Sweat is dripping out of my hair. I’m hidden from prying eyes in the back bedroom of a ranch house that has seen better days. Now would not be a good time to call. You see, I’ve just performed an exorcism. On myself. On my treadmill. There are various moods that take hold of me from time to time. Some of them are mildly amusing, such as when I talk to myself in research mode or start singing mock opera lyrics when I’m trying to resolve an argument. “What… does it mean to youuuu… when my mouth is moving and sounds are coming oouuuutttt?” Most of my moods are disagreeable, to others, but also to me. I don’t want to hang out with myself. One of these moods is “the snit.” This is when I feel irritable, like there is a stress hormone saturating my body. (This is probably true, and it’s probably cortisol). The snit is nobody’s fault, but if I don’t steer clear of other humans, some of it may splatter on them like hot grease. Another disagreeable mood is the way I feel on a cloudy day, when I’ve burned through too much unstructured time and started to feel listless and bored. Too much sitting tends to make me headachy, and thus, grouchy. One of the biggest surprises of my life was learning that exercise is a reliable mood elevator. It always works. It works in the rain, it works when I’m sleep deprived, and it’s even worked when I started out with a headache. I have gone to the gym so tired I could barely put one foot in front of the other, and emerged after a full cardio workout feeling like a million bucks. When I work out strenuously several days a week, my resting mood is about a 9 out of 10. This is why cranky people hate athletes. We’re so cheerful you want to kill us all. It’s like we’re having better sex (true) or enjoying how we look in workout clothes (probably false) or like being fit actually feels that much better (true). The trouble is that it’s easy to adjust to this super-excellent feeling. Then, if anything happens and you can’t work out for a few weeks or months, you start reverting to your baseline mood. It’s like the last third of Flowers for Algernon. Experiencing this spectrum of baseline moods is a sort of metaphysical puzzle. Which of these is the real me? Is it true what they say, that the runner’s high is just like any other drug? (One of the most absurd fallacies ever). In a sense, it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that I know which behavior packages result in which states of being. If I can choose between chronic pain and fatigue with misery, acceptance with fortitude, or happiness with enthusiasm, then I can make an informed choice. I can realize that it is a choice, that I have a choice. I didn’t consciously choose chronic pain or illness, but I do choose when I am blissed out. I don’t enjoy being in a snit. I don’t enjoy feeling crabby or cranky or irritable. I don’t enjoy that restless, mopey, cabin-fever feeling. I lived alone for years, and I didn’t enjoy those feelings when I was by myself. Now I’m married, and I have to multiply my emotional environment by someone else’s. A snit is no longer just a snit; it’s a 2x snit, or more if we have guests. Negative moods become more costly, to myself and to others. I’d rather not… inflict myself on other people. The prospect is even more unnerving when I consider that other people are just as entitled to their own snits as I am to mine. It becomes a scenario of exponential growth. “Normal me” has a baseline mood of about 7 out of 10, while Workout Me hits a 9. Past Self of the fibromyalgia, four-day migraines, and thyroid disease lived at around a 4. At that time, I thought perky people were dumb and annoying. Honestly, I feel like becoming an athlete has made me smarter. I sleep better, and it may be nothing more than that. I can definitely attest to improved concentration sustained over longer periods. I’m better organized and more productive, measured by projects completed. I’ve become someone whom my own Past Self would totally hate. All I can do is look back at her and ask, “So, how’s that working out for you?” I’ve exorcised that dissatisfied, jealous, irritable, sarcastic version of myself, jettisoned in the same way I’ve eliminated my credit debt and cleared my clutter. I have everything she ever wanted, which of course is why I would annoy her so much. The best thing about a treadmill exorcism is that it only takes 30 minutes. Walk in feeling bad, walk out feeling fantastic! The endorphins are great and the natural analgesic effect is even better. The time and effort involved are pretty minimal. I went to the garage and cut out a board to put across the arms, so I can prop up a book or my laptop. Sometimes I watch true crime shows or skim Facebook. Usually I read a library book. In other words, I do exactly the same things I would have been doing if I were lounging around on the couch. The only discernible difference to me is that doing the treadmill barefoot makes your feet all black, so I have to wear shoes. Better to tie on my shoes, though, than to be in such a snit that I want to throw them at someone. BS per square inch is more highly concentrated in the field of diet, nutrition, and weight loss than anywhere else, and I’m including multi-level marketing and trance mediums on the list. Nobody knows anything. It’s so bad that people have stopped believing it’s possible to live a healthy lifestyle and started believing that it’s natural to need pharmaceuticals and medical appliances to survive. I know more people who need CPAP machines to breathe at night than I do people who can run 5 miles. Add in all the people I know who have had open-heart surgery or who have an insulin pump, and I know more people in the intervention group than I do who can run one mile. Humanity is planning our first mission to Mars, and we can’t figure out how to keep people using their own lungs? It’s terrifying. It doesn’t have to be this way. Our culture is funny. People are often more impressed by someone who has lost a lot of weight and kept it off than they are by someone who has a patent or who has published an article in an academic journal. Of