The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

The Year of Do

It's been a bit since I last wrote. Not sure why I do this, let my account expire and then take forever to update it again. Just my thing, I guess, to let myself writhe and twist in the wind knowing full well that I have the power to save myself, and elect to do nothing. I've spent most of my life like this. I have no clue as to why. Masochist? Some sort of perverse pleasure in suffering while experiencing some kind of comfort in knowing I have the power to control it? It doesn't make much sense on the surface.

But, I've been keeping up with everyone else's lives, at least, the people whose lives interest me in some way. There has been a rash of diet tips and daily food intake updates in journals/blogs and I am amused by this. Each January, this is the trend, but with good reason, I suppose. It is a month of good intention, a blank month without holes in it. Since a recent study concluded that more Americans are obese rather than just plain overweight, I suppose a little bit of attention to one's diet is sort of important, but I have to say it doesn't make for good reading. Plus, a lot of people are just plain doing it wrong. You can't diet, you see. You have to change the way you eat forever.

My weight has been up and down since I was about ten or so. I have always been in the range of slightly overweight to teetering on the edge of fat. At five foot four, weight shows up a little bit quicker on me than it would on my amazonian friends but I genuinely love food and cannot imagine eating for the sake of mechanics. I have found joy in it, excitement, even sexual pleasure once or twice. Food and I have a very special relationship. My worldly travels B.P.A (before panic attacks) were routed by restaurants. It used to be an amazing treat to go to the U.S and peruse the variety of chocolate bars they had in their convenience stores because a good lot of them were not available here at the time. It was orgasmic the first time I sampled a Baby Ruth, I must admit. And, I loved pop. Coca-Cola, more pointedly. I could drink bottle after bottle (the small forty-five cent bottles from the corner store, at least two a day) and never grew tired of it. I ate bags of curd cheese, potato chips, ice-cream, french fries and my all-time favourite: hamburgers. It was the quintessential North American diet for kids, and shutting me up was as easy as handing me something wrapped in a McDonald's styrofoam container. Then, I turned twelve and my body began to betray me. I became round and spongy. My skin was dotted with evidence of my poor choices. I ceased to be cute and was a long way from pretty.

My mother took me to a facialist and put me on Slim Fast when I was fourteen. Neither did much for me. The Slim Fast was a nightmare in that it tasted like sludge and was the culprit for all sorts of stomach ailments of dieters in the 1980's, which I'm assured has been corrected since but I still think it's horrible stuff. I lost a little weight, but I wasn't healthy and when I stopped drinking it, the weight and then some came back. In short, the stuff is just a gimmick. Then, I went on the all-popsicle diet and dropped loads of weight when I was sixteen, but again, it wasn't healthy and my parents thought I was becoming anorexic. When I ate 'real' food again, the weight came back, as would be expected. I teetered and tottered for years until I hit my late twenties and suddenly realized that I'd slowly, unconsciously put on about thirty pounds since my teen years. My blood pressure was a little high, which was odd since I was only in my twenties, so I went on a fat-free diet which took off about eighteen pounds. I was happy with that, but then I started having anxiety issues and after some time the only thing which made me happy was food, which in turn brought on the weight I'd lost and a whole lot more. I broke up with R., dropped weight again because of stress, felt sexy but lightheaded most of the time and moved in with M., who got me pregnant within two months and started me on the road to my all-time highest weight which I could not shake off as easily as I could the years before. I just about gave up on myself.

So, the thing is that for most people, weight is harder to get rid of when you're further along in years. Also, when you diet sporadically, consistently mess up your body's metabolism with stupid eating trends, your thyroid revolts and makes you heavier than ought to be. You get tired, you get sick more often and then you get depressed. Clothes are no longer fun to buy, or wear, and you take up the new hobby of hating yourself and everything you stand for. Not fun. Not smart.

So, enter the gall bladder attacks. Can I just say that in some weird way, my gall bladder has been the greatest educator in terms of food and how to eat it? Oh, I have been complaining about it, sure, and I might have cried a little when I first realized that I would have to avoid all the things I've loved for so long, like cheese and handfuls of chocolate, but after a couple months of eating 'healthy', I no longer feel the need to whine. First off, I've lost about twelve pounds, which makes me officially twenty-two pounds lighter than I was two years ago when I was at my heaviest. Now, I'm weighing what I did when I first met M., and I feel kind of attractive. I am feeling more self-assured, more in control of myself because I know that I am doing good things for my body, as well as for M. and Kitty Kat by ensuring that I am making meals that are healthy and nutritious rather than superficially delicious.

The big thing is that I have not had heartburn in ages. I have had acid-reflux disease forever, I think, and it had only become worse in the last few years after being pregnant. Now, I am going to bed at night without even thinking about how there is lava in my esophagus. Though I still have the occasional bout of intestinal woe, as well as intermittent back pain courtesy of the gallstones, I know that this the suffering of many years of poor habits coming to fruition, rather than the result of anything I'm doing today. At some point I'll have the surgery and the pain will (hopefully) be gone. Then, what?

