Chronicles of a Late Bloomer

I just walked out of a session with a teenaged client who cycles in and out of depression. Over the past 2 years, we’ve managed to even out her roller-coaster existence into a series of shallow dips. Without the drama of violent mood swings, however, she’s now being expected to perform at a higher level. This, she complains, is annoying. She no longer receives special treatment when she’s feeling this way.

I counter her frustration with a bulleted list (of course). After all — we’ve been all over the psycho-socio-emotional reasons behind her depression. Big insight wasn’t the ticket tonight. She and her parents have made immense progress already and I felt that all she needed was a little fine tuning.

I explain that when she slides into the now-shallow valley of her mood cycle, she needs to rally the troops and do extra things in order to take care of herself. She has to fortify her defenses against the gravity of her depression to keep from sliding further down — to put extra effort into treading water so she doesn’t sink. The list of reminders that we develop together is so basic, so obvious, and motivational that I have sat at my desk for 15 minutes, reading and re-reading it.

1. Watch for signs and take action ASAP.
   
2. Sleep as much as possible.
   
3. Eat well.
   
4. Exercise.
   
5. Communicate and express in healthy ways.
   • Talk to friends and family.
   • Ask for what you need.
   • Don’t be afraid of the hard questions.
   • Write in your journal.
   • Be creative and make things.

The curse of being a therapist: it’s really hard to take your own advice. The blessing: you get slapped upside the head with it over and over and over again.

Inhale, close your eyes, exhale, stretch… April is over and May is a New Day.

Sure, the world came crashing down around me in April, but I also allowed myself to make a few critical errors. Here they are, for your voyeuristic enjoyment. (It’s like watching a wreck, isn’t it? You just can’t look away, and the bulleted lists just keep coming.)

• I asked too many people for advice. As much as I love to get other people’s perspectives on things and challenge my own, the tension of conflicting advice added more sense of uncertainty and desperation to a month packed with Unknowns.
  
• I lived too much in the future. For me, one sign of psychic trouble is that I start making big plans for the future, and getting caught up in the minutia of these imaginary plans. If I catch myself looking at apartment listings for another city, then I know I’m in trouble.
  
• I ignored my basic physical needs. I didn’t sleep enough, exercise, go on walks with the dog, or consider the nutritional quality of my intake at all (just the bulk and quantity of it). As a result, my energy dwindled, I became mildly depressed, and generally felt like garbage day in and day out. At a time when I could have used clarity of mind and a surplus of energy, I acted as though my brain resided in a disembodied head. Not helpful.
  
• I did not self-care. In spite of constantly lecturing my clients about self-care, I utilized none of my self-care secrets this month. I didn’t journal, paint, garden, walk the dog, or do anything besides call and talk with friends and loved ones (see above re: too much conflicting advice). I know better than that.
  

The good news is that MAY IS A NEW DAY. Just for today, I’m going to try to correct my mistakes. I will take things one step at a time. I will eat a veggie omelette for breakfast.

* * * UPDATED * * *

Behold, success! Veggie omelette smothered in green sauce with a side of strawberries. I’m a little late for work, but screw it. I needed the omelette for my morale alone. Hello, May. Welcome to my home, won’t you take a seat?

I have continued to track my daily weight and average it for the past month, in spite of wishing that April would just die a horrible death and be done with it. I am an emotional eater, and I do pretty well when my stress level rides between 60% and 80%, but I have not yet built up alternative coping mechanisms for when my stress skyrockets past that point. This month:

1. I have faced the possibility of breaking up.
   
2. I have traveled to my parents’ house for a visit.
   
3. I have gotten behind on work to a degree proportional to the visit home.
   
4. I have attended more than a dozen job interviews.
   
5. I have survived a serious health scare.
   
6. I have managed my family’s feelings about a gay brother who just came out.
   
7. I have learned that my current roommate will be moving out and, without a definitive answer about jobs or locations, I am back in the business of finding a new roommate.
   
8. I have hospitalized 2 of my clients for suicidal threats.
   
9. I have braved some serious financial difficulties.
   
10. I have begun to consider serious future plans, including PhD applications, licensure, and moving. A big move. Like, a state-to-state move. Again.

Ironically, we could have stopped at number one and still capped out my 80% stress threshold, so you can see where things got out of whack for me.

Part of this whole project is about getting to know and understand my body better. How does she respond to illness? To stress? To happiness? What happens to her during my monthly cycle? How does she respond when I have good days or bad days?¹

Here’s what I’m learning.

• My body’s “natural” weight when I’m bingeing is around 340 pounds.
  
