Weighty Matters

This morning when I was getting ready for work, I had a random thought.  Is happiness a conscious choice?  I almost immediately discounted the notion because next thought was that I couldn’t imagine that someone would choose to be depressed, sad or otherwise not happy.   Then I thought about clinical depression as an illness and decided that happiness couldn’t very well be a non-illness.

Then I decided that I’d done enough deep thinking in the first 15 minutes of being awake and, perhaps, I should hold off until I’d had a cup of caffeine tea.

I had a busy day today with some ups and downs.  I knew ahead of time that we would most likely head out for a manatee rescue.  I love manatees and hate that they frequently are hit by boats. I relish that this work is part of our mission because, hey, how many jobs are there where one can say that they are directly helping an endangered species?   This morning I pinballed between opposite emotions.  I was sad that there was a manatee that had been hit, happy that our team was going to help, sighing because I’d be out of the office all day on the rescue instead of tending to the list of projects on my “To Do” list, happy because I’d be out of the office today helping a manatee.  Later on I was happy because we were successful (The little guy is already at a place receiving treatment!), bummed that it took most of the day, happy because we got photos and video out to the news, wistful that we didn’t get the true “money” shot.

I also didn’t get done early enough and had to miss my Tuesday evening Zumba class.  Even though I fully accept what the priority needed to be, this made me mega cranky.

How did all this emotional variety affect me?  Well, on the way home I really, really, really wanted chocolate.  I didn’t give into the temptation but drove home, let out the dogs, and changed into my pajamas.  Not only are these garments, cozy, comfy and nurturing, but I’m also a lot less likely to go through the hassle of changing back into my clothes and going out for a sugar rush.

While that is a positive check in the successful strategizing column, the good control has not alleviated my crankiness.    I just asked myself, “Now what?  Are you going to be pissy all night?”

That is the question.  I’m back to the pondering with which I began this morning.  Is happiness a choice?  Honestly, I don’t think so.   It’s not like I can toggle the switch and go from cranky to happy with a single flick.  I can, however, be willing to work toward it.  That’s the choice I can make.  Here’s how I’m going about it.  I made a cup of my favorite green tea (Tazo Zen).  I’m going to stretch out in my recliner and watch some television for awhile and not dwell on the more “downer” aspects of my day.  I’m going to choose to have a better attitude for the rest of the evening and then treat myself well with a relaxing hot bath.

Maybe there’s no guarantee, but it has to be better than dwelling or doing nothing.

I just heard that today is the annual Great American Smokeout — the national day to encourage smokers to quit.  I’m not going to preach at those of you who smoke.  I’m also not going to judge.  God knows I spent 53 years in the grips of an eating disorder, wrecking my health with obesity.  I have no room to judge.

I am, however, going to tell you a story about a wonderful woman.  This woman was a sweet, loving, compassionate, fun, caring darling.  Everyone who knew her loved her and she had a gift for loving them back and making everyone feel special.

She was born in 1925 and when she was in her late teens and 20s, the world didn’t really understand how horrible cigarettes are, the damage that smoking them does to our bodies, and the diseases and conditions that smoking can cause.

This woman, like most of her contemporaries, smoked for decades.  Oh, as time went on and we learned more about the health risks of nicotine, tar and the other nasty crap in cigarettes, she tried several times to quit.  She’d have brief periods of success but always went back.  In the 1970s, she developed peripheral vascular disease.  Plaque built up in her leg arteries and it hurt her to walk distances and began to impact her ability to play tennis — an activity that she loved and participated in several days a week.  She eventually had to have bypass surgery on her legs.

She was a beautiful woman but smoking took a toll.  Her skin began to thin.  Between that and the blood thinner medicine she needed to take to fight the plaque build up in her legs, if she even slightly bumped her leg, the skin would tear and she would profusely bleed.  She’d bruise on almost a thought.

But this wasn’t the worst of it.  Back in the early-to-mid 1990s, she actually managed to quit smoking for a few years.  Unfortunately, it was too late.  In 1997, she developed a cough that wouldn’t quit.  She thought it was a cold that developed into bronchitis.  I remember telling her that she needed to see a doctor and get treated so it didn’t progress into pneumonia.  A week later I got a call from my brother.  Mom had called him from Florida.  She’d begun to cough up blood and was at the hospital.

