Fencing Bear at Prayer

So, I'm reading along in Prof. Boice 's book as I eat my strawberries and roast beef and ham and drink my beef broth and tea with half-and-half for breakfast , and here he starts talking about how strange it is that there are so few therapists actually working on understanding what we call writer's block when there are hundreds and hundreds of therapists for other anxieties and phobias. Why [he asks] do writing blocks remain largely untreated?  Why are most accounts of blocking and its treatment amateurish and less than credible?  Where else can we find similarly unimpressive results?  The answer to the last question is easy and illuminating--in traditional programs for weight loss in obese people.  Put simply, dieting generally leads to failed plans and even greater weight gains in the long run.  The reasons for this expensive failure are becoming more and more apparent.  For one thing, diets typically rely on external forcing.  For another, weight ...

It should feel more meaningful.  For the first time in my life, I have kept a Lenten fast.  Six weeks plus a day or so (I started early) on 20-25 net carbs a day.  I've lost about two inches in my waist, likewise two in my bust, and (probably, it depends on how I measure) two in my hips as well.  I've learned to think about food in a wholly different way, as something nourishing for my body rather than as a drug for my mind.  I can recognize carb cravings now for what they are (a cry for help), and I know that I can survive without stuffing my emotions full of sugars and starch (although, full disclosure, those Atkins peanut butter bars really come in handy at the end of a long day).  And I look forward to the day when I can fit into my skinny jeans not with longing, but simply as a matter of course.  One day, I will simply be a different size. And that, it would seem to be, is that.  No great drama.  No great crises of self-realization whe...

According to at least two of the four women's clothing catalogs that came in the mail yesterday, I am already closer to a size 8 ( Coldwater Creek : 36"-30 1/2"-39", their size S; Simply Be : 37"-30"-38", their smallest size) than I thought I was.  Which is funny, because according to the size chart that I have been using for the past twenty years ( Tweeds ), I am still much closer to a 12 (38"-29 1/2"-40 1/2") than even a 10 (36 1/2"-28"-39").  Of course, Coldwater Creek caters primarily to women of a certain age (they also include Women's sizes), and Simply Be starts at size 8 and goes up to size 32 (61"-54"-62"), but I am still smaller (size-wise) than I thought I was even according to Athleta (8-10 36-37" 29-30" 38 1/2-39 1/2", their medium) and, lo and behold, Venus (10 37 1/2"-29"-40", their larger medium).*  Mind you, I still look more like the models in Simply Be, b...

Yes, yes, I know, it's getting boring.  Yet another post about the wonders of a low-carb diet.  But if you had good news, wouldn't you want to spread it?  My husband just smiles and rolls his eyes now whenever I start waxing evangelical: "I feel so good!  Look, I can fit into my jeans again!  I'm eating real food!  I have been able to distinguish cravings from hunger!"  And so forth.  I could go on.  Maybe I should.  Maybe this is too important not to post about over and over and over again.  Because, you see, I have found salvation.  Okay, maybe not in the way that we usually understand the word in English, but you have to forgive me, I'm too used to thinking in Latin.  And in Latin, the word that is typically translated "salvation" ( salus ) also means "health."  I wonder why?  Oh, right, because in Latin, or, rather, in proper Christian Latin, the salvation of the soul goes hand in hand with the health of th...

Okay, so that's a slightly blasphemous title, but I don't know quite how else to give this post the force that it needs.  Because, you see, I had an insight on Sunday after I wrote that post about not being enough of a bitch while I was on my way to the strip for my pools.  But you'll have to bear with me for a moment here, because it was one of those insights that, when it hits you, turns your whole world inside out after which, suddenly, you are looking at things with whole new eyes, typically weeping for joy.  (How's that for a teaser?)  And then the moment passes and you spend the next day or so too involved in life (fencing, talking with friends, driving home, recovering from the fencing and the talking and the driving) to be able to write about it, by which time (i.e. now) the full force of the insight has faded and all you are left with is the conviction that it is absolutely vital that you write about what you saw because therein lies the salvation of the wo...

It's working! It's working, it's working, it's working! You know how I know? Because I can fit into my fencing knickers without having to tug! Even better, I can fit into the heavy ones that I wear for epee that don't have any give. I can't wait to try on my stretchy ones for foil tomorrow. But, first, I need to write. Something. Anything to clear my head for the competition today. I am sorry that my bear's brain seems to be running to nothing but diet; my human brain has been carrying around all sorts of other thoughts these past couple of months. But somehow when I sit down to write here, all I can think of is, "Carbs!" It is a persistent demon. I can't say that I have been having cravings, but I have had regular nightmares the past week or so in which I find myself eating something that is not on my diet at the moment (if, perhaps, ever, now that I understand the effect that the sugars and starches have on me). It's odd, be...

