Let Me Eat Cake

So first there’s a sob story:

My birthday was often on the first day of school, or the first week of school. I felt like starting back to school on my birthday was a punishment. I didn’t have a whole lot of friends at all in grade school, and it was especially rare for me to have a friend carry over from one school year to the next. So on my birthday, even if I would eventually have friends that year, there wouldn’t be time for me to know anyone long enough to celebrate with.

Compounding that, my mom was a teacher, and the week of my birthday was (understandably)  a particularly stressful time for her, so even if she wanted to plan events for me, she rarely had time energy or focus to invest in it. In my teens I took to organizing my own celebrations, and that worked to varying degrees of success. The successes are memories that have always been dear to me. The failures are something that I took to carrying around in my ledger of wounds… the one that proves to myself and the world just how unlovable I must be.

Then there’s the fantasy:

All my life I’ve always wanted something out of my birthday that I didn’t feel like I was getting. At heart, it’s a fundamental yearning for validation. In the fantasy, the people who love me throw me a surprise party. The party takes a great deal of organization and effort. There’s lots of guests, a big menu, presents. They work really hard to keep it a surprise, and they pull it off. I come through a door and there’s this whole room packed with people that love me. They love me so much that they’ve done all of this work just to make me feel happy and loved. They’re all smiling and have grins of self-satisfaction because I’m so surprised and they can read the emotion and gratitude on my face. They love me so much that the reaction makes all the work worthwhile: they have made me happy and that’s what they wanted most of all.

It’s a big party, there’s good food, and gifts and I’m surrounded by people who love me enough to go through all of this effort just for me. The only thing less flattering in the fantasy than the plain desperation in the yearning of it, is that I have never, ever told anybody about it. If I told them and they they did it, it would be born of obligation and not the spontaneous and independent desire to make me happy – the latter being somehow greater in the degree of love. The least flattering thing in the fantasy is that it reveals how much I think that doing nice things for me can only come of obligation – someone couldn’t do nice things for me or love me unless  being forced.

In my thirties, my world became smaller, I became more introverted and in that process, gave up on the idea that there would ever be a party. The peculiar part of this disordered thinking is that my family and friends probably (and perhaps rightly) suspect that I would be mortified to be put in the position a surprise birthday party would create. To be the centre of attention, the recipient of all of that focus may make me profoundly uncomfortable and embarrassed. I’m not sure I’d even know what to do with it.

The idea of validation that contains the equation that love=spontaneous and unsolicited devotion effort that is somehow divined by psychic ability is a syndrome that a lot of women are socialized to embrace, and I get a extra super-sized portion of it spoon fed to me by my mother, who wears it like a badge. The irony of the whole thing is that when I come crashing into those same behaviours in my mother, I hate it, hate it, hate it. It’s so passive aggressive, acting like a wounded bird. It does nothing more than to justify how I really feel about myself deep down in the ledger: unloved and unlovable.

To make matters worse, this thinking has compounded over the years by expansion. Year after year I’d secretly hope that this year would be the year that someone would love me enough to celebrate me. And year after year, (because really, it’s a self fulfilling prophesy, isn’t it?) the world would fail my secret heart’s test. And if  I couldn’t be validated one way, I’d be validated another: That is, if I my worthiness couldn’t be validated by the psychic love test, my poor self esteem could be validated by proving that I was unloveable. And every year, I’d then take it upon myself to cram all the space that love should have filled by celebrating myself with food. Days before my birthday the slide would start to happen. It’s a child’s idea of excess, really: Not just one celebration, but a litany of indulgences that last for a week.

And here we are:

Since my husband and I got married, every year he has made me a cake. He makes amazing cakes… so delicious and always huge and full of fat and sugar. Poshy dessert stores wish they could sell cakes like this, he himself has taken to calling them “an affront to God”. These days, the party is that cake. The cake that it takes my husband a half a day to make. The cake that demolishes the kitchen, uses every dish in the house and does truly deserve to be called an affront to God.

