Slow motion transformations

A month ago I wrote my last blog entry. I intended to write another one shortly after we shifted house, but that turned out to be a little unrealistic. Maybe moving is a bit like childbirth; you remember it was difficult, and stressful, but somehow the true nature of it is dulled enough for you to contemplate doing it again.

This move is a big change for me. It is part wish fulfilment, part impulse decision, part desperation, and part of the plan all along. It feels like it was the right thing to do. I'll know soon enough if it was a mistake, once the bills start rolling in every month.

So why talk about a home in a blog about my health/ weight loss transformation?

Every now and then I will see an article about how having a lot of clutter or disorganisation in your life can really impede weight loss. It is a bit chicken and egg; does the clutter come first or the weight gain/ plateau? Does this mean all messy people are fat and all tidy people are not? Does it need to mean anything? Obviously its a self-limiting area of study because there are always exceptions to every rule, people are complex! But for me, at least, clutter and disorganisation are a part of my pathology.

I like things tidy. I am not overly OCD about it, and I don't like clinically zen environments, but it is definitely an issue for me. When things are not organised at home, my mind seems to fly into the mess and hide out there. My mother, bless her, was (still is really) a monumentally disinterested housekeeper. Part rebellion against her disapproving mother, part reaction to the things facing almost every woman who found herself in a suburban house in the mid 1960s, part a symptom of her long term depression. Instead of turning inwards and becoming the sort of fussy uber-mum some of my friends had (can you say temazepam?), or the disturbingly calm and relaxed perfect housewives other friends had (can you say valium?), she instead turned out. Literally, she would stand by the window in the kitchen gazing at the sky and sipping sherry for hours, while the house sort of piled up behind her. Hers was not the prescription drug route, she used alcohol. I was a kid with pretty severe allergies, so home was a struggle. Everywhere I went I sneezed and snuffled and wheezed my way though the stuff. There was no medication for these issues in the 70s, you just limited what you did. So for me, a messy house equals illness and my reaction to it is the same as it was then, to retreat into a cocoon somewhere and just read and daydream my way out of it.

In a nutshell the past three years have been a bit tough for me. Don't mistake me; there is a lot of really good stuff going on in my life and I am grateful for it. But being a single parent is hard work, being the parent of a kid with learning difficulties is hard work, jobs here are demanding and with the many benefits comes long hours and an encouragement of workaholism. Without even realising it, I had dropped into a pretty deep pit. In fact, sitting here in my new place I am a little overwhelmed at how deep and how all encompassing that pit had become. I had somehow gone from a busy but manageable life, where I was at a reasonably healthy weight, got a reasonable amount of exercise and was coping reasonably well with the demands of my son and my job; to one in which I pretty much lived on a spot on my sofa and tried to ignore the trainwreck going on in slow motion around me. If I did move, it was off and out of the house and into a shop or a movie or anywhere that just kept me spinning along doing nothing in particular. It had happened without me even noticing, and how had 3 years gone by?

My life, while becoming bigger and more complicated in some ways, had effectively shrunk to one square metre of cushioning and a TV screen.

Was it depression? Honestly, I don't know for sure. I have been depressed before and this was nothing like that. I got stuff done full speed ahead at work. I had had a long and serious bout of pneumonia and I did seem to get things back on track for a while but my mind wasn't there for it and I lost track. It was at home that everything went on hold. I had battled for so long to get my son into the school I knew was best for him and I suspect, tuckered out from the long, exhausting and endless push of it all, I just sort fell into a funk. I knew I needed to get my helper to work a little better, but I kept putting it off. I knew I should walk my dog, but he was getting older and seemed happy to blob. I knew I should exercise but somehow could not muster the energy to do anything else after a 14 hour work day. I knew I should start figuring out the mess of bills and medical costs (learning disabilities are not covered in our medical scheme) and getting my budget under control. I knew I should not have borrowed money, more than once, to help my mother but I couldn't say no. I just kept putting things off. There were endless deadlines and tasks to do at work, plus it is very easy to just volunteer for things and therefore have even more excuses for not facing up to things at home. I was halfway through my masters and I just couldn't bring myself to do any of the work so I withdrew from it. Any residual feelings of anxiety were stuffed back down with food. Mirrors were avoided. I refused to have photos taken and if they were I asked friends to delete them. Friends left with startling rapidity and I faced a lot of empty spaces in my social life. I stopped going out.