• My body’s “natural weight” when I’m not bingeing (but not really restricting my food and not exercising) is around 315 pounds.
  
• My body (or my mind? or both?) has some sort of plateau around 300 pounds that is hard to break through.
  
• My body does not seem to respond well to sugars, due in large part to the diagnosis of PCOS that I’ve had for over a decade.
  
• My body gains around 3-5 pounds each month during pms, then releases it plus a few more pounds if I can more or less stay on track throughout.

As a final thought, I’ll mention that the late-blooming orchid is still full of billowy flowers, which show no sign of so much as wilting. In the meantime, another of the orchids from the front window is sending out an arm full of buds.

This metaphor — of starting over with fresh starts and building on previous lessons in the meantime — is not lost on me.

1. By this, I mean emotionally good/bad days, and not good/bad eating days, since I don’t assign value judgments to foods. [↩]

Despite what they say, you can go home again. And again, and again, and again… in all the good ways and the bad. I’ve been struggling through the month of April. Warning signs have included: bingeing, isolating, complaining about constant overwhelm, obsessively planning for the future (instead of living in the moment), anxiety attacks, falling behind on obligations, a general sense of fatigue or malaise, money woes, a world overtaken by clutter, and — did I mention? — BINGEING.

I had a great time at home with my family. I thoroughly enjoyed my night out with the girls. I relaxed, I got hit on, I came home to a puppy so smooshable that you’d get a stomach-ache. Life isn’t so bad, when you think about it.

But signs of trouble exist elsewhere: (1) I have continued to pursue my current health scare with my doctor. (2) I have had multiple interviews for new jobs and will probably have one or more offers next week, yet still feel that I may want to stay with my current employment because (3) I have decided to pursue my PhD applications sooner than later. (4) I may have to move from my current home and that always stresses me out. (5) My brother recently came out to my parents and I have been working overtime to manage everyone’s emotions about that.

On top of everything, and probably most importantly, (6) my wonderful relationship with Record Store Romeo may be slowly winding to an end. I don’t know for sure about this, but two nights before I boarded the plane for home, we had our first, “Maybe we should just break up” talk. For now, things are sort of back to normal, but we both feel, to varying degrees, that we are living on borrowed time.

In fact, in therapy yesterday, we pinpointed this as the source of all the frantic, frenetic and destructive energy. I seem to be shoring myself up against what I anticipate will be the most difficult loss of my adult life to this point. In doing so, I have fallen back on my most familiar coping mechanisms: (1) numbing the pain with food, (2) obsessively, compulsively planning contingencies for all of the Great Unknowns of my immediate and far-off future, and (3) making ridiculous amounts of numbered and bulleted lists. Sorry.

I always gain some weight when I go home, but I have gained a total of 10 pounds in April. I am feeling it. I imagine people see me as a gigantic slug, which is funny because I’m still 15-20 pounds lighter than when I first jumped back on the health bandwagon this year, and at that time I didn’t think too much about it. Still, 10 pounds. Insert inappropriate cursewords here, in all permutations of maternity, blasphemy, and bodily functions.

What’s interesting to me is that as you wander through BlogLand, you pick up hints of similar slumps in others. Many of you are handling it better than I, with your fancy good attitudes and reasonable emotional reactions and logical thinking. OH THE LOGIC. Y’all are killing me. I’m not ready for logic. I’m still wallowing in everything, and not entirely sure how to get from here to there.

Dear April, you kind of suck. GO AWAY.

Tomorrow, I ditch all of this stress and frustration for a pseudo Spring Break in the mountains. It’ll be nice to see my family, celebrate my brother’s graduation, and work in half-a-day of lounging.

On top of everything, though (and, this is where you should be truly jealous), it looks like I’ll get to meet Rachel and Meta for dinner and debauchery! I’m a lucky girl.

Before I go, I have to go for more lab/blood work due to certain suspicious elevated something-something levels that showed up last time. I’m trying not to freak out too much about the fact that the doctor used the words “lupus” and “rheumatoid” and”neurologist” and “temporal arteritis.” Instead, I will just be excited about my vacation and let the rest of the pieces fall where they may.

Then, I’ll arrange them when I get home.

The unheralded arrival of my period this week, a full 8 days late, and the coinciding drop of 3+ pounds from my daily weight, have reminded me of some questions and thoughts that I’ve had for a long time regarding weight loss and gender.