It occurs to me, at the end of a sleepy day spent translating Walter of Wimborne's Ave Virgo Mater Christi ( watch this space ) and marking final exercises in rhetoric, that...I'm very sleepy.  Okay, so the point of trying to write right now was to take advantage of the few minutes that I have before going to practice to get in a "brief, daily session" of writing as per Robert Boice's excellent advice , but this is what tends to happen when I write when I'm tired: gibberish.  Or maybe I am just wonderfully low on carbs at the moment so I am finding it hard to concentrate.  No, I'm tired, and need to take another piece of Prof. Boice's advice and stop now before I work myself into tizzy.  Because, see, I have done a fair amount of work today, not a lot, not loads , but some, just as much as I promised myself I should do.  And now I want to stop and eat carbs.  No, I didn't say that.  I don't really, but I recognize the symptoms.  I'm tired...

I spent the past two days at a conference in honor of one of my most beloved colleagues, surrounded by good conversation, good friends, and lots and lots of--you guessed it--carbs.  It was hard, not in that grim, nail-biting way that counting calories tends to be, but in the sense of having voluntarily to excuse oneself from the party.  "No, thanks," I had to keep saying to myself as I walked past the mounds of muffins and croissants and cookies and M&Ms, "I'm fasting." And, indeed, I had been worried about this past week, what with the entertaining and traveling I was going to have to do.  I even succumbed on Wednesday and went and bought some Atkins bars.  For which, I have to say, I was very grateful on Friday and Saturday, when I might have been tempted to self-medicate against the anxiety of being among so many colleagues, students, and friends.  But, I am happy to report, I didn't (succumb, that is), and according to the tape measure and my ...

I hate 'em.*  Always able to wear whatever they want without having to worry about showing their knees.  Going through life oblivious to the shame of not being able to fit into their jeans.  Slender, powerful, desirable, loved.  Never having to worry about what they eat because somehow their bodies simply don't accumulate excess fat.  Flashing their legs as they stride past you in their skinny boots, skinny dresses, skin-tight jeans.  Or, worse, slinking past in their flowing skirts which they wear simply because they enjoy the sensation of fabric moving over their legs, not because they are trying to hide anything, like, say, their knees. Did I say I hate 'em?  All my life, they've been there, in their seventies peasant blouses, in their eighties business suits, in their nineties mini-skirts: mocking me with their knees, their waistlines, their ability to wear shorts without shame.  Every so often, I managed to catch up with them momentarily, b...

The Dragon Baby just caught and ate a baby mouse.  After wresting it from its nest out under a yucca plant on the Midway.*  While it was still wriggling.** I'm not sure how I feel about this.  But I bet you can guess how she feels! "Yum, mice!  When can we go hunting again?!" *At least, I think it was a yucca plant. It had long spiky leaves. **The baby mouse, not the plant.

I am happy that my brother can think of alcohol with nothing but the utmost indifference .  It has been over a year and a half since I stopped smoking (again) and I still have the occasional craving for a draught of that oh-so-soothing nicotine.  Not that I don't feel better for having stopped (or not continued to start back up again); nor do I miss at all the enslavement to the drug.  But.  The pleasure, the desire, the self-deluding "Maybe just one" are still there.  I know that I am not quite--and probably never will be--entirely free. It's a week since Ash Wednesday and ten days since my last carb fest.  And, indeed, I'm feeling great.  I was able to get into my "fat" jeans last night (i.e. the jeans that I bought a few years ago for wearing with long underwear, thus a size bigger than the ones I actually wore at that time; they were my regular jeans last winter and I haven't been able to get into them at all since last autumn); I am feeling en...

I didn’t sleep again last night. Perhaps it was the coffee that I had at dinner in lieu of the bread pudding that everyone else shared. But I didn’t want bread pudding or margaritas or rice or any of the other carb-rich options on the menu. It’s Lent, after all. I never give up anything for Lent, but this year I have promised myself to give this carb fast a try. And now I’m terrified. Terrified of the energy that I feel coursing through every cell in my body. Terrified of the seeming clarity that has come to my thoughts. Terrified of the anger that I feel at having spent so much of my life being meek and nice rather than calling people out for the way that they behave. Terrified of the willingness that I suddenly have for speaking my mind. Not, of course, that I have ever been exactly mute. But, I recognize now, I have been afraid, holding myself back for fear of hurting other people’s feelings. Not. Any. More. Apparently. Because all I feel right now is rage. Is thi...

Why am I not thin yet?!  I've been watching my carbs, eating more meat in the past week or so than I had all told in a good five or so years, waiting for the promised Atkins Edge to kick in and the pounds to start slipping away.  I've felt the fatigue at practice when my energy dropped; I've had the low sodium headache and cured it with beef broth; I've looked yet another helping of chicken salad in the face and managed to finish it even though I didn't really want to.  Why aren't I thin?  Oh, right, well, there were all those Cravory cookies over the weekend that my husband got me for Valentine's Day, but I didn't eat all of them.  I didn't even really enjoy them, not as much as I would have in the past when nothing was so intoxicating as a sugar-starch high.  And, okay, I'm still drinking orange juice first thing in the morning, just to get myself going for the day.  And we had spaghetti for dinner one night last week.  And I had cereal for ...