I flew down the next morning.  Within a couple of days of testing, we learned that she had a malignant tumor in her lung — a squamos cell carcinoma.  Ten days later, when she went to the hospital to get the port put in for chemotherapy, she suffered a stroke.  Her carotid arteries were severely clogged.  They “rotored” them out.  The stroke left her aphasic.  She had trouble sometimes connecting what she wanted to say in her mind with the actual words.  It also cut her vision field off to the right.  That quickly she went from a completely independent woman to one who could no longer drive her car and needed physical therapy to build up her muscle and motor skills.

This was all in January of 1998.  Over the next several months, amid the chemotherapy treatments and radiation therapy, she suffered one or two additional strokes and developed a seizure disorder that required a cocktail of medications.  We made seven or eight emergency trips to the E.R., all of which required additional hospitalizations.  She spent six weeks in the rehab facility getting back on her feet from a stroke.

We learned in August that the treatments had worked and the tumor in her lung was gone!  This news gave us great hope and we knew we could deal with everything else, if she could continue to live cancer free.

In September, the doctors discovered a tumor in her brain.  We were going to try a then-new treatment of pinpoint precision radiation.  Before that could happen, Mom’s body had had enough and different systems began to slow.

As difficult as it was to accept, we knew that there was truly nothing more that could be done that would save her life or prolong it with quality.  We had to make the shift to providing her with as much quality of life as possible while easing her through the last months of her life.

My darling, sweet, wonderful mother died on November 13, 1998 at age 73.  There has not been a day since that I haven’t thought of her with love and missed her.  I’m crying now as I type.   You could say that she died from cancer and strokes.  I say Mom died has a result of a 50 year addiction to cigarettes.  Every thing that she experienced was a result of smoking.

So that’s the story.  If you smoke, I hope that you will consider quitting.  As difficult as it is, it’s possible.  I can testify to that.  I started when I was 16 years old.  This year marked the 26th anniversary of the day I quit.  I have never once picked up a cigarette since.  There are a lot of tools and programs that can help.  For the sake of your health, and the sake of the people who love you and will miss you if you die, please quit.

There are a lot of ways for me to think about my journey through weight loss toward a healthy, more fit life.  I just said one — that it’s a journey.  I use that many times.

I also think of it as a battle.  I’m in a fight for my life.  I like considering myself a warrior for my own well-being.  It makes me feel like I’m powerful and strong.  Building on my last couple of posts and also thinking of the personal story Pink Pelican shared in comments, I think I’ve geared up for a fight.  Who’s the opponent?  I am or, at least my old self and lifetime of disease and poor eating habits.

Nobody can go into a battle unarmed and expect to win.  I’ve got a number of different weapons in my arsenal.  Despite a lifelong history of yo-yo dieting with great weight loss followed by great gain, this time is truly different.  My number one weapon is my weight loss surgery.  A severely restricted stomach is a great tool.  There’s a definitely limit to how much I can eat. and that’s enormously helpful.

The second weapon overall is my earnest desire which fuels my willingness.  Recovery from super obesity and eating disorders is hard work.  We truly need to be willing to go to any lengths to achieve recovery.   I have that willingness even when the old diseased thinking tries to suffocate it.

The third weapon is a good food plan.  If you don’t have a plan, a strategy, how can you even go into battle and not get creamed?

The fourth weapon — my commitment to exercise.   Keep moving, no matter what.  I am not digging in to defend my position.  Instead, I’m on the march, taking the fight to my opponents of laziness and immobility.

Weapon number five is knowledge.  I’m knowledgeable about what I need to do and how to do it.  I’m not flying blind.  Whoever said “knowledge is power” knew their stuff.  Now I do too.

Weapons two through five are super important, make no mistake.  They’re the things that I need to deploy into combat and they’re mighty soldiers for sure.   However, without the stomach surgery and the sixth weapon, the other tools on their own are not enough.  They need something else.  That’s why I think that weapon number six is the one I really need to keep active in my arsenal if I’m going to have long term success.