course, we also like to choose our political leaders based on whether it would be fun to drink a beer with them, which is bonkers, because surely our president has more to do than to lounge around in a tavern, although I’ll make an exception for Grover Cleveland. In short, we’ve started thinking that losing weight is harder than anything else, for two reasons: 1. Almost everyone in our culture is overweight; 2. Misinformation is so common that accurate information is a statistical anomaly. I’m a Unicorn-American. I lost my weight even though I had a low-functioning thyroid gland and chronic fatigue. I ran a marathon even though I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. I’m too small for a size zero in all but, like, three stores. I’m 40 and I’d rather share selfies of my abs than my face. Nothing I have read in the past several years about body image or healthy lifestyles makes any sense to me whatsoever. First I’m going to review all the trends and truisms I see and completely ignore. Then I’m going to share what I actually do; the things that work for my thyroid disease/chronic pain/chronic fatigue/migraineur/sleep-disordered middle-aged self. That’s not real. It’s natural to gain weight as you get older. I’ll never be thin. Having children makes you fat. I’m fat because I have an injury that keeps me from going to the gym. The only way to lose weight is the way I did it; I lost 40 pounds; I should do that again because of course I’ve gained it all back and then some. MACRONUTRIENTS! Specific individual foods with maaggggical powers! Juicing! Smoothies! Packets of powders! Bars! Shakes! Foods nobody knew about before the great 20th Century Obesity Epidemic, because that makes perfect sense! Abdominal exercisers! Anything whatsoever sold on INFOMERCIALS! Plastic wrap for your abs! PILLS! SO MANY PILLS! Motivational posters! Calorie-burning shoe soles! Caffeinated skin creams! [Full disclosure: I actually have tried acupuncture and homeopathy, though not for weight loss, but I did once buy a $35 cellulite cream, because yeah, my thighs totally needed to absorb more substances… ] Okay. I lost 35 pounds. This is what I did. 1. Googled “healthy weight for my height.” Tried to get other reputable opinions from other websites. Accepted there might be more science behind the number that came up than there was in my current method, which was NO SCIENCE. Committed to test-drive myself at that weight, at least temporarily. 2. Googled how much water someone of my height/weight should drink. Trained myself to drink it. 3. Kept a meticulous food log. Measured and weighed everything. SCIENCE! 4. Strictly limited calories – cut by about 30% for three months. 5. Weighed in every day. Took regular stats with a tape measure. (chest, waist, hips, thighs, biceps) DATA! 6. Reached my goal with a full, nuanced understanding of my previous ineffective eating habits. 7. Kept doing steps 2, 3, and 5. 8. Got rid of my fat clothes. Note that there is no step for exercise. That is because exercise has nothing to do with weight loss! Stop thinking that! You don’t ever have to go to a gym if you don’t want to. The research is pretty clear: diet for the short term, exercise for the long term. Most of my weight was lost while I sat around on the couch, feeling sorry for myself and crying because I couldn’t have a chimichanga until next month. Then I trained for a marathon and gained back 8 pounds because I kept eating so many vanilla fig bars. Then I lost it again while sitting on the couch and icing my ankle. (Wait! I know! My IKEA couch is actually a MAGICAL WEIGHT LOSS MACHINE! You can make an appointment to sit on it for just three monthly installments of only $1999.99). I don’t “juice.” I have a smoothie maybe once or twice a year, if my mom makes me one. Under no circumstances have I ever given a care about tracking macronutrients. It’s been debunked. What I do track is MICROnutrients. Fiber, people! I eat wheat, corn, and soy whenever I want. I don’t take any medications other than birth control (which people think causes weight gain, just like thyroid disease, so go figure). I take a B-12 supplement, but you should know that taking a daily multi-vitamin has been linked to greater mortality from all causes. Vitamins (see above under micronutrients) should come from food, not a jar. I don’t do crunches. I haven’t had a gym membership for five years. I’ve never worked with a personal trainer, although I plan to one day. I have muscles but I’m super lazy. Every now and then I decide I’ll do planks, and I do one for about a minute, and then that’s it for the next several months. The reason I have visible muscle definition is that I’m down to 22% body fat. I don’t lift anything heavier than a laundry basket. I haven’t even done pull-ups for several months because I got tennis elbow from my phone. I walk about .8 miles to the coffee shop where I write, maybe 2-3 days a week. Exercise is something I do as a treat, or when I’m angry or frustrated about something that makes me too restless to stay in the house. Exercise is a means to an end: the ability to carry a backpack and hike into the backcountry; local transportation; ability to “play hard” on vacation; a giant F.U. to the endocrine gland that tried to kill me and made my hair fall out. You hear that, thyroid? Yeah, I said it. To be fair, there are things I do that may make a difference besides just eating a consistent volume of food at consistent times of day. I sleep 8 hours a night, more if I can get away with it. I don’t drink sweet drinks – not juice, not soda, not diet soda, nada – and I also don’t drink coffee or alcohol. I don’t eat sugars in general. I don’t eat 95% of what you would find in a typical grocery store bakery, including bread, bagels, muffins, croissants, cookies, pies, cakes, donuts, brownies, or whatever. I also don’t eat crackers, breakfast cereal, frozen desserts, or snack foods in general. I don’t eat junk food or fast food. I might eat chips or fries at most once a month. I don’t generally eat grains, especially not pasta or white rice, unless I’m in training, but