the box

Recently S. and I signed up to receive weekly boxes of produce from Door to Door Organics. It's similar to CSA, as we receive (primarily) local, organic produce, and we can even choose what we want based on a list of possible substitutions, which we enter on the website. Our first box came on Thursday and it was like Christmas in August: plums like red orbs, romaine lettuce, stunningly beautiful swiss chard, peaches, roma tomatoes, yellow onions, carrotts with their wonderfully unruly tops, sweet corn. A little worm came along for the ride, hidden in the silks of one of the ears. Being from Ohio, and having worked for a produce stand (supported by its own farm) for eight summers of my life, I understand wormy corn. I know that the chemicals used by conventional farmers are designed to keep those worms at bay. Because this is organic corn, however, worms are common, and sometimes they don't do much damage outside of creating a mushy mess on the end of the ear. But in this particular case, the whole ear was affected and so I wrote to Door to Door to tell them that they sent me a bad ear. I loved this response:

"When purchasing organic corn, either from us, Whole Foods, Wild Oats,or whoever, you may find worms in it. The worms are a great source of protein if you choose to eat them.
Because worms are a part of the organic corn experience we only offer a 1 time credit for the corn. I applied this credit to your account."

Oh BLESS YOU, Mat with one T. How nice of you to grant me this one time credit. And how hilarious that you suggested that I eat the worm for protein. I may be a spoiled American, but I draw the line at eating worms.

I wrote back Mat with one T and told him as much. He then responded with:

"Believe it or not, we actually have a few customers who specifically request that we save the worms for them. I know what you're saying though, I personally do not eat the worms either."

Who are these worm eaters? How exactly does one prepare a worm? Are the green grubs dipped in chocolate and rolled in nuts? Are they fried like a pork rind and served with a side of ranch? Inquiring (grossed out) minds want to know. I mean, if I'm missing some great source of protein (I bet one worm qualifies as a WW zero point food!) then maybe I should ask Mat with one T to save me some worms, too.

Mmmm, worm po'boy.
Mmmm, worm coulis.

words are weapons

Words are weapons, people. Use them with great care.

Ccensorship sucks ass and pussyfooting around core issues that really matter in our eternal battle with weight loss and good health is a waste of fucking time.

I've no time for power trips, superficial platitudes, ego-feeding. I'm here to unravel the tight- fisted rage within, calm the ravenous one, let the magic that comes with letting go of control speak and be counted.

Words are weapons. Don your armour.

There was some ugliness on the WW boards yesterday. It caused casualties, inflicted wounds. I suppose all these women coming together in cyberspace breeds the inevitability of such things happening--too much emotion, too many people thinking their way is the way, such need, such voracious need.

Is it in the not filling ourselves with food that we seek to fill ourselves with the strokes and praise of those who we barely know? This anonymity, too, allows some to open up with their deepest secrets and fears. Someone, surely, will understand. Someone will sympathize, maybe even empathize.

We choose. We step into the light with the hope of being seen. I shared some hard experiences yesterday with the group, and now, frankly, I'm regretting it. Not because I feel unheard. I know I was heard by those who matter. My regret stems from the simple fact that the overriding tone on the boards, at the end of the day, was that of moral certitude, and I have absolutely no tolerance for that. It negates the holiness of being human, vulnerable, imperfect. It rings false. Thou doth protest too much.

Words are weapons. I keep the most dangerous in a locked box, the key to which hangs around my neck. It's invisible, but I know it's there. I touch it when I need to remember the losses that came as a result of my releasing those words--just a few--into the world. I touch it when I need to remember my power. I hide it from myself when I know that if I don't, someone is going to get hurt.

To never be silenced. Not by the holier-than-thous, not by the head-in-the-sands, and certainly not by my own inner voice that begs me to stop this relentless unleashing.