It is, sugary, buttery, chocolaty proof that somebody loves me enough to work for me. And when I eat it, from the time it enters my mouth to the time that my insulin crashes me out, I am filled with an intense and powerful knowing that I am loved. Right here, in this moment, and fuck you in the face of all moments that I have been and will be without it: right here I am loved.

So let this last supper be the last supper. This is the last birthday before my surgery. It will be the last time I ever have an affront to God, and it will be the first time that I ever do it mindfully, recognizing in the moment what I am doing, what it has meant to me and let me see it end. Let me eat cake with the knowledge that I am loved with or without it. Let me let the idea go that love and cake are the same thing.

Let me let go of the idea that love and selfless psychic prowess are one thing tied up in a birthday bow. Love is my husband reading and researching about the surgery, and preparing to deal with the aftermath. Love is him braving the possibility of being alone if something goes wrong, and braving the fact that it will likely change our lives fundamentally, because he wants to be with me longer, and he wants to see me healthy.

It’s not cake. It never was.

The Last Resort

So I’m sure nobody’s reading this blog, and that’s OK…

But in case there is one straggler or two who is about  to get very confused, I thought I should post my change in direction.

After a lot of thought and soul searching, research and on the advice of not one or two but three doctors, I’m going to be having weight loss surgery this year. I’m not doing it lightly, and it’s not an easy way out.  In fact, I suspect it will be the battle of my life. I will be having a Roux-en-Y Gastric Bypass surgery sometime in November or December.  I’ll be using this space to write and reflect about it, and as always, to work on overcoming my disordered eating.

If you are reading, wish me strength. I’m going to need it.

I am…

First exercise in Why Weight? is to write 10 (or so) sentences starting with “I am…” that can be abstract or concrete, short or long. Here’s what I ended up with on my first go around:

• I am unhappy with my body.
• I am afraid.
• I am missing out on so much
• I am trying to heal myself.
• I am smart and compassionate.
• I am dying by inches.
• I am struggling to be free.
• I am finding my courage.
• I am longing to be more.
• I am anxious.
• I am tired.
• I am wasting my life.
• I am not sure how I got to this point.
• I am full of  pain.
• I am afraid of other people.
• I am taking it slowly.
• I am learning myself.
• I am going to break free.
• I am finding out who I am.

The idea is to have a go and come back later and have a read, look for trends, surprising things. I’m kind of surprised – and happy – to see how positive I was, and some sound very determined.  I would say that the reading and working of the last few months have created some of that. I think past lists might have been harsher, more hopeless and more self-judgmental.

Interesting.

Working on Me

I’ve just finished a phenomenal book called Women, Food and God by Geneen Roth. It’s badly named, having little specifically to do with women and holding a very different conception of God than one might expect when picking it up. It’s a self-help book, which is something I have historically wanted nothing to do with. But… it’s really very enlightening. There were at least a half dozen times while reading it that I found myself in tears, a half dozen more where I found myself re-reading passages out loud so that I could hear it, feel it, better. I’ve already started taking some of the advice to heart and using the techniques outlined in the book. I’m kind of shocked to find them working.

Basically, the book is the cumulation of Roth’s work on emotional eating and compulsive dieting / compulsive eating. How you eat, what you have on your plate and how you consume it, Roth maintains, tells you everything you need to know about your relationship with yourself and your spiritual fulfillment.

I liked it so much I’ve picked up a few of her other books: Breaking Free From Emotional Eating and Why Weight?: A Workbook for Ending Compulsive Eating. For a very long time I resisted the idea that I was a compulsive eater. The term invokes binge eating patterns to me, and while I am definitely a mindless overeater, I have thankfully never been a full-on binge-eater of the eat-the-world-until-I-burst variety. I have a lot of compassion for those folks, but my eating isn’t the same.

This is me: My portions are too big. I eat without recognizing I’m getting full. I always clear my plate. I fixate on the food that hasn’t been put on my plate yet, even when I have had enough to eat. I have a mental drive to obliviate as I consume food. I’m attracted to food that helps me do that even if it doesn’t make me or my body happy. I am convinced I will enjoy unhealthy foods more than healthy foods even when I know that is not always true. I distractedly read, talk, think, watch TV do anything but pay attention to the process of eating. I eat for emotional relief: I graze in times of stress or boredom. I soothe myself with food. I reward myself with food. I bargain with myself for food.

