Hello, Sunshine.

shameful confession: I love top 40 music and I listen to it all the time. I was completely surprised though when on two separate occasions the DJs said offensive things that I keep forgetting to write about. Here goes.

offense 1:

The DJ is talking about giving away tickets for a Jordan Sparks concert, and he says, “So y’all know that Jordan Sparks is a big woman, I mean, really big. So if you want to win these tickets give me a call and guess what she weighs.”

Then DJ 2 jumps in with a guess that is over 25o+ pounds.

DJ 1 responds with, “Yeah, maybe when she was 13.”

offense 2:

The DJ is talking about giving away Sara Bareilles tickets. He says, “…I like Sara Bareilles, she’s ok. Not as attractive as she should be, but she’s ok…”

I feel so gross about both of those comments, I’m not going to say anything further.

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noon Wake. Drink water. Stumble around

12:15 Rebound on mini-trampoline for a while (in pajamas & sports bra).

1pm Make juice. Or eat fresh fruit (in pajamas).

2pm Watch TV. Sister wakes, joins you.

2:30 Help sister make breakfast

3pm Shower. Dress in something comfortable, or put pajamas back on

3:30 Watch TV. Wake dog from nap. Pet

4pm Snack

5pm Sister naps. Venture outside, decide its too hot, return inside

6pm Snack

7pm Watch TV or sports with Dad. Try not to look bored. Surf web.

8:30pm Eat dinner

9pm Consider calling a friend. Forget while pacing around

9:35 Pet dog. Coo.

10pm Watch TV with sister. Laugh.

2am Bed

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It’s actually chilly tonight, post-rain in the middle of summer heat.. I’m enjoying the fresh air on the patio as I type this. Since Saturday I have been reluctantly relishing the joy of doing nothing. My family has made this quite easy by constantly occupying the vehicles, making it impossible for me to be busy or go anywhere. It’s weird to leave the feverish pace of finals to one that is so much slower.

The school year is complete (for this year anyway)! What an accomplishment. I got my spring quarter grades today online, which makes it truly over. I did better than I had hoped, though not quite to the same standard of my first two quarters. Letting go of perfectionism is one of my lessons recently, so I have ample opportunity to practice in relation to my grades. I did my best, which is really what counts.

Its weird to be home with my family. Thats another story for another day though.  I miss my independence, and I feel like a little kid at moments. It’s also a time of endings and new beginnings, creating what happens next.

I need this break very dearly right now. I’ve been in school for the last five quarters without a break, and it was time to take some time off. I’m going to be busy as the summer continues, so to take several days entirely to myself feels priceless.

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about overeating french fries…

“…To make a meditation out of [eating] and eat them consciously without having a secondary entity in your head that says you shouldn’t be eating them. Eat them fully and consciously, and at the same time feel how your body feels while you eat them and after you’ve eaten them. Then you bring some presence into it, and you may realize in some cases that the body doesn’t actually want to eat them. It was the mind that wanted to eat the potato.” –Eckhart Tolle, Week 3 of Oprah’s A New Earth web class

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Pure brilliance.

“Its that I have a masters and then I got married look.”

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a moment in the life of intuitive eating, and re-training the mind.

the scene: I just got out of the shower after exercising.

body: I’m hungry!

mind: Great! Let’s go eat.

body: I want one of those organic pop tarts!

mind: eeeerrr. Those have a LOT of calories.

body: You didn’t care about the calories on Friday (when there was no workout).

mind: Yeah, but you just worked out. There’s like as many calories as the workout.

body: so? that’s what I want.

mind: um, alright. i can handle that.

(eaten mindfully, with joy, no guilt. it took the mind a little while to remember we’re intuitively eating and there was an old “calorie” mentality at first…but it came around)

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In January, as part of my self-care plan, I quit formally exercising. It was a hard mentality to shake off, because I was so used to berating myself for being inconsistent with fitness, it was very weird to have permission to not exercise. Now I am fully aware of both the health benefits of exercise, and the sanity benefits I personally notice, so I never planned to give it up for good…just to give it up until I naturally felt like doing it without any “shoulds” or nasty self-talk.

