Of Cabbages and Kings

The biggest “life breakthrough” I’ve made in the last year has to do with my health.  I mean, my overall health, not just this new IIH thing.  Because, ever since I can remember, I’ve been the “chubby” and “chunky” kid.

The one looked at suspiciously for taking second helpings at the dinner table, or snagging a piece of candy in the middle of the afternoon.  (“Do you really need that?”)  The one veritably forced into “exercise”, because, “it’s good for you.”  The disobedient one – for daring to be, well, not a size 6. 

I have heard lectures about dreaded diseases that come from “being fat” and when I’ve politely asked the lecturers to butt out, I’ve been told that this harassment is “for your own good” and “because we love you.” 

I have seen the shame in my family’s eyes at the fact that I “refuse” to “take my weight seriously”, at the fact that I wear a size 14, at the fact that they have to live with a fat person.

I have heard how all of my problems will be solved if I can just “drop some weight”…that the reason I’m not married, not successful in my career, not athletic enough to make the team, is because no one likes to have fat people around. 

I have been conned into buying clothes a size too small because “it looks ok, but it will look even better if you drop a few pounds.  You are trying to do that, aren’t you?” 

I’ve even heard, “You’re so good at everything else you do, surely if you apply yourself to this, you can be successful in this area as well.”

And for years – decades – I lived with this shame, embarrassment, and stigma of not being the skinny one.  Because skinny = healthy.  Skinny = obedient.  Skinny = acquiescing to societal norms.  Skinny = “being good.”  Skinny = beauty.  

Bottom line – what society, culture, family, even Christianity says: If you are not skinny, 1) you will never be happy and probably no one will love you, 2) you obviously don’t care about your health because you are basically guaranteed to get heart disease, diabetes, and cancer (again), 3) you simply aren’t trying hard enough, and 4) your body is a temple and you’re sinning by being fat.

For years – decades – I believed this.  I believed that I was “bad” for not conforming to the pictures in the magazines.  I believed that I just couldn’t manage to get my priorities straight enough to beat my body into submission.  I prayed – yes, prayed – for the willpower to be anorexic.  During my years on the campaign trail, the introvert in me hated doorknocking (spend all day having 30 second conversations with random strangers, no thank you), the campaigner in me thought it was great (it does work, at least in places like Iowa), and the shamed fat kid in me loved it (too busy to eat + tons of exercise = campaign t-shirt does fit a little looser, now that you mention it).  I piously “gave up carbs” for Lent (and then made my body completely freak out when I overloaded it with chocolate eggs and hot cross buns on Easter morning).  I counted calories, carbs, and grams of fat, and recorded them religiously in notebooks or even online.  I ate more Splenda than any human being should ever look at, and made pretend ice cream with ricotta cheese.  

If all of this sounds completely f-ed up to you, then congratulations.  You are seeing what it took me decades to see.  

Last summer, I was cyber-introduced (by the Holy Spirit) to the writings of Ragen Chastain, who blogs at Dances With Fat, and who, one post at a time, revealed to me just how f-ed up these ideas actually are. 

See, it turns out that basically everything that “everyone knows” about health/weight/dieting is completely and totally wrong.  See, it turns out that health and weight are not the same thing – that weight has almost no bearing on one’s health, and that “dieting” can, in fact, have a negative impact on one’s overall health.  

For the research lovers – did you know that 95% of individuals who attempt weight loss will, within 5 years, gain all of the weight back, plus more?  Did you know that this constant so-called “weight cycling” can have hugely negative metabolic effects on the body?  Did you know that in the last decade, hospital admissions for inpatient treatment of eating disorders in children under the age of 12 have risen 100%? Did you know that BMI is a totally worthless measurement when it comes to determining individual health? 

For the anec-data crowd – do you know skinny people who get diabetes, arthritis, heart disease and all of the other so-called “diseases of being fat”?  Do you know skinny people who eat total crap all the time and still stay skinny?  Do you know fat people who eat nothing but salad and exercise every day, and are still fat?  Yeah, me too.  

Unfortunately, we as a society have so conflated health and weight, that it is nearly impossible for us to believe that anyone who is fat can also be healthy.  But it turns out that this is totally wrong.  Take me, for example.  I am a cancer survivor, an amputee, and I’ve been diagnosed with “high CSF pressure for no discernible reason”.  I’m 5’6”, and according to the dreaded BMI chart, counted as “obese.”  And yet.