I do eat a large baked potato with lunch every day. I eat wheat bread, but only from three specific brands. I eat as much fruit as I want, whenever I want. It’s not “carbs” – how oversimplified and misleading! – but rather, over-processed industrial foods. I’m not a strict personality – if I want candy, I’ll eat it – I’ve just lost my taste for these foods. They make me feel weird when I eat them, which I sometimes do, just often enough to remind myself why I don’t eat them every day. Once I realized that I ate more desserts by volume than I did vegetables, I felt foolish and started ramping up my cruciferous vegetable consumption. To this I attribute my overall state of health, sound digestion, “young skin,” and ability to sleep well. Gut flora. Worth considering. Also take note of magnesium deficiency, its prevalence, and its symptoms. As a final note, I eat a plant-based diet. I think most people would do well to be as skeptical of dairy products as they are of grain products. I haven’t eaten dairy products since 1997, and it seems unfair not to mention it. Don’t believe anything I’ve said. I have no credentials, and that matters! The only thing I can offer is anecdotal evidence. I lost a bunch of weight and reversed my health problems, and now I’ve maintained my bikini bod for a year and a half. It’s possible I’m making false correlations and attributing my results to the wrong inputs. It’s not possible I’m some kind of genetic anomaly, since I was at least as fat and ill and sedentary as anyone else for my first 35 years, and my family tree has no athletes that I know of. All I can say is that I believe it’s possible for everyone to be lean and fit, as long as we don’t follow the Standard American Diet or live the Standard American Lifestyle. Anyone can make lifestyle experiments, track data, and chart a trend line. What have you got to lose? I think it’s pretty clear I ain’t no size two, ‘cause when I shake it shake it, my pants start falling off. I’m a nerdy, middle-aged suburban woman who wears sub-zero clothing. In my world, that ought to mean clothes that keep me warm in the winter. Au contraire, mes amis. Let me tell you what it’s like. What I want out of the fashion industry is pretty straightforward. Call it business casual. I want flat shoes, natural-waist pants, knee-length skirts, shorts that cover my entire caboose, and tops that cover my entire bra. I prefer that it be assumed I am in the practice of wearing undergarments, without displaying them for all to see. I’m not a bluestocking. As far as I’m concerned, public nudity is a-okay, as long as it’s intentional. Which my accidental flashing of my entire naked breast in a restaurant the other day most assuredly was not. I have a young friend who is probably engaging in ritual self-mutilation at this very moment, in a feeble attempt to bleach the sight of my sundress malfunction from his mind. (The label says Size 1, by the way). My narrow shoulders cannot accommodate loose straps any more than my flat marathon runner’s butt can hold up a loose waistband. All those signs reading PULL UP YOUR PANTS? I know they’re aimed at me. Despite what most people would guess, my body image is quite good. I won a lengthy battle with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease, and every day I appreciate my strength and energy level with full force. I like having visible muscle definition. I have never been “skinny” and I am definitely not “naturally lean.” I’m just… small. But not small enough. I’m at least two inches too tall to wear petites, with a long waist, long arms, narrow shoulders, short legs, big thighs, and more bust than fashion designers expect. Put it this way. For the first time in my life, I look better naked than I do dressed. Nothing fits me. You think I’m exaggerating? Let me Google some size charts for you. Target: size 0/2 bottoms. Waist 26-26.5. Hip 36-37. Sears: size 0. Waist 25 ½. Hip 35. (Same as KMart) JCPenney: size 0. Waist 25 ½. Hip 35 ½. Walmart: starts at size 2. Waist 24 ½. Hip 35. LL Bean: starts at size 4. Costco: starts at size 8. My measurements are 34-27-34. According to the size charts, I should be able to fit in a 0 at Ann Taylor (see above photo), the Gap, and Old Navy, and a 00 at Banana Republic. In practice, those size 0’s are too loose. I tried on several size 0 garments at the Banana Republic store yesterday that were too big, and a very sweet employee directed me to the website, where I found… five styles of pants. Period. They don’t carry a 00 in the store, and I guess it’s not a big seller online either. Most 00 stuff is designed for truly skinny body types, not for athletes with bulky hamstrings, adult hips, and a BMI of 20. There is a dividing line between extra-small clothing and average-size clothing that is at least as vivid as the scene change from sepia to Technicolor in The Wizard of Oz. The women’s section has everything I want: modest, classic clothes that cover my stretch marks. Their “XS” is equivalent to about a size 6. The extra-small section (see H&M, Forever 21, Macy’s, and Nordstrom) currently has biscuit-bottom shorts, racer-back baggy tank tops, miniskirts, “pants” that were called “leggings” in my day, beachwear, and a broad spectrum of completely transparent tops, mysterious cutouts, and distressed denim. Good luck finding a single item that would be suitable on an airplane or in a nice restaurant, much less anything that would meet any office dress code. I can choose between “teen character actor” or trying to duct-tape age-appropriate garments onto my body. Which I’ve considered. But this is a hot climate, yo. That gives all new meaning to the concept of “tacky outfits.” Caring friends have advised me to wear children’s clothes (because Dora the Explorer has a new business casual line) or men’s clothes (because there are so many more men who are 5’4” and weigh 120 pounds – problem solved!). Really, though, nobody gives a flying leap about my problem. I Googled “size zero” and found a Wikipedia article that indicates a 3” range in clothes labeled “size zero,” explicates “criticism” and “movement against size zero,” and then stops without indexing places one might purchase said clothing. The remaining first-page results are all about a size-zero woman who got liposuction, except for one article about size inflation called “Congratulations! You are a size zero!” I looked up “size zero fashion” on Pinterest. Much to my astonishment, what popped up was “curvy” and “plus-sized,” with a certain amount of disparagement for small women. “Does anyone really look like this?” and “Anorexia is a disease it is NOT a fashion statement”. You think people body-shame you? Evidently my clothing size gives people the right to assume I’m mentally ill. I have just as much right to buy clothes that fit as anyone else. But capitalism is failing me. There is no market for the products I want to buy; therefore, they don’t exist. I’ve been online, and I’ve only found one brand of underpants that fit me. Even on Amazon, I’m off the bottom of the size chart for almost everything. I used a tape measure, ordered a sundress that should have fit, and the smocking… didn’t stretch. My options at this point are to keep returning most of my online orders, make my own clothes, pay for someone else to do it, or wear vintage. (I’m the same height and weight as Betty Grable, although Grable’s hips were an inch bigger and I’m bigger by 4” in the waist, 3” in the thigh, 2” in the calf, and ¾” in the ankle. Nobody seems to think she had an eating disorder, even with that tiny waist and those slender legs). My long-suffering husband, who has been my companion in clothes shopping over the last decade, is threatening to take me to London, where I would be a size 6. In other parts of the world, my build is perfectly normal and average. My “size zero” issues aren’t just a First World Problem – they’re almost exclusively an American problem. Correction: a Unicorn-American problem. I used to believe that fitness came from two sources: Good genes or exercise. I also believed that people only played team sports because they weren’t smart enough to do anything else, and that people only went to the gym if they were vain. I believed that I personally couldn’t go to the gym, even if I wanted to (which I didn’t), because I had fibromyalgia, and all the books and doctors and research agreed that FM patients are exercise-intolerant. Therefore, I was the size I was, that was how it was going to be, the medical establishment backed me up, case closed. Density = destiny. Now, I’ve lived the following combinations: Fat, ill, and sedentary Fat, somewhat okay, and active Fit, healthy, and active Lean, healthy, and sedentary [But I have never been thin and ill]. I haven’t been to the gym in five years. I ran a marathon last fall, but all I’ve done throughout 2015 is walk short distances and do some light yoga and physical therapy. The majority of days this year, I haven’t even done those things; I’ve sat on my patoot holding an ice pack. I weigh slightly less now than I did during the months I was running 30 miles a week. I’m in the same clothing size that I was before, during, and after marathon training. It’s clear to me that weight, size, and body fat are all the result of food intake, based on the data from my food log. I’ve been careful to track my diet and activity level since January 2014. I know I don’t have “superior genes” leading to a “naturally lean” physique. If that were true, it wouldn’t have taken me until age 39 to become lean and fit. Also, there would be more lean people in my family tree. (Not going there, but we have photo albums dating back to the tintype era). Then there’s the issue of the thyroid disease I suffered in my early 20’s. I had a thyroid nodule, and my hormone levels were at the extreme low end of “normal.” All the objective, measurable data indicate that my “set point” [snort] is “curvy.” I have “birthin’ hips.” Or at least I did. Now I’m a little bitty sub-zero and people tell me, “I can’t picture you ever being fat.” And, “You were obese?!” Let’s look at some data. Here is my progress chart from MyFitnessPal for the week of 8/9/2015 – 8/15/2015. I weighed the same on Saturday the 15th as I did on Sunday the 9th. My weight was the same within 2/10ths of a pound all week, with the exception of Friday the 14th. What happened? Here is a screen shot of part of the activity data from my Apple Watch. We see that I won three separate activity awards. I walked almost 6 miles. I doubled my target movement/calorie-burn goal and exceeded my exercise goal by 50%. Although the data don’t show it, I also climbed about 8 flights of stairs that day. I worked out SO MUCH – why did my weight go up a POUND AND A HALF the next day? Ugh. That’s so unfair. Last, here is a screenshot of the data from the Health app. It shows dietary calories and weight. We see that my calorie consumption spiked on the 13th, my weight spiked on the 14th, my calorie consumption dropped on the 14th, and my weight went back to normal on the 15th. On the low-calorie day, I skipped my afternoon snack and had cabbage instead of a potato with my usual lunch. What may be more interesting is the high-calorie day: I met a friend for lunch, and I got the smaller size of the “brown rice and vegetables” plate. I had a lemonade, but no refills, I had a Frappucino with soy milk and no whipped cream, and I had one cookie. Sounds reasonable? The lunch was over 800 calories and the cookie was nearly 400. Counting the Frappy, my caloric needs for the day were met even if I had skipped both breakfast and dinner. Which I didn’t. That’s just one day, granted. I have 20 months of data, though, and they support this trend. No matter how much I exercise, if I eat more, I weigh more. That includes days I ran 17 miles. My heaviest weigh-in in six months was the day after I ran my marathon (26.2 miles).
