Food, we need to talk.

Thinking about that last post, I'm brought back to Pollan's rules, and the one I said was my favorite:

"Don't create arbitrary rules for eating if their only purpose is to help you feel in control."

I knew this was my favorite because of my disregard for dietary rules, but I don't think I explained that disregard fully in that post or this blog (realized this when Ben suggested I post my own rules and I thought "Ooo ... that's exactly what I wouldn't do.") And I think I didn't express it explicitly because I didn't wholly understand why I don't like rules in the first place. I knew they didn't work for me. That they were frustrating. But it didn't come into full view until last night, when I realized that I didn't like them because dietary rules and restrictions often put the blame on the food itself, not the way we eat the food or why we eat it the way we do. They don't recognize that people's relationship with food is deep and intimate, and by simply removing and replacing some items you are only addressing the shiny, approachable exterior of the problem.

For example, all of last year I lived under this guise of "Well I eat pretty healthy foods most of the time, so even though I'm a little overweight, I'm okay." Then sometime over the summer it hit me that my problem wasn't necessarily what I ate, it was how much. I'm an overeater, often emotional, always because of lack of self-control. And I knew it deep down the whole time, I just ignored it because I wasn't emotionally ready to address that aspect of my relationship with food.

What was my breaking point? I don't know. Living on my own. Buying my own food (you eat more, you pay more!). Growing awareness of what "wasteful" really means, and how much I waste (both in the trashcan and in an already-full belly). Gaining respect and ownership of my own body and self. A new-found sense of control, I guess.

Which is what diets are, really, an attempt at control, but all too often for external reasons. I have to lose weight to look good in that bikini, wedding dress, etc. So we do it the way we've been taught to control anything: with rules. No more chocolate. Maybe instead of targeting the individual foods we eat, it's better to look at our relationship with that food. Why do you like the foods you like? Why do you not eat certain foods? How much do you really know about what you are putting in your body? How much do you care? If it's very little, why?

So I won't give you, if you are someone who is unhappy with your relationship with food, rules on what to eat and what not to eat. That's entirely subjective and, anyway, it takes a lot of time to grow to love certain types of food, something I don't think nutritionists take into account. What I will give is advice on perspective.

• Think of "diet" in its original definition, meaning what we eat. That's it. Over time it's been morphed into this temporary quick-fix to a problem that can't be fixed quickly. Think of a change in diet as a gradual, continuous slope. 
• Your life, your happiness, should be your reasons for this change, as opposed to events or milestones. The latter is too frivolous on its own to uphold any serious changes. However, if a graduation or a wedding is merely a catalyst to ignite changes that you've been aching for deep down, this is fine, as long as you address the deeper reasons. Simply wanting to look good in pictures is not enough. 
• Go slow. If you eat a lot of fried foods and decide you're going to stop completely and only eat steamed or grilled, you will get frustrated. If you go to the gym for the first time in 10 years and say I'm going to run a mile, you will be disappointed. Listen to your body, and if you're out of breath from walking on the treadmill, great! Stick with that and gradually build up. 
• If you can't love your body yet, at least respect it. One day it will become love.

skinny jeans manifesto

About a month ago I received a voice mail from my dad: "Uhh... we're taking things to Goodwill and I'm bringing that bag of clothes you left in the basement." Panic and immediate call back: "No, Dad, those aren't Goodwill clothes, they're just clothes I don't really wear anymore but I don't want to get rid of yet, please don't take them." Pause. "What's the difference? If you don't wear them, get rid of them."

Whether my reasoning got lost in translation because of differences in gender or age, I'm not sure, but I didn't expect him to understand. (Will Smith was totally right.) Sure, that bag was filled with both too-tight jeans and old band t-shirts inscribed with angsty quotes that now make me cringe, but they had not yet sunk to the level of no return. There was still hope in some of that cotton.

And good thing, because about an hour ago, after lugging the bag back from his house, I experienced one of the greatest moments ever recognized in the history of womandom: I fit into my pre-college (and pre-weight gain) jeans, no shimmy necessary.

I've never experienced this elation. When I lost my childhood chub, it was because I grew vertically and just, well, straightened out I guess. My weight didn't actually drop. Since then, any weight losses were subtle and were countered by puberty-induced changes (I have hips now? What are these?). Because of all these other directional growths, my pant size has only gone up, not down.

Now, I know that I've said many times that I think it's important to focus more on over-all health than a number on the scale, and I'm sticking to that. (In fact, I have no idea what I weigh right now. I don't own a scale.) But--by this I don't mean that weight doesn't matter. It does, especially when it's in either extreme. So then what do I mean by this little credo of mine?  Well, it's sort of two-fold: what matters more than getting down to a certain weight is why you want to lose that weight and where you plan to go after you do.

