Body Tales From the Heart and the Scales

Was it All a Dream?

2009-07-10T07:07:00.000-07:00

Was being a fat grrl all a dream? Was being 50 lbs overweight simply due to the rebound my body did after I let go of a drug and tobacco habit?

I started gaining weight when I was 29. Until then, for about a decade, minus the time I was pregnant with my son until he was about three months old, I was between 135 (at 19) and 150 (3 months post childbirth) lbs. The smoking started at about 30. The drugs, a year after that. I was in an emotionally abusive relationship from 29-32 and the speedier metabolism of my extreme youth was starting to slow down.

I was quite sure the slow gain that began at 29 was my ineffectual attempts at protecting myself from my abuser. But in getting really real, I had started gaining before that. I had bad eating habits; more about volume than content, although I was a fast food eater at times. I always loved to cook, so I did eat good, whole foods, although I'm sure I used too much butter and oil, ate too many Pepperidge Farm cookies and ice cream.

But why I ask, was it all a dream, is because for 3 1/2 years, I've been the size I was in my 20's. And despite taking breaks from tracking, despite watching my calorie count go from 1350ish post Weight Watchers, to about 1700 a day, I'm not gaining weight. I'm staying right about at goal: 150 lbs +/- a pound or two.

I know it's because I exercise every day and burn about 4000 calories a week doing so. I know that my muscle body has sped up my metabolism from the years I was a sedentary, heavy person. It surely isn't because I've "cured" my overeating and night time eating habits. That piece is still there. The exercise and the very sensible eating during the day often feel like "damage control" for the night time snacking, the vast affection for chocolate and my need to not feel caged and restricted.

Sure, I've done years of work now to heal the broken parts of self; to give them different and healthier "jobs" than to sabotage me or get me in trouble or lead me down thorny paths that are best not taken, but my body feels like it was all a dream. My body is forgetting what it was like to be heavy, in pain all the time, unhappy, disconnected from the rest of me. And my head is happy to comply with that forgetting.

So I'm here to say: No. It was not a dream. I was 205 lbs at my top weight. I have worked damn hard to get to where I am and finally where I am is a very happy in my body place. Yes. My thyroid is an issue, but I'm dealing with it. Yes. I'm aging and I can see it and I'm dealing with it. I'm dealing with it with love and admiration as I witness this aging body continue to thrive and shimmer.

Some people tell me I'm too skinny. I can't wrap my head around that at all. But I am happy here in this body place that is familiar from my youth when I didn't have to try.

I think the trick is realizing that, while newer and healthier patterns have been rooted and are working, this state of grace of not feeling like I'm working so very hard at this all the time is because the habits have become more automatic and NOT because I'm not working hard. I still work hard. It's just become the way I do my life.

And the losing path was really sexy. I think I'm finally in the place where staying right where I'm at is sexy too. Another state of grace.

It wasn't a dream.

My body thinks it was a dream.

I can live with that paradox.

I Seem to Have Some 'Splainin' To Do

2009-07-09T06:12:00.000-07:00

(This is for Karen who nudged me. Thanks.)

I did it! I went to Born To Drum Women's Drum Camp for the third year in a row. This year camp was for 4 days and 3 nights; one night more than previous years. At the Walker Creek Ranch in West Marin County you are totally off line. No cell phone reception, no wireless. It was actually a blessed relief to be disconnected for a few days. It also meant that I didn't track my food after tracking Thursday's breakfast, until I began again with Monday's breakfast. 96 hours of no tracking, being totally out of my normal routine, having others feed me most of what I ate (I cooked my own breakfasts in the RV), and I didn't gain all my weight back. I gained a phantom pound that fell of within two days.

It is funny to me that I still get nervous about not tracking. That I still don't trust myself to stay within caloric boundaries necessary to maintain my weight. And the truth is, that whenever I do return to tracking after taking just a few days off, that first day of food journaling has me feeling a little restricted. And if I can feel restricted with eating 1600-1700 calories after just four days, that means I was eating more than that while not tracking. Another truth is, and I have said it before, after a lifetime of overeating and bad eating habits, 5 1/2 short years doesn't totally counteract that deep, deep hardwiring; that tracking is one of the cornerstones of my success and if I have to do it for the rest of my life to keep this slimmer, healthier, happier body, then so be it. It is truly a very small price to pay. Especially when you consider the alternatives. Like Bariatric Surgery.

So, yes. I ate my head off at camp. Not for no reason though. During class time, we were sitting in chairs or standing at our drums, but beyond class time we were walking all over the compound from RV to dining hall to class rooms to other class rooms to RV to the pond, etc. It was such a sharp contrast to my sitting in front of the computer for most of the day normal reality. Lots of movement. Lots of interactions with other people. Far more than I am used to. And all of that burned more of what I consider "non-exercise calories".

I got a new Polar Heart Rate Monitor for my birthday a few weeks ago. An F11. The F11 is more sophisticated than my F4, which I gave to Tara. Tara's a bit tachycardic. She strapped on the F4 for a whole waking day to see how many calories she burns in a normal day and she burned about 2400. That was without exercising, but she is a locksmith with a mobile shop and when she's not driving or running codes on her computer, she is getting in and out of her truck, and basically moving through space a lot more than I am.

In my normal day, with my very slow resting heartbeat, I burn less than 100 calories an hour. If I have a heavy cardio workout, my F11 says I burned far more calories than the less subjective F4, usually between 850-1025. So let's say 925. If I'm burning an average of 85 calories an hour during the other part of the waking day and 925 for 80 minutes of cardio exercise and I'm awake for about 17 hours, that's 1360 for the 16 hours I'm not exercising plus 925 for the 80 minutes that I am, for a total of about 2285 during the waking day. If I have a strength training or yoga session as my exercise for the day, I can subtract about 650 calories from that daily total, leaving me about 1635 burned for the waking part of my day.

I am quite sure that while at camp, my calories burned were way up from that average of 85 per hour. And that is why I was able to eat so much and not really gain anything. But I will confess that it was a relief, in a way, to return to the safety of my own day to day reality and to my tracking tools.

I've been struggling with my thyroid and adrenals these past months. I've been getting regular blood tests to see where my thyroid and other hormone levels are, but recently did a saliva test where I spit in a tube four times over the course of the day and had my cortisol levels tested. The results showed adrenal exhaustion. My hormone doc put me on something that whacked me pretty badly within just five days. I stopped taking it, but it's taken me over 2 months to recover from those five days. If camp had been six weeks earlier, I don't know if I could have done much of it at all, so I know I'm much recovered from the Cortef debacle of early May, but not totally back on my game.

Knowing that I was going to camp less energetic and able than last year had me make some agreements with myself before going. I would follow my energy levels and not regret what I didn't feel able to do. And since my top priority was the classes at camp and since I am so much more of a morning person than a night person; a reality that is so much more evident during these months of adrenal exhaustion and thyroid struggles, this is what camp looked like for me this year:

I got up every morning between 6:00-7:00 and was outside or in some quiet classroom by 7:30 doing 45-60 minutes of yoga, using an audio recording or podcast on my iPhone. This was to counteract all the sitting on hard plastic chairs in the classes and benches in the dining hall.
Breakfast
I went to 1 or both of the morning classes on Friday/Saturday, the full days and took a hike during the first session on Sunday then went to the second session class.
Lunch
During the afternoon session, I either took the session (on Saturday) or went for a hike (on Friday) to move my body, sweat a little and recharge myself from all the interactions of being at camp and around so many people.
This year there was a "Free Time" session during which I took a short nap or rest of some kind
Dinner
Evening events: Each evening had 2 things happening. This is where my body was so very clear about her needs and I did what I said I would do which was honor those needs without regrets. Each of the three nights I did the first evening event, but skipped the second one to go to bed. This meant that I missed the drum jam on the first night, the Healing Drum Circle with Vickie Noble on the second night and the 2nd set of the teachers' performances which went until 2:30 am.
I took a total of 7 out of 10 class offerings. The reason I didn't take the three sessions that I skipped was more about there not being an offering I was interested in than anything else. I took 4 Afro-Cuban classes, 1 West African, 1 Venezuelan and one Ghanaian class. The four Afro-Cuban conga classes were taught by my own teacher and another teacher I love who is from NY. This is the kind of drumming I do most and what I teach. I did play my conga drum in the Venezuelan and the Ghanaian class and played an African Dundun during the West African class.

And even with all that self-care, I came home Sunday night, slept for nine hours the sleep of the exhausted and it is now Thursday and I finally feel like I've mostly recovered. This fragility is sobering to me and also evokes a small thread of grief. My drum teacher is 61 years old and she goes all night long. It's not about age necessarily. I have always been a strong and sturdy person with a good immune system and a strong body. Even when I was sick and out of shape, my body was strong. And now I've become a person who takes 2 kinds of thyroid and has weakness in my energy body. And I do feel grief about that. I haven't been the party all night grrl for a very long time, but I seem to have entered a new level of where my body is at. So the Pollyanna in me says, "Work with what you've got and you've got a lot!" but my inner critic and judge (who, by the way, have undergone a rigorous retraining program so they stop being toxic to me) say, "You aren't the grrl you used to be. The contrast is pretty obvious. Take good care so you can do more of what you want to and need to do!"

And this is my excuse for not blogging since May 11th. I blame it on my adrenals and my thyroid. I've let go of my writing group for the rest of the summer. The Muse hasn't been hanging around me like she does during the darker seasons when I don't have a garden calling on me every day, beautiful weather to be out exercising in or a desire to connect more with people and spend less time in my own inner landscape; the fertile ground where the Muse and I do most of our dancing.

I do trust that this ebb of creative inspiration is about the filling of the well with real life engagement and experiences and interactions with others so that when the Muse does return to grace me, the ebb returns to flow and I can express in written words the things that I feel send that ripple of healing and insight and Good/Right/Beautiful out into the world once again.

I Have Bad Days and Times Too

2009-05-12T12:11:00.000-07:00

If all you knew of me was what I wrote in my blog, you might assume that I've healed my body hatred and self-loathing, "fixed" most of my bad habits that made and kept me a fat person for so many years and am just waltzing through this new life, in this new body, happy with what I have and have accomplished and free of all past poisons.

And you'd be wrong.

These last 10 days or so, I've been feeling very mortal and somewhat betrayed by my body. And when my emotional body feels betrayed, by my body or anyone else, there's usually some kind of hell to pay. About 10 days ago, I started developing a rash. It looked and itched like poison oak but after a few days, I started wondering if it wasn't something else. It was something else. It was a fungal or yeast infection on my skin. My groins were the worst, then my armpits, the elbow crease of one arm and one corner of my mouth.

Finally, last Friday, I went to see my osteopath/hormone doc. He confirmed that it was fungal. He wanted to put me on a Naturopathic regime that was going to take up to two weeks to turn the tide, but I wasn't willing to wait. I weighed the liver stress of taking Diflucan against itching for another 2 weeks and I asked for the Big Bug Bomb. He wrote me a prescription and told me to use a topical athlete's foot cream for as long as the rash remained plus two extra days. I did the big loading dose of Diflucan on Friday afternoon, then did two days of a much smaller dose 2x a day. After three days my ears were ringing pretty loudly and I found that my heart rate was erratic and way too high upon any major exertion. I could feel a real body anxiety that is very different from emotional anxiety, which is not something I often experience, but I am very clear on the difference. I stopped the Diflucan and the rash is almost gone.

I find it curious that right during the five days that I was taking a new hormone to support my adrenals, I broke out in this rash. I hadn't felt comfortable with this one: Cortef. It was prescribed by the aforementioned doctor after my cortisol panel showed adrenal exhaustion. I got the medicine and saw with no small concern that it was a version of hydrocortisone. I had been prescribed a steroid for HRT. It was a horrible five days. My body is very clear when she is distressed by something I put in her and this stuff was poison to me. Over five days, my exhaustion didn't improve, rather I was needing to actually nap in the afternoon and if that opportunity didn't present itself, I would be fighting to stay upright. When I was napping, I started having nightmares that increased in intensity over these five day. Nightmares that I couldn't move and couldn't breathe. So I stopped taking the drug. During these five days is when I got the rash. In my mind, as a fairly intelligent person, I felt pretty certain that there was a connection between taking a steroid, having my immune system crash, allowing an imbalance of yeast to occur and manifest as this awful rash.