All in the name of weight loss.

musky

right now, I'm eating musk melon. It is, as Jerri Blank might say, dee-lish-us. I was planning on eating this melon before I checked my voicemail and listened to a 5 (or so-- coulda been longer) message from my former employer (or one of 'em), who was the big factor in my leaving that line cooking job. I'm not really sure what his message was about, other than a kind of groveling for me to come back, combined with a guilt tripping thing about how I left (I didn't feel compelled to explain myself to him, and opted to tell his business partner, instead), and this weird pseudo familiarity based on nothing (other than the fact that we spent a few days touching food together). To top it all off, he sounded a bit fucked up/drugged, which is was the reason behind my leaving that job. So I've been sitting here, feeling out of sorts, because this, like my time working with him, brings up all kinds of issues and pushes all those old buttons, which, like those wired to so many old doorbells, are tarnished and grimy, and not the kind of thing you want to look at for too long, much less touch.

I took a shower a half an hour ago, and I opted for this shower because I was worried that with a bath, I would find myself pulling a Madge ("you're soaking in it!"), and I don't want to pull a Madge even if she did have that cool green shirt. So. Even after my shower, I'm still trying to let go of the stickies, to look at the ways in which I still have this natural tendency to put someone else's (in this case a guy I worked for) needs ahead of my own. It's like one of those horror films, where you're trying to shut the door, and the tendrils keep poking through (or crawling under), and it just won't stop. But what I really want is the Get Smart! doors-- the ones that bang shut with such finality. And so I'm trying to muster all that heavy steel right this minute, despite the fact that I still have a paycheck due to me. You know what? I can chock up those 16 hours to experience. No problem. It's worth it to move on and never look back.

But this musk melon-- I'm eating it because I wanted it. I'm also eating it because it is not the pile of salt, grease, sugar, whatever! that I want to medicate with right this minute. And maybe that's how I made it through all that button making (promises, lies, promises broken) of my youth. When I revert, I want to revert all the way. If I'm replaying all that old triangulation (and this is, with my female acquaintance the other owner, a kind of triangle) of childhood crap, can't I have some Orowheat english muffins and Laura Scudder's Old Fashioned peanut butter to ease me through?

But maybe it's not about easing through. Maybe it's not about going (and growing) numb. Maybe it's about pulling a door shut with such force, such finality, that it shakes my very being. And that, my friend, requires musk melon. Cold, sweet, maybe even a bit too ripe, musk melon.

stinkin' thinkin', or uh, floundering pondering

you know, this OPness stuff, I have a confession, or an admission, to make. Once upon a time, a while ago (actually, a long while ago) I had the EOP thing down. Can I just tell you that EOP is a whole lot easier when I'm single? It is. So this draws back to this other onion (a cippolini onion) I've been peeling, which has to do with aloneness and loneliness.

So it's easier to be EOP on my own because, well, I make all food decisions, and there's nothing pulling me one way or the other. I'm not showing love in the form of dessert-- I'm just making myself a tofu sandwich. And can I blame my girlfriend for my lack of EOPness? Is it her fault that it's been a struggle lately? No. If she opens a bottle of wine, I don't have to have a glass. If she wants cheese on her Lentils and Chard, I don't have to put cheese on mine. But you know what? It makes me wanna do what she's doing.

I'm not a very Alpha personality. But I'm starting to realize that I need to be the kitchen alpha, and I might just have to find a t-shirt with an A on it for the sake of taking a little more Agency when it comes to health and wellness.

I know I feel better when I'm doing all the OP stuff, and yet! I've been seeing what I can get away with. It don't work so well, over the long run, mainly because I get to feeling ungrounded and a little bitchy, and maybe even a wee hint o' the ol' OUTTA CONTROL!

It's all these shades of detox, right? Starting in on WW was the hardest, but returning to a safety net of really working the program, that's another one. And that's where I am. I know it's better that way-- and if I remember all my fellow WW Princesses, I don't feel so alone.

what is OP, anyway?