For one, there is a colossal, often-overlooked distinction between wanting to lose weight to look skinny and thus more attractive (an externally-motivated desire) and wanting to lose weight to be healthier (internally-motivated). And for me, it took completely dismissing weight loss as a goal altogether to finally lose weight--counter-intuitive, I know, but this mindset worked. This seems like a difficult place to get to mentally, especially as a single twentysomething woman who would like to, you know, attract a nice potential-husband someday. But it's not, because my decision had nothing to do with the way I look: I wanted to get Healthier, and if Skinnier decided to tag along, so be it. Because of this, losing weight was even more satisfying; it was like an extra treat, the prize at the bottom of the cereal box.

But I wasn't always like this. I have countless memories of shocking glimpses in the mirror, tears streaming down my cheeks, scribbled lists of all the things I was no longer going to allow myself to eat. All such diet ventures have hitherto been failures. And perhaps rightfully so, because besides being superficial, they were punishments assigned during fits of anger toward myself, my body: "You let yourself go, now you have to suffer." All totally unrealistic. They were like those year-long grounding sentences issued by fired-up parents during high school, the ones that made you turn your head and snicker because you knew it was never gonna last.

Same with those diets, only this time it was my bad habits doing the snickering. Once my frustration toned down, so did my will to eat only salads for lunch, order from the "lite" menu at restaurants, pass on pizza with friends, etc. Everything about these "diets" was painted negatively: How many calories can I burn, how many can I cut out. These restrictions were so suffocating that when I didn't immediately see results, I gave up, thinking "Well if I'm not going to lose weight, I may as well eat what I want."

I focused on a tenuous destination, not a long-term journey. And as corny as it sounds, being healthy really is a journey, in that it is one little step after the other. Don't plunge in and expect to know how to swim; you have to toe the shore and allow your body time to accommodate. And it will. I found that the more healthy foods I tried, the more I craved them. Same with exercising. That my body loved me for it; I could feel it in my lungs and my stomach and my muscles and my heart, without a doctor telling me so.

And today, I felt it again in the empty space between my skin and the waistbands of those jeans. Without a guy's approval.

Halloweenie

It's Halloween, which means it's time for all of us to go into diabetic comas.

Not trying to chub up this year? Want to keep your child from acquiring chipmunk cheeks (or teeth)?

Well these two dentists in South Carolina seem to have the answer: Instead of buying candy for kids this year, they're buying it from them--in particular the kinds they don't want--to ship to soldiers in Iraq.

Hey, thanks for being willing to die for me, to show my gratitude I send you stale Good 'n Plenty. Grandma didn't want them this year.

And kiddies, capitalism lesson number one--always take things for free and then sell them at higher prices.

Have a Happy American Halloween!

flashforward

Did it! 3.1 miles in 30:10, which is better than I expected, considering I wasn't "training", just running for fun all summer. I am very happy. I meant to take a picture of Kelsey and I after the race to post on here but forgot to amid the pancakes (and beer?!) and speakers blaring shitty pop music.

So instead you get a picture of me from districts (that race I mentioned previously) 6 years ago:

Note: This is probably the skinniest I've ever been.

races embrace the metric system

I feel like I must explain why I am on this at 11 p.m. on a Friday night, probably more for my ego than for your actual interest, but the reason is health-related so I can claim to not be that vain.

Tomorrow at 8:00 a.m. I'm running a 5K (3.1 miles) with my friend Kelsey. The race is called Run Shadyside, and it's a run/walk through my neighborhood to benefit the Boys and Girls Club, so, you know, good causes and all that junk.

But it's way more than that to me, seeing as it is the first race I've ran in 5 years, since I left cross country in a disillusioned huff. My last memories of races (which were all also 5Ks) are of severe disappointments, crawling into the benches on the empty bus while the rest of the team stood outside and chatted in all their sweaty glory, so I could be alone to hate myself and accept that I'd never be able to run it in 21 minutes like the top girls on the team. The best I ever did was 25, at the district championships my freshman year.

Which, looking back, was fine, great, an achievement for the little fat girl who used to make up excuses not to play kickball in gym class. But I let the pressures of the running world, and my self-imposed definition of what a "runner" was, get under my skin and convince me that I was one of those girls on the team that spectators saw and poofed their lips and cocked their heads at. A charity case.

I don't blame myself entirely for this mentality though. The (slightly ridiculous) competitive nature of high school sports chipped in its fair share. I got to the point of: Why compete if I can't be as good as I want to be?

Of course, this race will be a lot different than those distant memories. There's nothing at stake here, time-wise. Thirty fewer seconds is not going to mean the difference of my team advancing, etc. No one on the sidelines screaming at me to pick it up.