Yeast/fungus is a weak spot in my immune system. I know this because I have danced with athlete's foot on one foot for over 20 years. I treat it and it goes away, but it never stays gone. My doctor had told me that people of East European Jewish descent have issues with what he called "molds". This most awful rash I've ever had that wasn't poison oak left me feeling so vulnerable to the whole eat and be eaten condition of the life experience. The spot in the corner of my mouth grossed me out the most. Thrush. Yuck. And this whole last 10 days that have been capped off with crappy sleep for three nights now has left me feeling very mortal. And because my emotional body somehow feels somewhat betrayed by my physical body, that voice is right back on my shoulder, whispering nasty things about my body to me in my ears, like she had never been sent to the back of the bus to play her endless games of chess.

Saturday, when alone in the woods, every time I tried to run, my heart rate jumped immediately up to the 160s. Too fast! That created some anxiety that had me jumping at squirrels and birds. "You better not have a heart attack out here all by yourself. You'll die out here and get eaten by crows. Maybe it's too dangerous to go out in the woods alone, hmm?"

Luckily, I ran into Patrick, Sally and their two dogs and we all came off the trail together. And I was fine. I didn't have a heart attack. But I did have those minutes of feeling fragile, vulnerable and mortal which kicked in the mean, parental voice that still lives in my psyche, still forgets about chess once in a while to come whisper poison into my ear. Going out in the woods alone is what I do. I do what I can do to make my experiences safe and happy, but the vagaries of life happen. I know I've been lucky. I am empowered by going out by myself. I've had to dis-spell a lot of "survivor" fear to do it. Going out in nature, being in my body in nature is healing to parts of me that were long broken.

I have felt like there has been a battle going on in my body these past 10 days. My emotions are erratic, I've felt like I have cooties and these past nights I've not been sleeping. Last night was only about four hours of broken sleep that has left me feeling like crap-on-toast. I decided on a moderately vigorous yoga practice for my exercise this morning. I bring in a mirror and check my poses out for good alignment. I'll admit, I like seeing how strong I am too, but today I just saw the fat girl. I look no different than I did yesterday and yesterday I had a weigh-in under 150 lbs for the first time in about two months. Yesterday I was feeling and thinking I was looking "skinny" but today I thought I was looking "fat". The critic was driving the bus to such a degree today that I even changed my yoga pants 10 minutes into my practice today because I thought I looked too fat in the pair I had put on. Fat seems to be the default self-hater that still lives somewhere in my psyche. If I perceive myself as fat then I am deserving of loathing. That pattern is so old and so toxic, I'm realizing that it is one of the hardwired in patterns, possibly pre-verbal that has been part of my operating system for most of my life.

But it is different now. In the before, I wouldn't have even been aware of what I was doing in the continuum of my days. With my somewhat amazing ability to screen out what I don't want to face and deal with in my inner landscape, I would have just done what I had always done, which was to screen out the mean voices. This never kept me from taking the poison; it was in the very air I breathed, but the difference was that unless someone who cared about me pointed out how mean I was to myself, I was oblivious to it. It was part of the way I operated.

Today, during yoga, I was aware that I was having negative feelings about how my lower body looked in pants while I was exercising. I was excruciatingly aware that my dear body was moving with grace and exhibiting glorious levels of strength at the same time I was grappling with this inner critic, this misdirection of one aspect of my emotional body's voice which was bigger and louder and much, much older than the newer, healthier voice that was noticing and appreciating my strength and grace and was being of my body rather than separate from her.

I think that having my body's flora get so unbalanced affected my emotional connection with my world. I think bombing the building with Diflucan escalated a battle that was already occurring, and added another layer of feeling out of my emotional and physical center. And all of this was in addition to my emotional reaction to feeling mortal and being in a body that was struggling instead of mostly glowing.

When I finished my yoga practice with shavasana, the sunlight came in the window and began warmly shining on my face. Instead of rolling on my side and pushing myself up to sitting, facing the sun, making mudras with my hands and saying in words in my head all the things I was grateful for, I rolled onto my side, allowing the beam of sunlight to shine fully on my face, but I didn't get up. My hands found each other in Namaste at my heart and I just let myself feel. The feeling was Good: No laundry list of gratitudes, just the feeling of Good. For a few precious moments, I was a baby, before language, without any unattended needs, just me, on my side, hands in prayer, sunlight in my face, my body feeling the life force pulsing through.

And I reset myself again. Again, I lead myself back into this newer reality of self-love and care, holding that part of self that still hates me and still having something like faith, or maybe it's just stubborn determination that all the parts of me will continue to heal. That I will continue to be quicker at seeing the old, destructive patterns when they get triggered and start trying to assert themselves. That I continue to face my Critic towards positive tasks when I need her and send her to the back of the bus for endless games of chess with the Judge when I don't need her.

Because I like this life, this body, this degree of inner peace that I have attained over these past 5 1/2 years. And a person just has to keep rolling up her sleeves, because the alternative is a landscape I don't want to live in any more.

Maddy's Obsessive/Compulsive Parts Speak: On Counting Calories Burned and Fitness Minutes

2009-05-02T11:36:00.000-07:00

I've confessed this before, but here it is again: I have a certain component of obsessive/compulsiveness in my personality. In holding to my commitment of working with who I am instead of against who I am, the o/c part of me is thrilled with the job of recording fitness minutes and calories burned during those minutes.

Joining SparkAmerica last year and seeing my fitness minutes add up has been, well, thrilling to me. For the first time that I can remember, I set a linear goal that went one whole year out. And then I exceeded that goal by hundreds of minutes. So this year I set a higher goal. And here, in the beginning of May, I'm ahead of par for this new goal for this new year. Breaking the minutes down into months is the driver for the Fitness Challenge thread that I post to every day on the veggie board. This month is the twelfth month that I've been participating in this challenge. It is really rewarding to see my fitness minutes add up over the course of the month. My o/c parts get to constantly calculate and recalculate par and how far I have to go to make my goal.

Getting my humble Polar F4 Heart Rate Monitor last year, which calculates calories burned was like the Best.Birthday.Present.Ever for that part of me. While I'm running, I'm figuring, in 10 minute blocks what my average calories burned per minute are. I'm figuring out how many minutes it takes me to run a mile uphill, run a mile downhill and less often, run a mile on a flat course. I'm doing arithmetic in my head all the time. But the truth is, I have always done arithmetic in my head. The blessing/curse of having a math teacher for a father? Not sure.

For what it's worth, here's why I like counting fitness minutes:
I count both fitness minutes and calories burned and have a weekly goal for both. My exercise week resets on Sunday. I've completed this week with 610 fitness minutes. (My SparkPeople goal is 525). Regarding calories burned, I set that goal based on how much I like to eat vs how much I want to stay right here at this weight. My goal is 3400 calories burned per week.

This is what I did this week:
290 minutes of yoga
115 minutes of Core Fusion (Pilates based strength training)
total: 405 minutes of strength and flexibility work
205 minutes of cardio
Total calories burned: 3175, leaving me 225 calories short of my calories burned goal.

Prior week:
135 minutes yoga
45 minutes Core Fusion
total strength training 180 minutes
415 minutes of cardio
total: 590 Fitness minutes
Total calories burned 3750, exceeding goal by 350 calories burned.

Both weeks I exceeded my minutes goal. Both weeks I exercised every day, a couple of days doing two different things, usually one thing in the morning and another in the afternoon.

If I only looked at calories burned, I'd probably be much slacker on my strength training because it doesn't burn nearly as many calories as cardio. But the truth is, I need the strength training to stay strong and flexible and actually undo the "damage" I do by running. These are two extreme weeks in terms of the balance between the cardio and the strength training. But just like you don't need to eat all your essential nutrients in one day, more like over one week, you can mix and match what you do for exercise. The place where my o/c tendencies get sent to the back of the bus is when my body clearly wants to follow a different path than my head's agenda. Then all bets are off and I follow my wise body's lead. I believe that it's good to follow what you feel up to, or feel like doing and in the end, it is all good.

I wanted to share this with people newer to the wide and vast world of exercise and I hope my ridiculous numbers don't put you off. It has taken me over five years to get here. I think of my prioritization of my fitness program as a crucial part of the mission to "save my own life". It is just as crucial and deserving of high priority to me as journaling my food and eating a healthy diet.

All kinds of exercise are good; serious and playful, intense and leisurely. What I've learned is that the more I move, the better I feel and the more confident I feel in my body. And feeling confident and good in my body, after almost an entire adult life of feeling the opposite, is a gift that I both work hard for and never take for granted.

Taking a Moment to Record Being Happy (or) "The Simple Ecstasy of Breathing"

2009-04-21T12:19:00.000-07:00

I was starting to really feel good this past weekend: I went to Sonoma County and had the blessed privilege to see Patricia, my Feldenkrais Goddess for a treatment. From there, I went to my old home town of Occidental, picked up y friend Mar and drove through Monte Rio and along the Russian River to the coast where it was a splendidly beautiful day. We had a picnic at Goat Rock, my favorite little piece of CA coastline, saw the Harbor seal mamas and their babies at the mouth of the river and had a chance meet up with Mar's grown children, daughter in law and her granddaughter who is just past five months old. I spent the night at a friend's house who was not home, woke up to a gorgeous Sebastopol dawn, drank coffee, packed myself up and went for a run for over an hour on the lovely, relatively flat and level Joe Rodota trail. Running on a well groomed, relatively flat trail is a real treat for me, since where I run here in Willits there are no flat, well groomed places, more like mountains and rocky trails or steeply hilled streets.

After the run, I went all the way into Sebastopol, which I have to admit is my favorite town on this planet and was the center of my world for 23 years before moving from Sonoma to Mendocino County. Daniel, my son, met me at The Slice of Life for breakfast. It was joyful to be with him, joyful to go to a vegetarian restaurant where I didn't have to negotiate my food and joyful to be flying on the endorphins from my run and the caffeine from my coffee.

After breakfast, we spent a long time across the street at the Sebastopol Farmers' market, which is a vibrant, weekly community event. After shopping, we sat on a bench, people watched and talked. Eventually, it was time for me to start heading back towards home, as I am teaching my African brother Dian Sewo to read.

While I was down in Sonoma County, my heart was filled to bursting with the beauty of my former home in her most glorious season. I felt some grieving and regret at not living there any more. I really owned all of my feelings and tried not to be hard on myself for having the grief/sadness/regret be in front of the joy and delight at being there. I spoke it aloud to both Tara on the phone Saturday night and to Daniel while we were together on Sunday.

I was pretty tired when I got home, but Dian Sewo was coming in a few minutes, so I just rallied. This was our second lesson. Dian Sewo speaks seven languages but has never learned to read and write, which is a very difficult handicap to run with here in America. I am his sponsor. I take my sponsorship of him seriously. He is family to me, to us. And I want him to be strong in this world here so he can contribute what is needed to his wife, my friend Fanny, and their beautiful 8 month old daughter Sahdjoo. We ended up spending our entire time together working on arithmetic: adding, subtracting, multiplying and making a budget. After teaching how to write it out by hand, I taught him how to use the calculator on his iPhone. I know that every lesson leaves him a little more empowered.

Sunday night I told Tara that I felt so fortunate: I really like my child, my wife and my mother. I have never had all three together like I do now and I spoke to that and took a moment to really feel the blessing of that. Right now, I'm feeling the love all around me and am not really in struggle with anyone at all. Life without draining drama is so liberating!

Monday was a tough day making a living, but at 3:30 I got a nice wine sale right before my meeting with Steve, the creative writing teacher whose class I wrote about in January. The class ended up not working out for me or him and he offered to meet with me for one hour 1 on 1 for 3 sessions instead to help me really get my book moving forward. We had a very good meeting yesterday and I think we both left the encounter flying high. I know I was. I had a few "aha!" moments about form and structure that I believe will help me greatly. I felt this great gratitude for both of us staying open through the difficulties that we had with each other and having this creative solution be presented and implemented. I felt gratitude in the moment of our encounter yesterday, for his creative input and his graciousness.

That night Tara and I shared our days and both of us had had really positive interactions with other people that left us feeling good about ourselves and the great good fortune we both had in our lives. I felt a richness all around me that had nothing to do with material wealth.