I've been musing on this one, because, well, I'm not so sure I know exactly what this means anymore. I mean, I used to have this idea that it was about some kind of strict adherence to cleanliness or something. But lately, I've had days where I was not a super-upright citizen, but still was OP. I say this because I had beer and soy crisps, which, under my previous model would have qualified as so NOT OP, but now I'm kind of looking at the overall balance of foods, and exercise, and after adding it all up, I'm within a decent range of points, and I'm calling today OP. Is OP a state of mind, like, if I feel like I'm not out of control do I call it OP, and if I feel out of control but still within points (is this possible?) do I call that not OP? Maybe I'm trying to blur some edges with myself, to get things to a space where I feel a little more relaxed, where I honor that some days feel rigid and some feel loose, and yet they both can be acceptable, that a little slip or slide does not have to ruin the week, that no day is worth tossing out or turning my back to, or I dunno, that the sum of all the parts, even the imperfect ones, can be a beautiful thing.

Isn't that the beauty of a program like WW? That it allows for fluctuation, imperfection, something less that utter rigidity? Isn't that why it works? And yet, how many of us feel that we can trust ourselves with that flexibility? No curfew? Come home whenever I want to?

Me, I was an exceptionally well-behaved teenager (I thought I'd win points for it, or something). As an adult, where I am only answering to myself, it's often hard to be that good girl. I always look to please others-- it's not really about honoring or respecting myself.

Maybe it's time for that to change.

on getting real

Just this moment I was pondering the relationship between fitness and emotional/mental boundaries. And let me say that I know that not all the "fit" have good boundaries. But I was thinking about my ride home from work yesterday, and how it functioned as this release of all the tension I was feeling, and it started turning into the space in which I was mulling shit, and if there's one thing I know, it's that you can't ride distracted. It's dangerous. And then I had this revelation-- there on my bike as I rode into the wind, I felt it so firmly in my gut that it was a huge relief. And right then and there I resolved to leave my second job, to get out of what I could see was/is a bad situation. It's about having this boundary about my psychic/emotional space, but I found it through processing the information (previously churning in my head) down into my body. And maybe in struggling a little against the wind (which I cannot control), I realized that my work environment (which I can control) is really my choosing. And if my openness and clearheadedness are not met, I don't need to stay. And so I can ride away from there on my bicycle.

And so I did.

Ho Ho Horrors

During the course of a long, somewhat excruciating conversation with my mother recently, I found myself thinking differently about her struggle with my father's lifelong battle with weight and food addiction. We were talking about how Dad's addiction (I will frame it only that way, though I am afraid that Mom can't wrap her head around the concept) shaped how all of his children think about/act toward food, and how really, my mom was totally the opposite with her relationship to food--I told her that I could still remember how she would go a whole day without eating.

"I still do," she said quietly.

(Man, that stung.)

"And isn't it interesting, Mom," I said, "how you ended up marrying a person who challenges some of your very deepest fears every single day?"

I heard her let out a little laugh sound, not a full guffaw, but more like an acknowledgment laugh, a sound of comprehension.