And I'll have Kelsey, my friend who's running it with me, by my side cheering me on. She never did cross-country, but she did play soccer and ran track (and was good at both, from what I hear.) After a substantially more sedentary freshman year at college, she began running during the summer to get back in shape. Last spring, less than a year later, she ran the half-marathon in Cleveland, and last weekend she ran the Great Race in Pittsburgh. So, although she's not as fast as some of the girls I remember from cross country, she's still faster than me. But she's running this shorter race for me, not to beat me, but to encourage me, which is so, so great in a lot of ways that she may not totally understand.

I'm trying not to set any goals for myself besides to finish it, and run the whole thing, which I know I can do. I want to do this to feel good and to show myself that races don't have to mean torment, that no matter the outcome I've still achieved something awesome. I want to face an irrational fear and roadblock and take one giant step over it toward a positive image of myself and my body.

Plus, there's free pancakes afterward. I think I deserve to indulge in one or two.

rant and then run

Okay, maybe it was a bad idea to post a picture of Lindsay Lohan; every time I look at it my gag reflexes act up. Could be the stretchy pants (leotard?). I don't want you to vom when you click on my page.

But I posted that picture for a reason. If you've lived through the past decade and are under 30, you know why. Otherwise, let me fill you in: about five years ago, Lindsay starred in a delightful Tina Fey comedy called Mean Girls, in which she looked doe-eyed, glowing, and healthy. Fast forward a couple years, add some fame and booze and drugs, and you have the present stick-figured, crispy-orange version of Lindsay that so often graces our tabloids. This trend is all too common in Hollywood, trading in curves for angles to please the cameras or the public or most likely, the angry gold-chain clad Hollywood gods who sit in LA offices grunting and banging on tummy-tuck skin drums. Who are probably fat themselves.

As much pressure as this is for actresses and models and the like, it doesn't stop with them. Thanks to E! and VH1, we are a celebrity obsessed nation, and will do anything to look like them, as unrealistic as it may be. (News flash: they have personal trainers to monitor every move and every morsel. Do you?) Which is why I was particularly upset when I saw this ongoing article in Health magazine about an actress trying to shed her baby weight. She is 5' 5.5". Her starting weight was 130 pounds, and her goal was to get down to 115.

Go to a BMI website. Enter her stats and you'll find out that 130 puts her score at 21.5; 3 points above underweight, 3.5 points below overweight. Read: average. Normal weight. In the middle. Already healthy.

Now plug in 115 pounds, and you'll find that she wants her BMI to get down to 18.8, 0.3 of a point above underweight. Nearing the danger zone.

When I flipped to this article one day at work, I jumped up and waved it in front of the face of every girl/woman in the office, trying to find someone as vehemently disturbed as I was. (They thought it was ridiculous, but not to the eye-bugging, finger-jabbing extent I did.) In a magazine that is meant for the general public, they are blatantly telling women: Oh hey, you're healthy? According to the Department of Health and Human Services, the federal government, the highest power in the land? Well, guess what, not good enough. Watch us glorify this woman getting borderline undernourished and then go pacify your tears with Chubby Hubby because you will never be as good as her.

So Health magazine lost one reader, like they care. They have an agenda to fill, this whole nation has an agenda to fill, one based primarily on images and false perceptions. But that's not mine, and, hopefully, not yours.

I think before one can embrace a truly natural, healthy, holistic lifestyle, it's vital to shed these notions of not being good enough, skinny enough, attractive enough-- all the artificial baggage that is dumped on a woman by society as soon as she's old enough to grow boobs. When I became a teenager, I wasted two foolish years with my fingers down my throat because I somehow knew I could never be happy if I didn't get skinny. I finally got grossed out by this and joined cross country instead. I wasn't that fast, but running made me feel alive. And after a year, I got down to 135 pounds. Then at practice one day my coach referred to me and one of my friends as "the big girls" on the team, which was true, relative to the gazelle-like top-ranked girls. I quit.

This past summer, five years later, I started running again. For me. Not to win a race, not to lose weight, but to remember how it feels to hear the blood pumping through my veins.

A good (but bad) example

You don't want to be this.

The Skinny

I spent this past weekend with my mom and sister, my lone comrades in the natural health crusade. All three of us have had similar difficulties with health throughout our lives, since we're, you know, related and all, and so I'm able to talk to them about my problems and achievements, knowing they'll understand on a level my friends cannot.

Probably the most striking similarity between us is that, despite our obvious and vocal efforts to be healthy, none of us are thin. Thanks to that smiling angel named Genetics, we all carry our weight around our middle, the most dangerous place on your body to store extra pounds, since it is home to your guts. We're not obese by any means-- my sister and mom are quite small, in fact, both in frame and stature, whereas I'm... not. We're just not skinny.