Today is a beautiful day too and I had an appointment with my osteopath down in Redwood Valley, about 15 miles south of Willits. As I was driving, sun roof open, drinking in all the new green, the California poppies blooming, the old, gnarled valley oaks with their maidenly heads of newly unfurled leaves, warm wind blowing in the open windows, warm sun on my head through the sunroof, I felt happy. Happy, like I was unfurling my new growth too. Happy in my body, in my spirit, in my heart, creatively engaged, feeling blessings all around me with all my senses.

These past days of warm, green, growing, burgeoning Spring I feel my own greening, my own growing, my own burgeoning, my own warming, . And today it's easy to believe that the flower growing towards the warm sun and the hundred year old oak branch unfurling those delicate, light green leaves feel the same joy at being alive that I do. Tara often says a blessing in Arapaho. The literal translation is "It is enough" Nenéé nehínee is the closest translation I could find. And today; these past few warming days, I have felt this deep in my core.

This was today's Note From the Universe:

"Ohhhh, to be alive in time and space, Maddy! If only those now living could recall what such a prospect once meant to them before their life began. And what it still means to multitudes in the unseen now awaiting their own initiations who, try as they may, can't even imagine the simple ecstasy of breathing.

To them, you already "have it all,"

The Universe"

"The simple ecstasy of breathing."

It is enough.

And the Truth Will Set Me Free

2009-03-22T21:03:00.000-07:00

So much happened this weekend at the Wild Women's Weekend. I'm still digesting most of it. But something happened between Saturday night and Sunday afternoon that is begging to be shared. I've written here recently and probably farther back in this blog about putting your goodness out into the universe and trusting that some of it will help some people or creatures or causes along their journey. And that you didn't necessarily get to know how much you affect the world around you.

In the learning to love myself, I have focused a lot of attention on "catching myself doing something right," and seeing how and if I can see how it manifests around me. Today I got to dance with the shadow of this dynamic.

On Saturday night a woman named Kym was playing. Kym is a singer songwriter, an event producer, a single mother of two children about 6 and 11 and a denizen of Sonoma County, my former home. She's brazen and tells it as she sees it. Sort of like me. And I remember that there was something that had happened with the two of us, that I had gotten really mad at her about something, but I couldn't for the life of me remember what it was. It happened "a long time ago" (6 years) and the encounter or event had been absorbed into the spongey place in my mind where my memory tries to be.

Kym performs. Her 11? year old daughter does a rap bit complete with dancing and she's breathtaking. She's a complete embodiment of the No-No Grrl we had called in as the Maiden Aspect of the Goddess the night before. Kym's daughter is beguiling. Kym's performance is moving and wonderful. I see her beauty. I see her beating heart. And she tells a story of being fired from a once a year event that she had been running the stage and hiring the entertainment for. Why? Because she spoke truth to power to a group of people, several of them women from the same life style and community that she lives in. She probably made them (rightfully) uncomfortable, and they fired her.

And I really saw her. And I saw that she was hurting around this. I saw that as a "real" feminist (a woman questioning why women performers made so much less than their male counterparts at a certain festival), and a heterosexual woman who most likely has so many more opportunities to raises her sword to colonization and its insidious daggers and barbs than a pretty separatist and far more reclusive person like me has to and I knew I had to make some kind of contact with her and hopefully it would feel right so I could find the place to tell her that I saw her, that it was colonization and that she was Good and Right and Beautiful.

I believe that part of the reason I love myself and my life as much as I do is because when Tara and I got together, she started saying that to me: "Maddy. You are Good and Right and Beautiful," and the parts of me that felt Bad and Wrong and Ugly would start another layer of healing. And there were many layers. There still are, but there are so many less layers than when she started saying this to me.

This was Saturday night. It's now Sunday afternoon and we're coming into our closing circle. I put my arm around Kym's shoulders and say, "There was some stuff between me and you. But I can't remember what it was and I release it," She bursts out laughing, but I'm thinking she doesn't recognize me from that long ago event that I can't remember. No doubt. I am 50 lbs lighter, my hair is much shorter and I've aged a bit. But it's not time to tell her what I want to tell her so I wait.

After the closing circle there is a Bye Tea. We all have tea and pick at snacks, exchange phone numbers and start saying goodbye. I get Kym aside for a minute and I tell her. All three things: That I see her; that the way the women from the festival committee turned on her is a symptom of colonization; that she is Good and Right and Beautiful. I watched the pores of her skin receive being seen. She hadn't considered the colonization bit. And she got tears in her eyes as she tried to absorb the Good and Right and Beautiful. But my goodness and magic aren't why I'm relaying this tale.

We started talking. Really talking. And Kym says to me after about 15 minutes, that she is envisioning a women's music festival held at a beautiful ranch in Sonoma County called Ocean Song. She had produced an event there before called Baring Witness She produced this event; an anti-war protest during which over 100 women laid out naked on a hill with their bodies shaped into the word TRUTH. She pulled it together with a week's notice and with a nursing baby in her arms. You can read about it here. I exclaimed that I had been there! I had been part of the middle T in TRUTH.

She lamented that the straight and lesbian women's communities still had a lot of healing to do with each other and proceeded to relate a story about how this was supposed to be a women-only event; that many women had voiced that they would only felt safe taking their clothes off if there were no men present. Kym had called the local paper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and requested a woman photographer. They said they only had a man available. She made a judgment call and in the name of getting the story in a major regional paper, she agreed. So she's telling me this story and I'm remembering this part, because I was there. And then she says, "And this woman Maddy got really mad at me for letting this man in to take photos. She and a couple of other women said some things to me that were so hard for me. I was doing my best on a week's notice with a baby in my arms. I didn't know it would be such a big deal."

I burst out, "That was me! I am that Maddy!" I saw the recognition bloom in her face and we both started to laugh. Then we were hugging and crying and laughing all at the same time. The words we exchanged to bring this circle to closure were affirming and kind.

And I now remember why I had been so angry at her. And I laughed with some degree of discomfort at the me that I was then. I laughed as I forgave myself for that forgotten transgression of using my words like knives. Maybe I laughed because it was so way past time to forgive Kym for making a unilateral decision that caused many older, separatist lesbians to get angry and perhaps feel unsafe which fueled some need of mine to be their champion or their voice. Or maybe my own. And maybe it was also way past time to forgive the knee jerk standoff that so often has people who were trying to be allies, forget that they were if something that seems "other" raises its head between them.

And I laughed at the humbling lesson that was the most prized gift of the weekend: This strong, get-things-done, powerful woman said to me, about the anger she received as she pulling off this amazing feat, "It was like a piece of sardine stuck to the can," and I got it that this interaction that I had forgotten was a splinter that had been embedded in this woman's psyche for over six years. And I gave her this splinter.

I think that splinter was pulled out and given back to the Earth today. With laughter. With grace. With two women seeing each other as the amazing allies they could be. With both of us seeing each other with the veils fallen away for the first time. And what I learned today was that all our words have power. That, yes, we can surely heal with them, but we can also wound and scar. Like a surgeon's blade, my words can harm or they can start a healing process. And I find that this knowing today makes me feel humble. The truth isn't always easy to dance with, but I feel that I must. And in doing so, with this Truth, something in me was set free.

Welcome Spring!

2009-03-21T08:16:00.000-07:00

There's this event going on in Willits this weekend: Wild Women's Weekend. My friends Ileya and Mana are hosting it at their wonderful art, music, ritual space downtown. I was asked to do an invocation of Spring. I asked three of my drum students to help me. I thought long and hard about what I wanted to say. Or more accurately, I asked over a period of about a week who wanted to be called in? And the answer came pretty clearly:

Spring is the maiden aspect of the goddess. The maiden is one of the sacred trinity of Maiden, Mother and Crone. In modern times, much talk has happened about a fourth aspect which years ago we dubbed the Amazon Artist. Since women live so much longer than in times of yore, there was a big gap between the milky, creative Mother years and the post menopausal Crone years and hence the Amazon Artist; woman walking into her full power as creatrix, as knowing her own self and having more of herself to actually devote to self-growth and empowerment. And it is the aspect of the goddess that I have been embodying for many years now as I stand on the precipice of cronedom.

But it was the first day of Spring yesterday and that is the time of the Maiden. And when I opened to who wanted to be invoked to help us in these strange times, a girl child was not the aspect that wanted, no, demanded to come it. The Maiden for 2009 (in my world) is the Teenager: the No-No Grrl; She who pokes at the edges of everything and asks "Why?" and says "No!" to whatever doesn't make sense to her; She who is each of our own personal scouts that finds the boundaries and pushes at them, stands up with no fear and says, "This is not the way I want it to be!" and changes it. She's the rebel, the fierce one who lives in every woman, only waiting to be given the out-ward facing job of being the edge and boundary pusher.

And we called, sang, drummed and danced her in last night.

It was a short ritual, more of just an invocation, and it took everything I had. Embodying my inner teenager for 30 minutes was exhausting. But it needed to be done and it is done. A group of women from age 20 to age 99 (seriously; there was a woman there who will turn 100 on 9/11) called in the No-No Grrl and the room was buzzing with joy and laughter, energy and attitude by the time I left to come home.

And today, for the first time since January 16th, my very peri-menopausal body started a period. Blessed Bleed.

And Welcome Spring!

May our sap rise fiercely to empower us to do the important work that is to be done. And may every woman find her inner No-No Grrl and face her outward to change the world.

Recipe Time! Creamy Sweet Potato, Red Lentil Soup

2009-03-17T10:33:00.000-07:00

I'm getting over my first cold in about a million years. I must say it's been rather a relief to be five days in and realize that this is a "cold" and not bronchitis or pneumonia. I've been staying down and doing a fair amount of soup and tea making and consuming. This soup was born of my desire for Vegan Penicillin. In my mind, miso based soups and lentil based soups are good for what ails me. This is, of course, a lentil version.

Creamy Sweet Potato, Red Lentil Soup

This is a creamy, filling, spicy, beautifully colored, comfort soup.

Ingredients

2 tsp olive oil
2 tsp cumin seed
one large onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 Tbsp ginger micro-planed or very finely minced
1 small jalepeno pepper, minced (optional)
1 tsp turmeric

3 cups peeled, cubed sweet potatoes (garnet is the best for this because of its dark color)
1 cup red lentils
6 cups water with 3 cubes no-salt-added vegetable boullion or 6 cups vegetable broth
juice of 1 large or 2 small lemons
chopped cilantro for garnish (optional)

Directions

Heat the olive oil in a heavy bottomed 2 qt or larger saucepan. Add cumin seeds and saute until they start popping. Add onion, garlic and jalapeno pepper. Saute for about 5 minutes, stirring often over medium heat. Sprinkle turmeric over the onions and saute another minute to thoroughly coat everything.

Add broth, ginger, sweet potatoes and lentils, stirring occasionally until it reaches a boil to keep lentils from clumping. When it reaches a boil, reduce heat to simmer and simmer partially covered until sweet potatoes and lentils are very tender, about 30 minutes.

Stand an immersion blender straight up and down in the pot so bottom of blender is flush with the pot and blend soup until it is thick and creamy. There should still be some chunks of sweet potatoes and pieces of onion that you can see. If you don't have a stick/immersion blender, then puree 3/4 of the soup in a blender and stir back into the pot with remaining 1/4 of soup.

Stir in lemon juice to taste
Garnish with cilantro if desired.

Nutritional Info

Servings Per Recipe: 6
Amount Per Serving
Calories: 212.9

Total Fat: 3.8 g
Cholesterol: 0.0 mg
Sodium: 557.0 mg
Total Carbs: 36.8 g
Dietary Fiber: 10.4 g
Protein: 7.5 g

Something Food Related That I Was Thinking About While Cooking Last Night

2009-02-08T14:06:00.000-08:00

Last night I was making a Thai curry with light coconut milk and green curry paste. I've been looking at this bowl on my counter for months now. It has been filled with a slowly-decreasing number of winter squash: Spaghetti squash and Delicatas from my garden and one sugar pie pumpkin and acorn squash that I had bought at the Willits farmer's market in, oh, I think November. Last night I was inspired to use the littlest of the Delicatas. In my mind's eye I saw thin, arched slices, tender from being simmered in broth and coconut milk, in the company of carrots, green beans and cilantro, cashews and seitan sausage, served over Jasmine rice.