And yet, all of the metabolic indicators of my health are perfectly normal.  If anything, my blood pressure is low.  My resting heart rate makes me proud and happy.  My blood sugar is normal.  My cholesterol is in excellent shape.  As previously noted, I do not have a brain tumor or MS.  The contents of my CSF are normal.  Every blood test you could possibly think to run is normal.  I eat a wide variety of foods, including fruits and vegetables.  I go running 2-3x per week, working up to a 5K, and I’m planning on some Black Hills hiking this summer.  I drink one cup of coffee in the morning, and almost exclusively water thereafter.  I brush my teeth, and usually remember to floss.  Bottom line: I am one of the healthiest damn people you know. :)  And you know what else?  People come in all shapes and sizes, and this is the size I come in.  

This is still a journey, no doubt.  I have so many years of disordered eating patterns to break (it’s been 10 years since I drank milk with any regularity), I’ve viewed “comfort food” as a “guilty pleasure”, by definition loaded with calories and carbs, instead of “what I think sounds good right now”.  I’m trying to practice intuitive eating (learning to hear what your body wants and needs, because it knows) instead of guilt-and-shame based eating.  And it’s hard.  

But it’s also a spiritual journey.  It’s learning to see my body as a good thing, as a gift from God, as beautiful because it was created by my Creator.  Right now, for example, instead of being a lazy body with “bad” metabolism that “needs” to risk life and limb driving to the gym in a foot of snow to satisfy the Health Overlords at Portico or the U.S. Government or whoever, I can recognize: to be able to sit here and type this, my eyes are working, scanning the screen (and even putting up with the way-too-much-screen-time-I-ask-of-them), my fingers are working, and my brain is remembering 8^th grade typing class.  My heart is circulating blood throughout my body, and my lungs are dutifully exchanging carbon dioxide and oxygen.  My sinuses are draining properly, and my tummy is telling me that I shouldn’t have skipped breakfast.  Thank you, body, for doing all this.  And thank you, God, for giving me such an amazing body that does all these things.  

Actually, it kind of looks like this:

I believe that God has made me and all creatures; that He has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my limbs, my reason, and all my senses, and still preserves them; in addition thereto, clothing and shoes, meat and drink, house and homestead, wife and children, fields, cattle, and all my goods; that He provides me richly and daily with all that I need to support this body and life, protects me from all danger, and guards me and preserves me from all evil; and all this out of pure, fatherly, divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in me; for all which I owe it to Him to thank, praise, serve, and obey Him. This is most certainly true.

Of course, it is hard to believe that this is most certainly true, when you (we all) have been taught from a very young age to hate our bodies.  But think about it this way: is there anything else in your life that you hate?  Possessions, personal property, even (I hope not) other people?  Do you take care of those things that you hate?  If you hate your carpet or your car, and can’t wait until you can justify buying something different, are you particularly concerned about stains or flaws or door dings? No, of course not.  

Our bodies may be temples, but we can’t learn to love them and treat them like temples until we first get it out of our heads that they – in and of themselves – are awful and hateful, deserving of shame and mistreatment and ridicule.  This is the temple that God gave me – I can either starve it and mortify it until I decide that it’s really what a temple should look like, or I can love that this is the temple He gave me, and trust that it is already a loveable temple because He says it is.  

And as I said above, yes, I’m still working on this.  But.  From the moment I realized just how f-ed up everything I’ve been told and believed and done all these years really is, it was like a giant weight was lifted off my shoulders.  Despite the emo-blog posts and marginally coherent FB rampages you all sometimes see, actually, my mental health is worlds better.  My failure to “drop a few pounds” hundreds of times over my life is not my failure – it’s how all bodies work - it's how they are designed to work, in fact.  My single state is not because I’m not a size 2 (and even if it is, why would I want to be with someone who needs me to engage in manifestly unhealthy behaviors to warrant his attraction?).  I’m learning to run because I like being active – not because “thou shalt exercise or thou shalt die immediately”.  I’m eating amazingly delicious vegetables and yummy homemade soups because they taste good and are fun to cook – not because they are “low calorie” (hint – when you roast them with bacon, they’re not) or low carb. 

This, I truly believe, is Gospel freedom.  To love what you have been given – your body, and all that preserves it – and to enjoy it, trust that it is good because God says it is, and then to go about your life and your vocation in life secure in the knowledge that God has given you all that you need, your daily bread, and still preserves your life…yeah, that’s freedom.  

It’s hard, sometimes, to step into that freedom.  When you realize that you’ve only had a carton of yogurt and a cup of coffee all day, and it’s 4 pm…when your tendency is to ignore the low-blood-sugar headache and spaciness, and instead congratulate yourself on consuming only 150 calories…it’s hard, and takes a ton of effort to ponder what I really want to eat, what my body really needs right now, and then do the work to make that happen.  