Peter Walsh (link below) has written a book about transforming your life by decluttering. To be honest I find him a bit of an annoying man but I think he makes a really good point. In particular this struck a chord with me;

"So many of the people I work with--people who struggle with varying degrees of clutter in their homes and lives every day--have one thing in common: They are frequently not engaged in their own lives. By this I mean that much of their daily activity is conducted almost by rote. They buy things without really thinking about it, eat food without really tasting it, watch TV without noticing what they're seeing, and interact with people around them in a distracted way. Put simply, they're preoccupied by so many distractions they're just not thinking."

That was me. I was not really engaged with my life. I was doing all the right things at work because I am responsible and I have to have a job, but my life was gradually curling up at the edges like a fallen leaf.

So now what? Well I am halfway to my first 8kg loss goal with Sam. 119kg this morning. I know it is very very slow but at this point, I am OK with that because I want to take some time and get it right.

I have some trust in myself again. I took a punt with this new place, and it will require some belt-tightening or heaven knows some creative accounting of some sort but it is a nice house. It is my putting myself first for once house. It is my fitness house. I have to walk up to the third floor every time I got out and come back again. There are stairs inside. It is a 40 minute bike ride to get to school. To catch the bus I need to walk for 25 minutes. I have lived here for ten days and I kid you not - the stairs are working. I have a gym set up in the corner of the living room. I have a balcony where I can sit and watch birds and squirrels and the occasional lizard live their lives. I have room to breathe here. It may be a spectacularly irresponsible decision to increase my rent at this point. But when I was unpacking I said to my son, "It's like we got all this stuff for the house we have now". Seriously, everything fits here, like a well oiled and heavy lock clicking. The TV is gathering a bit of dust. I am listening to more music. A new helper starts on Saturday.

So this last month has been a big one. And scary. Because before I was scared not so much of losing anything (I hated my life, I suspect I secretly hoped I would lose something), but of being somehow outed as an imposter in my own life. (The resident mean girl in my head would whisper, "See her? She is pretending everything is fine and she knows what she is doing, and she doesn't have a clue). Now I am not scared of that scenario, I am nervous because I do have something to lose. I feel like I am sitting on the windowsill of a really new and fulfilling and happy life. And that makes me excited and terrified all at once- it is a lot in the hands of someone I have only just begun to trust again.

I am not quite ready for pictures of me yet. They will come. Filtered, but they will come. Instead here is what I am gazing at with my morning coffee, and in the evening after the long cycle and climb up the stairs.

http://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/lose-clutter-lose-weight-peter-walsh-book/story?id=30322571

Feeling the fear and doing it anyway

I am paraphrasing the famous title of Susan Jeffers' 1987 hit book. I confess I have never read it, despite the phrase and probably some of the ideas having neatly entered the popular zeitgeist. I am now feeling a bit silly for not reading it. In the 80s I was preoccupied with self-improvement (and I was doing it very badly) and sadly I was hijacked by Linda Hay and entered what I like to call my 'decade of self-blame and recrimination'. What a shame.

There has been a two week lull in blogging for me, as I became ill and it was a proper; lie-down-in-bed-for-two-days-and-then-stagger-about-on-deer-legs for another 6 after that illness. Combined with what I had already scheduled as a bit of a mad week time-wise, it defeated all creative thought.

I would like to say I stuck to my new healthy eating beautifully but there were some blips. However, I held a lot steadier than I have in the past. Since the aim before the summer break was to train and maintain, I was on track as much as I could expect to be.