It was a quick, cheater's broth: a cup of water with a packet of Trader Joe's vegetable broth concentrate diluted into it. First I cut the squash the long way, cut off the ends and scooped out the seeds and minimal pulp. Then I cut the squash halves in half again the long way, then cross cut in 1/4" thick slices. I simmered the squash in the broth for about 10 minutes, then added thinly sliced carrot, my own frozen green beans and a few ounces of light coconut milk. The green beans got me thinking: I remembered the work of picking, prepping, blanching and freezing. It's not a lot of work. Green beans are one of my favorite things to grow and if the harvest is good, I will usually have beans in my freezer until the next summer. This was not to be this last year, as the very short growing season and the fires in June/July conspired to create a rather scanty harvest of many things in the garden this last year. And so, as I portioned out a cup of beans from the last bag in the freezer, I got to thinking about eating locally.

The price of gas is rising again and I don't trust anything about or connected to the price of gas. The prices of everything went soaring when gas went up to $4.50 a gallon last spring and summer and those prices haven't really come down. For a person like me who is committed to eating organic, it can get very expensive to buy organic green beans (probably from Mexico) in February. Right now I have chard in my garden. The ubiquitous chard that happily grows through heat and frost, downpourings in winter and scanty watering in the summer. I have chard. I have some onion greens. That is what "eating local in season" would look like if I were to rely on what was growing right now in February. And if I needed to rely on my own garden, the chard would be all eaten up pretty quickly. But I do have electricity and a freezer. I do know how to dry or can things and preserve them in clean glass jars, so it is possible to have "summer in a jar" around our house.

I haven't bought tomato sauce or canned tomatoes in years. We do the work and very little goes to waste with the tomatoes. I braided up all the garlic last summer and ate my own garlic all the way through to the end of December. There are about 14 spaghetti squashes in the garage and I have a freezer full of completely prepped fava beans. And one bag of green beans. The last one. The one I used a cup out of last night. And while I was cooking, I thought about what the flow would have looked like if I had used fresh beans. Not much different, but I would have had to take the time to prep them and they would have gone into the pan to simmer much sooner than was needed for the prepped, blanched, frozen green beans.

The word "convenient" flitted across the screen of my mind. And I had to smile. At the back end of all this planning, digging, planting, watering, feeding, protecting from raccoons, harvesting, prepping, blanching and freezing, it was a pretty simple thing to measure out a cup of beans and scatter them into a simmering saute pan. It was convenient. Just like deciding that last night would be the night to eat the second of three delicata squash that I was able to harvest from a plant that started late, was uprooted again and again by the damn raccoons that plagued my garden last year and survived to give me three squash that landed in the large ceramic bowl that has been sitting on the penninsula, filled with one bounty or another since about August. There it was; a perfect two serving sized squash that only needed to be cut, deseeded, peeled and sliced to be turned into a componant of a delicious curry.

Gardening is not convenient. Sometimes it's downright frustrating and heartbreaking. But something in me has me face the challenges and the work and grow food. And then harvest and preserve food. As the price of gas follows its strange, incomprehensible path and we as a country fall further and further into a recession/depression, I'm glad for the space that we've nurtured and built to grow food. I'm glad for the things I've learned along the way about how to grow it. I was glad to eat my curry last night and know for sure that two of the ingredients in it required no gasoline to get to me and onto my plate. And that the luxury of fresh tomatoes in January may become a thing of the past, replaced by what I put in a jar or dried in September. But not yet. Right now, the convenience of just driving to town for chocolate, for coffee, for coconut milk, for vanilla beans, for agave syrup, for vital wheat gluten, for all the other things that come to me with the price tag of the true cost of gasoline, are still an option. And maybe I'm just an alarmist and they always will be an option.

But I can't help but try to think of what our lives would look like, what our table and pantry would look like if it wasn't.

Working Out at Home: How Much Space Do You Think You Need?

2009-02-08T12:54:00.000-08:00

Behold the odd, diagonal space that I use to burn at least 1/3 of my weekly calories: My house is not very big, total square footage is less than 1100, and when we remodeled three years ago, we sacrificed many square feet of "living room" to create a larger, workable kitchen. What you see in the picture is:
On the right: the end of my couch.
On the left: the penninsula of the kitchen.
Space between the short, flattened corner of penninsula and couch: 6'
Our TV is on a cart with wheels. It sits flush against the wall when not in use and is swung around at about a 45 degree angle for exercise and a full 90 degrees to be facing the couch when we want to watch TV, vs interact with TV for exercise.
Space from the bottom of the picture frame (end of yoga mat), to the edge of the rolled up carpet: 9'
What I have to do to exercise with the TV in the living room:
I have to take the coffee table and turn it perpendicular to the couch and push it flush with the wood stove hearth. I then roll up the carpet. Then I sweep the floor; basically the entire field of the photo and all the way off the bottom and bottom left of the photo field.
Once I've done that, I'm good to go. In terms of "free wall space" for yoga or Core Fusion Body Sculpting, I don't have any that is standing height. I have the office door. On the occasions when I want to do inversions like handstands or headstands, I go totally out of the picture field and use the closed office door. For Core Fusion abdominal work, I use the long side of the penninsula that you see in the photo, as it only needs to be as high as I am while sitting on the floor and putting my feet and legs up into a V shape.

It's a small space. I hear people talk on the message boards about having a very small living space and not being able to make the room to exercise. And I know from doing this for several years now, that the 6' spot in my own space is sometimes restricting. Sometimes it forces me to turn my mat and orient 90 degrees away from the DVD I'm using, so as to not hit the penninsula or edge of the couch, usually with my feet when I'm doing some yoga thing that has me fully extended. With my arms over my head and feet fully extended, I'm well over 6' in length.

Yet the fact of the matter is that a space that is an oddly shaped 6' x 9' at its narrowest is far larger than my yoga mat, which measures in at 2'x70", or 2' x 5'10". Unless I'm dancing or doing some creative, flowy Shiva Rea lying down something, my mat is the world upon which my calories are getting burned and my body is getting stronger and more toned.

Perspective is everything: When I was doing a combination of yoga classes in the big studio at the gym and doing DVDs at home, my home space felt very small and somewhat restrictive. Now, not only do I not go to classes at the gym, but the entire gym is closing at the end of the month. This makes my sixish by ninish foot space seem quite adequate, for it is surely larger than no space at all. Also, I've adapted: I know when I have to turn that 90 degrees on my mat to avoid kicking the penninsula or the couch or hit the rolled up portion of the carpet. I've learned in an empirical way that my space is adequate. In fact the area of my yoga mat is adequate for doing most of what I do for exercise here in my living room. I've been exploring a dance DVD called Soul Sweat. I don't use a mat for that. I'm moving around the space dancing and even with two steps forward and four steps back, my space is adequate. I've learned to move "on a bias". I've learned to utilize what I have.

I think it all comes down to what motivates you. Times are tricky for many people right now and when the money gets scarce, things like gym memberships seem to float to the top of the list of the slash budget. If you do things like yoga, body sculpting, free weight lifting or other exercise that requires the minimal space of a yoga mat, do you have that 2' x 6'? Can you make it with a little rearranging? Yes. It's a pain in the ass to have to move furniture, roll up carpets and sweep the floor every time I want to exercise at home. But it's about priorities. I want to be fit. I want to be strong. I want the "feel good" that yoga, weight training, body sculpting, etc gives me and I've organized it all in my head that the housecleaning and furniture moving are worthy prices to pay to have those things. And the end result is that that modest yoga mat; that modest 6' x 9' space has become an entire universe in which transformation continues to happen.

"Gotta Have it Now": An Idea Whose Time is Over

2009-01-30T06:33:00.000-08:00

I read the other day through a link on Huffpost that Starbucks is ceasing their "every 30 minutes no matter what" policy of freshly brewing pots of decaffeinated coffee after 12:00. They say this is part of how they'll save $400 MILLION by September by doing this, among other things relating to reducing "labor and production expenses". When I related this to Tara, her first response was to shake her head and shudder that this policy of brewing fresh pots of coffee every 30 minutes has been creating hideous excess and waste for years. She spoke to the land and water and labor used to grow this coffee that went literally down the drain.

However, this was not the first thing that I thought about. The first thing I thought about was why Starbucks brews fresh coffee every 30 minutes. My first thought was that it is us in our high speed quest for instant gratification, instant response, that has driven businesses in a highly competitive culture to be the fastest, the cheapest, the most convenient so we will patronize their business or employ their services. So first I thought it was us. But the more I thought about it, I realized that we've been trained to want things immediately. This may be an idea created on many Madison Avenue drawing boards for corporate strategies, but my deeper sense says no, it's more than that. It feels more like an agreement we've made in this digital age of wondrous new technology, the point of it all which seems to have created a dynamic by which we are both instantly accessible to anyone or thing in the world as well as have other people and things be instantly accessible to us; to click on a webpage and be transported there in a moment; to push the button on the answering machine and get the message with no more than a second delay; to put the DVD or CD in, advance it instantly, take it out when it's done with no rewind; to cook our food in microwave ovens or buy fast "food"; to rarely have to stand on a line for any length of time; to not stand for having to wait long for much of anything.

But back to coffee: When I mentioned our conditioning to want our coffee fresh, Tara's reply was, "What's so bad or wrong with coffee that is more than 30 minutes old?" Now this is the grrl who sometimes gets the acid swill at the gas station and grew up with camp coffee. This is not to say that she doesn't appreciate the difference in a fine and fresh cup of coffee, but her way of seeing this was to posit that we are way too spoiled as a culture if we are tossing 30.1 minute old coffee for fresh based on a rarified and conditioned expectation. And I do agree that this is part of a much larger problem. Upon Googling "Starbucks to stop brewing decaf after 12:00", I was dismayed at the blog posts and news headlines that came up, like this one: Sad News For Starbucks Decaf Lovers. The company has said that it takes FOUR MINUTES to brew a cup of decaf fresh. FOUR MINUTES. So please tell me what is sad here? The death of thousands of oak trees in CA: That is sad news. The loss of tens of thousands of American jobs: That is sad news. Having to waif for FOUR MINUTES for a cup of decaf? That is not sad. That is, in my opinion, the turning of a tide.

Before this headline appeared, I had espied a new Starbucks ad on TV. It's an "Obama campaign-like" TV ad with digital, soy-based ink-like colored animation that is encouraging and touting all of us rolling up our sleeves and pitching in for America. Sign up for a certain amount of community service through your local Starbucks and they'll give you a free coffee. This had a greasy, corporate feel on the cynical part of my psyche, yet the Pollyanna in me got all choked up watching the commercial. They also gave out free coffee to everyone who came in and said "I voted" on Election Day and I admit: I went into my local Starbucks for my free coffee after voting. So maybe this could be what "corporate responsibility" looks like in the 21st century, in a hemorrhaging economy. I am choosing to see these hints at a turning as good things unless they are proved otherwise. I'm so tired of "yeah, but" punditry, so I'll take this one at face value.

Getting back to Tara's horror at all the waste that has been a matter of corporate policy: Once I was finished with following my threads of the why of it all, I came back around to the waste issue and realized that I as an individual can do my best to make a smaller footprint. There is a (somewhat flawed) test you can take here that shows you, based on the results of a quiz you take, that if everyone in the world lived like you do, it would take X number of planets to support us all living that way. By the sheer virtue of driving a car and living in a single family house with electricity and running water, I can't seem to get below 2+ planets on this test. I lower my footprint by being vegan, by working at home, by driving less than 1000 miles a month and by recycling, but it is a sobering thought to think that most of America lives in a way that would use up over 5 planets if everyone lived that way. (Flying on airplanes and eating meat were two of the bigger markers for needing more planets.) Yet in the light of my footprint, vs corporate footprints, there is no comparison.

And all of these things are indicators or bright red pointing arrows that can show us why we as a nation, as a culture are in the terrible mess that we're in. If we eat the whole world, where will we live? If the cost of having whatever-it-is right NOW results in waste that is literally unrecoverable, then can we think about changing our relationship with our consumerism? Can we just slow down a little and wait a mere four minutes for a cup of decaf? This won't heal the problems of our systems, but I dearly believe we have to start somewhere. Why not trust that it can start in that space of four minutes? Maybe in that four minutes of stillness we'll get an idea, an inspiration, a creative kiss. Maybe the solution to a problem will enter through the space we make by taking our time. Maybe in those four minutes we'll actually feel ourselves just being. And I see the possibility of an entire universe of value in that.