It’s hard, but I’m trying.  And slowly, slowly but surely, God is teaching me to love myself, because He loves me. 

New Plan

So, as I learned on internship, to blog is to do.  Writing it down helps hold me accountable - in part because it means I have friends reading this who hold me accountable.

And I've decided that the next thing I want to do is take up running.  I've avoided it for so long because, really?  Who wants to do that?  But I want to build more activity in my life, and I want to live abundantly, and so I'm doing things that scare me, that challenge me, that I have believed for too long I can't do.

After my amputation in the 6th grade, my parents told me that it didn't matter, I could do anything I wanted.  And mostly I did.  I still played outside and ran around with my friends and played softball and biked (that one was hard) and hiked Civil War battlefields.  My freshman year of high school I played first base for the freshman team, but really should have been playing JV.

Then we moved.

At my new school, softball tryouts were rough.  We had an awesome team, like Olympic-trial-quality, practically.  My inability (or, more accurately, never having learned how) to "slide" meant I was never in a million years going to make the team.  Then I thought I'd play rec league - and ended up with a coach who hated being stuck with the lame kid and made me play catcher - which I a) hated, and b) really struggled with because of lack of ankle mobility.  But he was convinced that having me behind the plate was where I could do the least damage, and so there I stayed.  I stuck out the season, but quit playing after that.

Since then, I've slowly and surely downgraded my physical activity.  Sure, I did a 5K on internship, and that was awesome.  And this spring I spent lots of time playing catch with friends or against the Bockman wall.  But on the whole, I'm not much of an exerciser.  I've let my disability judge-y coaches determine what I could do.

But no longer.  I'm going to run.  I want to run.  I'm falling back into my isolated-self, Netflix-and-ice-cream bad habits from internship, and I definitely don't want to go there again.  That was a scary, depressing time, and I'd rather not have it back, especially for an indeterminate amount of time.  So I'm starting slow.  I'm doing Cool Running's Couch to 5K, and slowly building up my fitness level.  I don't so much care about time or distance.  This is about me, and doing something that for too long I've believed I couldn't do.

The other attitude adjustment that is helping me, and taking the pressure off so that I can have fun with movement and activity, is adopting a practice called Health At Every Size.  I'm going to have a lot more to say about this, but right now there's this: My whole life, I've been told that I'm fat and that I need to be dedicating all my efforts to weight loss.  I believed that lie for so long, but then I stumbled upon the fantastic Ragen Chastain.  She was the first person in my life to ever challenge that meme.  The first person to point out that if my cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood glucose all indicate health, then it really shouldn't matter what I weigh.  The first one to say, "right now, your eyes are reading this webpage, your fingers are scrolling the mouse, your heart is beating, your lungs are breathing, etc..., so why do you hate your body so much?"  This summer, I spent two whole days reading her entire blog straight through, and it was like a light switch for me.  It truly has taken all the pressure off to live up to anyone's expectations but my own, and God's.  And God says, "I want to you live abundantly".

Which is a great segue into my final point on taking up running - what's been holding me back from movement has been other people telling me that I can't do it, and the belief that if it doesn't impact the scale, then it was worthless.  But as I wrote last spring about my Holy Spirit class, God has been doing some awesome work to free me from the lies, to remind me that no one can harm me, that God, and not anybody else, says who I am and what I'm worth.  This running thing is part of that, I think.  And it feels so, so good to be free.

So here we go - Couch-to-5K in 2 months.

God is good, indeed. 

Childhood Obesity

I caught a few minutes of another scare-mongering report on "The Nation's Great Epidemic", childhood obesity, today.  And I just don't know...

Are some kids fatter than they should be?  Probably.  Absolutely.  Are some kids skinnier than they should be?  Probably.  I, for one, think that in a lot of instances, the height vs. weight charts are off.  According to them, my ideal weight is 125 lbs.  Seriously, if I weighed 125 I would look like a starving child in Africa.  (Well, to everyone else's eyes.  To my own eyes, I would probably still look like I weighed 500 lbs, since that's just what's in my head.  We're all lucky I don't have an "addictive personality", whatever that is, or I'd be anorexic.  But I digress...)

Anyway...where was I?  Oh yes, fat kids in America.  I find it a tad ridiculous that we think the best way to solve childhood obesity, or whatever, is to simply tell kids to drink less pop and eat fewer candy bars.  Well, yes.  And sugar does play a huge part in weight gain, at least for some people.  As a low-carber, I would know.  But focusing all our energy on one or two food items or types of food items is crazy.  There is sugar (and carbs) in way more than just pop and candy.  Orange juice is super-high in sugar, for example.  Yet it's deemed healthy by TPTB. 