This is what happened. I spent three months on strict calorie restriction. I tracked everything I ate, and all my exercise, with meticulous attention. I figured out why I tended to gain weight, which was a combination of several behaviors. I quit those behaviors and found a daily routine that ended the problem. I eat the same breakfast, lunch, and snack almost every day. I’m careful to eat the recommended daily allowance of micronutrients, via food rather than jars of pills. I love exercise, but the lifestyle I live now seems to work regardless of whether I exercise for months on end, or sit on my caboose for months on end instead. Believe my words or don’t. My personal experience has been that no doctor or health professional has ever once mentioned my weight, my body fat level, my food intake, or my fitness-related activities. They certainly never have tested my blood for nutrient levels. It’s pretty straightforward to collect these data for yourself. There are various free web-based and smartphone apps to track food intake, or you can use a library book or $6 paperback. If your phone doesn’t already have a pedometer, you can get one at Target for $12, and/or a scale that estimates body fat for about $25. You may already have a tape measure, measuring spoons, and measuring cups. I’d say “there’s only one way to find out,” but actually there are many ways. Whatever data you collect, record them every day and then watch the trend line. Numbers are just numbers. Data are just data. There are no moral components to this. When my weight fluctuated between overweight and obese and back to overweight, my stress level fluctuated a lot, too. It was a relief to me to get some objective measurements, analyze the trends, and realize that it was within my power to influence these trends. I never realized that I had a choice, because getting fat was something that “just happened” to me. I became fat and unhealthy as an accidental result of factors I didn’t understand. I became lean and fit due to research, experimentation, focus, and applied effort. As it turns out, it’s a lot easier to stay this way than it would be to revert back to my former state. That’s what I want for everyone: an easier life. “Moderation in all things, especially moderation.” Emerson said this, and everyone in the world seems to agree with it – except me. I think moderation is dumb. What does it even mean? This is why I have such a problem with adages and folk wisdom. These sayings are like incantations to justify whatever it is we want to do. For instance, there is no such thing as the “14-second rule” that we invoke when we really want to eat off the floor. I’m not saying I’ve never eaten off the floor, but my justification is not that “the food hasn’t had time to get germs on it” (patently false). More simply, I’ve done it before without negative consequences. It’s possible that occasionally eating dirty food off a dirty floor may help maintain a robust immune system. It seems to work for my dog (and a kindergartner I just watched put her mouth on the edge of the counter by a garbage can). Let me point out that telling the Internet about one’s floor-oriented dining experiences is not a moderate act. Moderation is defined as “avoidance of excess or extremes.” Synonyms listed are restraint, self-command, and self-discipline. Okay, I’m all about self-discipline, but in my mind this has nothing to do with moderation. I do things I want to do, because they make sense to me at the time. I’ve never committed murder. I’ve never needed to restrain myself from murdering someone. This is not something that takes self-discipline. There’s just never been anyone I wanted to kill, and I’ve just never felt that kind of impulse. I also don’t need self-discipline to take a shower, brush my teeth, cook dinner, or play with my dog. These are habitual behaviors. What’s the difference between habits and moderation? Habits include automated routines and heuristics. A heuristic is a problem-solving technique. My husband and I use a heuristic for parking the car: in a crowded area, take the first visible spot. This may result in walking an extra quarter mile in urban areas, but it saves endless amounts of time, frustration, and potential fender benders. Technically, we may wind up walking 10x as far as someone who spent more total minutes driving in circles and jamming up a parking lot. There is nothing moderate about this, but it works. Extreme behavior is often what is needed to reach the threshold of effectiveness. Highly strenuous exercise reversed my thyroid disease, whereas my lifelong moderate habit of walking everywhere had no effect. Going on a strict diet for three months resulted in permanent weight loss, because I stayed focused on analyzing and changing my dysfunctional eating habits. Debt elimination was significantly faster when I spent a couple of years on a lockdown budget, because interest compounds monthly. I no longer need to focus attention on paying debts, losing weight, or managing a chronic health condition. My attention fluctuated from 100% to 0%. Moderation can be really frustrating, to the point of learned helplessness and despair. When I tried to lose weight via distance running alone, I discovered that it took 38 miles for me to run off a single pound of body fat. At the rate I was going, I wouldn’t reach my goal for a year and a half, and then only if I didn’t go on vacation or celebrate any holidays. Paying off credit cards is the same, because if all we do is stop overspending, we’re still spending everything we earn and getting hit with unanticipated expenses. The goalposts keep getting moved further down the field and we never reach them. Getting rid of clutter a couple of bags at a time is another example of how moderation is unhelpful and takes forever. It’s like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket. Total life overhauls can happen in a shockingly brief time period when we pause for a radical change in perspective. Extreme behaviors work for me. I don’t drink alcohol or coffee because I don’t like them, even though it would smooth out a lot of social situations for me to submit and accept these yucky beverages sometimes. (It’s amazing how invested people can be in making sure you eat or drink something in front of them). I maintain my goal weight within 2 lbs. I carry zero consumer debt. I keep my house clean, doing basic chores even when