bodies can be such a pain in the butt.

So what's happening with my weight management project these days, anyway?

Those of you who had been faithfully following my whole weigh management oddyssey from mizducky's migrations might wonder what's behind the long silence on that blog. Well, long story short: when the weight management thing was my then-current front-and-center primary enthusiasm, things were going great. But eventually, life moved on, and my energies turned to other and newer enthusiasms, and ... things are not going quite so great on the healthy eating front.

They haven't gone all to hell, mind you; but I have put back about ten pounds, and have gotten considerably sloppier in my eating habits. Especially since I've been recently putting so much energy into writing and other creative pursuits, which seem to involve long hours of physical inactivity in front of a computer and deep into the night, messing with my already-lackluster attempts at exercise as well as my sleep schedule.

The fact of the matter is, I obviously know how to eat healthy and lose weight when I make it the primary focus of my life, to the point of having no life outside of that. What I still haven't quite figured out is how to stay on the eating-healthy thing when I'm busy having a life and focussing on something else. And I'm especially bad at doing that when I'm deep in a creative process. I tend to get extremely self-indulgent when I'm writing like hell--and that is a huge temptation to the ol' Lizard Brain to come roaring in and bite me in the ass.

However--and I swear I don't find this to be rationalization--I might not be doing badly after all. Loosening up a little, even putting back ten pounds, is not necessarily the end of the world. As long as I don't let it go any further than that. In recent days I finally realized I just plain don't feel as good physically as I did when my food was cleaner and I was getting more exercise. That in itself is a good sign. It's one thing to screw around with the plan and enjoy it; it's another to realize the screwing-around isn't even particularly pleasant.

So ... gently but firmly, I'm working to bring this part of my life back in gear, but without making it the entirety of my life like I was doing before. Will I succeed? Stay tuned!