I was standing in front of the mirror today and tilted my head to one side. I had to squint, since I wasn't wearing my glasses. I turned my body so that I was sideways to the mirror, rather than just facing it on an angle.
I pursed my lips together, my brow furrowed, as I strode quickly into my office, grabbed my glasses from atop the pile of assessment notes that I've been steadily cranking my way through, and went back in to look in the mirror again. Then I frowned. I hadn't been imagining it, after all. My abdomen was protruding past my breasts.
I know what this means, I thought, as I pulled my shirt up just to make extra sure. I wasn't making up that whole thing about my pants getting tighter.
At the beginning of the school year, I have the best of intentions. I am feeling good, rested, happy. My food is healthy. It's still sunny and reasonably warm outside. I'm drinking three cups of coffee a week, tops, and my water intake rivals my food intake. But then something happens -- usually work related -- that requires my attention and triggers my stress level into sky-high flight.
There are many levels to this pattern. I might deal with whatever is stressing me out on the emotional and spiritual levels, but by that point, I've somehow managed to forget that the way I stay out of the stress is strictly physical. Enough rest. Healthy food. Plenty of water. Not too much caffeine. Going to the gym and doing more than a 15-minute walk around the indoor track. My convenient forgetfulness -- combined with the sharp increase in the cost of produce, the fact that cold weather makes cold food less interesting, and the fact that I know the location of every Starbucks vendor within a 50-mile radius and how delicious whipped cream can sometimes be -- kind of sets me up to put on a few pounds.
I forget this, I swear, every single year.
It isn't really about the weight or the food for me. As a teenager, I was thin. I would have liked to have weighed a few pounds more, but I was generally fine with my appearance overall. I started to gain weight in college, and I was glad about this. But then it started to go too far the other way, thanks to intimate discourse with my Russian textbook and the Papa John's delivery guy at 2:30 a.m. on most nights of the week. Well, I take that back. It had to do with feeling most of the time like I was in way over my head at a private college 13 hours away from home, and believing that I did not have the emotional resources I needed to deal with such a huge life change.
There were several things I deeply understood about myself when I was 18 or 19, but I didn't realize that much of how I was thinking about my life at the time was contributing to my stress level, and that much of what I was worrying about wouldn't matter much in the long run. Like some new college students, I was terrified, and as badly as I had wanted to get away from home and try something new, I feared that my adjustment was going much more poorly than it had for my peers. I wasn't completely oblivious, but I didn't have a solid idea about how to comfort myself well through some of these major changes. I also didn't have a great sense of how prone my body was to chemical ups and downs depending on the food I ate.
I have learned a lot about this over the past 12 years or so, about my food, my body, and how I deal with my needs for comfort and care. Sometimes my strategies are effective, and other times, they aren't. When my belly extends past my breasts, I view it as my wake-up call that my self-care has somehow gone by the wayside, and probably not just physically.
I marched out of the bathroom, walked into the kitchen, and thought for a few moments before I told my Resident Partner-In-Crime that I was going to do a 7-day green smoothie fast so that he had fair warning. It wasn't urgent. It wasn't forced. It was simply an acknowledgment of the fact that it is time to step back from my habitual way of responding to life in the month of November and to pay closer attention to myself. This doesn't mean that I pay attention to the point of self-absorption, but rather that I notice how I'm feeling, how I'm thinking, and what things are in my power to address in a different way. I can't do this effectively if I'm distracting myself by knocking back a bag of smart puffs.
Stepping back to do something as simple as drink smoothies for seven days and get regular exercise feels like stepping into a minefield. I know it isn't, really, that I'll eventually feel much better like I have every other time I've set forth to interrupt an old pattern. It's also helpful to remember that I have the resources within and around me to deal with any emotional or spiritual fallout. I've acquired enough practice and experience with this over time to realize that I've done it before, and it didn't kill me. Quite to the contrary, it brought me to greater peace.