I mean, I find it kind of amazing that, for 10 (or more, in this case) days of the month, my body is totally and utterly hijacked by a complex biological function. This function is beautiful, miraculous, ancient, mysterious, feminine, tidal, and blah blah blah… but the fact is that for a huge chunk of my life, it doesn’t matter what I eat. It doesn’t matter how much I do (or do not) exercise. No amount of drinking water, counting calories, or eschewing refined flours can budge the scale downward. Rather, I gain weight steadily. Sigh. Step off the scale. Keep on trucking.

Then, at the end of the jolt, the pounds drop off. Equally quickly. Sometimes (depending on how well I have fended off cravings), the scale dips slightly lower than it dipped before my period sent out its advance scouts. Sometimes not. Then, I get about 3 good weeks of eating right, exercising, and seeing some progress before the Hormones attack again.

What I’m trying to say is that the better I get to know my body and what happens to it from day to day, the more aggrivated I get by the traditional “eat less, move more” mythology. I don’t think it works that way for women — it certainly doesn’t seem to for me. I think it is a construct of the male-dominated collective, and the feminist in me snarls back from her dark corner.

As we know, the tradition of Western Medicine was largely founded and perpetuated by Old White Guys. These guys found a formula (and oh, how Old White Guys love formulas!) for weight loss: expend more energy than you consume. What a formula! It is as simple as it is obvious! It’s practically a couplet, and might as well rhyme for how it is memorized by school chlidren and housewives: Eat Less; Move More. For Old White Guys, it works perfectly. Almost every time.

The problem I keep coming back to is this: beyond the obvious accoutrements, men’s and women’s bodies are so different. We have different plumbing, chemicals, hormones, chromosomes. We have different functions, really. Purposes. Roles. People generally accept that, in general, even our brains are built differently, with complementary learning styles and strengths. The expectation that a simple weight loss equation could work so simply for both genders is really kind of ludicrous. To get depressed, disappointed, or to give up because our bodies aren’t responding like good little robots is natural, maybe, but unenlightened.

I’m thinking of examples from my real- and internet-lives that illustrate this well. How about Fred and Robin? I used to read both of their blogs religiously. I became discouraged, however, when it was clear that they were living similar lifestyles, yet Fred was losing weight and Robin wasn’t. Robin was exercising daily, taking 5-plus-mile walks, routinely recording what she ate, trying different programs, etc. They each indulged in one “free day” per week. And yet, Robin’s weight stalled. It soon became painful to read. She’d try new things. She’d increase her exercise. She’d decrease her intake. She’d give up the fight for a while and then she’d come back. She went to the doctor. She got sick, and got well. She tried thyroid meds and merrily bitched along. She continued to live her life, yes, but you couldn’t help but wonder — how hard was it to crawl in bed every night with someone who seemed to just eat less and move more?¹ Now, she is post-op and has lost half her body weight, but without the surgery, no amount of genuinely Eating Less and Moving More worked for her. It worked like a charm for her husband, though.

So, we hobble along. Some of us hobble along better than others, but even our big heroines (I mean, have you ever seen PastaQueen’s chart? Maintain, maintain, maintain, LOSE. Maintain, maintain, maintain, LOSE.) don’t seem to be falling into the “simple math” category. I’m thinking of certain other bloggers (Marla, Debbi, and others…) who are doing everything “right” and their bodies refuse to release weight. Maybe there are examples of men who have the same struggle, but I haven’t seen them.

For me, the math is somewhat more complicated. I have PCOS, and have for over 15 years. My body’s hormones, insulin, and other chemicals are all out of whack and I have to respect that, if I intend to live more healthily and build fitness. I see so many women experience a little hiccup in the system, set goals beyond their control and not reach them, and go through a period of maintenance or even gain. Often, women get frustrated, give up, and blame themselves for not being able to do the simple math. We eat less and move more, and we don’t always lose weight. Something must be fundamentally wrong with us, right?

Generally, we act as though our bodies should function as some sort of calorie bank — we want to make deposits and withdrawals and be able to balance the checkbook at the end of the month. All I’m saying is, maybe it doesn’t always work that way, in spite of what the Old White Guys say.

I, for my part, am going to give in to the wonderful, ancient, mysterious experience of living in a body made up of estrogen and ovaries and sugar and spice. I’m going to just keep nurturing myself and stop expecting my body to have read all of the textbooks. I’m going to fault the system, instead of myself, when my body doesn’t comply with Their rules. I’ve always been a bit of a rebel, why shouldn’t my body, too?

1. Note: I’m sure Robin would be the first to tell you, in her characteristically and wonderfully brash and honest way, that it was just fine and dandy thankyouverymuch… I’m mostly just talking about my own personal thoughts and reactions here. I’d have been pissed. [↩]

In other news which flies in the face of things I have been trying to think and do recently, my doctor told me this week that he thinks I am losing weight too slowly.

