33 days of recovery!

I’m doing the recovery thing and it’s day 33 without flour, sugar and alcohol or bingeing and choosing instead to eat healthily – sticking to 1200 calories per day (if I don’t exercise) and 1250-1550 (for moderate exercise days and 1550-1800 (for 3 hour work out days). I use myfitnesspal to keep track of mycalories, carbs, protein, sugar, fat, vitamins, water and exercise and when I work out it adds more calories I’ve “earned.”

I joined the gym and I’ve been doing 2-3 hour serious work outs 4 times a week and on work days (I am up at 5:30 AM, out the door by 6 with a long commute, work from 8AM-6-7PM) then I stop at the gym on the way home for an hour and a half workout 3 x per week. I do try to skip a day, sleep in an extra few hours, take walks.

Today I had to rest my “muscles” so I danced in my living room to music but now that I am an active person my dancing is like its own little work out – it is pretty intense. I also did heavy house work up and down the stairs and lugged the vacuum cleaner every where and just kept moving so I guess that counts to at least not being sedentary.

I want to start swimming laps at the gym during off hours. I also want to join their yoga class although I have a lot of improvement to make before I am bendy again.

My work outs involve the arctic machine which has  skier/elliptical/stepper/climber modes so I just follow the fat burner, shaper and strength modes. I also use an intense cross trainer machine and the constantly revolving epic stairmaster that FORCES you to keep climbing the killer stairs until you shut the damn thing off. I walk on the treadmill because since I was a kid I’ve had bad knees. I can’t run. I really loved running but I had to give it up. Honestly even at my slimmest I have an ample, er, bosom, so I need an industrial strength sports bra I think if I try some light jogging. I’m built like a Mad Men extra, built for another era. Petite frame, ridiculously tiny hands, not tall, but not made for flapper fashions.

The machines have made me feel like I am firming up, tightening and lengthening all at the same time. I’m actually beginning to feel myself stride when I walk. I feel more balanced. I feel stronger. I’m losing weight but building muscle. 

I RUN and bounce up flights of stairs. Don’t get me wrong, I am far away from my fitness goal. But this daily activity and the prolonged work outs and the water drinking and the lack of booze, processed carbs, sugar and large food portions are filling me with energy and passion and striving. I am tasting life and I want more. I want to fill myself with lightness and heat and fire. I don’t want to numb myself with the opiates of the past.  

I honestly don’t think there is anything wrong with having a glass of wine when I reach my goal (I mean my tumblr is called champagne for crying out loud) but I personally cannot do this or achieve this without a full commitment. I’ve tried and failed too many times before. The flour and sugar binges just made me feel terrible and craving more. I was more bloated than a seventies Elvis. I just can’t tolerate it. I don’t want to go back to the flour and sugar. It affected my health (I found out  a genetic youth issue with cholesterol and triglycerides) which were horrific. I take a pill. I’m changing my life. I’m taking herbal remedies to lower these issues naturally too and I am going to be tested this week to see if I’m ‘normal’ and can go off the medication! Fish oil is also amazing. It’s made my skin glowing and clear and my hair is thick and glossy again.  

Exercise, prolonged, hard but not excessive exercise, has been such an incredible way to let off steam, let go of resentment and has been such a mood enhancer. I haven’t felt depressed since I started. Or frustrated. I feel like I have options and choices and attainable goals. 

Obviously I am going to have let downs, feel angry or sad or what have you, but I’m feeling my feelings and I am not afraid. And I consistently feel better and like I’m growing a tougher shell against the world while simultaneously feeling more connected to it.

I’m reading inspiring quotes, going to meetings, asking for help and I’ve stopped listening to my inner voice which has been seducing me for years to do nothing, to be nothing, to implode. 

They say it takes 90 days to form a habit. I’m on the road to that. I just have to keep plugging along on a daily basis. I’m focusing on a few key things in my life and on being a fantastic, more alive, freer version of myself. I’m not worrying about the other things right now. I have ‘enough on my plate’ for now. And that’s fine.

Reading the literature, attending meetings, no flour, no sugar, no alcohol, and lots of exercise and asking for help a hundred times a day

I was sick for six weeks of the summer and working a lot and I bounced back to two to three hour work outs and trying my best to balance life and work and I injured myself at the gym so now I’m stuck on the mend when all I want (and need) to do is move and burn off this renewed energy. So I don’t implode.