What is a "Day of Rest"?

2009-01-23T13:54:00.000-08:00

For me, a day of rest doesn't mean that I'm only doing my normal cleaning, cooking and moving my body pretty gently through space with my heart rate staying at or near resting rhythm. It doesn't mean that I spend the day inert. A day of rest doesn't mean I don't get out of my pajamas or that I just sit in a chair or on a couch and/or take a nap for a couple of hours in the afternoon. That's what it meant at one time.

Now, what it means to me is determined by a qualitative feeling I have during and after moving. I may have walked for an hour, but the operative word was "walk". Usually I "hike" or "run". To walk implies moving relatively gently through space and maybe somewhat elevating my heart rate, but in no way feel like I'm stressing my body, pushing her edges. The same is true with yoga: I can do a 60 minute practice that is more about stretching and releasing than strengthening. Strengthening means that I'm tearing and rebuilding muscle, stressing my muscles so they grow stronger. I can do the lunar type of a yoga practice and that feels, to me in the qualitative feeling of it like restore-ation, and I would include that in what I call a day of rest.

Something I've learned is that a fit body likes to move, loves to move, craves it, gets cranky without it. And my first 1-2 years exercising, when I started my Weight Watchers journey in March of 2004, I did it because I "had to" to attain my goals of weight loss and health. I endured months of muscles talking to me for the rest of the day and night for what I'd asked of them during exercise. Soon, it felt good after I stopped and that was a nice reward for the efforting. And eventually, in not really a very long time, it started feeling good through all the phases of doing it. Except maybe the first five minutes. The first five minutes of running don't feel so great, but after that....flying! Joy! Centered, breathing, Maddy-in-harmony-with-the-Earth...I happily endure those first minutes for what comes after.

I find it near miraculous to me that I am this person. And that a 50 minute ior a 90 minute walk can constitute part of a rest day. Pat had this to add to this discussion, "Fitness gurus describe lighter movement not geared toward defined increases in muscle strength/endurance or cardiovascular fitness as Active Recovery. Active Recovery is especially important for helping newbies and those sore from trying a new routine. I find it especially valuable for retaining an attitude of joy in movement, not always pressing, pushing, striving. Kick back a little and find happiness in movement from time to time. "

Mavis referred to it as "active rest" and I really like that phrase. It captures this newish Way of Maddy just right.

In Search of The Sweet Spot

2009-01-12T06:31:00.000-08:00

I figured I'd get here sooner or later, as from the path I walk, I could see this on the horizon. It is a meeting, a crossroads if you will of several "messages" from outside sources; none of them critical, none of them that cause me to feel bad about who I am and how I do my life, but simply messengers.

The first is The Universe, who says, "Thoughts become things... choose the good ones! ®". In my quest to be the happiest person I can be, I really hang my hat on this one. I have gotten, over the past 5 years, more and more comfortable with noticing my thoughts and how they affect my outcomes, my body, my spirit. And I know that my mind is a very powerful entity; shaping the way I see and interact with the world.

So with that as my alluring introduction to this process, I'd like to step back a little bit and look over the past 4 3/4 years. My 5 year Weight Watcher anniversary is March 7th. I followed the program, became a person who exercises, lost the weight I wanted to lose and began maintenance. I've admitted here that it has taken me a long time to feel like I was succeeding at maintaining my weight. It took the turnings of two years; of coming to my goal weight anniversary date of March 1st for the second time in 2008, and actually still being at or under my goal weight before I believed that I was succeeding at maintaining.

Why did it take me 2 years to believe it? I think this was partly due to knowing that only 5% of people who lose a significant amount of weight keep it off for more than 2 years. I think I still had some demons flitting around in my head that said I wasn't worthy, wasn't working hard enough, didn't deserve to succeed. But the truth is that I've worked harder at this than just about anything I've ever done and I deserve my continued success.

And a curious thing in all of this for me is that I've actually gotten pretty relaxed about the food intake part of this grand equation. I still track just about everything I eat every day. I use Sparkpeople's food journal program and recipe building program with great success. Doing this has become a normal part of my day. I make the time for it. It is, for the most part, a non-negotiable for me. If I'm going out of town and not cooking any of my own food and not really having good internet access, I'll take a few days off, like I did for drum camp. And I've even gotten comfortable taking those occasional days off from tracking. But my mind (this very strong creater of my reality) really believes that tracking and food journaling is a major cornerstone of how I maintain. So I happily comply with my mind's equation and so far so good.

And then there is exercise. Another part of my mind's equation for success is my exercise program. The Sparkpeople calorie allowance is based on what you weigh, what you'd like to lose and how quickly you'd like to do that, mathematically transmogrified by the number of calories you burn exercising each week. I am still doing the SparkAmerica, count your fitness minutes challenge and the monthly Fitness Challenge on the Weight Watcher's message board. So I do set a minutes goal for the month, for the week. And in order to be able to eat more, I set a pretty stiff exercise goal. I commit each week to burning between 3,200 and 3,400 calories in exercise; right now mostly a combination of hiking, running, treadmill and yoga. My mind's equation says, "If I track all my food, exercise every day my body says YES (which is most every day) and burn those 3,200-3,400 calories a week, I will maintain this happy weight of right over/under 150 lbs."

I believe the Universe is full of love and compassion and really wants to accomodate my visions; my versions of how the world is, so I continue to spend hours every day tracking, journaling and exercising. And lo and behold! I am coming up on my 3 year Maintenance anniversary and I'm still right around where I want to be with my weight, with my physical health, my strength, my cardio/pulminary fitness. And yet, I see the obsessive/compulsive aspects of myself and worry about all this focus making me a boring person, obscuring beauty and magic that I would possibly see if I weren't so deeply focused on my "program". And as The Universe (A.K.A. Mike Dooley) reminds me daily that Thoughts become things...choose the good ones, I've recently gotten two other messages.

The first is from my own body. About a month or so ago, I started getting a debilitating pain upon certain movments in my right arm where the deltoid and the tricep meet. Many trips to the osteopath have not resolved this issue and I've been referred to physical therapy which starts this week. This has greatly impinged on my yoga practice. I've modified or omitted all weight bearing asanas on my arms, which is a lot of what I do. I completely stopped lifting free weights. For the past week, my neck on the same side has been out and again, two trips to the osteopath have not resolved the issue. I go again tomorrow to see the wife of the couple. I think her treatments are better for me than her husband's, but for something that is moving from acute to chronic, we shall see. I hope for the best and am prepared to try other options.

It seems clear to me that my body is trying to give me a message. It's confusing because the parts of my body that are healthy are so in love with all the activities that I do and they don't want to stop or change or modify anything. And yet, I see this injury as being a huge, as well as compassionate teacher because it is holding up the mirror for me to see how my O/C tendency of adding up my minutes and my calories burned are possibly not serving me here. So why don't I just take a break? Why don't I take a week off where all I do is walk? I don't do it because I'm uncovering that that O/C drive to keep accruing minutes and calories burned is being generated from fear: Fear of losing my momentum and starting down the slippery slope of gaining all my weight back as I reacquaint myself with my old habits of overeating and not exercising.

So right when I'm facing, with compassion and love, but facing this uncomfortable personal truth, Mavis, one of my Weight Watcher friends posts this on the Fitness Challenge thread:

"Physical movement is a form of creative expression for me. I truly [find] vitality and connection through it."

That's why I like to create my own routines. It's a way to do a "live journal" of how I'm feeling on any given day. That's why it's so important to move beyond the mechanics (calories burned, specific routines, time frames, etc.) Those are measurements, which are fine in their place. But for me, true power came when I integrated fitness as part of how I live. I can accept fluctuations, setbacks, bumps, whatever, because I know it's always available, and I don't need one specific situation or circumstance to keep my momentum."

I no longer require perfection or certainty in my practice. I've done 20-minute ad hoc yoga practices on a towel in a hotel room, took month-long hiatuses in 2007 when I was in a car accident and my Dad was terminally ill, and I'm still here. My routines may change, but I know I'll do something. I trust that there are seasons for everything. It's a wonderful thing indeed! "

May you all find your expression and fitness 'sweet spot.'"

Indeed. And so I expose to the light my iron grip on all of this and with a large exhale, loosen my fingers. Just enough to care for my injury. Just enough to take a deep inhale. Just enough to step out into the void. Just enough to feel the grand expanse of self, within which lies today's "sweet spot".

Happy Three Year Anniversary, Body Tales!

2009-01-02T10:40:00.000-08:00

Once again, I'm wishing myself and my blog a happy anniversary one day late because I spent most of yesterday working on my manifestation collage for 2009. It's not quite done, but I'm getting close. My collage is about what I want to continue to nurture and what I want to begin to cultivate in 2009. If I want to have a book to try to get published, I really have to get serious about writing it. So far I have over 100 recipes collected but not edited or tested. I have a whole bunch of my online vegetarian, omnivore and vegan friends who want to be testers. The trickier part of the book is all that "how to" regarding getting and staying fit and healthy, creating new habits and priorities around food and healing broken parts of self. I really have all green lights on this, so the only thing standing in my way is me. In this new year, I want to see this book come together and be ready to shop around.

(This is why I love my life: Just as I wrote those last words, this post came through on my online bulletin board. Since I'm the list owner, I am the one who approves new posts and here's what just came through:

DATE: Fri, 02 Jan 2009 18:56:56 -0000
SUBJECT: Creative Writing Class
Do you like to write, feel you have something important to share and would enjoy having a forum to express your ideas and experiences? Consider joining the Journalism 180 class, Writing for Publication, at the Mendocino College--Willits Center for the Spring 2009 semester. The class is taught by journalist and fiction writer Steven Hellman and is suitable for adults and teens, and all genres. The class meets Mondays, 5:30 - 8:30 p.m.. For info, 459-6224.
------------------------
It seems that I might want to call that number and see what happens. It couldn't get any easier to do than to have a college extension class here in Willits, as the main campus is in Ukiah, 25 miles away. )

This is also posting number 201. I am amazed anew at my stick-to-itiveness at keeping this writing thing going for three whole years. My number of postings have definitely slowed from that first year when I was having so many epiphanies and healings, but they still come and I still try to write them down and post them here. For that, I am grateful to have this format to archive my life as I'm living it.

Blessings to us all in 2009. May our new president make large and crucial inroads towards a better direction that we can all follow for our collective and individual good. May we find the sweetness in our lives moment by moment. May we heal parts of both self and our own world that are broken. May our courage and our joy always rise to the top.

Happy New Year

32,160 Fitness Minutes: A Reflection on Goal Setting

2008-12-31T14:05:00.001-08:00

In the end of 2007, Sparkpeople created and begain the SparkAmerica Challenge. The concept was about acruing fitness minutes to collectively reach 1,000,000,000 minutes for 2008. As a world-wide group, we've fallen short, by more than half, but 1 billion is a very large number.

On a personal note, I blew my goal totally out of the water. I had committed to something that felt challenging but doable: 27,000 minutes. That was 75 minutes a day, 360 days of the year. I had never set a long-range goal like this before in quite this way. I've set sales goals before. I actually had to when I worked for the corporate winery, but this was personal. It was uncoerced and it was all mine.

It would have been empowering to make my goal of 27,000 minutes, but to end the year with a total number of fitness minutes of 32,160 is more empowering that I can even express. That is very close to 90 minutes a day for 360 days. And I'm sure I only took about 6 (remember, this was a leap year) days off with no focused activity all year. My qualitative goal was to exercise every day my body said "Yes" and that was most every day. To realize how few days I did no exercise is a testament to how healthy and strong and happy this dear body is and for that I am profoundly grateful, as I still remember those years of illness and body suffering. To realize that a "day of rest" now means an hour of a gentle yoga practice is immensely gratifying. To look at the most recent yoga pictures that Tara took of me today and see my strength showing through from top to bottom is a manifestation of all this hard and loving work.

