Scaling Down

Wednesday morning weigh-ins are not without a ludicrous amount of choreography all in preparation for that moment of truth. A moment of accountability that I've written about here. The quasi-truth the scale reveals is a truth that never sets me free. I’m trying to value numbers less… from pounds to waist measurements to clothes sizes to calories… in my maintenance move towards a new normal. But in this post-weight loss skinnily ever after, numbers remain a secret concern.

I weigh myself once a week, instead of every day as I did at one point; I figure a week is a good enough chunk of time to not only make mistakes and see their consequences, but also to see the results of a week spent diligently damage-controlling or just working hard.

I weigh myself naked. I figure that’s the real me… that’s how much I weigh… I don’t want to know me + clothing, me + shoes. I weigh myself bare foot. No matter how attached I am to those nikes, they are not an actual extension of my being. I weigh myself hungry. I confess that’s some stupid logic, but I never claimed to be rational. I weigh myself first thing in the morning, before I’ve ingested so much as half a crumb or a driplet of water. I weigh myself after I’ve gone to the bathroom.

Extra. I know.

If once I step on the scale the number isn’t what I hoped for, I try again (I like to blame computer error before i consider what i know to be human error)... and again... and again. When third time is not a charm, I try moving the scale around in my bathroom… sometimes that changes the number, sometimes that doesn’t. Then after a few moments of denial, elation or straight-up indifference, the number sinks in and I accept it as my new reality and let it inspire the next seven days. It’s New Years in my bathroom every Wednesday morning! The world is mine (so is the gym), there’s nothing I can’t conquer… and I resolve to go get it.

Why Wednesday? It used to be Mondays, but I found myself over-forgiving of weekend weakness… which in any case never showed up as soon as Monday, but always reared its ugly head by Wednesday. A weekend weigh-in would kill the fun of weekend weakness or produce too much guilt, disgust, failure feeling and other such unproductive sentiments. But by Wednesday, I’m in a certain flow and feel fully equipped to accept the gravity of any number and to take things in my stride––run it out, run it off.

The New Year, the New Me: Resolve

Resolutions are cute. The end of year feels like a solid full stop (a period––in American speak). It’s a chance to start a new sentence in my book––an opportunity to write a twist in my life story, a new quasi-beginning. What does this mean? 2010 was who I’ve been, 2011 is who I can be… “who I am” is somewhere between the life I live and the life I imagine.

At an African party in London, March 2009

On December 31^st 2009, I resolved to make 2010 the year of sober Aida. It seemed unimaginable to some who could only visualize me with a glass of shiraz attached to the end of my right arm like a prosthesis––enjoying the organic yet mechanical motions of daily carousal. 90% of New Year’s resolutions don’t last longer than one week. I, too, would have doubted my ability to pull off a booze-free year if it hadn’t been for the fact that on the night of the 31^st I felt like I was on day three of the worst hangover of my life. 31^st December 2009 found me back in California suffering the effects of a hectic Uganda-Kenya booze binge. I was so turned off alcohol; it was easy to swear to be done with that delightful devil.

Quitting booze had its perks. I’ve written about the caloric catastrophes of immoderate imbibing here. But I quit drinking for more than just the weight loss benefits. Drinking was an excuse for me to feel okay relinquishing control. But when I really thought about it… I was liberated, scandalous and comfortable at any level of intoxication or complete sobriety for that matter. I haven’t quite been able to figure out what I got of drinking or would get out of drinking again… and I still don’t trust myself to behave “moderately”… so for now, I’m comfortable not knowing when and if I’ll drink again.

Winter wear, November 2010

So what of 2011? Well, I would like to consider this thing you call “moderation” … primarily in terms of exercise. I’ve been on holiday for three weeks now––I’m eating like a queen, haven’t written down one calorie, working out about 3 times a week instead of 6 or 7… and to my elation, for now, my weight and size has not changed. In 2011, I will do a better job of marrying an active and healthy lifestyle with an equally rigorous dedication to my academic life, spiritual life but most importantly… social life! I will stop lying to people that I’m maintaining as I secretly try to lose more weight… really Aida… enough is enough. I’ve been teetering between veganism and vegetarianism… in the New Year… I will probably continue to teeter… and I will be okay with that. I don’t want to be afraid… of adding weight, losing weight, food, or hard work. I want to try new things and keep working on the old. I will run races. I will start dance classes. I will be resolute in my pursuit of the life I want to live; active in the making of the world I want to live in.