So let me head back 2 weeks, because I had a moment of epiphany on Saturday June 6, which went a bit like this: I had done my second workout with the divine Sam Blakely the night before. I had not wanted to go, I was tired, hot and sort of over everything. But I dragged myself along and of course finished it feeling fantastic and empowered. The next morning I woke up and it was hot. Really really hot. The temperature gage at home inside said 34 degrees but it felt more like 38. On any given Saturday this would see me perched in the 2 square inches of cool air produced by our asthmatic air conditioners, watching TV, and feeling guilty about being lazy.

Instead, I put on my swimsuit (this in itself is a bit of a mission in self-help talk; lycra and sweaty fat bodies do not co-operate and it is very hard to avoid seeing yourself), and I went down to the pool. It was genius, I immediately cooled down and better yet, I did ten laps of the lengths pool. Slow, not very technically correct laps but I could feel my body tiring so I knew I was working out.

Then a young couple walked by. In our condo there are a lot of students form the INSEAD down the road. They are most often in their late 20s or 30s, European, here for a limited time, and treat the place like a holiday resort. So this was an INSEAD couple. They saw me and started talking about me. I don't speak French but I know enough about body language and facial expressions to get the gist. I was so stung, and angry. I tell you if I could have hauled myself out of the pool fast enough I would have. Not to yell at them, but just to point out that I could actually see and hear them, and what made them feel so superior to everyone else anyway? I didn't of course. I just kept swimming. I had decided to be resilient. I had decided to be tough. I was feeling the fear and doing it anyway, wasn't I?

Well I got back in and headed to the shower. I felt great! Everything would start to improve! I had nothing to worry about! I am resilient! Then, for some reason, my Dad popped into my mind. And I started to cry big fat messy tears. I stood there sobbing for the longest time, and for the life of me I could not figure out where it was all coming from. But here is what I think now.

Resilience can be a bit addictive. Don't take this the wrong way, it is an enormously positive quality and something to really foster and encourage in ourselves and our children. But in my family it lent itself to more of a stoicism and the culture was very much one of keep going, put up and shut up, tough it out. And for me, that has nosed its way in to my sense of what resilience really was. Resilience implies elasticity, you go with the flow but allow yourself to bounce back. Its more flexible and fluid. Toughness means you stretch until eventually, inevitably, something snaps. And it was exactly this kind of toughness which killed my father.

My dad was a big, strong, policeman of Irish ancestry. He was good at everything 'manly' like fixing cars and building and catching crims. One evening he slipped while putting out his wheelie bin for collection and badly broke his ankle. No one else was home so he crawled inside and called an ambulance. He was 65 and his approach to anything like this was to simply push through the pain. After a few days he was released from hospital to recover and he refused to take any pain relief. He told me this every time we skyped. I was due home for the first visit since our move to Singapore and I was shocked to see his leg when I arrived. I insisted he see the district nurse about it and after arguing back and forth he agreed to go the next day. The following morning he died of a pulmonary embolism in front of my son and I, after a blood clot from his ankle broke away and entered an artery in his lungs. He was 65 years old, and in quite good health. He was overweight but active. However his refusal to take pain medication had meant he had spent too much time immobile after his release form hospital. And he had ignored his symptoms. I am not blaming him for his own death. But I do think the whole stoic culture of getting on with it had a large part to play.

So where am I with this long shaggy dog of a tale? Why does this mean I was standing in the shower sobbing away? Well I think I have been mixing stoicism up with resilience for a long time now. I got unexpectedly pregnant, to a man who wanted nothing to do with raising a child. I decided to go it alone and I did. I went to work preparing to have a baby (and ate a lot of ice-cream and put on a lot of weight). Then I had the baby and went to work preparing to return to school (and ate a lot of comfort food and kept that weight on thanks very much). Then I returned to school, while still breastfeeding, and finished my degree, and enrolled in my teaching diploma (and I spent a lot of time writing essays at 2am and eating chocolate to stay awake and just a little more padding crept on each year). Then i got a job in a school, a great job with a really terrible, toxic boss (and I spent a lot of time looking forward to lunch and stuffing all of those feelings down with a nice cake or a pie). Then, I moved to Singapore. I applied for a job and no more than 6 weeks later I had moved here with two suitcases and a 4 year old in tow.

