In honor of the one-year anniversary of me getting my CPAP machine and life being just awesome, I’m kicking off the first ever installment of “Dear Bethany!”
Content Warning: discussion of weight stigma, the belief in fatness as pathology, intentional weight loss, and medical treatment choices for sleep apnea that are NOT weight neutral.
I’ve set a new habit goal for 2017: cook any recipe from this list 100 times this year.
I live in a city with great Vietnamese, Thai, Lao and Cambodian food, and one of the areas I can definitely cut back my spending is on takeout food. I have tried in the past to cut back but never seemed to be able to sustain the change.
Then it hit me: if I am not excited about the food I am cooking at home, why don’t I just learn to cook the food I want to eat? Many of the dishes I like can be made quickly, cheaply and easily; it’s just a matter of getting comfortable working with the techniques ingredients.
I already have the cooking skills and the cookbooks and have stocked my pantry with the ingredients I will need, so now it’s just a matter of jumping in and getting comfortable. I made a list of recipes I like to eat, and where they can be found in my cookbook collection. My goal this year will be to cook a recipe from this list 100 times. How’s that for a fun New Year’s “resolution?”
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When I started two years ago, deciding to track healthy habits instead of a number on a scale or clothing size was unfamiliar territory for me. I decided I wanted to be open to whatever outcomes would come.
Last year, I listed the following outcomes I experienced after one year along on a habit-based, weight neutral health journey:
Looking back on what I wrote last year, I am happy to say that most of those outcomes have continued throughout year two. I did have some depression and back pain creep back in when an injury required me to stop lifting for a few months. With adding lifting back into my life, both of these conditions are improving again.
I also experienced some other cool things in year two.
Looking back, I feel really proud of what I accomplished this year. It didn’t seem like I did much of anything until I actually went back and read all my older posts. What I feel most proud of is keeping up a consistent self-care routine during a very challenging year. My family had a lot of challenges: my husband got injured, I got injured, we lost our pet, we had a terminal illness and death in the family. I feel so proud that I took excellent care of myself so that I could face these challenges well. Honestly, the self-care felt like the easiest part and I know that is because of the habit-based approach.
So…..to give credit where credit is due, I feel very proud of myself this year. I’m excited to see what year 3 brings!
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With the holidays here I am starting to see talk of resolutions and goals. My own Facebook memories showed me that at this time last year, I put together a cool rainbow spreadsheet with all the habits I was tracking at the time. That got me thinking it was time for a “how are my habits going and what’s in store for 2017” post.
PREAMBLES AND DISCLAIMERS: If you read the title of this post and are thinking that I am about to advocate judging others on the basis of their health status or whether they engage in healthy behaviors ….I want to make it clear that I am not. One’s health status and/or lifestyle does not make anyone morally superior or inferior to anyone else. To quote Ragen Chastain, “health is not an obligation, a barometer of worthiness, entirely within our control, or guaranteed under any circumstances.“
Also, there are very few people who are role models in many areas of life at the same time. So even if someone is not modeling a healthy lifestyle by any one person’s definition, it is possible that they are kicking ass in another area of life. Maybe they work tirelessly to support their families or pursue their passions. Maybe they go above and beyond in helping others. Maybe they create beautiful music or art or literature. Maybe they contribute to new scientific discoveries that make life better for others. Maybe they are present for their kids. Maybe they are bravely facing life in the face of an illness that may be physical or mental, visible or invisible. Maybe they are great at uplifting people and making them laugh, or making them feel accepted no matter what. I do not consider it my job (or anyone’s job) to ask “what’s your excuse for not prioritizing the same things I do?”
Conversely, the fact that I model what I consider to be a healthy lifestyle does not mean I believe myself to be a role model for my kid in all areas; in fact, I definitely do not. And I know that is okay, because no one person can be everything to their kid. That is why they say “it takes a village to raise a child.”
And without further ado….
One of the ways I see the pursuit of thinness being marketed to mothers (and fathers, to a lesser extent) is by playing to one of their deepest insecurities: their fear of being considered unfit as a parent. By telling them that they cannot be considered a role model to their children if they are not thin.
Caring for a hospice patient is a lot like caring for a newborn – very intensive for everyone helping out. Feeding schedules, medication schedules, sleep disruptions, round the clock care, nurses and aides coming and going. I had a few days off because my husband and I felt that it would be good for kiddo to have some time at home with his normal routine and his friends. So I was on kid duty at home and my husband stayed to help my father-in-law care for my mother-in-law. The break also gave me time to attend to some of my own feelings and anxieties over the past week several weeks.