Which is what I’m want to do far too often in my life.

I’m always trying to out run the black wave.

This time I’m having to let it wash over me but I won’t swallow any of it no matter how hard it gets.
Or how many mistakes I make.

Picking up the pieces of the broken parts of your life isn’t supposed to be easy I suppose.

 

Day 13 in recovery

From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.

 

– Anaïs Nin

 

 

 

 

while listening to chopin

food plans and recovery

CEA HOW The upside to this food plan is it fits my health requirements and is a weigh and measure, disciplined diet with maintenance small portion whole grains. No white flour, no alcohol, sugar as the 5th ingredient or higher. 

The website is strong and the phone meetings are fantastic, well run and available every day. They utilize the tools of recovery.

The downside is they don’t have any meetings in my area – none – so I can’t have any face to face time to find a sponsor or keep a check on myself. I have failed to retain long term recovery partly because I avoided the meetings and didn’t claim my seat or make phone calls. Those actions cost me. It’s my go to response to recovery since I left it. I had some of the best, healthiest years of recovery from 1993-1996, when I was still a teenager. Then I hung on – barely – by a thread from 1996 to 2000/2001. It’s been very bad, a few meetings, lip service, unresolved resentments, a deep fear of the depression returning and comfort eating. A great weight gain, worse than ever. I had some success in 2011 but it was just the food, not recovery. In 2012 I lost weight and started exercising and feeling better. I abstained for a handful of months. But no recovery. I thought I could will myself, finally, into breaking the food problem. I didn’t think about what made me eat in the first place even though I was well versed in the why and the how of my disease. And I got cocky and I thought I could drink and eat again and some terrible stress and deaths and other life issues popped up and I turned to the negative relationship with food. I thought I was exerting my will over my life by not surrendering to a group or rules or a higher power. But I bow down to that voice inside of me ordering me to self destruct, to kill myself with food. I am on cholesterol medication. I am 100 pounds over weight. I am trapped in my body and in denial most of my my life. I eat to keep the pain at bay but it stopped working a long time ago because it began to create its own pain. Being fat, being an addict who is powerless every second of her life and has been giving into that addiction, and is not actually strong or independent in her “cups”.

I’ve been reading Overeaters Anonymous literature and I have taken the advice of people I love – one in particular, in Alcoholics Anonymous – who has made an intervention with me because they are tired of seeing me destroy myself under the guise of self protection.

People like me overeat to hide themselves from attention and to keep the dark folds of depression from blocking out all the sunlight of life. But a temporary feeling of relief just makes our lives darker and more remote.

I am tired of being blinded and stubborn but the strength I can gain in recovery is waking up each day reminding myself I *am* blind and stubborn in this area – so I *need* help. I can’t recover alone. I can’t. I cannot. Always I must remind myself of this. I must go to face to face meetings (big book, alanon, oa) and I must call 90 meetings in 90 days on the CEAHOW line and *actually* get a SPONSOR. I’ve been trying to do it without one for years and IT HAS NOT WORKED.

So the dilemma is I can’t go to face to face meetings in CEAHOW. I will have to go to “regular” OA meetings (which I respect greatly) but it was difficult for me to find a place their because of the lack of food plans and at times, long term recovery or clear lines of what we need to avoid for real abstinence. I am  not talking about perfection just a clearer line. I need rules to follow or I will do the most ridiculous, skewed food choices on my own.

Greysheet was powerful for me as a teen and I weighed 105 pounds for years on it. I however have some health issues and eating high fat animal protein and no carbs whatsoever is not recommended by my doctor. But I can eat flour bread and pasta and certain other “trigger” foods. So The CEAHOW seems to have the best of both worlds – very close to greysheet (protein, veggies, fruit, a little fat) with a little extra upon maintenance (small portions brown rice, a few 100% whole grains, sprouted flourless “bread”, legumes, unsweetened oats, more fruit choices, a tbsp cream for tea or coffee, a 1/2 cup unsweetened fruit juice) which would help my cholesterol and triglycerides issues. I’ve also begun exercising at my gym (joined it in June) and doing 45-75 minute intensive workouts 3 to 5 times a week. I need a little boost for the exercise and I see the CEAHOW as an option. I am just doing it now, today. And I am going to commit to actively find a sponsor – even if she’s miles away in another state – so I can being the tools of recovery. I came clean to someone about my struggle and my lies surrounding the  obsession with food and weight loss and trying to forget myself and I feel hopeful today. I just have to do something with this hope.