Excuse?

I had scheduled the appointment after reading about Hilly’s diagnosis of Pseudotumor Cerebri, because I experience many matching symptoms and I wanted my doctor to consider the possibility that my near-daily headaches, whooshing tinnitus, vision abnormalities, and vertigo/balance issues may all be related. Plus, it had been a while since he tried to sell me something or push a prescription which neither of us thinks I need so, you know, I was missing him.

First, he dismissed my complaint of “4-6 headaches per week” with a wave of his hand. “That’s not so uncommon,” he mumbled, and then made a mark on my chart. I imagined it to say, Lame fat girl imagines symptoms. Annoying. Without looking up, he said, “It’s probably just your high blood pressure.”

I sighed a little. “I don’t have high blood pressure,” I countered. That’s when he looked up at me, scanned my bulky, obese frame from tip to toe, and said, “You don’t?”

He didn’t say it with surprise or shock. He wasn’t asking a sincere question. He didn’t sound as though I had given him new information — information which, incidentally, he could have obtained through a quick review of the chart in his lap. He said sarcastically, as though he were dealing with a “slow learner” or trying to make a sardonic point.

I kept my cool, though. I didn’t take it personally, start crying, or grow indignant as I have with doctors in the past. Instead, I just held out my right arm as an invitation.

Generally people are surprised at how “good” my blood pressure readings are, given the fact that I am routinely 150 pounds overweight and exercise in spurts. Usually it hovers around 127/88. This week, as the doctor put down his stethoscope and rrrrrrrrripped open the velcro cuff, he hmmphed. “Actually, it’s quite low.” 110/65.

So, I got a referral to a neurologist and an opthamologist and the other thing I anticipated — a lecture about my weight.

He is pleased that my weight is trending down. That it continues to trend down. That it has done nothing but trend down since I first began seeing him last year. In the year before I met him, apparently he lost around 60 pounds. He did this in a very quick and manly way, by exercising 6 days a week and monitoring his ketosis.

“At your weight, you should easily be able to drop 2 pounds a week, if you just hit ketosis and stay there.”

Uh huh.

He continued, “If you do a lot of on-again/off-again dieting, one day on and the other day off, that could also lead to headaches.”

“But,” I countered calmly, “I’m not really doing that. I’m just trying to lose weight in a way that I think I can maintain.”

At this, he looked me up and down again, slowly, with a tiny little smack of disdain.

“Even if it takes you forever?”

Yes. Even if it takes me forever.

This morning, I had a call from the potential new employer with the perfect job. It was not a “Come on in for a second interview” call, as I had hoped, but rather an “Our Training Director has decided to change the requirements for that new job and, because you’re not yet licensed, you no longer fit our requirements and so we can’t offer you a job at this time” call.

I don’t feel so badly, because I know (as with all good breakups) that it wasn’t me, it was them. The director and the other potential supervisor repeatedly expressed sadness, stating over and over again how much they liked me and how well they thought I’d fit into the team. One even said that she was excited after my interview because hiring me (specifically me) would have solved a significant problem that they are currently having.

I know that they aren’t bullshitting me. I know because of the length of their messages, the regret in their voices, and their plea that I keep them in mind for the time, 3 years in the future, when I will qualify for employment under the new requirements. I also know because of the friends I have who already work there and have overheard lunchroom talk about me that they are being genuine. I know that this rejection isn’t about me.

But, it still sort of sucks. I have already had to curb 2 disappointment binges about it. Fortunately, I have curbed them. My period should start tomorrow. I feel that it will give me a clean slate in the weight loss department.

A small orchid garden sits above my kitchen sink, with half-a-dozen potted gifts from clients and friends. After all, who doesn’t love Trader Joe’s floral department for a last-minute present? The collection I’ve assembled is pretty broad in terms of color, size, and species — especially since I got them all for free.

Most of them bloomed last year, and have just been dwelling happily, if dormantly, in their sunny window sill. They accept their weekly watering, and I try to fend off the ant colony invasions as they come. They are quiet. They are not showy. Without flowers, they are a bit of an eyesore with their long scraggly leaves and lumpy, bumpy root systems.

About two months ago, one of the more exotic and strange orchids in my collection sent out a shoot covered in buds. It’d been nearly a year since the countertop garden had sported any flowers, so we were all excited to see the branch come to life. It reached tall — over 2 feet high and straight up in the air — and was soon peppered with 17 buds just ready to burst.