So this week, I am staying with a friend, who just happens to have a small fitness room in the apartment complex. On Monday I felt compelled to take a trip to the workout room. I was a bit hesitant, but exercise is really about convenience for me, and all i had to do was walk down some stairs. Getting on the treadmill and beginning to walk slowly felt really good. I walked a little faster, and then slowed down again when that felt right. It was a wonderfully liberating experience to be on a treadmill and to experience my lungs clearing, my blood flowing, and my skin sweating just for the sake of doing it. I didn’t focus on the distance covered, calories burned, or what speed I “should” be going. I focused on feeling my body move fast, and then to feel it move less fast. To not be pressuring myself or yelling at my body to do things it doesn’t want to do. Exercise feels amazing!

It is particularly enjoyable when I have given myself permission to only do what feels good. Almost every day since then I have taken some time to go to the exercise room and to move and stretch. I also didn’t go when I didn’t feel like it.

Tonight I had a particularly empowering experience where I went down in the evening to walk for a bit before dinner. I had been studying for finals all day, and I needed to move my body a little bit. So after like three minutes I was NOT feeling it, but I also didn’t feel quite ready to give up. I decided to go until the five minute mark and then stop if I didn’t want to continue. I know that sometimes it takes a minute for exercise to feel good, so I walked faster and into a (slow, incredibly slow) jog. Normally I walk the entire time and jog for about 2 minutes total, just to increase my sweat. But tonight jogging just never stopped feeling good, and I ran for EIGHT minutes. Now… this is significant. For a gal who hasn’t voluntarily run more than two minutes in.. my life? I ran a whole freakin’ lot. The significant part of the story though, is that it felt SO GOOD. Running has always been extremely uncomfortable for me, so I was perfectly happy to never do it. But tonight, to feel my body actually like something that I have always believed that I wasn’t capable of doing. Well, that was just extraordinary.

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I tend to get a tremendous urge to write whenever I have finals and exams looming overhead. It’s also a time where I suddenly find motivation to clean (particularly small nooks, crannies, and high shelves), write love letters, watch movies, make intricate recipes with exotic ingredients, and re-arrange drawers. It is a really wonderful feeling to reach final exams, because it means classes are finished, I get to sleep in, and I am just hours away from being done (in this case, for the whole freaking summer). But it’s also a time when resistance digs its claws in, and unnatural motivation must be summoned for each study hour.  Freedom and relaxation are so close I can taste it, why would I want to study?

I don’t have a recipe for success to handle the ants-in-your-pants-jumping-out-of-your-skin for summer situation, unfortunately. If I did, I probably wouldn’t be writing this at all and I would be studying for statistics. What I can say though, which actually works for me, is that the best thing to do is to honor the intense desire to be finished, and let that fuel you through finals. You can’t really fight it, resistance is futile. But by giving in to the joy at the end of the road, that can charge you through all of the reading, writing, and studying that must occur in order to be done.

With that, I am back to the books.

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I went to the dentist yesterday, who told me I have a LOT of cavities. As someone who goes to the dentist twice a year, brushes religious, and flosses every single day- I feel really upset about this. Partly it was the manner with which this particular dentist dealt with me, and partly it was feeling like I had let myself down in some way.

Over the past year, I ended my strict raw vegan diet, and have taken time to learn to eat intuitively and honor my needs. I eat whatever I desire, and I feel great. It felt like a huge kick in the teeth (pun intended) that just as I am celebrating living a town over from Crazyville, I get the news that part of my body is “deficient”. Now everyone has their beliefs about their teeth, and I am one who believes that our diets strongly influence the status of our teeth. Particularly as the hygienist is cleaning my teeth going, “…Such clean teeth! I don’t see how a girl with such clean teeth and no plaque has so many cavities!” It gets complicated here because health is complex. Firstly, I am seeking a second opinion. This dentist was an absolute jerk and had appalling patient discourse. He essentially told me there was no reason whatsoever for the status of my teeth and that I was doomed to having “major reconstructive problems for the rest of my life.” Secondly, after I have these cavities and issues filled and resolved (ELSEwhere), how do I prevent further issues? I refuse to accept for one second that I am “doomed.” Granted it seems I have inherited certain tooth genetics, and after talking to my mom she has had many similar issues. But genetics are NOT the final answer. I am certain there are things that I can do, in addition to maintaining excellent hygiene, to improve the health of my teeth.