So, I'm making the choice to keep eating the way I have been, forever. I will keep the portions small and will eat more often. Yes, eating more often is actually better for your body, if you're eating the proper foods. I am dropping weight by eating pasta, and avocados and bread, which is making the skeptics in my life cringe. I only use olive oil, and I go heavy on spices to enhance flavours. I read the labels on everything, and if there is one iota of trans fat in something, I do not buy it (trans fat should be illegal people, it's totally lethal). I have given up red meat entirely, and I no longer drink pop. Ice-cream has been replaced by fat free mango gelato, which I smother in strawberry/blueberry sauce that I make myself by putting frozen berries and a soupçon of brown sugar into a pot and stir until it turns into rich, smooth decadence. I still have the odd cookie, the odd square of chocolate, but in small amounts these things are not detrimental to the body. I have had red wine, many glasses actually, because it's relaxing and good for me in moderation. I am missing nothing, and find myself nauseous when I watch fast food commercials on television because I know it's not food. It's just...coercion to commit slow, fat, uncomfortable suicide? Kinda, yeah.

Oh, but exercise...this is where I fall short. Now that I am on track with eating well, and really enjoying it, I know that there is still the matter of my sedentary ways. This is something I can't get away from, I know it. There is no way to be healthy without it, people. It is what it is. So, M. bought me some winter boots, Sorels actually, and in them I am able to walk and stay warm and not fall down. We have made the decision to go walking together when the wee one is at school, because the weight I've lost he's somehow put on, and we both know that we don't move enough. I also said that our sex must become more sweaty, because we've sort of been doing it without moving a lot, and even though it still brings on some seriously satisfying results, I feel like we're becoming kind of lazy with it. Passion should involve sweat and increased heart rates. We'll see how it goes.

I know that I am a dreamer, a talker, a pontificator of what could be if only...but it's time to move away from it a little. Time to be a 'do-er'. I don't write that with visions of pom-poms and enthusiastically nodding heads. I'm a realist, and my reality is that I tend to give up before I start more often than not, and I always feel like I have good reason to do so. The thing is, it isn't working for me. I've been woeful for so long that I've begun to believe it's part of who I am. Of course, it's possible that I am mournful by nature, my Celtic-ness deeply imbedded in my brain, flaring up whenever the wind changes direction, but some of my moroseness is just as likely to be a result of perpetual complacency and personal allegiance to North American excess. In plain english, I ate badly and was lazy, and all I got was this lousy disposition.

I did not make any New Year's resolutions. No one keeps them, and I'm no exception. I can only promise myself to make a little effort this time around, to stop being so passive in my personal quest for happiness. I am very slowly getting it, that being liberated from all the horrible circumstances of life is really up to me, and that I must want it badly enough to try. It occurred to me the other day, while sitting in my freshly polished, vacuumed living room, the one with the red walls and Iranian rug, that I was sitting in a room I'd put together myself. I perused the photos on the shelves of the bookcase, studied the gorgeous paintings that M. had done, the model of the gondola he'd made and encased on top of the sideboard, the art deco clock, the Wedgwood pitcher and nineteenth century chairs and I recognized where I was. I was sitting in a room I'd always dreamed of sitting in and calling my own. I had unconsciously yearned for a home filled with antiques all my life before, I had yearned for a little girl and a man who spoke in impeccable sentences. I had craved his accent and his long legs and his ability to speak French and Italian. I had dreamed of sipping wine out of crystal glasses and polishing silver while at the same time eating peanut butter straight out of the jar. I suddenly knew that I was now sitting in the very place I'd always wanted to be, that I'd done it despite all the years I'd been miserable and pessimistic and convinced I'd never be happy. Here I am, I thought, I am actually here. Perhaps the sadness and pain lead to something that made suffering it worth it?

Am I totally happy? No, laughs, not entirely. I still have more doing to do. Taking a step back, though, and looking at where I am has been valuable to me in terms of understanding myself, though. In a very quiet way, I've been taking responsibility for my own contentment, and though it has been slow-moving, sometimes completely stalled, there is a lot of pleasure in knowing that even the hard times are necessary in growing, that they lead us away from what we don't want in our lives. That is, unless you decide to stay there.

So, I have the food thing under control and I refuse to keep a diary of it because it's basically just common sense mixed with effort. I like the expression 'if your grandparents couldn't buy it at the grocery store in their day then you probably shouldn't be eating it'. One should live by that. I am making small plans for my future by possibly taking a computer class next month (I think I know most of it, but a potential friend wants me to join her), and a poetry class after that (particularly interested in this, even though my anxiety is telling me not to go. Shut up you stupid bastard!). I am beginning to reconcile myself to the reality that I have to work, that hiding from life is not going to make the fear go away.

I took a step back, looked at what makes me so unhappy and realized that it all begins and ends with me. Not exactly prophetic, but it was the plainest reality I came up with. So, my favourite journallers out there, I see where all your strengths are, not just your weaknesses. I see relationships that are clearly not working, some which are even toxic and dangerous, and I see some which are solid and nurturing. I see immaturity and I see poise. I see talent and I see people passing the time. I see self-obsession and I see clouds splitting apart. Most of all, though, I see the potential for something more. Take that as you will.

A life of doing. Hmmm....