Blend This! (Green Smoothies, Revisited)

 December

My name is Amy, and I have a pizza problem.  Oh, and a chocolate problem, a coffee problem, and an ice cream problem.

The problem is all of these foods are delicious (I am particularly indiscriminate about pizza), and more of them find their way into my body than is healthy and appropriate.  This became clear over the holidays this past year. 

In December, if I only had myself to think about, I would much prefer to curl up and hibernate a bit.  I'd probably spend a fair amount of time reading, writing, painting, and doing other soothing activities.  Instead, everything gets busy.  There are relatives that I want to visit, celebrations I want to attend, and gifts.  At work, there are projects to wrap up, paperwork to finalize, deadlines to meet, and projects to support students in wrapping up.  There are regular schedule disruptions at both home and work.

Chocolate and coffee were both available in abundance and, as I am fond of saying to my assistant at work, "Amy runs on Dunkin'."  She would respond by bringing out a bag of mini Snickers.  We would laugh, and then I would eat three of them in a row while staring despondently at the stack of science classwork that I'd just received and had no chance of being rendered accessible by third period.  It would then occur to me that it was only 9:10 in the morning.

With this kind of habit, you can imagine how much it might have been affecting my body.  I realized that, after the holidays, I would need a reset.  My old friend, the green smoothie, wandered back into my thoughts.

Contemplative Impulsivity

"Are you going to do the smoothie thing?"  The spouse asked me on January 3, steam rising from the dishes he was rinsing.

I shrugged as I opened the freezer, reached for one of the 15 chocolate products I had received for the holidays, then stopped.  I hadn't been fully aware that I had just grabbed a chocolate bar, but then I suddenly was.  I shoved the chocolate bar back in the freezer and heaved a sigh of martyr-like proportions.

"Yeah," I said.  "I have to do something.  I've felt like crap for over a month."
 
On January 5, I was on to the smoothies.  Twice a day, I had a smoothie and followed it up with protein.  I had forgotten how good they could be.  Spinach and mango and pineapple and coconut.  Kale and blueberry and banana.  There have been pomegranates.  There have been kiwi (and I don't like kiwi).  Oranges and grapefruit, apples and grapes, all a welcome respite from the onslaught of holiday stress.

Every night, I had whatever I wanted for dinner.  Snacks were herbal tea, water, water with lemon and ginger, fruit and veggies if I really needed them.  The chocolate bar in my desk at work taunted me.  The snickers bars...well, they snickered at me.  I ignored them.  I tried to blot out the smell of coffee while I was in the teacher's room.  By day 3, I noticed the hunger pangs between meals had stopped.  I had been fighting off some kind of illness that cleared itself up.  My energy began to return.  I discovered fried brussels sprouts and fell back in love with raw ice cream.    Even my dinners became healthier, as I started to focus more on vegetables and fruit, making sure to include some at dinner.

Diet and Habits

I'm on day 19, and I definitely feel better.  I plan to keep it going until February 5, at which point I will, with any luck, remember to keep on blending.  I don't know if other people are affected this strongly by changes to their diet, but I never fail to be stunned when I realize I've fallen into a pattern of eating unhealthy food, then change back to healthier eating.

The older I become, the more important it is to me to keep track of my energy and my health as best as I can.  This is not always easy, between working full time, caring for my family, and finding time to rest or socialize.  These days, I do not get as much exercise as I would like.  Yet I find that changes to the way I eat impact me quite profoundly.

I think it's important for people to find a way of eating that works well for them, doesn't feel overly restrictive, and helps them feel nourished and energized.  I may fall back into a pattern of eating unhealthy food, but fortunately, I know what to do to get myself back out of that place.  

Self-Care and the Green Smoothie Fast

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.