Which is an interesting concept to most Americans, where we associate weight with health: If I'm skinny, I'm healthy.

This is so, so not true. You can be underweight and undernourished, or nearing overweight with no detectable health problems, granted you eat well and exercise. It's all about how you take care of yourself.

Example: I have a friend who has lost her grip since starting college. She drinks too much, but has managed to not gain any noticeable weight. I was baffled by this until one day, I asked her what we were going to do for dinner. She said she wasn't going to eat much so she could drink more later that night. I hesitated, fighting my desire to yell are you STUPID?! and instead shrugged and went into the kitchen to make myself some food.

People do this, and think it's a good idea. She knew if she ate and drank, she would gain weight from all the calories. So she sacrificed one, thinking as long as she kept her weight steady, she was okay.

This friend of mine is an extreme case of unhealthy tendencies, but people do things like this all the time. I'm going to have cheesecake with my boyfriend tonight, so I'll skip lunch. It's not just the average population that has this mentality, though; I've seen it advertised. There is a TV commercial for some sort of health snack thing, where this little crudely drawn woman limps into a room with her friends, saying she did four hours of aerobics because she indulged in a hot fudge sundae. Although I'd promote an exercise trade-off like this one over deprivation, because it is technically healthier, the fact that they are advertising exercise as a punishment irks me.

If you view exercise as something you have to do to balance extra caloric intake, it will never become something you want to do. It will be torture. All that huffing and sweating will wrongly translate in your mind into abuse for bad deeds, instead of a treat for your body, which it is. (We're made to move. Why do you think kids play so much?) You will push yourself too hard in your workouts, hating every agonizing minute, because you'll think it is necessary for the trade-off. I have to do this to be skinny.

I'll tell you right now, if your focus is entirely on weight and outward appearance, not on health and inner harmony, you need to reevaluate your priorities, because you'll never get what you want. I promise if you focus on doing what's good for your body, instead of punishing yourself for missteps, you will become healthier. You may never be Kate Moss, but you'll look and feel the way you were meant to, inside and out.

Why should I care, you damn hippy?

First, I'm going to be honest with you so you don't get your panties in a bunch later on: I am not a nutritional expert. I don't claim to be. Any health advice given in this blog should be taken with many grains of salt (or maybe not because you could then die of a sodium-induced heart attack.) I'm just a semi-normal Midwestern girl, circa 21 years since birth, grappling with newfound mortality and the fact that I have a body that is mine and will be until the day I die.

Like many modern Americans, I have struggled with my weight my whole life, winning and losing various battles. I spent most of my childhood overweight, feeling imprisoned in flesh. Come junior high and puberty and an apparently lightning fast metabolism, I shed weight and could suddenly eat what I wanted and stay slim. But "slim" is a word I use in retrospect-- throughout high school my mirror falsely painted me as chubby, and I mentally punished myself for those extra Cheetos.

Then I went to college, and the mirror wasn't lying anymore: the fabled Freshman Fifteen came true. That spring, my doctor informed me that I had extremely high cholesterol for my age. I mean it's not like I was going to die or anything (yet), but it was the first time I realized that I was not invincible. Just because my outside was smooth and shiny and smiley and young, didn't mean that inside there wasn't a sticky monster lurking in the depths of my arteries.

Since then, I have overhauled my lifestyle. And I've made discoveries along the way, gems that I think elude many Americans blinded by beacons of neon M's seen from the comfy seats of their sedans. But I don't blame anyone for falling into this unhealthy trap, because there's no reason or need to fight for food in our society anymore; if anything, we have too many choices. Even in our present recession, instead of people thinning out like our grandfathers in the Great Depression, we are gaining weight, courtesy of an abundance of cheap processed food products.

So to put my views in the simplest way: I try to eat real foods. Lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. Whole grains. Lean meat and dairy. Things that have been manipulated and morphed by humans as little as possible. But I'm no martyr; I still have pizza, ice cream, and other junk that I know is bad for me. But I don't keep them in my apartment, because I treat them like the indulgences they are.

Most of what I think about food seems like common sense to me, and it is, but it's overlooked in our society, where people define "diet" as temporary torture to lose a few pounds, instead of the way they eat everyday. "Flavor" consists of fat, salt, and sugar, instead of the myriad other spices in our cupboards. Biologically, we have not changed much in the past few thousand years. But within the past fifty, the way and the things we feed ourselves have. And so has the quality of our health.

So I'm here to tell you how I (and others) have given the ol' bod some much deserved and needed love and respect. Hopefully America will do the same before we all find our bodies giving us one last chance, with a gun to our thick, fat skulls.