Within two weeks, the buds exploded into a cascade of fairy dresses, and I don’t think it’d be too dramatic to say that it made that corner of the kitchen very magical indeed. I gazed at them as I washed the dishes. I tilted the pot to and fro to get the best view of the blooms from day to day. And then, one by one, within the span of about 10 days, the flowers all…

Well…

They all died. Just like that — they burst into being, and then burned out just as quickly. The stems refused to shake themselves loose. In the end, I had to snip off the glorious stem at the base and put the whole plant back into hibernation until next February.

At the same time, another plant in the back corner of the shelf was quietly sending out its own growth. The nursery on the smaller, squatter plant drew less attention, and it developed slowly. It was so gradual, in fact, that I didn’t notice the new stem until its buds began to form. One morning, while doing the dishes and bemoaning the fate of our last 3 or 4 flashy flowers, I noticed the new branch and pulled the pot toward the sink. The span was much smaller, reaching only 8 or so inches long and thrusting out horizontally. It was much more unassuming than the first.

For its size, the plant appeared overladen with life. I counted carefully — 17 buds. An identical crop to its flashy cousin. Four baby arms branched off from the main stem, extending its growing potential front-to-back and side-to-side. Each of the offshoots birthed 2 or 3 buds as well, compactly spaced to conserve energy and share resources. I watched the new plant, and waited.

And, I waited. And waited. And waited.

Finally, weeks later, the first buds swelled with promise. I mentioned it to people in passing, expecting the same dramatic blooming as the speckled orchid — fast, furious, and fatal. Instead, I waited. And waited.

One day, the largest of the buds opened up its little mouth, as if to murmur an unceremonious “Huh.” The next night, I noticed that a petal — one little hand — was beginning to unfold. Would you believe that it was nearly a week before the entire bloom had opened and could collect sun for its sisters? And so it went, painfully, ploddingly…

…perfectly.

We get a new bloom now once a week or so. Some of the flowers are hidden, packed in tightly as they are, and they contribute more to an overall effect than the first orchid did. That orchid was a chorus of soloists, each vying for attention and straining for the sky. These flowers, though, perform as a choir — a billowy stretch of petals and stamens that harmonizes as a whole. The flowers are hardy, enduring, and strong. They will last up to two or three months, if I tend them well, and when they finally decide that they are done, they will shrivel only a little — like a sigh — and fall asleep.

This is a good reminder to me, as I reach the third month of these lifestyle changes and begin to lose stamina and enthusiasm. Generally, I prefer to take my time and patiently wait for an end product which will be satisfying, if not dramatic. Showy and flashy changes are enticing, but I don’t need to drop 5, 8, or 12 pounds a week. I need to learn to nurture and nourish myself in a healthy, sane way. I need to make changes that will last, not flame out and die within the first few weeks.

Yes, I could cut more calories. I could add in a radical exercise regimen and drink “meal shakes” and subsist on saltine crackers and, yes, that would help me lose weight faster. I might get more attention. I might have all sorts of crises of identity and health as well.

But, as it turns out, the kinds of changes that work for me are small, incremental, gradual, and painfully slow. They may occur without anyone noticing at all. But quietly, surely, they are building a new me. They are incubating new growth. They will be, I believe, more lasting in the end.

Today, I got sort of excited about this book, The Vice-busting Diet, based on the reviews over at Amazon. I was excited, that is, until I browsed through the first few pages and found the following quote:

The top three major diet vices that contribute most to obesity are sugary and/or soft drinks, fast food, and television. (page 8)

Well, shoot. I don’t drink soda, and haven’t for nearly 10 years.¹ I don’t watch television, and haven’t for over 3 years.² Since attempting to change the way I eat, I haven’t really consumed fast food, either. I had already identified it as my biggest food weakness and taken drastic steps to eliminate fast food from my eating plan.

So.

I guess all this proves is that we each have to write our own life-altering bestseller based on what works for us as individuals. I’m getting to the point where I’m pretty self aware. I’m better at pinpointing my own unique problems and developing strategies for overcoming them. In the end, the only life-altering program I can write is one for my very own self. Everything else is just platitude for the masses.

This week, my top 3 diet vices are:

1. Fancy restaurants.
2. PMS cravings.
3. Buying into the myth of easy answers and paperback cures.

1. I gave it up for Lent as a missionary and never went back. [↩]
2. Minus the incident a few weeks ago when my boyfriend (the movie junkie) and I hooked up the rabbit ears to watch the Academy Awards and snark about gowns and tuxes. [↩]