I’m sick. I don’t check baggage, even if it means donating some clothes I packed to Goodwill (from whence they came originally). I’m either not doing something at all, or I’m totally committed to it. If I’m trying to resolve a persistent problem, I put laser focus on it, researching it and thinking about it and working on it and looking for examples of people who don’t have that issue. By the time I’m done, my perspective has changed and I can laugh at Past Self’s ineffective way of approaching it. Don’t be moderate in following your passions. Don’t be moderate in telling people you love them. Don’t be moderate in wrestling down any problem that causes hassles for you. Don’t be moderate in your daily life. If you sing, put some volume behind it. If you dance, dork out, because vague and half-hearted never look good. If you meet someone and you want to be friends, say so. If you want to be creative, spend every drop, because you’ll learn and improve and you can always burn the evidence. I have a strong opinion and I’ve just laid it out for you. Moderation, schmoderation. If you’re reading this, you probably know exactly what I mean by “spoons” and why I’m talking about them. Try as we might, when we talk about chronic illness, we generally won’t reach an audience of well people. A healthy person in a generous mood may humor us for a few minutes, long enough to pick up the sense that being sick sucks. Let’s face it, though. A healthy person’s priority is never going to be dedicating hours of time to talking and thinking about illness. For all we know, their Charitable Listening quota was already extracted by a dozen other ill people earlier this week. We can take a moment to be glad for them. If we care about them, we wouldn’t wish our conditions on them. Well people are like fuzzy little ducklings. Aren’t they adorable? Now I’ll pause and list off my chronic illness credentials. It’s like flashing a gang sign. If I were better at drawing, I’d make up hand signals for: fibromyalgia, thyroid disease, migraine, TMJ, carpal tunnel syndrome, vasovagal syncope, childhood-onset insomnia, bruxism, restless leg syndrome, confusional arousal, and pavor nocturnus. (Not a complete list). I had a cancer scare. I’ve swallowed radioactive iodine and been on beta blockers. I’ve had my thyroid scanned and had an EKG. I’ve had so many ultrasounds on so many body parts you’d think I could cash them in for a free baby. If I brought my parrot to appointments, she would definitely be able to say, “I don’t know what to tell you.” The other thing my bird would be able to say is, “You don’t know what it’s like.” Chronic illness is something of a competitive sport. Quite frankly, none of my stuff “counts.” My four-day migraine is nothing compared to so-and-so who was hospitalized for migraine. My running around the house sleep-screaming and slapping myself until I bleed is mildly interesting, but at least I don’t need a CPAP. See what I mean? I have several friends who have fibromyalgia. Only one of them is actually willing to talk with me about it. The fact that I’m not symptomatic anymore makes me some kind of poseur. A friend of mine wrote the other day that ‘healthy lifestyles’ are now an acceptable means of moral judgment. This makes me want to beat my head on the wall. So, you’re talking to someone who feels better than you do, and you don’t want to hear about it? WHAT IF THAT INFORMATION COULD HELP YOU FEEL BETTER? It's like we were both wrongfully convicted of a crime we didn't commit, and I'm offering you the business card of the lawyer who got me exonerated, and you respond as though I had just accused you of being a criminal after all. The first thing about having a limited number of spoons is to FIGURE OUT HOW TO GET MORE SPOONS. Waiter, Table 12 needs some EXTRA SPOONS please. If I only have one spoon for the day, I’m going to use it to Google information on spoon acquisition. The next day, I’m going to put my spoon toward getting a second spoon. The thing about chronic pain is that it’s a super power. Guess what? You have the ability to withstand extreme pain for incredibly long periods of time, AND LIVE TO TELL ABOUT IT. Heck yeah! Here is the order form for your cape and boots. I married a big, strong, alpha male who began participating in team sports around age 4. He played football and hockey and he was actually a lumberjack. Basically my exact opposite in every way. What I found out about big strong athletic people is that they endure chronic pain, too, but they take it for granted and they don’t let it stop them. A game I play when I meet athletic people is to ask about their sports injuries, surgeries, and chronic pain areas. These lists often sound hauntingly familiar. I started to wonder if I had it in me to be an athlete as well. Come to find out, I did. I ran my first marathon in October 2014, 16 years after being diagnosed with fibromyalgia. I couldn't walk the next day, but neither could anyone else who ran the course. Recently an acquaintance asked if I would be willing to correspond with one of his clients who has fibromyalgia. We wrote back and forth several times. She said it was encouraging for her just to know that someone with FM could run a marathon. She wanted to pick my brain about how I got better, and she had tons of questions. Many pages into our correspondence, she mentioned that she spends a lot of time in a recliner. I hate recliners because they push my head and neck forward; I find them so uncomfortable and pain-triggering that I prefer to sit on the floor. I suggested that she reconsider the recliner and experiment with other chairs for a few weeks. I never heard from her again. Whenever I hear about anyone being diagnosed with a chronic illness, I fret. Sometimes I cry. I can’t bear the thought, even if it’s someone I’ve never met. I want to come bursting through their wall with a flaming sword and defeat the foul demon that is ruining their life. I want to back up a dump truck full of spoons and start pouring them over the back fence. Spoons! Spoons for all! When I hear that there is no cure for something, I