Sculpin

I didn’t think I’d ever say this, but I regret hanging up on a telephone survey person. Because now I’m wondering what on earth her script would have had her say next. Even more, I wonder how long she could have kept up that colossal perkiness. At some point, you’d think, just about anybody would start to deflate.

Our opinions are worth something; that’s why these media researchers can bundle them up and sell them. But we don’t get a cut of that money, not even a micropayment to the charity of our choice. It’s daft. I’m not going to agree to that, and certainly not to someone who’s just pulled me away from my book.

If you enjoy discomfiting people who call you up and bug you for your opinion, you could do worse than to ask whether you’ll be paid.

The problem with being all, “I will eat what I want! Hooray!” is that sometimes what I want is to sit down with a spoon and a jar of tartar sauce; that’s too weird even for me. What can I say? That Captain Toady’s stuff is freakishly good.

Their cocktail sauce is also tasty. Josh and I have been doing a lot of shrimp cocktail lately with little wild Oregon pink shrimp.

At the Lake City market yesterday, a couple of women walked by carrying bundles of huge, brightly striped hoops. I approached and asked, “Um, pardon me, but, uh, what’s with the hoops?” Turns out I was talking to Carrole Johnson of Cirquesse Hoops, who’d been talking to the folks at Mieko’s about starting up a hoop dancing class there. (I didn’t care for Mieko’s, especially after the remodel, but for a hoopdancing class I might rejoin. Maybe.)

I’m sure I was staring at the hoops pretty hungrily. “But,” I said sadly, “I’m not even sure I can hoop. I had a herniated disc.” At which point the other woman, her mother, piped up and said that she was fifty-six years old with a bad back and it had done her a world of good. Meanwhile, Carrole was demonstrating a little bit, and wow does she look graceful. Hm… maybe…

Well, heck, I’m in. Josh and I went right up to Home Depot and picked up a length of 3/4″ 100-psi irrigation tubing and a few connectors. Using these hoopmaking instructions from JasonUnbound, we made a 42-inch hoop with 1.5 pounds of water for weight and took it out for a spin. It’s fun! I suspect it’s a little small for Josh, who was having some trouble with it, but I got it up and spinning awkwardly counter-clockwise, at least for a while. Pretty soon I was dipping my hand into the hoop-space as it went around and a couple of times I even managed to turn with the hoop, more or less.

The extra weight makes it easier to keep the momentum going. It also makes it a wee bit bruising at first. I can’t have been actively hooping for much more than fifteen minutes, but it looks like I’ve been punched over and over by something with tiny fists. I think I’m going to try one of those ridiculous neoprene slimmer belts to give myself a little padding, at least until I’m a bit more fluid. I’ll tell you, I may be bruised, but my back feels great.

On the advice of the generous and indomitable Kitty Kerosene — thanks, Kitty! — I sanded down the inside of the hoop, making it significantly easier to manage. Fancy gaffer tape is in the mail from Identi-Tape, enough to use on an awful lot of hoops. There’s still plenty of tubing left. Come join me!

Carol isn’t the only one who was kind of freaked to hear that I was “on a diet”. I gather I have earned something of a reputation for over-enthusiasm. But here’s what I’m actually doing now.

My rules:

1. Shoot for 1200-1400 calories a day. 1200 is not better than 1400.
2. Write everything down in a food diary.
3. Use smaller bowls.
4. Weigh in daily and track the moving average.
5. Get what exercise I can.
6. Use trustworthy information sources to help decide how to stock the fridge and pantry.
7. Money is not the issue. Shell out for tasty fresh food.
8. The body is the ultimate authority.

The thing is, the body is not my enemy. My body is often a lot smarter than the rest of me. So, I figured, what if I capitalized on that? What if, instead of imposing a lifestyle on myself from without, I were to radically trust myself with my choices? As long as I hit my caloric marks, everything is fair game for eating. But here’s the catch: I have to actually want what I eat. And I mean the food itself — not the idea of the food. Not the marketing of the food, the nostalgia of the food, the cultural significance of the food, or even the supposed dietworthiness of the food. I try to engage with the food object as fully as I can, without preconceptions, and then pay attention to how I feel as I digest it.