I saw this on somebody’s facebook page the other day:

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Bye 2010! Hello 2011!

Happy New Year, Everybody!!

Nairobi sunset driving back from a day trip, December 2010

Failed Interventions

At my heaviest, nothing anybody said or did could have inspired me to lose weight. There was no piece of information, light bulb revelation, magic word combination capable of motivating me out of an appetite and into gym shorts. Which is something I sometimes forget when I feel that oh-so-human urge to share my feelings about how somebody else, usually somebody I love, seems to treat their body.

No matter how well meaning, it’s hard to hear and process a legitimate sentiment or reaction to my body for what it is. Quite frankly, I can’t think of anything more suspiciously condescending than concern. When people told me to lose weight, even out of true worry, care, kindness, love… I hated it. I hated them. I hated them, because it was easier to hate them than hear them. And even when I did hear them, all that translated into was my feeling bad about myself, about my body. A comment about my largeness was a rude reminder that it was not all in my head but in yours too, in the heads of others around me.

Nobody ever told me anything about my size I didn’t know deep down. So I teeter between appreciating the act of bursting delusions versus silently sanctioning self-destruction.

“You know such-and-such is bad for you” never deterred me from doing it. If anything it almost inspired a borderline moronic will to defy. I don’t always want to be good.

The most upsetting thing about somebody expressing concern for my size was that they got to leave when the conversation was over but I did not. At the end of the day, especially if I shared their concerns, I was left with this body we disapproved of. And to want to live in my body (something I had few other options but to do), I had to unhear or mishear words that hurt. To make my body liveable in again, to love myself and seek change in my own time for my own sake, I became immune to what others had to say. Correction. The things people said only hurt me, they never inspired me. That’s just how it was. I guess I had to find my own cliff edge, my own limit, fall over it, and rope myself back when I was good and ready. Because frustratingly remarkable people don’t hold the monopoly on willpower… lying at the other end of complete desperation, on the other side of my too far was my motivation. I lost eighty pounds when I found myself eighty pounds overweight.

My Salad Situation

Am I goat? Why am I eating leaves?

An edamame salad

Salad, like yoga, seems to some to suggest a personality type more than anything. In a Zimbabwean vernacular, you call somebody “Sa-lad” (emphasis on the last syllable) if they are snootily moronic… bourgwaaaa… la-di-da… shee-shee-fu-fu... uppity… precious.

The idea of eating an array of mostly raw vegetables used to make me a little angry inside. It seemed to symbolize some sort of extreme self-deprivation… a kind of torture I was quite happy to leave to some suburban housewives somewhere. It was a little too western for my already overly-westernized African self. When I visited Los Angeles for the first time, I got off the plane starving and my friend took me to a salad restaurant. I wanted to smack him… and all the other twigs in the joint munching away on grass pretending to be satiated by some carb-less existence.

But I changed. Over the past year or so, I’ve gotten into the whole salad thing… in kind of a big way. When I first moved to California, I was super-excited for what felt like all you can eat Mexican food all over the place. I drowned myself in chicken quesadillas... they tasted good. But these days, the idea of eating a chicken quesadilla does absolutely nothing for me. Aside from the fact that I don’t eat meat, my palate’s more excited by the bright and bold colors and complex of textures found in a giant salad bowl.

A spinach and berry salad with almond slivers

And size does matter! I discovered that part of the whole overeating and overweight thing had to do with the fact that I like to chew a lot… like I could eat a mountain of food. So, in a weird way, I get roughly the same amount of satisfaction sitting down and eating an entire giant bag of crisps (potato chips) as I do eating an entire giant bag of lettuce. I’ve done both, many-a-time. The difference is that one bag has about 1200 calories and the other has about 25. So… I pick the lettuce.

I’ve gotten really into the taste of fresh fruits and vegetables. And from eating them so often, I’ve reset my body, my appetite, my palate. I feel as though salad dressings hide or monopolize the taste. So I don’t use dressings, and I’m not into cheese (two things that… if you’re not cautious… can make your salad a de facto quesadilla… calorically-speaking). But I try to get the nice mixture of nutrients that a meal should have (carbs, protein, fats, vitamins, minerals, all that jazz). My salads have it all…fruits and vegetables and nuts and beans… hearty salads… good stuff. And when I munch away, I feel satisfied, energized, fueled and ready to roll.

Time Narratives

Okay, so it’s been about five million years since my last blog post… and even though I’m six days away from this humungous oral exam and in the middle of finals, ergo really in the middle of stressing myself with ideas about the time (I do but think) I don't have… I will take the time to write this post.

