Monday, November 7, 2011

When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Blogging

I'm sure my small group of loyal readers has noticed a distinct change in tone and subject on my blog.

When I first began this blog, it focused on what I believed would be my weight loss journey thanks to mindful eating. It was, like many other blogs, a sort of web diary and review of the good, the bad and the ugly issues related to weight loss in my life.

Slowly, I began to take a more critical view of dieting and came to realize that slimness = good health was a faulty, dangerous generalization. My writing became more analytical and references to my own experiences became just that--references to back up general observations and critiques of how society is profoundly obsessed with weight loss and actually cares very little for improved health, despite the health-focused discourse we hear all around us.

Gradually, my blog roll began to reflect my new perspective. Originally, it contained a number of dieting blogs, but it morphed into a list of blogs that promote, in one way or another, a HAES (Health at Every Size) viewpoint, and, to some extent, a fat acceptance viewpoint (this is something that I'd like to talk about one day, but not now).

But life has a way of sneaking up on you and "the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray," as the poet Robert Burns once said.

The more I became interested in physical activity--not as a way to lose weight, but rather as a way to improve my general health--the clearer it became that my body, and specifically my knee, would have none of it.

After I had my first hip replacement, I started a blog called "Total Hip Disaster" to help myself get through the disaster of a hip replacement gone very wrong. It's still floating out in cyberspace at totalhipdisaster.blogspot.com if you feel like taking a glance. It was written for myself and an anonymous audience. I never gave anyone I knew in the real world the URL and no one knew me in cyberspace, so it was a pretty private little story. I just re-read a few entries today and had to laugh when I read a post where I mentioned how my left knee was pretty cranky over the abuse it got while I was recovering twice from surgery. Prescient.

All this to say that New Me's blog will once again take a more personal route. Blogging will be part of my mental preparation for surgery on November 17th and really a way to deal with my worries and fears. If you read "Total Hip Disaster" you'll understand why I am very apprehensive.

I feel that I have made a few cyber-friends in the past two years, so I beg your indulgence and hope you will bear with me as I go on a little personal blogging side trip. There probably won't be much talk of food for awhile--unless I decide to go on a rant regarding how bad hospital food is!

5 comments:

  1. IM SO GLAD.
    It's so easy to veer off path with our blogs---and IMO this is why we should do it.

    Im not leaving

    xo

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  2. Thanks for the link to your other blog. I'm considering microsurgery for spinal stenosis and your experience is a good counterpoint to my assumptions that this is a no-brainer.

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  3. A couple of posts ago, you gave us permission to pray for you. I will do that. While I don't believe in a God who keeps a tally sheet and heals those who gather the most, I do think prayer is oddly helpful. Maybe mostly for the pray-er and not the pray-ee, but helpful nonetheless. We need to wrap words around our helpless feelings, then turn them a notch in a useful direction.

    I will pray for you a robust recovery. I will pray that your creative thinking will serve you and strengthen you. Banish the shadowy thoughts, borrowing trouble from a future that likely will not materialize! I will pray this surgery becomes a positive metaphor that will ultimately enrich your life on many levels. I will envision you on a warm day in April with nordic poles, moving, I don't know what speed, but moving forward with a smile on your face, the sun shining on it. Let it be so, God. Let it be so.

    Doesn't hurt to pray. May help. I will pray it several times between now and the 17th, then may revise after the 17th, or continue.

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  4. I will have to take a look at your old blog...
    Mine definitely serves my mental health more than any other function (just me yammering to myself for the most part)... Very little of any profundity!

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  5. I agree with DebraSY about the value of prayer, not so much because we're asking our version of God to grant favors, but rather that doing so serves a purpose. I believe that caring for people directs energy toward them, and prayer, good wishes, kind and supportive thoughts or whatever is a more potent form of energy direction. It can't heal you, but it can perhaps turn some sort of molecular tide so that your spirits are a notch hire, you healing a few minutes faster, etc. I can't say what happens, but there is value in such thoughts, regardless of how they are focused.

    You are very right that physical activity is important for health, and when you are prohibited from doing it by structural problems (a place where I live as well, with persistent back and knee issues myself), it has a profound impact on your life. One of the things which is lost in all of the vanity that surrounds exercise is that it's really about motion to keep your body functioning properly. One of the gifts of age is that vanity concerns definitely fall away (not that some of us had big ones when we were younger... I didn't, and I think you didn't either, but I think you see that I'm speaking in general about the current zeitgeist).

    I'll be here no matter what you write about. :-) And I'll be hoping for you best and fastest recovery.

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