And I took this idea from SparkAmerica and created it in a slightly different form on the Weight Watchers Veggie Board. We call it the 30/31 Days of (whatever month) Fitness Challenge and we count our fitness minutes and track them day by day. We cheer each other on and I am a witness to constant greatness and success. And the success of others, the enthusiasm of others feeds my own. Sometimes I think about what it would take to create something like this in real life: a weekly meeting to talk about health/fitness/weightloss topics, inspire each other and know that you will have something to report the next week....sort of like a Weight Watcher meeting but without the corporate crap or the junk food. I wonder what it would take.....I think I'll write my book first.

So to name them in public, here are my short term goals:

2250 fitness minutes for the month of January
Back under 150 lbs
Get the recipe section of the book edited and dispersed to testers
Continue to gather, transcribe and edit the posts from this blog that want to be in the book

So may it be. And so it is.

Scatter Your Seeds and Let Go

2008-12-18T12:53:00.001-08:00

Since it is almost Winter Solstice, my thoughts keep coming back to seeds. Metaphorical seeds: Dream Seeds, Love Seeds, Seeds of Transformation. And I've been thinking a lot about the Solstice, the Dream Time and what it means to be a being in a body in this life, in this world.

I had a series of thoughts that I want to plant right here. If you can get on board with the premise that when we put love and care out in the world, we are casting metaphorical seeds, then follow me here: These seeds, blown on the winds, carried by streams and rivers, transported on the coats of animals or our own socks, sometimes burned in fires that remove their outer casings which allows them to grow, need fertile or welcoming or just the right kind of soil to take hold, root and sprout.

I think one of the Great Mysteries is that we don't always or even often get to know where our seeds of love, hope, inspiration and care go, or if they sprout or not. Maybe they rest deep in the heart of someone for years and when the magic of alchemy of Divine Right Timing happens and that seed sprouts, they might not even know where it came from, just that they are inspired to change, to grow, to heal.

I have faith that as I walk my life in all the layers of my being, that these seeds I scatter on the winds, that stick on my socks, burn in the fire, or drift downstream on the river will go where they are needed when their time is ripe. I don't get to say when and I don't always get to know how. What I do know is that I have faith that scattering the seeds matters.

And that is what I wanted to share: We are all Good Right and Beautiful and sometimes we just have to scatter our seeds and let go.

Rest In Peace, Christy Molnar

2008-12-17T08:39:00.001-08:00

I got word yesterday that a woman that I worked with for many years, many years ago had died. We worked together from 1986 through the early 90's. I was a newbie wine sales person and she was a seasoned veteran. She taught me a lot. She was tenacious. She was seductive. She knew how to find a YES right up there with the best of them. Her phone name was Christy Love.

She was also a morbidly obese chain smoker. And this was in the 80's. From what I've learned from mutual friends, she maintained her obesity and her smoking habit all the way until the end. About a year or so ago, a mutual friend said she had become nonabulatory. She died alone in her home on Monday night. Her housekeeper found her Tuesday morning.

On Christmas Day she would have been 59.
Rest in Peace, Christy. May you be free of suffering, free of pain.

And yes. This is a cautionary tale.

The Wheel Of The Year Turns to Solstice and The Peak of The Dream Time

2008-12-17T07:01:00.001-08:00

The wheel of the year has turned a complete turn since my retreat at Harbin Springs last Winter Solstice. Phiona, our 1986 Toyota Dolphin is packed to go. The intention today is to take her to the KOA and flush her grey and black water systems, then go to Chevron to fill the propane tank and finally to the gas station to fill her up and check the air in her tires. The only possible problem with my plan to leave tomorrow for up to 6 nights at the springs is the weather. I'm gazing out at a garden and meadow covered in a few inches of snow. The top of my hottub is dusted with some new snow that fell last night. We may not be able to get Phiona down our ski slope of a street to get her to town to do all that we intended. The weather report is for snow and rain and then some more of the same with some breaks in between all the way through Monday. I'm supposed to leave tomorrow, Thursday. Harbin Springs is at about the same elevation as I am here at home, but 90 miles away and further inland. (Yes, many things I love dearly in this world are 90 miles away from where I live....in different directions even!) That's a long way to drive an old RV in bad weather, loaded to the gills. I'm challenged enough driving this mini behemoth on a sunny day.

I have to gently laugh at myself for all the obstacles my brain throws up around leaving town for overnights. I call it mild agoraphobia and I am sorry that I have to go through this every time I want or need to go out of town, but I am also grateful it isn't worse than it is. I can push through it. Usually I feel like I'm getting sick a few days or the day before I'm supposed to leave. This time, the Universe threw me a real sickness as I've witnessed Tara come down with and suffer from and still be recovering from a nasty respiratory illness that had her down from last Thursday night through yesterday, Tuesday morning. She went to work yesterday, but came home totally exhausted and went to bed at 10:00. I have been taking immunity boosters several times a day and so far, so good. I had felt invaded by this virus right around the same time as Tara had, but my rock solid immune system seems to have fended it off. I'm still on yellow alert, but I'm not feeling invaded any more. This is good, as while the RV has heat, it is too noisy to run it while sleeping, and the very scanty insulation lets all the heat leach out pretty quickly.

Last year it was very cold at the springs; down in the teens and 20s at night. I slept in double layers, under a quilt and 2 sleeping bags, wearing a hat. I would get up in the morning to about 35 degrees in the RV, jump down from the bed, flip on the heater and the stove to make my coffee, leap back up into the bed and wait. By the time my kaffe maker was done making my coffee, it would be an almost civilized 50 degrees in there: warm enough to get up and start my day.

It's totally dry/self-contained camping at Harbin, but not too far away from the RV parking is a second overflow lot that is available for RV and car camping if there is nothing happening in the workshop space next to this lot. The reason I'm bringing this up is that there is an outside electrical outlet on the side of this building. This is where I would charge my cell phone and laptop last year. I did this on the sly. No one used this workshop space the entire time I was there and if that is true again this year, I am going to bring a 100' heavy guage extension cord and see about plugging in at night so I can use my electric heater for warmth, as well as charge my electronics. I'll have to unplug early in the morning and only plug back in after dark. I'll probably get my hand slapped if I get caught, but I'm willing to take the chance for my comfort and ease. If it doesn't work out, I know what it will look like and that is fine.

So this is what the agoraphobe (me) has to do before feeling safe enough to leave town: I have to visualize my possibilities, make contingency plans and visualize what each plan might look like. The rough sketch view is that I will be there for six nights. I will follow my own bliss path like I did last year: eat, sleep, hike, do yoga, soak, write, read, be internal, be external all on my own time, following my own desires and rhythms. I want to work on my book and get a big hunk done. Last year I mostly worked on the How I Did The Work To Lose The Weight part and this time I want to begin with starting to create subsections for the cookbook and see where the big holes are. I also want to put some major effort in what I feel is the crux of the book: How I Keep the Weight Off Year After Year. I have a couple of books to read including the last remaining unread Kay Kenyon book that I bought from Amazon last spring and have been saving for this trip. I'm going to do a bunch of cooking today so I can bring food that is already made and not have to spend a whole lot of time cooking dinners. I didn't do this last year. I'm going to make seitan this morning. Later I think I'll make a batch of my black bean, sweet potato chili, some salad dressing and a batch of a new lentil soup that I created while Tara was sick.

The waters at Harbin are so wonderful and sometimes, especially when I'm there for a few days or more, just being around them is enough and I only go in the pools maybe 1 or 2 times a day. The hot pool is less hot in the deep cold; probably only 110 degrees. The cold plunge is almost heart stoppingly cold at about 55-60 degrees. It takes fortitude and courage to do rounds of that. Mostly I stay in the warm pool, a pretty tepid 102 degrees, except where the hot pool feeds into the warm pool at the far end where there is a hole in the concrete. I call it the hot hole. The water right in the vicinity of the hole is more to my liking: about 104 degrees. I always feel deeply healed by these waters, even if my soaking sessions are short.

In the year that has transpired, much has happened, much has changed. I saw Tara through a cancer scare and a total hysterectomy, followed by a 4 month MRSA infection in one of the surgery sites and the total hormone crash of the surgical menopause. Her forced menopause and the stress that ensued from the health scare, the surgery, the MRSA infection, the hormone crash pushed me into the next level of my own menopause journey. Over the past nine months I've seen huge changes in my own workings. Without going into the gory minutae of all of it, suffice it to say that my symptoms have been enough for me to start getting regular blood tests for hormone levels and to start doing bioidentical hormones under my osteopath's care.

It was hard at first and I didn't like the way the progesterone was making me feel. I was edgy and didn't feel like myself. The thing it did do for me was give me better sleep than I've had in years. The DHEA was useful too to alleviate many of my uncomfortable symptoms. I have started and stopped and started again. My doctor has been saying to me that my thyroid levels are very low and in following them, I am witnessing them slowly but steadily falling. What is true in "the real world" is that my energy levels have dropped as well. For a long while there, I kept accelerating my workouts: running further and faster, doing harder and harder things in my yoga practice. I called it "Personal Best" and the finding how far this beautiful and nearing-50-year-old body could go was exciting and gratifying. At some point, not knowing exactly when, I stopped trying to to do more and was pretty much staying where I was. And then, a couple of months ago, I noticed that the levels I had attained were becoming harder to do. Whereas the outer edges of my limits were, say, 1 1/2 hours running up the mountain and back, now only an hour of running and hiking would leave me more tired later in the day than the 1 1/2 hours did just a couple of months ago. The same was happening with my yoga practice. I found myself less willing to do the harder flows and felt challenged by flows that had been much easier just a couple of months ago.

My osteopath had been suggesting that if I took just a little bit of thyroid, I'd probably feel a whole lot better. I came home and told Tara this and she said, "You know Maddy, thyroid is one of those things that once you start taking it, you don't get to stop." That was alarming to me and from that place of being alarmed, I refused the offer of a prescription. My doctor, who is a great person and a fine doctor that doesn't make me bad or wrong or blame me for being out of whack because I won't do what he says, suggested that I do homeopathic thyroid and adrenal support instead. I agreed. But after 6 weeks of these very expensive remedies, I not only felt no better, I felt a little worse. My last blood test showed that my thyroid levels are scraping the bottom of normal and have one foot in hypothyroidville. So two days ago I asked him, "If I take thyroid and the end of oil happens and I can't get my meds or any other thing comes up and I have to stop taking it, what will happen?" (I love that he didn't even roll his eyes energetically at my question.) He replied, "You'll crash and then rebalance to about where you are now." And that was good enough for me. I told him to write the prescription.

Yesterday was my first day taking 15 mg of thyroid. (OK. Laugh at me. I'm very sensitive to medications.) For the first four hours I felt nothing and then I had an uncomfortable hour or two of feeling like I was on speed. My heart was beating faster and I was having a hard time focusing on anything. Then that leveled out and I felt, er, GREAT. As in, I felt at 5:00 teaching my drum class, as good as I feel first thing in the morning when I am at my best. It was a great class. I felt happy and inspired and inspiring. I had the juice to teach the class. And I realized that I have been struggling more and more to teach this class at a time of day that during other days of the week, I am doing nothing more complicated than starting dinner. I realized yesterday that I've been doing less and less in the "after tea time" part of the day because I don't have the brain power or the juice to do it. That is a lot of hours in my waking day to be doing little to nothing of any intrinsic value. And yesterday I got to see how much I've changed, how much function I had lost or was losing. And to think that I may be getting it back or forward or something is frankly, rather thrilling.

So in bringing this rambling posting full circle, I am not the grrl I was one year ago....not to say that I have ever been the grrl I was one year before whenever "now" was....but it is a good reckoning to see how my body has changed as I dance the menopause dance; the aging dance. For 4 years I was all about losing weight, becoming a person who exercises, acquiring a fit and muscled body, becoming a vegan, maintaining that weight loss and now in year 5, I've come into this "new" body and am finally seeing the aging process in action. My doctor called this hormone and thyroid adventure "a youth treatment" and I protest that phrase. My veggieboard friend Ruth rephrased it as "balance treatment" and I've amended that to "balance therapy". Because when I sift through all the minutae of my feelings and wonderings about, am I doing this for my health or for my vanity? And does it really matter which? What I come up with, and thanks to my ROARS Yahoo group where I posed this dilemma about health or vanity and got pages of wonderful insight, reflection and support, is a balance of both health and vanity. It is a balancing act for this dear body that loves this life so much and I want to feel good inside of her. I want to have these "do over" years; these years of making up for all those years of living like I didn't have a body, living in a vibrantly alive feeling body. I do the work to have that and if I feel I need to use a medication and hormones to help me, I am coming to peace with that decision.

