The Best Holiday Tips I've Seen

OK. After saying that I won't be around for a few days, I just have to send you all over to this great post: http://sizeate.blogspot.com/2009/12/size-ate-is-baaaaack-merry-mindful.html

I just love holiday eating tips that don't tell what to eat...or NOT eat.

Have a Merry One!

What with the holidays and all, I will probably not be blogging for a few days.

I just want to wish you all a very happy holiday season (Channukah is over and I apologize for not having mentioned it but Christmas is just around the corner; best wishes for Kwanzaa too).

I'll be back soon with more contrarian commentary to wrap up 2009 and start 2010!

Why Do You Exercise?

One day, you will not long quite so much to fit into those cool, skinny jeans. You will be happy about having improved your eating (more whole foods, less junk food) and increased your physical activity but you will also find it easier to accept who you are, including your lumps and bumps.

And maybe, just maybe, you will exercise because you know it makes you feel good and it's good for your overall health, not just because you've burned x calories in x minutes...Because, honestly, success is not just measured in calories burned and good health is not just measured in pounds lost.

I'm off to breathe now.

How to Make Someone Give Up

Before going out to yoga yesterday, I took a few minutes to do some exercises with ankle weights to help strengthen my glutes and protect my very sore knee. This is not exciting stuff, so I turned on the TV to keep me awake.

I caught the last five minutes of a Canadian show called "X Weighted". It's a slightly less nasty variation on the "Biggest Loser", but what I saw yesterday made my blood boil.

I caught the last five minutes of a show about a young woman who wanted to become a professional hip-hop dancer. Her goal was to audition for the dancers attached to the Toronto Raptors basketball team.

When I tuned in at the end of the show, she was still quite a curvy young woman, but what a dancer! She looked like she was in fabulous shape. Over the six months of work with the X Weighted team, she had turned her eating habits around and really stepped up the exercise. Apparently, she'd had a less than stellar start, but during the last three months she'd given it her all.

The program showed her during her first audition for the hip-hop dancers and then being asked to come back for a final audition. What a victory, right? Wrong!

In six months, she had lost about 25 pounds and almost 14" from her bust, waist and hips. She also cut her time doing the fitness circuit down by 30 seconds (she did the circuit at the beginning of the show and then at the end, six months later). The trainer was blown away. What a victory, right? Wrong!

Her parents and her boyfriend were there for the final weigh-in. She was happy with the inches lost, but disappointed with her weight loss. Then the trainer asked her mother what she thought. "She could have done better," said mom curtly. A tear rolled down the girl's face.

I was livid.

This young woman had worked hard. She was in fantastic shape. She was a great dancer, but she still didn't look like Kate Moss.

My first thought was that she'd probably built up a lot of muscle over the six months of training and damn it, muscle weighs more than fat. She'd lost a ton of inches--which is the real mark of improving the shape you're in. The trainer, of course, did not say this to her. Her let her cry.

Great TV. Really gripping.

I wonder where she'll be in another six months. With family and a trainer like that, who needs enemies?

The Perils of Tightrope Walking

Source: The Kenyon Review

A blogger is MIA--you know, one of the purist, cleanest eaters, the one who exercises religiously, who tracks every bite she eats.

She's been MIA for a few days.

Maybe she just doesn't feel like blogging, maybe she's busy buying Christmas presents, maybe she's come down with the flu. Any one of these options is better than how much she could be hurting if she's fallen off the dieting tightrope.

I have never even thought about becoming a tightrope walker. I always say that I can do just about anything except dance ballet, but I should add tightrope walking to the list. It must be really tough--the embodiment of the "straight and narrow". On a tightrope, there's no room for any mistakes at all. Once you've fallen off the tightrope, it seems like the show's over.

Sorry friends, but I do believe there's a very dark side to "eating clean", or eating "perfectly" or whatever you want to call it. For every yin, there's a yang and to eat "clean" there has to be an "eat dirty", for every "good" food, there has to be a "bad" food. If how you eat has become a dichotomy, make sure you've got a hospital nearby, because you're going to have lots of broken bones once you fall off the tightrope. And make no mistake about it, YOU WILL. Why? Because you're human. Only computers always follow the straight and narrow...until they crash.