"Yes, it is interesting," she said.


~~~

We had a visitor recently (I mentioned him in the last blog, Mr. Skinny Skinny) who brought all manner of terrible tempting food into the house. And I'm not talking a wheel of fine cheese, prosciutto, some first pressed olive oil from the Adriatic--no, he came fully armed with the kind of food that makes people like me hide in the closet in order to eat it.

Caramel HoHo's. Mega cheese mix, meaning a huge bag of cheeto/dorito/pretzel/sun chips all mixed together and sprayed for 10 full seconds with commercial grade day glo orange cheese powder. Orange Milanos. A 12 pack of coke. My cupboards hadn't seen that much partly hydrogenized trans fat hellaciousness since college.

S. feels compelled, whenever Giles (said houseguest) is around, to take care of him, i.e. never allow the mere possibility of one iota of discomfort to enter his psychic space. True, we are protective of him. His health has long been comprised, resulting in a string of what Giles refers to as "bonus years," and he can ill afford to lose weight. But S. also likes to use Giles as an excuse to indulge. When she quit smoking, the only exceptions to the quit rule could occur in one of three situations: if she was in Europe; if she was with Giles; and if someone/something very close to her died. We haven't been back to Europe in three years, she doesn't smoke with Giles because he smokes American Spirits and she doesn't like how strong they are, and, thankfully, no one's died since Mister Pancakes was killed by a raccoon two or so years ago, and that was the last time S. really smoked. I mean, smoked.

Now, instead of cigarettes, S. satisfies her oral fixation with yet another indulgence: brownies.

Seeing the load Giles brought with him strewn over the counter, I could not hold back the comments.

"Holy shit, it's cheese extravaganza!"

I take a hand full.

"What are you trying to do, make me weigh 400 lbs.?"

I slug a liter of water.

"Caramel Ho Ho's? What the hell is that?" I pick up the box, read the ingredients. "Beef fat," I say.

"Beef fat?" parrot S. and Giles, who has just chomped through his second ho ho.

"You won't eat anything that's a bottom feeder but you'll eat beef fat rolls?"

I was exaggerating--beef fat was just "one of four types of fat" and the one that jumped out at me first--but I couldn't resist that additional poke at Giles.

And I wanted a ho ho.

"I'm making brownies, honey, okay?" S. says suddenly, looking directly into my eyes. She knows well the seriousness of this proclamation.

And so I find myself in that moment again, the one where I'm faced with the choice of giving into eating and savoring however many brownies (or what have you) my little mouth desires or shutting down my myriad food sensors immediately, hanging the No sign, taking the whole IDEA of a brownie out of the picture. I can't eat that, and I certainly can't even think about trying to eat just a little bit of that.

I take the low road. "Yea brownies!" I smile back into S.'s eyes. Heading back to the kitchen. S. does a little brownie dance with a kick.

Celebration wins out. Giles hasn't been in town in six weeks, and when he does come down from Newcastle, he usually stays with another friend with a nice(r)? guest room set up. That other friend is out of town, so Giles has been here going on three days, a record. C

Celebrate! I want to eat brownies with these people that I love on this summer evening all buzzy in the sky and head. I tell myself that they're better than ho ho's but I'm still afraid that, in reality, brownies have more fat. (According to the nutritional info on the ho ho box, one serving of ho ho is three ho ho's. 38 g of sugar. That's over 10 teaspoons.)

The brownies emerge from the oven in their square pan and S. leaves them to cool a bit. I am not so patient. I dig in first, and too soon. But the corner is set, and holds an edge, just crisped on top with moist and crumbling hot chocolate goodness beneath. I eat one, then two, then half of three. I smoke a cigarette to stop my steady climb to ten.

The night after Giles leaves, I come home from work and join S. in the kitchen. Within minutes I realize that the brownie pan is gone. "What happened to the brownies?" I ask.

"I sent them with Giles," says S.

"Good call," I say. Then think of why and say "I was kindaof a freak about the whole junk food thing, wasn't I."

S. wrinkles her nose. "Yeah, you kinda were," she says.

"I was afraid of that," I say, exasperated with myself. My own obsessive thinking
around food showed its ass and I was ashamed. I'd been like a dog worrying a bone, except my bone was the presence of trigger foods in my kitchen, and those foods struck numerous fear chords in my orchestral heart.

