Losing the Cow

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July 31, 2004

The Non-Magical, Non-Mystery Tour

I live in Minnesota, very near the Mall of America. And from time to time, somebody asks me, "What's the Mall of America like?" And I usually say something like this: "Well, on one hand, it's remarkable -- like being inside a pinball machine with a zillion people and a Sunglass Hut and a roller coaster and giant Lego dinosaurs that move. But on the other hand, you know . . . it's a mall."

I saw a comment somewhere the other day from somebody who was expressing frustration about the complicated march through fame of various diet schemes (no fat! no carbs! nothing but grapefruit! nothing cooked!). Her comment was that she was very tired of hearing about all of it, because in the end, as she put it, wasn't it just a matter of eating less and exercising more?

Now, my natural reaction is to flinch at that, because it's such an absurd oversimplification of everything, and it tends to discount a lot of very complex experiences that deserve more respect than that. Furthermore, it also tends to be followed by something that equates the simplicity of a task with the easy achievement of it. I mean, running a marathon is just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other until you reach the finish line; the fact that it's simple doesn't make it easy. Same with quitting smoking. It's as simple as never putting another cigarette in your mouth. Simple, not easy.

On the other hand, as much as I flinch at that description, it's also true in a particular sense, the realization of which, I think, was really important for me personally in figuring out how to do this after years and years of feeling unable to. Because here's the thing -- I think after a certain number of years of gnashing your teeth over your inability to accomplish something, particularly if it's been going on since you were a child or perhaps even as long as you can remember, you stop thinking of it as a regular, achievable, simple task.

It begins to feel like wish fulfillment, as if you would need a fairy godmother for it, or a wand, or at least some magic beans. (And no, soybeans do not count, even if you can make cars out of them or whatever the hell those smarty co-op types are always getting up to.) It begins to feel like it's not something you would ever actually do, it's something you pray will happen to you. Don't get me wrong -- I'm not suggesting that I ever became passive, sitting around hoping that lightning would strike and I would magically become thin without doing anything. I'm saying that I think I became discouraged to the point where I was sitting around waiting to turn into a different person who would be strong enough to work miracles that my regular self wasn't capable of.

You can lose track of the part where it's simple; where it's possible, I think. There's a sense in which the Mall of America is just a mall, you know? The Gap. Ritz Camera. Bath & Body Works. Casual Corner. It's a big mall, and it's an imposing mall, but for the most part, it's made up of stuff you've seen. And similarly, there's a sense in which changing what you eat and working out is life-altering and earth-shattering and forces you to take yourself apart and put yourself back together. But ina day-to-day sense, it's also . . . just changing what you eat and working out. Eat breakfast. Eat lunch. Eat dinner. Eat some other stuff if you feel like it. Go for a walk. You're done. There's nothing there that you can't do. It feels like there is, but there isn't.

This is where my anger about the gastric bypass surgery doctors come in. I'm not here to judge the surgery people, particularly on the basis that it's "the easy way out," because hell, losing much of my intestines doesn't sound easy to me, and neither do the accommodations you have to make afterwards. And for people who are appropriate candidates for it, if doctors want to present it as an option, that's fine. But promotion of surgery has become an opportunity for doctors -- medical professionals who should know better -- to get their names in the paper saying that the reason to have surgery is that fat people cannot lose weight any other way. Cannot. Not "it's hard," not "we're still exploring what works and what doesn't," not "it's uphill." Just plain "can't."

And that's wrong. I am here to tell you, I have lost over a hundred pounds and not gained it back, and I am not special. I mean, everybody likes to believe she's special, whatever, but in this sense? No. The hardest stuff to deal with has been, as I've said before, all of the nutty emotional nonsense that I unfortunately built up over twenty-five years of frustration and anxiety. That stuff was complicated. As far as the actual doing? Not easy -- very, very hard much of the time. But not complicated. Not easy . . . but simple.

Okay, try this as an experiment: Think about something you have in your kitchen that you could eat. Don't eat it, just think about it for about ten seconds. Close your eyes if necessary. Okay, did you do it? Did you think about it and choose not to eat it? Congratulations, you're following the Linda Plan. And I'm only partly being facetious. One of the biggest revelations to me was the "You're doing it right now" moment. I think I expected that for a big accomplishment, there would be enormous moments, like Rocky on the Art Museum steps or something. But there aren't very many of those. I mean, sure, you work out, and you get off the treadmill all sweaty, and yes, you have visions of yourself saving the world from . . . the Visigoths or the Vandals or whomever. But usually, it's not like that.

Look, you just had your dressing on the side. Look, you just had Cheerios for breakfast instead of a donut. Look, you just went to Starbucks and had the skim latte instead of the mocha and scone. Look, you just took the stairs. Look, you got on and off a step for a half-hour while you were watching part of What Not To Wear. You're doing it right now. That's it -- that's what it looks like. If I made up a photo album of this process in my own case, that's what it would look like. It would be, you know, pictures of me eating seven Triscuits instead of sitting in front of the TV with a box of Cheez-Its. Look, there I am with a beer and some baked tortilla chips. Look, there I am drinking water. Look, there I am Sweating to the Oldies. (Oh, yes. I did it. We'll talk about it another day. I beg you not to judge.)