Get off the tightrope and walk on the road. It's not as exciting by half. For the most part, people won't notice you. The changes might be minimal or hard to see. You might simply feel more content. And you won't fall off the face of the earth.

Fat Talk

OK, we're all reading these blogs because we're interested in weight loss, or simply in eating better (and we all have a different definition of what that means), or because we have some sort of eating disorder (binging, anorexia, bulimia, etc.). So we're all talking about weight and that's OK.

But I'd like to challenge you all to limit "fat talk".

What is "fat talk"? Here are some examples:

"OMG, I stuffed myself. I feel so bloated and ashamed."

"I'm really working hard on sticking to the programme. I need to lose X. I'm at my heaviest."

"Oh, I really can't eat X. I have to stay away from it or else I gain weight."

And so on and so forth.

Actually, I often find that the worst "fat talkers" are slim, young women who feel it is their duty to proclaim their (totally imagined) fatness, because you know, you can never be too thin or too rich. I have sat silent listening to this kind of garbage spewing from the mouths of people who wouldn't know a weight problem if it bit them in the behind. I am ashamed for not saying anything.

But I think we of the currently, formerly or "in the middle of being fat" persuasion also shoot ourselves down by criticizing our own appearances (fat slob, thunder thighs, paunch...). And yes, I have been just as guilty of this as anyone else.

I say "down with insulting, debasing and otherwise hating ourselves"! Treat yourself with as much love as you treat others. When was the last time you told your mother/husband/best friend how crappy they look since they gained weight? I'm sure that even if you wanted to say that, you toned down the words so that they wouldn't go away hating themselves or you. Please be just as kind to yourself.

Mindfulness

I was first introduced to the concept of mindfulness at a time in my life when I was desperately searching for a way to address my physical problems (failed surgery) without going stark, raving mad. I kept thinking about how badly things had gone--not just my operation, but so many things in my life. And when I wasn't obsessing about the past, the future made me crazy with fear. What if they couldn't fix my hip? What if I had to live like this forever? What if I never got to travel again? What if I could never go for a simple walk again? I was living either in the past or in the future. The present didn't exist. I suspect this is a common problem for many people. I have a strong tendency to obsess over things that are done and gone, things that I can't take back or that I should have done better or not done at all. I also imagine all kinds of horrible things that could happen. I won't even give you a sample of my crazy worrying.

Mindfulness is the polar opposite of everything I just described. In a nutshell, it means living in the present. Here is a slightly more elaborate definition that I found in Wikipedia:

Psychological "mindfulness" is broadly conceptualized, say Bishop et al.(2004:232), as "a kind of nonelaborative, nonjudgmental, present-centered awareness in which each thought, feeling, or sensation that arises in the attentional field is acknowledged and accepted as it is". They propose a two-component operational definition of "mindfulness".

The first component involves the self-regulation of attention so that it is maintained on immediate experience, thereby allowing for increased recognition of mental events in the present moment. The second component involves adopting a particular orientation toward one’s experiences in the present moment, an orientation that is
characterized by curiosity, openness, and acceptance. (2004:232) The former mindfulness component of self-regulated attention involves conscious awareness ofone's current thoughts, feelings, and surroundings, which can result in metacognitive skills for controlling concentration. The latter mindfulness component of orientation to experience involves accepting one's mindstream, maintaining open and curious attitudes, and thinking in alternative categories [...]

OK, that was a quite a bit more elaborate, but well worth reading.

What does this have to do with a weight loss/health/personal journey? A lot, in my opinion.

While planning and goal setting are laudable activities, without mindfulnesss, you can't fully benefit from the moment that you are actually doing all these wonderful things that you dreamed about or planned for so long.

The same applies when you're living in the past and rehashing all the horrible (though often minor) mistakes you made, turning them around in your mind. How can anyone move on when they can't stop themselves from living in the past?

Tomorrow and yesterday. I know what has already happened and yes, to a certain extent it helps me to forecast the future. But remember that famous line you find in every financial prospectus: "past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results". BTW, there are over 6 million hits for this phrase.

I think that if I have one new year's resolution, it is not to exercise more or lose more weight. My resolution is to live more in the moment: to be aware of how I feel, both mentally and physically and honour those feelings; to stop and smell the roses; to respect my hunger and my fullness now, not in some hypothetical future.

So I think this means that resolutions are out the window: my resolution is to be here now.