I trust that there will be a day when "it's just not worth the psychic repercussions" will be enough to hold me back. This trust, in itself, is revolutionary.

Viva Revolution!

excuses, excuses

I'm running out of 'em.

Here's what I ate last weekend--let me see if I can encompass the enormity of my gorgefest:

Friday: not bad actually, but ate at least six crackers smeared with some creamy brie-like goat cheese and a salad with a chicken breast and chevre. I was bleating.

Saturday: two eggs and one piece ww toast in the morning. Saved myself for the afternoon mexican fiesta (authentic, to the T) and proceeded to drink about three glasses of sangria, eat two pieces of steak ranchera (one wrapped in a flour tortilla and one cut up and wrapped in homemade corn tortillas then smeared with guacamole and topped with black bean and corn salsa), one shrimp taco with cheese, numerous chips with salsa, and for my crowning achievement, a scoop of some butterfinger-laden cool whip extravaganza that tasted like candybar in a cloud. Oh, and then I had a beer.

Sunday: Up late, coffee, protein shake around noon and by 2:30 S and I are checking out a potential reception site called Buenos Aries Grille, which happens to have a pizza joint attached to it. We are, of course, hungry, and it's hot, so we duck into the joint, order a five cheese 12 inch (for our friend who is in from out of town and who thinks cheese is a major food group all by itself) , a pie for me (14 inch WHAT WAS I THINKING mozz, green olive, eggplant, onion I WAS CRAVING SALT, THAT'S WHAT) and a ham and cheese cubano/croissant for S. With fries. Oh and four empanadas: two spinach and cheese; two fresh mozz and fresh basil. And a diet coke. We are so fucked.

So we drop 40 bucks (did I mention the dulce de leche cookie that we just HAD to try?) and head home with enough food to feed a family of six. Our houseguest eats two pieces of his megamegacheese pizza and actually says "It's almost too much cheese." We take his temperature to make sure he's not coming down with something. I eat two pieces of my pie and I'm disappointed that the eggplant is actually marinated and haphazardly strewn across the top of the cheese, but I eat the pieces anyway. And chew through two empanadas.

Since we ate that huge meal at 3 p.m., and both S. and our houseguest proceeded to sack out until 7:30, we just kinda picked at dinner--I ate a nice barely-dressed salad, accompanied (of course) by another empanada and another piece of pizza, and then...well, by then, quite frankly, I wanted to puke.

So now that I have disclosed my sordid life of eating whatever whenever and filled you in on the details, I will also say that I started Monday with a bang (a quiet bang) and a new perspective. I would EAT LESS today. I would WORK OUT. I would stop at one serving. I would believe that change is possible. For the 2,398th time.

And yesterday I accomplished all of those things. The only thing that put a snag in the pant leg of my day was our houseguest (he leaves tomorrow thank god, because the man is skinny skinny and eats whatever the hell he wants all the time) and his offering of a slice of lemon poundcake (tiny, but still...) that I could not refuse. I mean, how rude would THAT be? Turns out I was able to stop at that one piece (I was offered another--S. took it) and Mr. Skinny ate the whole other half (granted it was a small bundt). Then we ate watermelon. Nice compromise. I did NOT have potato salad. I ate a small burger without the bun, one ear of corn (no butter) and some vegetarian baked beans. 10 points, which is a fair amount. But I'd also done 40 minutes on the elliptical at level 7 and really hauled ass, so it balanced out. Or maybe I'm just kidding myself.

Day two. Today. It's not so hot, so I'm planning a walk. I'm 60 oz of water into my day. I just finished lunch and I'm sated. I feel like a crack addict looking for a fix, 'cept I don't want rock: I want pasta. Maybe a donut. What's up with the donut? I NEVER eat donuts. But at the market last week, I picked up those tongs, grabbed a chocolate covered one and put it in the little wax paper bag. I picked up a few more items and then got in line. I stared at the donut in the cart as I waited for my turn at the check out. I spoke to the donut in my head. "I shouldn't buy you, Herr Donut. You're one spoke in my axis of evil." Silence. The woman in front of me in line was haggling with the checkout clerk, something about the price of cilantro. I was in a battle of wills with the donut bag. Picking it up, smelling the sugar, glancing around to make sure no one was watching, I did what I had to do: I nested it in the People magazine rack and never looked back.