And it turns out that — having broken myself of what felt not unlike an addiction to big piles of complex carbohydrates — what I actually want is pretty smart. I do want a whole lot more protein than I would have guessed. I love nuts, beans, olives and olive oil, shrimp cocktail, fancy tuna, fresh fruit, dry Cheerios, cruciferous vegetables, Greek-style yogurt, excellent chocolate, thin whole wheat spaghetti with guasacaca, beef jerky, highly flavored cheese, and the occasional Gardenburger. I hate cheap chocolate, and I’m surprised to find that my body thinks that potato chips aren’t actually all that. Neither are french fries. (I was all “OMG French fries yum!! want!!”, tried one, and was surprised at how much I did not care. I cared that Josh was having a treat and I wasn’t; the treat itself, eh, not really.) And as for industrialized cheese, how did I never notice how weird it smelled? Industrialized food in general — you know, it’s salty and fatty and sweet, but beyond that, it’s kind of boring.

So I’ve lost some twenty pounds by doing the me thing, within some caloric limits. You can call it a New Lifestyle if you like but la la la I can’t hear you.

ETA: okay, there’s one more part: some call it the “no asshole rule”. Nothing drives me to the crunchy snacks quite like anger and frustration. The Buddha is said to have advised that it was better to go alone than in the company of a fool, and I’m taking that advice.

There were some fabulous comments in reply to that last post, but I especially wanted to give time to Carol’s, because what she said stuck with me all day yesterday.

I’ve been calling this thing the Stick’n'Twig Diet in part just because I’m the sort of person who likes that kind of sarcasm, but also in large part as my secret homage to Tom, Josh’s late uncle. I’m sorry I never got to meet Tom, because from all I’ve heard, we would have gotten along like a house afire. Tom had an advanced case of some kind of cardiovascular disease and managed to control it astoundingly well through what I think was probably the Ornish diet. He wound up living several years longer than was predicted. The diet he was on was tough; sticking to it took a whole lot of discipline on his part. I admire his gumption and hope to emulate it, even while working within to a plan that is much less restrictive.

It’s also the “Stick’n'Twig Diet” because I chafe at some of the happy-clappy talk I’ve come across in regards to eating — you know, the sort of language you might come across in magazines aimed at an “Eat Pray Love” kind of audience. (Always with, “It’s not a diet!!” *twinkle* *sparkle* “It’s a way of life!!”) This not-a-diet diet culture bugs me. That stuff reads to me much like virtue language, which I grew up with and learned to thoroughly loathe. You know: good food! bad food! sin! guilt! woe! Except now it acquires a sort of psychobabble/enlightenment overlay. You know, I’m just losing weight. It isn’t a journey into wholeness. I was plenty whole to begin with.

I have to say, it also annoys me when I read, “You know, all that weight didn’t go on in a matter of weeks!!” Yeah, uh, thanks for the reminder that it’ll take a while to take it all off, but in my case, yeah, it kinda did. Triple irritation points if this is couched in language that implies that I have had a life of sinning but, if I am willing to devote my life to reverent obedience to the wisdom of my nutrition guru, I can be redeemed. Ugh. Ugh.

More subtly, I feel that I’d be selling myself a bit short if I started in on how I was adopting a whole new lifestyle. Not to blow my own horn, but — oh what the hell: my natural eating has been brilliant. Yeah, I had my mild fluctuations within roughly a ten-pound range, but in the grand scheme of things, my body’s food intuition has historically been pretty awesome under normal conditions. Consider: I had a disabling case of chronic fatigue syndrome and didn’t leave the BMI’s “normal” range; from what I can tell, that’s not usual. While I do have some old habits* that I want to return to, I really don’t think I have a lifetime of bad habits that I must overcome and jettison. It’s more like I’m choosing the subset of my habits that’ll do me the most good.

No, I respect my body’s intuition. I’ve been lucky. Given enough money for groceries and the absence of crushing stress, my appetites tend to be for pretty healthful foods in amounts roughly appropriate for homeostasis. It’s just that homeostasis isn’t the plan right now.

Calling it a diet — that’s just what works for me, with my own history and the particular ways in which my own psyche is torqued up. I think almost everybody is weird about food, weight, and weight-loss. You’d have to be pretty emotionally heroic not to be, in this culture.

* I do love those tomato-based dishes. A nice spicy batch of chickpeas and cauliflower smothered in a chunky, oniony tomato sauce redolent with turmeric and cumin… Yum. Sorry, Josh. You don’t have to eat any.