The other half of this, of course, is exercise and activity in general.  Now look, I'm the last to lecture anybody about this.  For the most part, I was and am an indoor kind of kid.  I like reading books and writing and laying on the couch enjoying the space in my own head.  It's tough to do those sorts of things in gym class.  I'm also not especially competitive, so those activities where you're supposed to care about who wins, just for the sake of winning, tend to annoy me (e.g., dodgeball, volleyball, footraces, etc). I'm probably going to lose, which never feels good even if a person isn't competitive, but then you are made to feel even worse because what's wrong with you that you don't really care all that much?  But that said - I love playing baseball/softball, or even just throwing the ball around outside for a while in a good game of catch.  I like playing non-competitive Frisbee or even cross-country skiing (which, for those who have never done that, is a ton of work).  But...since this isn't really about me...it's true, I think, that kids of my generation and younger don't get the kind of exercise and running around that kids used to get.  Almost everyone is bussed or driven to school by their parents.  Who do you know that walks more than a block or two to their bus stop? 

Also, my generation is the first to grow up with constant fears of child safety.  Adam Walsh was abducted 3 months before I was born.  While that's truly horrible, and his dad, John, should be credited with doing much wonderful work on behalf of missing and exploited children, it is these sorts of cases that spawned a cultural fear of letting one's children play out of immediate arm's reach for more than a moment or two.  This is regardless of the fact that very, very, very few children are ever actually abducted, and very few of those who are kidnapped are taken by complete strangers.  But we need to Protect the Children, and so we keep kids inside where they're safe, we let them play only on government-approved (aka boring) playground equipment (if we give them outdoor recess at all), and we ply them with video games to keep them entertained and out of trouble.

But no one ever talks about this stuff.  Instead, it's just "don't drink pop" and then shaming the inactive fat kids, which really isn't helpful. Telling kids not to drink pop isn't going to end childhood obesity.  It just isn't.  Neither is Michelle Obama, hula-hooping with kids on the White House Front Lawn and talking about how her own kids need to lose weight. 

I don't know what the solution is, but things like making kids walk to school, giving them recess or gym time that is unstructured, so they can figure out what kind of activity they each prefer, teaching them about actual nutrition (not the food pyramid, which isn't nutrition at all), and encouraging parents to prepare and serve healthy meals and be active with their kids are the kinds of things that will help.  Not continuously spouting off about pop.

New Year's Resolution - May Edition: My Achin' Patootika

That's something my mom used to say, and it's totally appropriate here.

I walked my first 5K last night.  The closest "big city" was hosting their annual marathon today, and there was a "day-before" 5K and 10K.  I don't know why I felt the need to do this - I just did. 

So I registered for it a few weeks ago, turned in my $35 check, and started training for it.  Well, sort of.  I'd been walking a mile or so a couple days a week, but I decided if I was going to walk 3.whatever, that I'd need to get on the stick.  I basically had three and a half weeks to get ready, so my plan was to walk a mile a day for the first half-week, 1.5 every day for the next week, 2 miles/day for the second full week, and then 3 for the final week.  Of course, that was my plan, which doesn't mean it actually happened.  I did decently until the last week, when I basically did nothing at all. 

By Friday morning, I briefly considered not going, since I hadn't worked out all week, it was raining and icky, and just, you know, I don't do these sorts of things.  But remembering that I had paid $35 and wanting to feel good about myself, I went.  I got on the road a little later than I planned, but I thought I would have plenty of time.  Apparently I was wrong.  The "race" was to begin and end at the arena where the local university plays basketball, and traffic was terrible.  The parking lot was full (for the 5K??), so I parked in a hotel parking lot about 2 blocks away, and was sprinting to make the deadline to pick up my "packet."  (Dude.  It's a 3 mile walk.  How much of a 'packet' do I need?)

Regardless...I get inside the arena, and immediately spot two volunteers.  I ask one where I go to check in, and they direct me to "section 24/25, and then go down to the floor."  Sounds good.  So I get down to the floor, and it's a madhouse.  Apparently there was more than just "check-in" going on at the arena.  There were all kinds of exhibitors - everybody from adidas to Topricin.  A local gymnastics group performing at one end.  Scheels selling bottles of water.  Nowhere do I see what looks like the registration table. 