It was been an absolute winner of a decision to come here in every respect except one. It is hard to make new friends in your 40s. And when you work in an ex-pat environment, often your new friends leave. So that net of supportive, helpful, generous friends you got used to is no longer there. That, combined with my 4 years of hard study and NQT training meant I had isolated myself. Food and work had begun to fill that gap.

I was crying in the shower because I was finally fully realising what reaching out for help meant. And how my view of myself was shifting. And how I had been running dangerously close to my Dad's early death from who knows what, caused by my own inability to stop and take stock and ask for help. And here I was worrying about what some random strangers may or may not have been saying about me. I mean, for all I know they could have been talking about something else entirely.

Feeling the fear and doing it anyway is the only way I will get through this and out the other side. I need to keep reminding myself that whenever I have done things that felt really right for me, they have turned out to be the best choice. When I eat lots of nourishing, healthy food (and I do mean eat, I am not focusing on calories at all yet), I feel so much better for it. When I get some real exercise done, I feel stronger and happier. Worrying about what I look like puffing and hefting myself about, or eating with a sense of dismal guilt for past meals, is counterproductive.

But more than just pushing through the fear is the absolute importance of sharing the experience. It's important to have some people in your corner, giving you a shout out when things go well, and another shout out when they aren't.

Two weeks on and I have found myself in a very different state of mind to the one I had in that shower. I got back on the exercise horse as soon as I could. And I discovered new and tasty salads to eat. I have been getting plenty of sleep. I don't know if I have lost much weight, the scales and I have a bit of a funny relationship and I am always amazed at how I can fluctuate 3 or even 4 kg in a matter of hours. I am a few weeks into my 'transformation' now, I think 5, and it is much more of an internal shift than I thought it would be. This in itself is a major difference for me, as in the past I have always fallen prey to that initial euphoric rush of losing pounds. Now I find myself focusing instead on how I feel, am I hungry? Does this taste really good or is it just a chemical mess? Could I walk or cycle somewhere instead of jumping into a taxi? I certainly hope to lose a significant amount of weight over the next few months, but I am trying not to obsess over the numbers just yet.

I'll finish up with a quote form Susan Jeffers: “Patience means knowing it will happen . . . and giving it time to happen.”

Monkey Mind

This week has been a mammoth.

In fact it was a little unsettling. Until I read a Vesak weekend article about a Singaporean woman who has just taken vows as a nun, in a Buddhist monastery in Washington. She spoke eloquently of her journey towards a spiritual life, and at one point mentioned her realisation that her mind was filled with negativity. She referred to this as 'monkey mind'. It is a term that my old Aikido sensei used to use, and when I read it, a bell rang immediately.

This is the broad definition of the term: "unsettled; restless; capricious; whimsical; fanciful; inconstant; confused; indecisive; uncontrollable".

Essentially it is a mind which is not fully under the control of the thinker, bouncing from branch to branch, looking for different bananas. Or, in the case of my mind, cake and poop to throw at myself when I mis-step. (My monkey has an attitude problem).

So the week has been one of small steps. And that is not a bad thing. I am dipping my toes in first rather than leaping in full speed as I usually do. (There is another Buddhist term for this; the impulsive and galloping Horse mind). I have been eating very healthily at breakfast and lunch. And even this change has meant I feel a great deal more energy. I saw Liza again on Wednesday and along with several very useful ideas for snacks and meals, the conversations we are having are helping me to focus on what causes my overeating. As I suspected; its not exactly a simple thing.