I feel that I need to say a bit more about why I am so exhilarated by what I have been reading in Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories ( not , as you know , by any means the first book that I have read on diet or the experience of being fat).  It is not strictly speaking because he is telling me something that I have never heard before.  Rather, it is more like the snowflake that starts the avalanche: I have been building up to this insight for several years now, and Taubes has put it all into perspective. Maybe, indeed, French women don't get fat because they concentrate on eating only the freshest, most appealing foods only when they are hungry--but how do you deal with needing to eat those pastries and cookies and cakes not because you're hungry, but because you have learned that eating all those yummy sugars and starches makes you feel better, at least for a little bit?  Maybe, indeed, slim people are better at paying attention to the cues that their bodies ...

Let me say it again : "Being fat is a metabolic--not a moral--state.  It has nothing to do with how much you exercise or how many calories you eat." "Yes, yes," you say.  "But so what?  It sounds to me like you've simply discovered the Atkins diet .  Do we really need to hear yet again about the evils of carbs?"  Subtext (as I hear it): "Isn't this just another gimmick like all of the other diets for sale?" Possibly, but I don't think so.*  Indeed, I am convinced not.  Because Gary Taubes (whose Good Calories, Bad Calories has been my mealtime reading for the past week or so, much to the chagrin of my family, to whom I keep quoting it) is not about diets; he is about the actual metabolism of fat.  And about how the science behind our understanding of that metabolism has been skewed for pretty much the whole of my lifetime against fat as anything other than a moral state. How many times have you heard the dictum that to lose wei...

Being fat is a metabolic--not a moral--state. It has nothing to do with how much you exercise or how many calories you eat.  In most cases, it is simply a consequence of eating too many starches and sugars, a.k.a. refined carbohydrates. Not fats, not proteins.  Carbs. Because eating excessive carbohydrates raises your insulin levels and forces your liver to have to work overtime. Which, lo and behold, makes you more susceptible to the very diseases (obesity, hardening of the arteries) that we have been told for the past thirty-five years are associated with eating too much fat.  Not to mention making you more susceptible to diabetes.  And quite possibly cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and other chronic "diseases of civilization" that only appear in populations when they start eating lots of sugar, flour, rice, and beer. This is because insulin is our bodies' primary regulator for storing fat.  When our insulin levels are high, they encourage our fat tis...

As a vegetarian, it always seemed to me that Cain got a bum rap (Genesis 4:2-16).  There he was, a "tiller of the ground," bringing to the Lord an offering of the "fruit of the ground," while Abel, a "keeper of sheep," brought "of the firstlings of his flock and of his fat portions."  "And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard." Which, understandably, pissed Cain off ("So Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell"), at which the Lord said to Cain: "Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen?  If you do well, will you not be accepted?  And if you do not do well, sin is couching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it."  And so, still incensed, Cain invited his brother Abel to go out into the field with him, where he killed him.  At which the Lord set this punishment upon Cain, that when he tilled the ground, it should no longer ...

"[Dichter] also understood that [American] consumers felt guilt after buying self-indulgent [ sic ] products, so marketers had to sell such things as tobacco and candy as 'rewards' for the deserving.  Much of this is taken for granted now, but when [in the 1940s] Dichter was whispering these sweet nothings in the ears of CEOs, they were revelatory." --" Retail Therapy: How Ernest Dichter, an acolyte of Sigmund Freud, revolutionised marketing ," The Economist (December 17th-30th, 2011), p. 122. Just in case you were wondering why you are so convinced that you "deserve" that cookie, even when you aren't hungry.  Or why you think eating will make you feel better when what you really need is a hug.

It feels almost miraculous.  Everything in my life (well, almost everything) that was holding me back (funny, I feel anxious just writing that) is now, well, perhaps not gone, but markedly better. I have a whole new set of tools for thinking about my eating and my body and my weight; I even forget to count calories most days (and know that it is better to stop myself when I start and simply ask whether I am hungry), and yet, I am eating better than I ever have and ( mirabile dictu ) enjoying my food. Our home is calm and happy, no longer stuffed full of junk we don't need .   Even better, I have gone shopping several times in the past month and come home without having bought anything because I couldn't find anything that was exactly right. I have established a regular schedule for working on my research and stuck to it for nine months even though I am not on leave.  I have made good progress on my translation , as well as researched, written, sent out for review,...

Eating something you're not really hungry for just because it is low calorie.  Or "a treat."  Or because you might not be able to eat later. Buying something that isn't exactly what you want just because it's not too expensive (a.k.a. cheap).  Or "on sale."  Or because it's as close as you think you are going to be able to get. Doing a job that doesn't inspire you just because it's a good opportunity.  Or pays well.  Or because you don't think anyone would be interested in what you really want.