I also have a lot of work to do in the big book step study process too as I stopped doing my tenth through twelfth years ago with any honesty or accuracy. I need to write out a tenth it’s so long, so I think I’ll have to do a second 4th step of sorts and work with someone in the program I trust. I need to be open to this. I can’t keep putting this off for another ten years!

day one

step one

seeing what calories go into the weight loss portion of some popular items in my food plan

39 calories for 8OZ mixed salad

78 calories for 16 oz mixed salad

132 calories for 4 oz of tuna (canned in water)

72 calories for 1 cup cooked asparagus

130 calories for plain nonfat yogurt (1 cup)

86 calories for a cup of skim milk

172 calories for 2 cups of skim milk

491 calories in 1 cup of mung bean noodles (chinese cellophane)

70 calories in Raos marinara sauce (1/2 cup)

40 calories in 8 oz of chopped raw tomatoes

70 calories in a 1/2 cup of yukon gold potatoes

150 calories in 1 ezekial sprouted grain no flour tortillas

140 calories in 2 oz of chevre

70 calories in 1 cup of light vanilla soy milk

140 calories in 2 cups of light vanilla soy milk

160 calories (& 17 grams of fat)! in 2 tbsps of Brianna’s New American Dressing

meeting

I went to an O.A. meeting today and it was like coming home. It’s been time for a long time. Now what am I going to do? Go to as many as I can and do this thing.

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A few stolen moments in Italy…

In Rome… there are statues of angels, saints and devils peeking out of crevices, peering out of corners in churches and museums, leaning over flying buttresses, their eyes following me all over the city. Even a garden refuge on the ancient Aventine hill is filled with angels and symbols of the beloved dead.

The shadows hold secrets in the ancient stone walls down every Roman alleyway. I could walk all night through it’s streets. Come to think of it, I have.

I am a voyeur, a street photographer, a purveyor of candids.

Here lies one whose name was writ in water… dear Keats. I meditated over his grave and Shelley’s with some verse and later enjoyed tea at the same tea house they took tea and visited his house and deathbed. I followed the footsteps Oscar Wilde, the Decadents, the Romantics, the Beats and countless others.

 

When stranger meets strange

Just how does one start anew in the middle of some middling crisis years in the making?

I’m half convinced I am the perfect candidate for split brain consciousness. I am fascinated by Colin Wilson’s myriad takes on the bicameral mind:

A Criminal History of Mankind, page 148

It is important to grasp that boredom is one of the most common – and undesirable – consequences of ‘unicameralism’. Boredom is a feeling of being ‘dead inside’; that is to say, loss of contact with our instincts and feelings. Experiments with EEG machines have shown that when we become bored the right cerebral hemisphere begins to display alpha rhythms – the rhythms that appear when the brain is ‘idling’. Robert Ornstein, one of the pioneers of split-brain research, discovered that this happens when someone is doing mental arithmetic. It happens, in fact, during any activity in which we are not really interested. But if the right brain ‘idles’ too much, it goes to sleep. The psychologist Abraham Maslow described a case of a girl who suffered from depression and a sense of meaninglessness; she had even ceased to menstruate. He discovered that she wanted to study sociology and was being forced – by financial necessity – to do a boring, repetitive job. When Maslow suggested that she should go to night school and continue her studies of sociology, her problems promptly vanished. The boredom had caused her right brain to spend most of its time ‘idling’; as soon as she began to think in terms of purpose and motivation, she also began to feel great again. 

 

I awake the same way each day on the same side of the bed. I follow the same morning rituals of stumbling into the bathroom, deciding on just how awake I need to be for the day. How much reality will I let in like the light hitting me in the face just a little bit more cruelly than the day before? And just how far down am I willing to sink today? Will I be the failure, will I be the selfish child or will I pretend to be a winner? Just to see what that would be like for a lark?