The end of the working week saw me trudging my way (mentally anyway, physically I was whisked there in a taxi) to my first session with Sam. I admit that I was dreading it. Primarily because each time I start exercising after a long hiatus, I seem to have discovered a new level of not fitness previously undiscovered! but Sam! What a treasure! The backs of my legs are still sore but I don't mind, I had no idea how amazingly great it would be to have a trainer when I was exercising! I thought it would be more... well actually I don't know what I thought it would be, I think my monkey-demon-poop-thrower had stopped me from really visualising it.

So all in all, a lot of stuff has come to my attention this week. Stuff to do with my mother, with my relationship to food, with my own wellbeing. There are so many threads that I am not at all surprised that I am experiencing monkey mind. It has been a bit much, but it has also been at the right time, if that makes sense. It is incredible how resistant we are to change though, even when we are not happy with the status quo.

The weekend came, and Saturday saw me zipping about doing errands and then realising I had made a massive, giant balls up with a funds transfer. The kind that puts you in the red with no way out. I don't know how I could have been so silly and I spent most of Saturday night trying not to think about it. I am still masterfully zen minding it by thinking-not-thinking about it. This is a bad habit of mine.

Sunday was a day for tackling the apartment (ever noticed how tidy things get when you are avoiding doing something?). Which I suddenly recognised had become as disordered as my eating and my general level of calmness. I spent 7 hours scrubbing and cleaning and only got the living and dining areas done. I wrote a note for my helper. Rumpled it up. Wrote another note. Rumpled THAT one up too. Decided that I would have a chat with her. (Still haven't, this is a bit of an ongoing issue). The flip side of this was I felt properly worked out (I was really going for it housework-wise) and I do love the tidiness. It helps my mind settle.

Monday I was hot, flustered and tired. I rode my bike for a bit. Added sweaty to the hot and flustered. Went to bed, early, with a mild sense of resentment at myself for everything. Attempted to ignore the lack of order in my room. Another weekend.

So here I was today, on Tuesday, monkey minding my way through the day. And I had a proper, good, old fashioned bad eating day. I left no carb alone. I am writing it all out.

How to conquer the monkey? Well, not by dwelling on it. The monkey will be the monkey and I need to learn not to try and distract it. I have to be like water, as Bruce Lee would say. There is a lot of stuff rattling around in my life that is not ever properly finished. But despite all of this, I really, truly feel I can do this. Because even if I did have a long weekend full of stress and frustration and a general sense of not being in the 'zone', I have also been incredibly touched by the support I am getting. From strangers. From people until very recently were strangers; with a lot of experience and wisdom and the absolute right to expect payment for their time and services. It is amazing to me. I am so very grateful. I think I might actually deserve a break. And that is a pretty good place to start, right?

I'm the Village

On Wednesday I met with the wonderful Liza, who is going to help me with nutrition and food and how to set goals and I suspect, have a proper spring clean of my brain.

Typically for me, I met her at the not-quite-end of a really busy day. There wasn't really time but I just double booked and left my Grade 11 students watching their weekly film. (They were all tucked up in bean bags at the boarding house surrounded by teachers, so it isn't quite as crazy as it sounds). But my head was full of work.

We have been studying the Japanese Golden Age of Cinema, and the film was The Seven Samurai, directed by Akira Kurosawa. I have seen this film many times, and introduced to students who have hopefully come to appreciate it as much as I do. Its not an easy film for a young audience, especially since it is over three hours long. But we were only planning to watch the first half, and then they could catch the rest for homework. So on Tuesday I had sat down and set out some tasks for the class to help them focus on certain aspects for analysis.

I wrote about how the film is structured; it is in three parts, each one is slightly over one hour long. The plot has a simple set up, a poor farming village in feudal Japan is threatened by Brigands. The villagers decide to recruit a samurai to protect them, even though this seems to be an impossible idea; especially given the strict social codes of the times. The farmers know nothing of fighting and defense, and samurai are a proud class; they would see no honour in working for the few simple meals the villagers can offer them.