And so the grrl I Am Now will leave on retreat. If I can't get out tomorrow, I'll leave the next day or the day after that. It doesn't matter. What will be will be. And I will be the person I am now, having my little Winter Solstice adventure, honoring the Dream Time, honoring the fertile, quiet places within myself that need alone time, space and being away to speak to me; to guide me as I see this year to a close and step onto the new wheel, to honor the return of the sun, keep the fire burning in my heart in faith that spring will return and I will once again plant many wonderful things in the garden of my being.

A Pep Talk To Others, But Essentially, I Think, To Myself

2008-12-09T21:48:00.001-08:00

(I posted this on the Veggie Board yesterday before I got on the scale yesterday afternoon. I never get on a scale in the afternoon, so I can only say in my defense, that I'd just gone for an hour's run and was in my post cardio, sweaty state in which I weigh in. I did not expect to see 155 lbs. But there it was. After doing weight and strength training this morning I was no better than 154.6. After a morning run, I might see 154 give or take. And this is higher than I've been at this time of year since I hit goal.

My menopause journey has amped up a lot. After some starting and stopping, I have resumed taking bioidentical hormones. DHEA and Progesterone to be specific. I know that some of this weight is from taking hormones and the water I can feel that I am retaining. And I know that the body is wise to hold weight to ease the transition to menopause because there is estrogen in that fat. And there is clearly a little more of me around my middle. This is cause for concern and for action, but I have to stop, breathe, and say that I'm not panicking. Nor am I feeling nonchalant about it. I've upped my cardio exercise and am working on my total calorie input for the day. My body is protesting, both crafitly and blatantly, yet being mean or punishing to myself is not an option. This is how I've changed. Constantly redefining what something is by seeing what it looks like is another way I've changed on this journey. And these are good things.

Following, is what I wrote yesterday. I guess in the end, I wrote it for myself. )

12/8/08
I've been witnessing quite a few frustrated Weight Watchers on the Vegetarian Message Board posting lately about plateaus or gains. I have some things to share as a person who was on the losing plan for 2 years and is now coming around the wheel for my 3rd time as a maintainer.

1) We are in the time of year I call the Food Orgy Season. From Halloween through New Year's Day, the world around us is pushing sweets, potlucks, lunches and dinners out on us. Often it is impossible to decline these invitations either because it would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, or bad politics. So we attempt to eat lightly the rest of that day, maybe we get a little extra exercise, we try to be careful in our choices. And it is damn hard to do! People not trying to lose weight really have NO IDEA how fraught with peril a Christmas party or company lunch can be for a weight watcher! But we go and we do our best.

Finally, the first of the year comes and the Food Orgy season becomes the Season of Repentance. This is the season where gym and Weight Watcher memberships soar. It seems like the whole world "goes on a diet" or embarks upon a fitness regime. If this looks like the world around you and you are plateauing or have gained a couple of pounds, you are DOING GREAT! Given the pressures and the minefields you have to walk through, staying the same or going up a little is FANTASTIC! KEEP UP THE GREAT WORK! The Season of Repentance starts in just 3 1/2 weeks!

2) You were losing steadily and then the colder weather came, the summer fruits and veggies were done, the heavier vegetables/starches of winter appeared in the stores so your meals got a little or a lot denser, and it became much harder to get out of bed in the dark. You may have what I call Bear Getting Ready to Hibernate Syndrome. Your body is wise. She is gathering her fat and holding it tight because fat keeps us warmer! We may feel more sluggish or not as inclined to get ourselves out to the gym or in front of our work out DVDs or to the Wii, or outside for a hike, a run, a bike ride. For me, I have found that if I just adjust the how and the when of my exercise program, I can still burn the same number of calories or close to it that I was burning in the summer. My pattern of running or hiking in the early morning isn't very attractive when it's dark and freezing out. So I do my yoga and weights in the early morning still because I always do that in my living room, but I have cut myself the deal of doing my cardio in the early/mid afternoons, OR doing it at the gym where it's warm.

You can accomodate that bearish feeling to some degree, but you can't totally give into it, or you'll just find yourself sleeping for 4 months. Give and take. Stay in bed later means that you have to w/o in the afternoon or evening. That's the deal. Keep your agreements with yourself.

Regarding the food mine fields: I have found that getting a good cardio workout on either side of a relatively large meal, usually a holiday or celebration meal, meaning that day and the next day, as well as eating lightly and even doing just roasted veggies all day the next day and then resuming normal eating at dinner will usually allow me to "get away with" a large, caloric meal.

3) Watch your self-talk. Be aware of how you are relating to yourself as you deal with your food and activity challenges. Being mean to yourself and calling yourself a failure doesn't further the cause AT ALL. In fact, it can lead you down the rocky road to giving up. NEVER GIVE UP! Nothing ever stays the same and your plateau will break. The couple/few coming-into-winter pounds you gained will come off again. Just stay on program or get back on program, do the work and one day you will step on that scale and be at goal. I promise. It took me 2 years to lose 45 lbs. That was an average of .43 lbs a week. I had two long "fall stall" plateaus both those years and have gained up to 5 lbs each fall since then. And as of today I have those five pounds more than when I hit goal almost 3 years ago and I declare those 5 lbs as my "bear weight" that I expect to have gone by the time I hit my 3 year maintenance anniversary on March 1st, 2009.

4) Getting through the fall is tough for so many of us for reasons that are other than food. Many of us are compelled to spend time with our families around the holidays...people who seem to live in a different universe than we do. They push our buttons, bring up very old feelings, but we travel to see them or have them come travel to see us. If you have a hard family dynamic but do this every year, first: Ask yourself why? Is the world going to end if you take yourself out of the passion play? If you absolutely have to and do it anyway and come home or send them home and are still in one piece, you are an Iron Person! Pat yourself on the back and move on.

Getting through the fall-into-New Year is, for many of us, the toughest time of year for all these reasons and more that I'm not thinking of. We are almost there! 3 1/2 weeks from now it will be January 1, 2009. If you've made it this far with your sense of humor somewhat intact and your commitment to your weight loss, fitness and health still close to your heart then you are your own hero. Embrace that. You are a HERO.

Next Thursday I leave for the hot springs for my annual retreat. Instead of seeking out people, family, friends, I retreat. I'll take Phiona again and maybe stay this time for six days. That will be six days of really getting reconnected with as many aspects of myself as I can handle. And then maybe a couple more. Part of following my pleasure and bliss path on my personal retreat includes caring tenderly and with much awareness for this body and all she holds. I will work on this book some more. I will hike, run, bathe, steam, do yoga, think, love myself, feed myself, follow my pleasure path and see where it leads. Find the dream seeds I want to plant in my garden in the new year. And I will come out on the other side of this fall into darkness, Fall into Winter season and I will witness and feel the sun start to return. And I will be my own hero.

A Weight Watcher's Thanksgiving

2008-11-30T06:28:00.001-08:00

Thanksgiving was a lovely, low-key day. Daniel, our son, came up the night before so we could cook together. Last year, I had gone to his house where he had cooked his first Thanksgiving. It was a hard day: His girlfriend at the time didn't show up until way after dinner was over. Her mother came and that was pleasant, but I remember him being pretty stressed out and not supported by his g/f who chose to have dinner with her father. And then there was me; coming into his house with all my own vegan dishes in tow. I remember that his stovetop was broken, and I brought my 2 burner hot plate. For a young, talented gourmet cook, it was a challenging day for him.

This year, he came bearing my Celebration Field Roast and the turkey thighs/legs that he, Tara and our friend Debbie would eat. He was my hero, as the closest Celebration Roast was down in Sonoma County where Daniel lives: 90 miles south. I'm sure I could have made my own seitan-something, but I was already planning a pretty extensive menu for the whole dinner and was grateful for being able to "cheat" with an already prepared roast.

Before I tell you about the day, let me tell you a knife story: I've had a Henckel Four Star 6" chef's knife since 1981. It has been one of my most cherished posessions. I used it when I worked as a chef and I have used it daily for over 25 years. And after all these years the tang and the handle are still firmly bonded. The blade tip, however has had a mishap. Recently, Tara sharpened the blade for me and spent some time straightening out the tip, which had suffered some mysterious mishap at some point. It was just slightly bent, but intact. The sharpening and straightening was too much for the tip and one day about a month ago, the tip parted from the rest of the knife. Just like injuring your finger or hand, you never realize how much you use an appendage until you injure it. My knife, while still cutting and chopping like a champ, had lost one of its minor functions and it became clear it was time to replace it. I have replaced it with a hollow blade 8" Henckel Four Star and while I was at it, I also bought a Four Star 4" paring/utility knife and a peeler. I am quite happy with my new knife. The hollow blade design keeps thinly sliced vegetable from sticking to the side of the blade. I am getting used to a bigger/longer knife. I have used and tried out other knives, but for me, nothing appeals like the Four Star line by Henckel. I think this bears mentioning because your knives are your most important tools. A poorly made dull knife is far more dangerous a tool than a well made, wicked-sharp one.

(Back to Thanksgiving) I started the cool, foggy day with an 80 minute excursion in the woods. I ran most of it, only hiking the biggest hills on the route and burned 650 calories. That, I figured, would give me a good jump on the day. Have I mentioned my menopause journey? Well, suffice it to say, we've amped it up a notch and I have been going longer and longer between periods. Now I'm up in the 40-something days in between and after about the 30th day, I've been retaining water like crazy. I know I've gained some weight, but I hadn't weighed in a couple of weeks, so I thought it would be a good motivational tool to get on the scale after my run. I was stunned and sobered by the number: 153.8. This is up 2.2 lbs from just two weeks prior. At 4 lbs over my redline, I realized that I have to turn the ship around and I have to do it now, foodie holy day or no foodie holy day.

So OK. Feedback is good. I'd burned a fair number of calories and in my view, earned my not WW friendly slice of pecan pie as well as my slice of far more friendly pumpkin pie.

After the run, I made breakfast for Daniel and myself. It was one of my typical breakfasts: tofu, veggies, hashbrowns with nutritional yeast and gomasio. Pretty big, filling breakfast. We ate at about 10:30. Soon after, the cooking began. I had made the pies the day before as well as the wild rice for the stuffing. Daniel and Tara collaberated on the turky related parts of the dinner. I sauted onions and celery for the dressings, as there would be two: One vegan one for me and one for them. When everything was cooking or done cooking, we went for about a half hour tromp through the woods looking for mushrooms. No one wanted to do much hiking so we went to a pretty well-combed patch of woods right up from the house. We didn't find any edibles, but had fun tromping around. We came home and I picked a bunch of carrots from the garden. Daniel and I munched carrots through the rest of the early afternoon.

Our friend Debbie came over at about 3:00 and we sat down to dinner at 4:00.

This was the total menu:
Celebration Roast for me (2 slices, total 3.2 oz)
Turkey for them
Vegan mushroom gravy
Turkey gravy
Vegan bread and wild rice stuffing
Not vegan bread and wild rice stuffing
Green beans from the garden simmered with garlic and vegetable bouillion
A giant salad with
Miso Balsamic Dressing
Potatoes mashed with Earth Balance and homemade veg broth, salt and pepper
Cranberry sauce (out of the can due to the perverse tastes of my wife and son)
Pumpkin pie (scroll downdowndown Bryanna's page and you'll find it)
Pecan pie (this came out OK, but not great, so I'm not going to share the recipe)
Soyatoo
Whipped Cream
Really really good red wine

Here is a picture of my plate. I eschewed the mashed potatoes. The stuffing is 1/4 of the recipe posted; about one cup. My total dinner was 620 calories, 60 gms of carbohydrates, 28 gms of fat, 0 cholesterol, 27 gms of protein and 11 gms of fiber.

Here's a picture of dessert. Now this was what I went running for in the morning: the combined dessert of a thin slice of pecan pie and a more generous slice of pumpkin pie ran a total of 600 calories, 87 gms of carbohydrate, 27 gms of fat, 0 cholesterol, 5 gms protein and 8 gms of fiber.
Total calories for the day were about 1650. Total points for the day were about 33. Not bad for a feast day!