Remember, I’m the next big thing in loserville, I thrive on making the possible … impossible. Each and every day.

I’m the pretty girl turning on herself, not realizing until it’s too late, I’m doing everything I can to become ugly. Match the inside out, turn everything upside down and make all those chances and wishes hard and shriveled regrets.

When was the exact moment I began to hate myself in that secret, sad, quiet way of mine? Was it when I first blurted it out loud to the neighborhood kids when I was ten years old and mother was on her way to the hospital, not for the first time?  

I hate myself. I hate myself.

No, you don’t.

Yes, I do. I hate myself. I have always hated myself.

Ah, so perhaps I always felt that way? I can’t pinpoint a precise moment of this feeling, this crawling feeling of dread and self doubt and black moods that’s been peering out from within.

I thought for years I’ve lived the life of an individual. I am free. I do what I want, when I want. I have little ambition. I cultivate small pleasures and life experiences. I am such a dangerous thinker. An outsider. I’m not afraid of the dark. I feel electrified in the heights. I will not be held back by the conventions of the all American suburbanites.  I refuse to worship another human being posed as the latest guru or any God for that matter. 

But to be perfectly frank I am my own worst enemy’s bitch. Because I lay at the feet of my own bad instincts. I scrape and bow before the bad thoughts, the crappy self image I pretend I don’t have except in moments when I lose my cool and can no longer hide behind the stoic face I’ve carefully built. As a child I learned how to figure out if the day was going to be good or bad by the mood fluctuations of my mother. Later I brought my human calculator into my difficult friendships and tumultuous romances. They were all difficult, they were all tumultuous. I was forever gauging my whole life’s meaning into the next five minutes with whomever I chose to love madly, deeply, terribly, at any cost.

I didn’t necessarily go for bastards or abusers, but I honed in on any sharply intelligent charmer with cold fish tendencies who saw me, who wanted me. The men weren’t so bad when I look at them collectively, but the (platonic) girl friends I’ve had were the viperous, controlling women I never could be, I didn’t want to be, but I never failed to befriend the biggest bitch in the room. The mass seducers, the women who fucked like men, the superficial, confident liars, the glittering girls who drank too much, who tried drugs, who annoyed me, who tired me, who taunted me. Oh, I got rid of them all eventually, but the damage was done. They added to my self doubt. They were the anti-me and yet they appeared to be far more successful in this mundane life stuff than me. I was ultimately the loser in the fight. And yes, it was always a fight. Every friendship, every boyfriend was a war to win or lose. And I always lost. That was the one constant in my life. A girl will grab onto whatever safety net she can get her hands on. And trust me, I needed all the safety nets I could hold. 

What is my biggest safety net now? Is it other people? Or is it a far scarier proposition? Is it chaos? I have somehow managed to build a large chunk of my life with a new family; my husband, his family, some of my extended family, a smattering of friends (not enough) but better than nothing, I have a university degree, I have travelled, I have a few middling talents, I finally found a talent I could possibly make money off of if I could ever get my confidence and focus to work together, I have a beautiful house, a job I like and financial security… I have love! But look at me, I compartmentalize my life. A “large chunk of my life” is filled with love and support?! What, not all of it? I must always separate myself somehow. Separate myself from the good and from the bad. Viewing life, viewing myself as beyond good and evil is the only great equalizer I have for perspective. Because I can’t seem to connect the dots to all the elements in my life. I mean I’m hardly living the life of Jean Rhys, more like the life of Riley… but in trying to lead an uncomplicated, surface existence I am in fact layering complexities in the form of neuroses. Everything is built up just when I want it smoothed out. I have no tools to deal with all this emotion. For feeling so out of control, so angry, so sad, so disconnected. The pain comes quickly now and it no longer digs at me, it tears. It rips. It leaves marks. I can’t erase the past as much I want to escape it, to forget it, to not be of it, from it, because of it. So I am writing about it in splintered posts, mixing memories with the impressions of now. Because trying to forget is second nature to me. And it’s what’s doing my head in. It’s the sabotage of the perfect victim.

I should have known by now I can’t hide from myself. My greatest frenemy. The biggest bitch of them all.