So I’m going to be working through these books, and a few others I picked up on mindfulness and acceptance, on cognitive and behavioral techniques. I may use this forum for some of the exercises, or reflection on some of the exercises.

I’m aiming to understand me better, and help myself through a transition to a healthier way to be.

Food escape

In the 90′s my father was diagnosed with lung cancer and given 2-6 months to live.   It was too late to do much about it, having already developed into massive tumors crowding his brain. It was a short four months before he was gone.

I was in my 20′s, single, living alone, newly promoted, and a smoker of many years. Within days of hearing the news I bought the patch and quit. It seemed disrespectful to do anything but. The first month was a blur of hospital visits and hard challenges at work, where I told few people about what was going on.  Soon, exhaustion added to the press of overwhelming feelings: heartache, grief, love, pity, emptiness and fear.

Early on, I made a promise to myself. I would stay present throughout the whole process of his dying. It was a bit of an odd promise for me to make. I wasn’t really a drinker, though I did smoke some pot. I had never in my life taken up a bottle to drink away some kind of pain, and had no attraction to harder drugs. As daughters go, I was a pretty dutiful one, and I was known for my work ethic. Most people wouldn’t have thought I’d need to make that promise to myself.

But I had to. Right from the beginning, I had palpable, terrible desire to flee, to avoid, to get out of myself and the situation I was in. I thought to myself in the face of my feeling: “This is how people become alcoholics. This is how people lose who they are.” I knew it as sure as I knew my father was dying; I was in a danger zone.

For the next four months I wouldn’t touch a drink, take a hit off a joint, or even have the momentary respite of a cigarette. I didn’t really watch TV, I got off the computer, I stopped playing fantasy games. I didn’t do much in those four months but work, hospital, home. I attended my father in his last days. I attended my mother in her terrible, terrible grief. I cried my heart out that my father, who I loved so well, was changing, was losing his faculties, was soon not to be.

When I look back on myself during that time I’m impressed with that me. With her strength, and her focus, with her willingness to experience the pain and live through it, rather than around it. But in my recent soul searching I’ve realized that successful as I was, I did find one way to self-medicate. I ate.

I can’t tell you what I ate. I don’t remember.  I can tell you that I didn’t cook. I spent most of my time and focus drifting from one stress to another pain and in the face of that pain, the quality and quantity of what I was eating was a small, insignificant nothing thing.  I ate what was easy, what felt good, what was there, what I was given. In this period of my life, where I had long since given up on dieting anyway what I ate just didn’t matter one iota.

Except, of course, it did. As unhealthy as the actual food might have been, that’s not why it matters. Whatever physical damage I might have done to myself in those four months could have easily been have been undone in a matter of months. What does matter is that it’s clear to me now that in the years to follow my level of emotional eating dramatically increased.

While my father lay dying, I cut everything out of my life that I could use to escape what was happening, everything that would get in the way of authentically experiencing that time in my life. But you don’t get to cut out eating.  Within six years of my father’s death I’d gained probably eighty pounds and went from being active,  relatively healthy obese to unhealthy, unlivable superobese.  There were a lot of other events that contributed to that, but this is one of those jenga bricks way down at the bottom of the teetering tower. It’s one of those things that other things rest on.

This is a good realization for me at this time because I’ve been reading and thinking and working a lot on how I can stop defeating myself through negative self-talk. I want to get better at get my brain and my body working together to get me healthier. While many times when I identify something in my past that led me to the state my body is in now, the voice in the back of my head kicks in to beat myself up about the failure of it.

But how can I be anything but compassionate to the person I was then? I loved my father dearly, and watching him die was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I was amazingly self-aware to recognize the avoidance pull and strong to be so pro-active about it. I was so smart to know that if I missed even a moment, checked out for any part of it that I would feel later that I had dishonored my father, and myself.