It's really not that glamorous. It's not magical. And I don't say that in the insulting, condescending, "there is no magic bullet, lazy-ass, so take responsibility" kind of way. I say it in the "there's nothing there that you aren't perfectly capable of doing" kind of way.

I think it's healthy to think of the Mall of America as nothing but a string of retail shops that sell mostly the same stuff you can get anywhere else while still holding in your head the notion that it is a landmark, a big achievement, and very impressive when you first see it. Similarly, I think it's healthy to think of changing all of these habits as nothing but a series of really not very singularly significant decisions.

You're probably doing it right now.

Posted by Alison-Jane at 01:53 PM | Comments (37) | TrackBack

July 23, 2004

Irrational Numbers

Administrative note: Thanks to everybody who joined the notify list. I have moved it to MT, and it appears to be working. If you want to get on it, just drop your email in the box over there under "Notify." Now, it should not give you trouble. And . . . sheesh, where did all you people come from? Heh.

If you were trying to learn Spanish, you'd understand that your progress was best measured by looking at a variety of factors, right? Your vocabulary, your reading comprehension, your ability to speak and be understood? You wouldn't stand there tracking the number of words you understood on the Spanish-language news broadcast that night and do all the math, and if you understood 46.7 percent tonight as compared to 47.2 percent last night, you wouldn't conclude that all your efforts were in vain and the enterprise was best abandoned, right? And you wouldn't conclude that you needed to spend $500 on Spanish immersion classes, right?

And yet.

I don't know how it works in other places, but Weight Watchers measures weights in 0.2 pound increments. So they'll tell you you're up 1.2, or down 2.4, or down 0.4, or whatever. It used to be, of course, that nobody tried to get any trickier than a half pound. No more. Someday, I'm sure, scales will go to four decimal places, so that they'll be able to tell you, "Congratulations, you lost 2.4337 pounds this week!" And I can equally guarantee you that someone will react to that development by saying, "But last week, I lost 2.4339 pounds! Why are my losses getting smaller? Why? WHY, WHY?"

And they won't want to hear the answer, which will be, "Because the underwear you wore this week was more linty."

Everyone's been to the weigh-in where you know you had some extra cookies . . . and that one day, Chinese food . . . and you never got off the couch . . . and there was some beer that never got counted. And then you step up. "Congratulations, you're down 1.6!" And you run away from the scale as quickly as possible, before it changes its mind. "Thankyouverymuch, Iwillbegoingnow."

That kind of unwarranted result is to be embraced. It is not irrational; it is whimsical. Just another wacky chapter in the Wacky Adventures of Shrinky-Girl! Sooooo funny!

Not like the other kind of week. You ate all your vegetables. You drank bathtubs full of water. On your birthday, you politely declined cake and had a bowl of antioxidant-rich berries. You worked out six times, and once, while on the elliptical trainer, you believe you saw God.

"Congratulations, you gained a pound!"

WHAAAAAAAAT?

It's surprising to me that the leaders who weigh people in don't wear full protective gear, like umpires.

Because yes, that will make you want to beat the living crap out of someone. You want your reward. You want your point. You want your pat on the head. Ah, those impish scale pixies, having their way with you again.

It is fear of the scale pixies that makes WW tell you not to weigh yourself more than once a week. They don't want you to hurt yourself banging your forehead against the towel bar in your bathroom every morning. But honestly, I think that if you can learn to handle it, it's not any worse to climb on the scale a lot than a little. Because if you do it a lot, you learn to look down at it and spit, "Yes, I'm sure I gained three pounds since lunch. Bite me."

Because it's true. It will go up for no reason, and it will go down for no reason. No -- it will. First of all, most scales aren't really awesome enough to reliably distinguish between 150.0 and 150.2. You're lucky if they can reliably distinguish between 150.0 and 151.2. And you drink and eat and digest and go to the bathroom all day and all week, and you wear different clothes, and there's nothing to be done about the fact that if you think all you're doing when you step on a scale is measuring your level of Bad Nasty Fat, you're going to find that it isn't the case.

There are a million things going on in terms of your body chemistry and composition when you change those habits, and only one of them is going to show up in that one number. That number doesn't tell you whether you got stronger, or your blood pressure went down, or your cholesterol improved, or you can walk farther without stopping than last week. It doesn't tell you if your arms got smaller, or if upping your yoga allowance has made you more intrinsically bendy.

Yes, eventually, it will go down. Gravity works, physics works . . . in all likelihood, it will eventually go down. If you take, let's say, a four-week moving average, that might tell you something. But one week? Pfft. Anticipating that drop of two pounds every single week is a good way to make yourself crazy, not to mention a good way to make yourself quit.

I just envision myself as a smoky Parisian jazz singer. "Zee scale, she goes up, she goes down . . . eet is very . . . how you say . . . mysteeerious. She is temperamental, unfaithful . . . she will make you cry weeeth sadness, make you shout weeeth joy . . . ah, zee scale." And then I just mutter, you know, "Sacre bleu," and have lunch.