think, “Yet.” Surely we’re not going to lie back and… and… submit! We’re not going to let it win – that would be a travesty. Unfortunately, this is not the attitude that is preferred. We want sympathy. Trying to fix the problem is not considered sympathetic. From what I gather, suggesting that there is a way out of this thing is elitist, controlling, condescending, moralizing, and rude. Hey, saying I got better is not the same as saying I am better. I got better by accident. Little by little, I stumbled across information and learned what my triggers were and how to avoid them. I learned how to adjust my sleep and activity level and food intake in a way that leads to better functionality. It turns out there are dozens of different inputs. It’s complicated, but not impossible. I still have occasional bad days. I’m never going to forget that spoons come in finite quantities. But I have enough to share now. My default position was that I was not fat, I did not overeat, and I only ate health food. None of these beliefs were true, but I am an extremely stubborn person and I was not prepared to change my mind. I believed the same things that many women believe: that any discussion about weight was 100% about appearance; that the beauty myth was a tool of the oppressor; that my weight was nobody’s business but my own; that going to the gym was for ninnies; and that any limits on what I ate would automatically cause some kind of psychological damage. Now that I’ve come out the other side of the weight loss process, I can spot patterns in my behavior and thought processes that were not evident to me at the time. My weight has ranged back and forth over a 35-lb continuum several times in the last 20 years. I never purposefully set out to gain or lose weight; it always “just happened” as a result of some change in my life, and usually I wouldn’t notice until someone said something (loss) or I had to buy new clothes (gain), and maybe not even then. I had a cancer scare at age 23. A nodule developed on my thyroid gland that caused a constant tickle in my throat and made it impossible to speak when I was lying on my back. I had an actual goiter that is visible in photos. Around the same time, I had my first migraine and got diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Good times. In retrospect, I’m pretty certain the migraine and the FM are related to the thyroid disease, but that was the 90s and nobody suggested it at the time. The other thing I have noticed in retrospect is that my symptoms are directly tied to my weight and my activity level. The more weight I gain, the more often I have migraines and flare-ups, the worse the pain, and the longer it lasts. The more sedentary I am, the more weird symptoms I get, like developing a bald patch or being chilly when it’s 75 degrees out. I’ve always been in the “normal” range for thyroid hormones, but I can pull out test results from the extreme low end to near center range, and they chart well with my energy level and activity level during those time periods. We had a weird year in 2013. Had to move four times in three different cities. I gained 17 pounds, because apparently I believe that putting things in my face helps handle stress, and my health collapsed. I was screaming and slapping myself in my sleep, migraines were happening every week, and I started having FM flare-ups for the first time in many years. Also, none of my pants would button. I knew that if I kept my weight under 135 (BMI of 23), I didn’t get migraines, so that was my weight goal. But in practice, that meant 135 was always my low weight and I was constantly slipping upward. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing that caused me to keep gaining weight. I was done and ready to change. But how? We hit the New Year and I decided on “Do the Obvious” as my slogan for the year. This was a broad-spectrum strategy, and health and fitness were only part of the game board. It struck me that “the obvious” for weight loss would be to choose a target weight, rather than trying to stay below a maximum weight. So I Googled “healthy weight for 5’4” woman.” Every search result I found turned up the same weight of 120 pounds. Okay, I thought, I know I can easily gain a pound a day and keep it, so if I feel somehow “too thin” at 120 I’ll just eat more for a while. The worst-case scenario would be that I would spend a few days being a little scrawny. The end result of the experiment was that I felt FREAKING AWESOME at 120. Awesome in a way I’d never felt before. The last time I was at that weight, I was 12 and two inches shorter, so I had no way of knowing. I gained back 8 lbs while I was training for my marathon, hit my highest weight in six months the morning after Marathon Day, and then had to quit running for 7 months. I lost the training weight while sitting around on the couch icing my ankle. What I learned was that “healthy weight for my height” feels about 10x better than “default weight I thought was normal.” I learned that diets do work if you’re ready to make a permanent change. I learned that maintaining a healthy weight is 1000x easier than trying to manage extreme fluctuations. I learned that exercise doesn’t really have any impact on weight loss. I learned that my past eating patterns were dysfunctional and made my life harder. I learned that size zero clothes are really hard to find, especially if you aren’t a teenage girl and don’t want to dress like one. I learned that being perceived as a “have” makes other women feel like they have the right to swear at you and give you dirty looks. I learned that my beliefs about lifestyle, health, fitness, and nutrition make me a heretic. But I’m a heretic who can do pull-ups and run a marathon, and I haven’t had a migraine in nearly two years. I used to be obese, but I had to quit. I was diagnosed with both a thyroid nodule and fibromyalgia when I was 23. I inadvertently managed to cure myself of the thyroid disease, and I’ve been symptom-free of FM for so long that my current doctor believes I was misdiagnosed. “People don’t get better from fibromyalgia.” (All