My mind today, my heart, even my inner voice wants nothing but to give the me back then a big, long hug to soothe the hurt. How could I beat that me up? I can’t. I can’t at all.

And so this is a good place to start from in trying to find compassion for myself. Rather than dwelling on what I should have done then… because I know that doing better at that time may not have been in my capacity, my attention turns to “now that I know, now that I see it, how can I undo it?” rather than getting stuck in a cycle of criticality and self-loathing that just turns into more self-destructive behaviour.

I don’t have all the answers yet, but this moment of compassion is a really nice start.

In praise of blueberries…

When I was a kid, we spent the whole summer  at the cottage. Within a day or two of school letting out,  our van was packed to the brim with everything we’d need for eight blissful weeks. I’d spend entire days at the beach, devour books, play hide and seek and ride my bike, hunt for cans to return for pocket change to spend on comics, candy and the arcade.

The cottage is right in the middle of one of the best blueberry territories on earth. I’d snack on them straight from the bush when building tree forts in the woods. I’d run out with a mug to gather a half cup when my mom caved in and  make pancakes. less fun, I remember sweating in the bush while horseflies buzzed our heads when my mom would take us out to to a big harvest. If you wanted the blueberry cake, or blueberry pie or blueberry dumplings (oh my, just typing that last makes me salivate) or blueberry jam that would come of them, you wouldn’t complain about the heat or the flies or the time you were missing at the beach; you’d just shut up and pick.

My mom considered the harvest a precious batch. They were apportioned out for specific purposes and they were never to be snacked on or eaten by the handful. The cottage was the only place in the world I ate blueberries that weren’t jam-ified or served at a restaurant because my mother declared cultivated blueberries inferior and WAY too expensive for purchase. Now that I’m grown I buy blueberries all the time, but the legacy of my mom is still around. Every Saturday morning, my husband makes whole grain, flaxy pancakes for us, and the blueberries are always bought for them. I don’t snack on them, I don’t use them for other things – I was very well trained as a kid.

The other day when having a little granola and milk as small, high fiber snack in lieu of a full meal between brunch and a late dinner. I saw the blueberries when I was getting the milk and on impulse scooped out a few to add to the granola (a banana nut, storebought Muslix variety) and… wow! So delicious! Each berry a little burst of delight amid the crunch. Ever since, there’s a little handful of them on my breakfast… low cal, low GI, high antioxidants… and wow!

I love me my blueberries.

Breakfast Salad

Just back from vacation and three weeks of excellent daily swimming and walking. I’m a few pounds up from earlier this year, but stronger, clearer with a good fresh, relaxed mind and a strong desire to do a hard forward push.

I used to eat eggs for breakfast every single day, and in my mind, breakfast eggs (over easy, poached, soft boiled) with firm whites and intact runny yolks are married to toast. When I eat eggs for daily breakfast, I eat way too much bread. So these days, if I have eggs for breakfast at all, they make for a Sunday morning treat.

Eggs for lunch are a different animal altogether. I do the recumbent bike and stretch on the ball over my lunch hour and am ravenous by the time I get to lunch. Sandwiches are easy, but too much bread again, so I try to be prepared enough to remind myself that I love easy and fabulous salads. Since I’m not eating eggs for breakfast, I reach for them at lunch. In a salad, my brain experiences eggs as an entirely different food. They are a lovely salad protein and add a great mouth-feel overall.

This “Breakfast Salad” is what I just had for lunch:

1.5 – 2 cups of raw baby spinach
2 hard boiled eggs, chopped to chunks
1-2 tbsps of bacon crumbles
half a cup of halved cherry or grape tomatoes
a handful of diced red onion
balsamic vinegar to dress
a tiny splash of oil
salt and pepper to taste

Throw them all together and toss.

I use pre-washed clamshell spinach, keep a diced onion in the fridge at all times, and hard-boil enough eggs early in the week to do three salads.  For particularly summerish joy,  the tomatoes are picked right off the plant in my backyard.

Delicious!