Anyway, we are back at my in-laws home now, and I have a bit of time to myself. My husband is playing with my kid after not seeing him in several days. My father-in-law and the home health aide are with my mother-in-law. And for now, it feels like an act of self-care to write about something much less emotionally charged than what we are going through. So here are some recent realizations I’ve had about the role of less-than-joyful movement when rehabilitating an injury.
It has been two weeks since my follow up appointment with the spine surgeon when I was cleared to ease back into lifting.
So far I have introduced light deadlifts and lat pulldowns (in addition to the planks and side planks which were included in my physical therapy). I’ve had zero nerve issues from these. My back, while not 100 percent, is feeling better than it has in months. My mood and motivation levels are better than they have been in months too.
I feel like myself again, and what amazes me is that I didn’t need to do an ambitious or time consuming program to drastically improve how I feel. I just added 3 sets of deadlifts, 3 days per week, and 3 sets of lat pulldowns, 3 days per week. I do the deadlifts in my living room in the morning, and the lat pulldowns at the Y before or after swimming.
For me, lifting weights is a far more effective anti-depressant than swimming and the SSRI I have been taking. That said, I am grateful for both swimming and the SSRI. Even though they were not as effective for me as lifting, they still helped me somewhat. The SSRI helped me get from “really bad depression” to “mild/tolerable depression/apathy.” Swimming helped me continue to be active when everything else made my back ache, and it felt good in the moment even if it didn’t help with day-to-day motivation and mood. Note: I know that effectiveness of depression treatments vary widely from person to person so please keep in mind that I am talking about myself only in this post. I’m in favor of everyone doing what makes them feel best, whether that is medication, movement, or some other choice.
I am grateful for my injury now because I think it helped me get my head on straight. Now that I realize just how much lifting helps me with depression and back aches, I also realize that my number one fitness priority is to keep myself lifting. Being free of depression and hopefully back aches means much more than any PRs or feeling proud of my lifting numbers. If I re-injure myself, there is a lot more at stake than some lost months of lifting progress… like my sanity, my mood, my productivity, my focus, and my ability to contribute at home. I don’t need PRs to be awesome. But I do need lifting to be my best self. Not for others, but for my own experience in this body as a comfortable place to live.
So there won’t be any more impressive lifts from me any time soon, or possibly ever again. Just day to day self-care and habits. You know, the boring stuff.
Here’s what’s next: since it has been two weeks and I’m not having any nerve issues from deadlifts or lat pulldowns, I plan to experiment with some very light front squats to see if my body can tolerate them now. I’m a bit gun-shy on back squats due to the nature of my spinal injury.
Very glad to be feeling better and to have my head on straight!
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“Can a person be considered body positive if they want to lose weight?”
This is a question I see a lot lately in the body positive and fat acceptance communities, in light of body positivity going mainstream, corporations who profit off body dissatisfaction co-opting the body positive message, and people who declare they are #bodypositivebut.
As with many questions, the answer depends on who you ask. And if you want to know what other people think, please ask them and/or read their articles, or read this pretty comprehensive summary of the movement from Buzzfeed. I’m gonna answer from my own perspective, while acknowledging that my opinion is not the only one out there.
And my opinion has many shades. I think differently than I did a year ago, and may think differently about it next year too. These are my thoughts at this particular moment in time. My thoughts here relate to individuals, not to for-profit entities.
I grew up as a believer in divorce.
I realize that is an odd thing to say, but it is the best way I can think of to describe it. My parents had a relationship that drained both of them. I recall, at the age of seven or eight, asking my mother why she and my father didn’t get a divorce.
They did – almost two decades later. Why did they wait? Ambivalence. Fear of the unknown. Belief that they could provide a more comfortable life for their children together than apart.
Watching them, I vowed that I would not put myself nor my children through the same. If I ever felt so unhappy in a marriage, I would not stay for the sake of the children. I would leave. Better that the children see me in no relationship at all, than to see me staying in an unhappy relationship.
And then I grew up and realized that life is more complicated than I thought as a kid. (Turns out that my younger self was judgemental and sanctimonious about many things I knew nothing about….marriage, kids, health as a middle aged person…..)
The other day I had a follow up appointment at the spine doctor, where I was cleared to ease back into lifting and see how my body tolerates it.
So, my plan is to continue swimming and ease back into lifting slowly. Possibly introduce one lift at a time and then if no nerve issues develop after a few weeks, then add the next lift. Starting with light deadlifts. No Olympic lifts yet. No back squats.
Even though it wasn’t easy or pleasant, I can now say that I am grateful for the time I spent injured because it taught me some lessons and perspective. Here are some of the things I learned:
Power, Peace, and the Porch Gym 