Posted by Alison-Jane at 09:21 AM | Comments (35)

July 18, 2004

The Slip and the Whip and the Chair

In administrative news, the notify list should now be working. Sorry for the confusion for those of you who tried it the old way. I did something wrong, and have no idea what it was, but now all is well. And now, on with the entry.

I really didn't slack off for two weeks and gain a couple of pounds just to prove a point or set up this entry. But, you know, now that we're here.

Yeah, this happens, too. If you've done this for any period of time, you know this happens. Admittedly, not to everyone -- I know people who have gone a year without a day of slack, and I take my hat off to them. But I'm not like that, and I never have been. I go slack from time to time.

And the irony is that it's a core part of my . . . whatever, my whole Cow Code of Conduct . . . that when you lose your momentum, you don't freak out about it. You take a breath and you get going again, because honestly . . . what's your other choice? I believe this. I could embroider this on a pillow. It's heartfelt, and I live by it, because I've never achieved anything resembling perfect consistency. Sometimes I pull harder, and sometimes I just hang on. And sometimes, things slip just a little. I live with it.

But how do I feel when it happens? Oh, horrified. Angry and irritated. Tiny and embarrassed. The sense of accomplishment shrinks until I can't even see the six sizes of jeans I've already thrown away, because all I can see is the M&M cookie ten minutes ago. Why did I have the M&M cookie? I wasn't going to have the M&M cookie, and I had it, and now I don't know what's going on, and maybe I'm wrong about everything, and what if this all ends and I can't do it anymore and I gain it all back and everyone looks at me with pity again?

Yeah, you know . . . it's raw, that stuff. Not buried very deeply. Part of that is ice-up-the-spine fear, and part of it is leftover puffs of shame that can still waft off of some pretty well smothered embers. And the sickening irony -- the part that's so unfair that it can really twist me into knots -- is that those are the moments when it all really can go wrong, too. I mean, it makes no sense -- that's when you're desperate, right? That's when your motivation is supposed to be the highest. Fear of failure should be a wonderful source of drive. And it just doesn't work like that. It's more like the shaky feeling feeds on itself, and I feel weak and rotten and angry, and I can't get going. It's not like I sink into a fourteen-foot pile of Cheetos or anything, but unfortunately, the idea that you have to sink into a fourteen-foot pile of Cheetos in order to lose ground is one of those myths, the destruction of which turns out to be a mixed blessing.

Gaining a few pounds is unbelievably easy. And the more you lose, the easier it gets. I behaved rationally the entire time. There was really no mad scarfing of anything. It's really just a leeeettle bit of this over here, and a leeeettle bit of that over there, and all of a sudden, you realize that you are officially Not Doing Your Thing right now. And then you're in a position of not staying on track, but getting back on track, which is oh, so much worse.

I sometimes think the hardest skill to pick up has been spotting which things are important. Whether you have a bite of something that somebody offers you is usually not important. Getting the last smidgen of chicken skin off is usually not important. In fact, saying no to a special dinner on a special night for a special occasion is usually not important. But every once in a while, I know that something is important. And after two weeks, I saw that number on the scale creeeeeping up just slightly, and it was very clear to me, for whatever reason, that this particular point was important.

Because surprisingly enough, there is this voice now, and it tends to kick in at these moments, and it says something warm and supportive that goes approximately like this: "We are not doing this, do you hear me? We have eaten five thousand grilled chicken sandwiches, and we have had the dressing on the side, and we have gotten sweaty on purpose in the middle of July, and we have said 'No, thank you' when everybody else got to say 'Yes.' We have learned to live with lowfat ice cream, and we have taken the stairs, and we have had the baked potato instead of the mashed. And if you think we are drifting back to the point where we have to do all of that again just to get back to where we are now, you have lost your M&M-cookie-impaired mind, because if I have to stand over you with a whip and a chair, as God is my witness, you are not letting this go for one more day."

So that's what happened. It ended, and now it's fine. The points are counted, disaster has been averted, and I'm getting my feet under me again. I don't want to give the impression that I think going to hell in something of a dietary handbasket for two weeks is a good idea, or something that I advise. I'm not happy about it -- it's two more weeks of pulling I have to do all over again. It's a waste of work, not to mention a really hazardous maneuver, because once it's two weeks, you're swimming pretty hard just to get to shore, dry off, and get the water out of your ears.

I suppose that what I aim for is just to spot the important point earlier every time. Undoubtedly, there were stopping points -- points where I could have let that voice get a word in -- earlier in the game. Probably after a day. Undoubtedly after a week. Listen better next time, that's all. Hey -- when this used to happen, it would be, like, three months before I hauled my ass out of trouble.

It's strange, and maybe even foolish, but in the long run, when I'm thinking rationally, I don't worry about myself a whole lot anymore in this regard. That voice is too obnoxious. It's my inner pain in the ass, you know? It's that feeling of really . . . wanting something a lot, which is what you eventually learn to use as the the whip and the chair.

So I just keep going. By the way, I'm happy to say that at least the M&M cookies were really good.

Posted by Alison-Jane at 10:33 PM | Comments (33)