right then; study me, I’m game). I’m turning 40 soon, and when new people meet me, they see no trace of my chronic illness years. They see me as this size zero marathon runner. Other women have asked me what I weigh and what size I wear, and then they swear at me. I hear a lot of “You don’t know what it’s like,” followed by a litany of issues, most of which I have experienced. (How do you know I don’t know what it’s like?) I have always been willing to share everything I’ve learned, because I can’t stand the thought of someone else suffering from chronic pain, or fatigue, or migraine, for the many years that I did. I’ll do anything to help. Food intake is the major factor. There is huge resistance to this concept, because it’s tied to ideas of morality and willpower and shame and psychological disorders. We prefer the idea that we can just add exercise, and we totally will, just as soon as we’re less busy or we get over this cold or the weather is more cooperative. Now, I’m an active person. My motivation for being athletically fit is so that I can go on backpacking expeditions and drag a third of my body weight uphill all day. It’s been my experience that exercise has virtually nothing to do with weight loss or gain. In fact, I steadily gained weight while training for my marathon, because I run around with a belt pouch full of cookies and trail mix. It takes me 37 miles of running to burn off one pound of body fat. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m too lazy to rely on anything that strenuous when I want to meet a goal! Everyone is on a diet all the time. We’re either maintaining a range of body weight, or losing weight, or gaining weight. Over the course of a year, we’re either going to stay the same, be leaner, or have a greater quantity of adipose tissue on our bodies. Those are the options. It was something of a shock to me to realize that I was on the Steady Weight Gain diet plan. I gained 17 pounds in a year, and my health went into a nosedive. I was getting migraines on a weekly basis. I had the first FM flare-up I’d had in years. I was having night terrors. I felt awful. I started keeping a food log. What I learned was that I was eating about 150% of what a person my height needed to eat. Over a three-month period, I meticulously measured and weighed and read labels and wrote down every single thing I put in my mouth. I lost the extra weight. I’ve “kept it off” for over a year, although I don’t really think of it that way. I think of it as “living.” I created a new normal that allowed me to stay at one size. Now I live the same way as everyone else. I eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks every day. I go to the grocery store and choose food and put it in my cart and bring it home. I go to restaurants and order stuff that looks good. The difference is that I do it as a lean, strong person, and I do it with full awareness and knowledge of the cumulative effects of my individual choices. When I see something that Past Self used to eat, I have the twin thoughts of “Yum” and “Uhoh.” Nothing tastes as good as pain-free feels. Yesterday I heard a strange jangling sound come from my bedroom. I went in to check it out. My dog was hiding under the bed. I couldn’t find anything out of order, so I chalked it up to his collar jingling. This morning, I discovered what had happened. The hook holding my race medals had pulled off the wall, dumping everything on the floor inside the closet. One of them evidently gouged the baseboard. Remind me never to drop one of these things on my foot! I took a picture and then picked up the medals and spread them out on the bed. It seems like I can still remember every step of each of those races. There is still mud on the ribbon of the Warrior Dash medal, a surprisingly small amount of mud considering the state of my clothes that day. These gaudy chunks of metal have no real purpose other than as reminders of mornings when I woke up unusually early and ran in what have been referred to as the most boring parades ever. I’ve never earned a trophy. I was 36 before I got my first medal. I was always one of the smallest kids in my class, definitely always the last picked for every team. I was awkward, uncoordinated, and seemed to have no depth perception or hand-eye coordination or ability to remember the rules of whatever sport we were playing. I’ve been hit in the head with almost every possible ball. I was once tackled in the mud by one of my own teammates. Given the choice, I would absolutely have chosen solitary confinement over a PE class. Why on earth would I set out, of my own volition, on any course of action that might result in a medal? Especially when mud might be involved? What happened was that I got thyroid disease at age 23, the same year I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. (There is probably a connection between these). I spent years trapped in chronic pain and fatigue. Gradually, I began stumbling across combinations of behavior patterns that led to some relief. I started running at age 35 and finished the first mile of my life a few weeks later. In my adult life, I have worked to build my fitness level from what I would call a zero to maybe an 8 out of 10. I can climb a fence, carry 1/3 of my body weight through the woods for four days, run a half marathon any time I feel like it, and do a full Bikram yoga session. There are no medals given for most of these things, but if there were, I would hang them on a hook in my closet and fawn over them every now and then. My husband has a whole box full of medals, ribbons, commemorative coins, and perhaps a couple of trophies from sporting events starting when he was 4 years old. He was going to throw them out. I made him keep them. It’s a pretty heavy box. It represents many years of commitment and duty and determination and teamwork and effort. It’s a monument to an ethos of perseverance and fairness. I didn’t fully understand it until I came home with a few medals of my own. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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