Here's something I've learned about feasts and weight watching: There was so much food, but I didn't have everything. In this case, I passed over the mashed potatoes for stuffing which is such a once-a-year thing. I had less than one cup of stuffing and less than one full serving (4 oz) of Celebration roast. I used about 1/4 cup of gravy and about 1 Tbsp of salad dressing. Yet look at my plate: It's full. And after eating everything on it, so was I. Comfortably full. Not stuffed. Not distended. Somewhere over the line of satisfied, as after all it was a feast, but comfortably full. I think this is important. Now let's dovetail this with my weighing myself in the morning: I have gained a few pounds. Some of it is due to menopause-ish bloat, but some of it is due to the overeating I've been doing these past couple of months. I was 149.8 on September 27th. On November 27th I was four pound heavier. This is significant; definitely a yellow alert situation. But I think it is important to say here that I didn't punish myself for gaining a few pounds, beat myself about the head and shoulders and do some kind of pennance for it, nor deny myself a feast on a feast day.

What I did instead was this:
~ I ran for over an hour and burned 650 calories
~ I had a hearty late breakfast
~ I noshed on carrots in lieu of lunch
~ I had a full plate, but reasonable feast dinner and dessert, savoring it all
~ The next day, Friday, I ate only fruit in the morning and only roasted vegetable for the rest of the day until dinner, which was a normal dinner. I had pie for dessert that night.
~ Also on Friday, I did 1 1/2 hours of vigorous yoga and went to the gym in the afternoon for 50 minutes of steep incline on the treadmill. Total calories burned on Friday were 700.

Yesterday I went for a mushroom hike for a couple of hours and got on the scale upon my return. I was down to 152.8. Net loss 1 lb.

The purpose of all of this detailed sharing is to illustrate that I, we, you can have it "all". I, we, you can indulge occasionally or even often, as long as there is balance. The key, as I see it, to maintaining a fairly large weighloss is to find where that balance points are for myself and make the necessary course corrections when my projection of that balance is off, which is reflected to me on the scale.

Now here we are after all the feasting was over. Just look at us! Do I look like I'm suffering? Deprived? Hungry? (I don't think so.)

The Wheel of the Year Has Turned: It's Mushroom Season!

2008-11-24T08:14:00.000-08:00

Tara and I went for a walk on the Rockefeller trail yesterday afternoon. This isn't a trail I go on too often, but it's a nice 3 1/2 mile walk: gently downhill going out and gently uphill coming back. There is a court that you cross from part one of the trail to part two.

Coming down part one, I espied the first Chanterelle of the season. It is a little early for Chanterelles, but this beauty wasn't out of season. I didn't have a bag with me, so unfortunately, I had to gently break the mushroom in half so as to fit it in my sweatshirt pocket. I was so thrilled, as I seem to have missed the Boletes this year altogether, which are my favorite mushrooms to dry, but the mighty White Chanterelle is by far my favorite to eat fresh and pick. They don't host bugs or their larvae, they are easy to clean and their growing season is quite long. So if that had been all I had gotten, I would have been deeply satisfied, but there was more:

When we got back to the court after the return trip up part 2 of the trail, I thought of Walter and Barbara, a great older couple that live in the first house down this steep street. Walter and I have traded produce over the years. His eco-climate is different than mine. He grows wicked huge onions and I grow wicked huge winter squash. His dog Scooter was out and ran up the street to greet us. I remembered the Lion's Mane mushroom tree. This is an ordinary young tan oak tree that happens to host the mycillium of the mighty Lion's Mane. Just one tree; and every year it produces one to three giant Lion's Mane mushrooms. It's a little early in the season, but with apparent climate changes, 'normal' seems to be constantly changing.

Walter came to see who Scooter was barking at and we all greeted each other. And there, across the street from Walter's house was the prize: a 2 1/4 lb Lion's Mane in all its fully ripe glory. Walter, who doesn't eat wild mushrooms told me that his son in law, whom he picks the Mane for every year wasn't coming this year. He loaned us a ladder and Tara climbed up and cut this beauty off the tree, leaving the "root" of the mycillium attached and taking just the "fruit". And here she is in all her 2 1/4 lb glory.

I never was a winter person. Yet the thrill of the hunt has helped me transition from my native summer preference to this wet, darker, cold season. All hail the mighty mushroom!

Recipe Time! The Perfect Vegan Omelette

2008-11-22T11:21:00.000-08:00

At last! The perfect vegan omelette is mine! (And yours if you wish to make it.)

I have been adjusting this recipe for a long time. Funny thing is that it took doing the counter-intutitive thing to get the right texture. By adding More liquid instead of less, this set up beautifully and didn't fall apart when I folded it over. It was golden brown on the outside, creamy on the inside and just delicious. The blended tofu, etc should be thin enough to pour into the omelette pan, with a rubber spatula only needed to scrape the last bits out of the blender/processor. This is a bit of a messy production to make, but if you are vegan and miss the whole dynamic of eggs folded over filling, I think you will find it worth the work.

Ingredients
4 oz firm silken tofu
1 Tbsp cornstarch
1 Tbsp flour
1 1/2 Tbsp nutritional yeast
1 tsp onion powder
salt and pepper to taste
5-6 Tbsp water or broth
1/2 - 1 cup veggies of your choice, sauted. (I used 1/4 cup leeks, 1 jalapeno pepper, 1 cup fresh mushrooms and 2 cups fresh spinach)
1/2 oz vegan cheese sub (optional) I used Cheezly Mozzerella style

Directions
In a small blender or mini food processor combine tofu, water or broth, onion powder, salt, pepper, nutritional yeast, flour and cornstarch. Blend until very smooth.

Have veggies for the omelette cooked and ready.

Heat a non stick pan with some oil spray. Pour in the "omelette" mixture and gently spread to the edges of the pan. Let cook for a few minutes on medium until bubble holes appear from outer edges and have moved in about 2".

Spread cheese sub and veggies over 1/2 the surface. Check bottom. It should be nicely browned to golden. Gently fold over omelette style. Cook another minute, and press gently down on surface. If the inside is liquidy at all, then carfully flip over and cook another minute or two on the other side.

Omelette should slide onto plate and be ready to enjoy.

If you'd rather do it fritatta style, have broiler preheated before you start. This must be cooked in a cast iron or other broiler-safe pan. Start on stovetop and cook until bottom is set, then slide under the broiler for about 2 minutes until top is hot and bubbly but not burning.

This is such a nutritional powerhouse that I'm posting the "long version"

Nutrition Facts
Serving Size: 1 serving
Amount Per Serving
Calories 262.5
Total Fat 9.0 g
Saturated Fat 3.1 g
Polyunsaturated Fat 2.6 g
Monounsaturated Fat 0.9 g
Cholesterol 0.0 mg
Sodium 323.5 mg
Potassium 1,234.6 mg
Total Carbohydrate 28.2 g
Dietary Fiber 6.7 g
Sugars 5.7 g
Protein 22.0 g

Vitamin A 122.3 % Vitamin B-12 100.2 % Vitamin B-6 379.2 % Vitamin C 46.2 % Vitamin D 13.3 % Vitamin E 9.0 % Calcium 25.5 % Copper 36.6 % Folate 42.5 % Iron 27.5 % Magnesium 33.2 % Manganese 45.7 % Niacin 229.5 % Pantothenic Acid 12.4 % Phosphorus 36.3 % Riboflavin 454.8 % Selenium 34.8 % Thiamin 499.8 % Zinc 27.0 %

From Pundits to Puppies

2008-11-17T20:38:00.000-08:00

OK, it's obvious. I haven't been blogging much lately. Life has been running me at full tilt and there have been too many plates to be kept up in the air (picture me juggling plates as I run to keep up with my life,) and I can't say that none have hit the ground and smashed over these past couple of weeks. My weight is up, my energy is down, the march to menopause is, well, marching along with all its humbling symptoms and I am just tiredtiredtired and starting to dream of my Winter Solstice retreat with the RV at the hot springs.

Without getting into the relief and joy of the Presidential Election literally cancelled out by the kick in the guts by the Rovian-like campaign that passed CA Propostition 8, I have been feeling many things including overwhelm and no small degree of depression. That has been lifting and I am almost embarassed to say that Puppy Cam has been my favorite depression-lifting tool this last week. MSNBC broke the story about the live webcam that watches six 5 week old Shiba Inu pups while their people aren't home. (Here's the video of the story.)

(from the homepage) The six Shiba Inu pups (3 boys and 3 girls) turned 5 weeks old on November 11th. This is the first litter from their mom, Kika.
Girls:
-Autumn (Purple collar) - 3 lbs 5.8 oz (as of Nov 11th)
-Ayumi (Yellow collar) - 3 lbs 3.4 oz (as of Nov 11th)
-Amaya (Red collar) - 3 lbs 6.6 oz (as of Nov 11th)
Boys:
-Aki (Green collar) - 4 lbs 0.4 oz (as of Nov 11th)
-Akoni (Black collar) - 3 lbs 12.6 oz (as of Nov 11th)
-Ando (Blue collar) - 4 lbs 1.2 oz (as of Nov 11th)

What started as a great idea to use the Internet and newer technology to keep an eye on their puppies, has become a worldwide phenomenon, or in the current vernacular, it's gone viral. The MSNBC report claimed that over 4 million people have been watching the puppies. I can say that I've been keeping a browser window open throughout the day and between 9:00 am and 9:00 pm, I've seen no fewer than 10,000 viewers on the site and as many as over 30,000. And this is at one time.

But over and above how many other people are watching the puppies, this has been a weird and comforting antidote to all the msnbc.msn.com videos, Keith O and Rachel M videos, youtube campaign videos, more pundits, more campaign videos even more pundits, more campaign woofwoof, opinions, polls and creepy, nerdy Nate Silver in his elongated fifteen minutes of fame with his fivethirtyeight.com savant-i-ness at creating eerily accurate polling outcomes. In answer to all that led up to and beyond November 4th, 2008, there came, into my home a view from a camera, volume on and sometimes off, focused on six adorable, rough and tumble puppies.

When I hear yipping or growling coming from the office and I'm in another room, I hurry in to see what they are up to. I watch them wrestle, play with their variety of toys, twitch in their dreams, pee, visit with their humans and sleep. They sleep a lot and it obvious how much they've grown in just a week. Sometimes their people come in. You never see either of their faces and they have remained anonymous to the world. Some lucky people have seen Kika, their mother come into their pen to nurse. I'm not one of those people.

I found out about Puppy Cam on the veggieboard, that seemingly endless fount of love, friendship, support and magic in my life. I never have to read another online 'zine to know what is going on of any import in the world. I just have to go to my Weight Watchers online group and it's all there. And that was how Puppy Cam has come into my life.

When I told an in-real-life friend about this phenomenon and how attached I've become and how it makes me a little befuddled to have gotten attached to these babies, she replied, "They're babies! Full of love and innocence. And love and innocence make people feel good."

Word to that.

Off Topic: Keith Olbermann Was an American Hero Last Night

2008-10-15T07:43:00.000-07:00

This blog isn't per se, a political blog in the classic sense, but with my growing distress over the outright lies and abuses being bandied about by the McShame campaign, I have to post this. I saw this on huffingtonpost.com last night. Keith's anger and righteous indignation was like a strong wind blowing the dust off the windshield.

Thank you Keith. Last night you were a hero.

Totally Off Topic: Is It Just Me?

2008-10-01T19:22:00.000-07:00

Or do you bristle or cringe too everytime you heard yourself referred to by politicians, not as the American People but as Main Street?

The other thing: I watched CSPAN today for hours while the Senate made their pitches and finally voted on the new bailout bill...not that they're daring to call it that anymore....and then I watched them all congratulating themselves at coming to this monumental decision, on our behalves of course, crossing party lines and working together and what a historic day this has been.

John McCain has been talking like a benevolent patriarch grandpa to an adoring audience for about half an hour his tone of voice as he talked about drilling into the body of the Earth and building more nuclear power plants like he's telling a bedtime story, and then tooting his own horn...the level of self-congratulations of all of them makes me feel sort of ill.

I'm not MainfuckingStreet. And I don't trust or believe you. I'm with Bernie.
You Senators all played nice. Woohoo for you. It's a learned skill. Maybe you learned something?
John McCain scares the shit out of me

Over and out.