So, the question that I am asking myself is how do I improve my diet, i.e. make sure that I am getting the minerals and vitamins for strong bones and teeth, while maintaining a healthy relationship with food far away from Crazyville?

It seems so easy in my head. Just drink more vegetable juice and eat less sugar! But the whole foundation of my progress this year has been no rules. If I don’t feel like making juice, I don’t do it. If i want sugar, I have it. Perhaps this is the start of phase two, where after asking my body what it wants, I ask my teeth what they need. A whole new discourse in self-care of truly checking in with my heart and head, and continue on. It is definitely an opportunity to revitalize and improve my health.

I also felt a whole wave of anger with western medicine yesterday, as I sat in this dentists office feeling utterly helpless. He delivered very upsetting (and expensive) information with no useful explanation, nor any suggestions whatsoever for preventing further problems. I can only imagine how people must feel when a doctor behaves in the same manner, sharing news of a much more upsetting nature than mine. The most challenging aspect is feeling like the doctor completely disconnected me from my body. After I got home, it took several hours and a long talk with my mom to get back to my body. No matter what a dentist or doctor says, it is still MY body, they are MY teeth. And I need to remember that, and to stay connected to myself. While I do feel pulled back into the world of “fixing” my life through my food, I am compelled to stay strong in eating intuitively. I know that I can increase the vitamins and minerals in my diet, and not get sucked back into the world of weight watching.

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Somehow I’ve never gotten around to writing about this, but for the past year I have been practicing intuitive eating. Many people come to it when they’re sick of diets that don’t work, but I actually never dieted because I already knew they didn’t work. Instead, I was a master of creating detailed “lifestyle projects” that I would pledge to in the hopes of solving all of my problems. It was my own form of perfectionist dieting and overall hell. I was in misery. For several years I was obsessed with fixing my life through my diet, feeling like a constant failure, gradually gaining weight, compulsive eating, binging, and depressed…So, one day I decided to try to get relief from constant misery by trying something I read about on the internet–eat absolutely whatever you want, when you are hungry. It was really quite terrifying, and I didn’t try it until several months after reading about it.

I decided to try quite slowly, and I had every intention of going back to my plan after three weeks. I still had mountains of restrictions on what I would and would not eat, but I let myself buy cookies (wheat free, gluten free, vegan, sugar free cookies). And, as most people do in this process, I ate the whole box. Several times. In fact for months as I loosened the grips, I “ate the world” and basically just watched Fat Rant on repeat to assure myself that it was ok to gain weight, and I would rather gain 10 pounds that feel miserable and binge constantly. I didn’t gain the world though.

The first few months were the hardest. There were ups and downs. Days when I felt happy, relieved, and calm around my meals. And then days where I would eat compulsively or notice my pants being tighter, and feel anger and shame at myself for eating so many “bad” foods. And, I still had a ton of restrictions. Some good (like tested food allergies), and some less good (old habits dying hard). But, I was making baby steps. I would notice the things that would trigger relapses into old habits of devising fancy plans, and try to look at the trigger, instead of the plan.

Today it has been over a year. And, the verdict is that I feel absolutely fantastic! Its a process without a finite finish line where I am free from food issues, but today I feel good. Progress includes: I don’t freak out about my meals and when I’m going to eat next. My weight has stabilized within about a five pound range, and while I still strive to make peace with what I see in the mirror, stability feels really good. I enjoy food again! Sometimes I overeat, sometimes I don’t eat quite enough, but most of the time I feel satisfied with what I ate. Episodes of binging have subsided to rare occurrences, and I can recognize emotional eating more quickly. And sometimes I emotionally eat, but I do it with consciousness and care for the greater emotional issues. I’m significantly nicer in the way I talk to myself, and much more comforting. I am a lot less stressed.

And, it’s still something I work on daily. The negative thoughts and anxiety still appear when I’m presented with “bad” foods. But they come and go more quickly and gently. I think what I love most is enjoying food again. I have embraced the enemy, and now it’s about feeding my desires and nurturing myself. I find that most often, my honest self desires are boring and monotonous (and totally delicious) things.

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