Before I got into a workout groove (a couple of years ago), my ideas about time were one of the biggest setbacks to committing to losing weight. Sure, I WANTED to lose weight… but where was the time? Now of course, I managed to find time to marathon all five seasons of The Wire while school was in session… I found time to develop, exhaust and quit various fads, activities, addictions. But when it came to eating right and working out… well I was kind of busy… and with all the school commitments, where was the time?

Well, it turns out time was there… on my lap… under my pillow… behind that 30 minutes of early morning facebooking… time was always there, even in my busiest moments. Time spent worrying about running out of time was time I could spend running. Because it turns out twenty-four hours is an ample amount of time, and so long as I budget it wisely (not wait until the last minute before working on something etc.), I had time. I have time. So even though I’ve been all stressed and unable to convince myself that I could take the little time to write a blog post, I’ve found the time to continue to work out and take care of my body.

Because all this time I, one, we have is ultimately time we don’t have. It’s convenient to plan to be better next time, soon, tomorrow, next term, next quarter, in the New Year, in the new millennium, any time but now… but now is what I know I have. So now is when I do it. In these two and a half months since my dad died, I’ve been filled with an overwhelming desire to quit deferring the living of life (which at times, funnily enough, translated into complete stagnancy… I couldn’t quite figure out what constituted living my life to the fullest). Because as one friend who lost her mum put it… and I borrow her words because I really couldn’t say it any better: “I found that I was living and loving as hard as I could because I wanted to be proud of myself- full of the certainty that if I was as whole a person as I could be, I wasn't wasting what she had stolen from her - life.”

This thing called life… this thing called my body… I live them now, not tomorrow, not in the New Year.

Give yourself time. Take it. Hell, steal it if you have to. Time is now.

And even when it doesn’t feel like it, ultimately, time––like your body––is yours alone.

this cartoon is unnecessarily morbid, but cracked me up anyway...

A Love Your Body Buddy

I’ve heard people advocate having a gym buddy… somebody to motivate you and another way to hold yourself accountable to some sort of physical rountine/regime. Generally, not a bad idea. Sure. But sometimes it’s hard to coordinate schedules, and besides… sometimes I don’t want company when I’m in get-it mood at the gym (I don’t need another witness to my crazy… my judging eyes can be more than enough). Similarly, when trying to “eat right”… that is refrain from wandering down the gluttonous path I am want to do… it doesn’t always help having somebody there to monitor your failure, point out what you already know, make you feel worse. If you are that friend, trusted with the task of keeping a buddy on track, you might notice them build a mild resentment towards you… mild turns to major… and next thing you know, you’re hearing rumors about yourself wherein you’re described as some sort of food nazi, gym drill sergeant, mad monster (all true, but still).

Language is a funny thing, a dangerous thing and a redemptive thing. Instead of a gym buddy, to whoop my ass into shape (or whatever other pertinent sadistic metaphor we’re often inclined to use), I charge my Love Your Body Buddy with keeping my thinking on track. When failing to eat super-healthy and hitting it hard at the gym are at risk of feeling like crime and punshiment, my Love Your Body buddy, puts things in perspective, reminding me that I am in fact human and not some sort of automated mistakeless machine. So on guilt-ridden days where words like sabotage, pigging out, demolishing, bad, losing (and not in the good way) or failing seem most relevant, she encourages me to re-think my word choices and thus my perspective.

The idea with a Love Your Body Buddy (LYBB - if this is starting to feel like a mouthful) is not to have somebody by your side shepherding you towards coronary heart failure or helping you to construct and maintain delusions wherein unhealthy choices have no consequences. Whether it's true or not, with self-love ought to come self-care. So being kind to both the inside and outside of your body necessitates a healthy and active lifestyle and mentality; working out and eating well become part and parcel of loving your body. Sometimes my LYBB and I meet at the gym super early in the morning, sometimes we go for long runs, frequently we encourage each other while navigating this vegan-vegetarian lifestyle kick we’re both on (more on that another time). But we neither police behavior nor unhelpfully sugarcoat reality. When it comes down to it, instead of becoming that person to dodge and detest, my LYBB is just the kind of person I love to keep around.

Boys Will Be Girls

This cracked me up so much...

I love the biggest loser... hopefully I don't ever sound like this.
I also love frozen yogurt. They're wrong though... red mango > fraiche > pinkberry