The parts are as follows:

1. Recruiting the samurai to defend the village
2. The recruited samurai and the villages prepare for the war
3. The actual war between the village and the brigands

This is a very common movie plot set-up now, especially in the action hero movies any mother of young boys is familiar with; even 'A Bugs Life' uses it. But Kurosawa was one of the very first to use it. He may even have invented it.

Why am I rabbiting on about this film I hear you asking?

Well, I finished talking with Liza. She is an amazing person; non-judgemental, informative, and she gave me a real boost without seeming effusive (which always comes across as a bit fake to me). And I sat in the office to do a bit more work, and then wandered down to get my bicycle and ride home. And when I hopped on my bike I thought, 'I'm the village!'. I have been feeling threatened lately. Threatened by my own inner 'demons' for want of a better term. I am a smart person, so I know that my past regressions into bad eating and weight gain have been a complex act of self sabotage. I am encircled by brigands. And now I am assembling some samurai to help me overcome them.

Liza had suggested I get two books, one to write down my goals and aspirations, and one to write down how I got to here. A curation of my life essentially. Like many metaphors, my 'Seven Samurai' link won't stand up to a very close inspection. And it might be puzzling to people that I have found inspiration in a centuries old Japanese code of ethics. So I should point out that for 20 years I studied Aikido and learned Iaido (essentially the art of drawing a katana or Japanese sword in a controlled and smooth movement), before my knees and demons saw me set it all to one side. But that kind of practise gets in deep, and I understand the value of bushido as a discipline of thought and action. And I need it. I cannot save myself without help, no matter how impossible it seems, I can make it if I am open to learning from others and accepting assistance.

Also, how cool is it that I was watching that film on that day?

I am the village.

Before

So, right now I am in the before stage. And I have been here before. Many times. Its that time when you finally realise you have been avoiding mirrors, have stopped glancing in windows as you walk past, that you more or less flee a room as soon as a camera appears, and that looking in the mirror in the mornings involves a lot of cursory glances and not too much detailed checking.

So my biggest fear is not that I won't be able to do it. I know I can, I have done it before! I have been 'on a diet' since I was 16 years old. No, my fear is purely from my history. Every time I have lost weight, I have put it back on plus another 5kg. I don't want to be another 5kg heavier than I am. I am already bigger than anything I can buy here off the rack. I buy clothing simply because it is in my size, even if I hate it. (And there are a lot of fashion crimes committed in the plus size racks). I cannot find a bra that does not dig into my body painfully. My underwear could double as a parachute. I do not like it, and I don't want to look back at this weight and think 'if only I was that small again'.

Its easy to slip into the 'I am only doing this for my health' and 'I will feel better physically'. I have some weight related health issues; snoring, fatty liver, some knee and foot pain. It is important to be healthy and being fit will improve my sense well-being. But if I am honest it isn't really the reason I am in a panic about my weight. I look in the mirror now and I literally don't recognise myself. This isn't because of age, its because sometime between chin one and chin two, I have started to look like my Dad. Now, I have never been a person who thought of myself as a looker. I am not saying this to garner sympathy, it is partly a lack of self belief but also I just haven't got classic good looks. However I always knew how to get my glam on and I had a bit of a style that made me happy. My style now is more of a Viet Cong chic: everything is black and slightly loose.

I was looking for a photo to put on here as a 'before' but I have hidden from cameras so much I don't think I have one. I'll keep trying. I will be honest; I am in analysis paralysis. I want to lose weight, but I don't seem to be able to focus on it or get started. I keep thinking about it, but I don't actually make it past 10am. Food for me is a coping mechanism and clearly I have a lot to cope with!

I can't wait to meet Liz and Sam and start figuring out how to get my head sorted. I am sure that if that happens, the rest will follow.

But for now, here I am, before (again).