So I grab one of the adidas guys and ask if he knows where I go to register.  He thinks it's against the back wall.  I head that direction, even though I don't really notice anything different, and eventually I come to an "information booth" of sorts.  By this time, I'm panicking, thinking they truly might not let me pick up my packet if I was late.  The info booth sends me "over there, to the 5K line."  I can barely see, because apparently the people designing the banners to mark all these lines did not consider the background they would be hanging against.  The color blended right into the arena seats, making them virtually unreadable.  Anyway...I get over the 5K line, step up to the front, and tell the lady volunteering there that I need to pick up my packet.  She wants to know my number.  Huh?  My number?  I don't have a number.  I registered online, but I don't have a number.  She points me in the direction of the number pick-up line, marked by an equally unreadable sign.  In that line, it takes the lady three tries to find my registration.  A little receipt printer thing prints out a little slip of paper with my "number."  Now I can go to the 5K line to pick up my packet, which consists of my "bib" (Seriously?  Am I a toddler at the dinner table?), the timing chip for my shoe, a tshirt, and a semi-permanent bag to put it all in.

By the time I'm done there, I'm starting to think that the hotel is going to run my plates and figure out that I shouldn't be parked there.  I find someone with a watch (because I have neither my watch nor my phone with me) and determine that I have 20 mins until I have to be at the starting line.  So I head back to the hotel, take off one layer (it's raining, but warm, so I decide I'm going to walk in a tank top and a jacket), and load up my pockets with cell phone, ipod, keys, and ID.  The bare essentials.  I attach the timing chip to my shoelace, and pin the "bib" to my jacket, and then proceed to drive about a block closer to the arena. 

Still close to a block away, I head for the arena, find that the starting line is literally on the other side of the arena.  This is close to another block, and when I finally get outside, it's another until the actual starting line.  At this point, I'm tired and crabby and I appear to be the only person doing this by myself.  Everyone around me is in groups of friends and families, couples and kids.  I'm standing there alone, in the rain, texting my friends for moral support.  Awesome.  Eventually I met another woman (Tina?) and we bonded because she was looking for her husband but didn't have her phone, so I let her use my mine.  We were chatting until she realized that there was a separate lineup for runners, and since she was running, she left to go there. 

Finally - deo gratias - the "race" starts.  I'm not racing anybody at this point, I'm just trying to not be last.  From there on out, it was fairly standard.  I had my ipod, and listened to last Sunday's sermon at Gigantor Church, and then a Freakonomics podcast on Warren Buffett's kid and the succession of family-owned businesses.  I knew how long the podcasts were, and the route was marked, but I was surprised when I crossed the finish line in less than an hour.  Not a great time, by any stretch of the imagination, but I was super-proud, since my "2-mile practice sessions" had taken me about an hour.  I was certain it would take me more like an hour and a half. 

Beyond the finish line are a bunch of volunteers handing out water bottles and little "medals" with the race logo on them.  I grab two bottles of water and a medal, and keep walking, fearful that if I sit down I will not get back up.  I make it back to the car, get all my stuff organized and back in my purse, crank up the AC, and head out of town.  On my way out, I stop to buy gas and reward myself with Little Caesar's cheese bread.  At the gas station, I run into a guy from Omaha, who is in town for the marathon.  I went to college in Omaha, he went to college about an 45 mins from where I live now.  Cool fact of the day. 

Interesting things from my first (yikes - does that mean there are more to come?) 5K:

• It's a 5K race, but they marked the route by miles.
• There was a lady from Canada with a Canadian umbrella.  She passed me as we neared the finish line, still holding her umbrella over her.  It stopped raining about 2 blocks into the race.
• As you cross the finish line and your chip registers, they call your name.  I thought this was weird, and sort of uncomfortable.
• The volunteers handing out the registration packets should know where the starting line is.
• One of the local group homes for the developmentally disabled had some of their staff or volunteers walking with some of the residents.  I thought that was extremely cool.
• Two ladies walking in front of me had shirts that said, "If you can read this, I'm not last."  Haha, awesome, I want one!
• Muscles I did not know I had are now all but immobile.  I have spent virtually the entire day laying on the floor with my Magic Rice Baby, ice packs, and topricin.  My dad swears it will be better by tomorrow.  I hope so.
• All kinds of people enter these things.  There were fat old ladies in stretchy mom jeans, and professional atheletes in spandex and all kinds of "running accessories." 
• I don't really understand "running accessories."  I'm not sure what you really need besides a good pair of shoes and a tshirt and shorts.  It's basically the cheapest sport there is.

I'm going to go to bed now, because I have to work tomorrow, and my ass hurts.  But, Go me!