That tool is self-awareness.  Denial of what’s really going on can undermine the best effort.  It will torpedo the steadiest ship.  Not being mindful of my own behavior and my past habits can lead to the entire strategy falling apart.  It can defeat me regardless of any other thing I try.  I work really hard to stay self-aware and to dig deep into my history and previous habits.  This blog is a fantastic tool for helping me process everything and build onto my self-awareness.  The more that I know and understand about my disease and what contributed to past failures, the more prepared I am to not fall victim to those things again.   Self-awareness shores up everything else and makes the other tools that much more effective.

I’m in it to win it.

So, that’s my arsenal.  What weapons do you stockpile and put to work in your challenges?

I’ve been thinking even more about my mind set and reaction after Friday’s doctor appointment.  Thank you for your comments.  They helped me with the process.

This morning I realized that underneath the upset/concern/disappointment of not losing weight faster the last month or so, lurks fear.  It isn’t the weight loss rate that’s really bothering me.  I’m really still terrified that, ultimately, I’m going to screw up the whole process and eat my way back to super obesity.

For all of the hard work and great progress I’ve made with my diseased thinking, compulsive eating disorder, and messy emotions, the fear doesn’t really disappear.  It goes away for awhile or lies dormant, but eventually returns.   It’s like Haley’s Comet, periodical cicadas and the chicken pox virus that later manifests as shingles.

My fear that at some point I will lose my battle against my disorder, stop eating healthy and according to plan, stretch out my stomach sleeve and eventually gain back all that I lost is not inconceivable.  I’ve been a yo-yo dieter all of my life.  Over the years since I was a young girl, I’ve probably lost more than 300 pounds — not counting the current weight loss of almost 125 pounds.  50 pounds here, 60 pound there, 100 pounds in the early 80s . . . I dieted off big chunks at a time, only to eventually gain them all back with extra for good measure.    There’s precedence.

That’s what the slow down signalled to me.  Instead of an “Ah Ha”, I had the big “Uh-Oh” moment.  Worry and fear seized me in their suffocating grip and refused to let logic and reasonableness breathe.  Immediately after, this triggered an almost overwhelming desire to gorge on carbohydrates — the very food items that I’d just been told I needed to scrupulously restrict.

Honest to goodness, this process sometimes makes me want to act in the most unreasonably destructive ways.

Thankfully, amid the moderate freak out, I remembered that I always have the power of choice.  I can want to do any number of unhelpful things, but “wanting to” and “acting on” are vastly different.  I can want to overeat and choose not to.  I can want carbs and eat protein.  I can want to lie around like a hybernating bear and still choose to tie on my fitness shoes and move.

Yesterday I woke up still feeling emotionally rocky.  I knew a workout would help so I went to Zumba class.  I already had some wonderful spa services scheduled for later in the day.  The timing could not have been better.  I came home after Zumba to shower and ate some Greek yogurt before heading to the salon.  Once there I gave myself over to the complete pampering of a manicure, reflexology treatment, facial and pedicure.  What was great for the body was incredibly great for my mind too.  I came home relaxed and more at ease in my emotions.

I took it easy for the rest of the day, ate reasonably, and went to bed early.  Today I had my fear realization even before I got out of bed but I was able to ponder it without freaking out even more.  I got up and dressed and took the dogs for a morning bridge walk.  (Today for the first time we made it a full two miles.  Nat and Pyxi are now, pardon the pun, dog tired.)

All in all, I feel much better.  I’m not going to give into the fear to the point where I sabotage myself.  I’m going to be loving but honest with myself in my food plan.  I want weight loss more than I want extra carbs.  The most important thing for me to remember is that I am not at the destructive mercy of my eating disorder.  I have the power to stay healthy and never go back to the super obese person I used to be.

This is not a post-election commentary.  I’m happiest that it’s over and am actually holding out hope that all of the elected officials commit to working together to solve issues instead of putting out roadblocks, obstacles and gridlock.  Okay, maybe it’s a teeny bit of commentary to lead into my main musings for today.

A couple of months ago, I reached my saturation point on the nastiness spewing out of my television set and on my Facebook page.  I got fairly good at tuning out the tv campaign ads.  It was harder to skip posts by friends and acquaintances.  It got so bad that I finally made the decision to unsubscribe from the people who posted one vicious, negative thing after another.  I didn’t “defriend” them; I just adjusted the settings so I didn’t see their posts.  Maybe by doing so I missed out on other fun stuff, but in the long run, this was a wise choice.  I was much happier.

Today there appears to be even more nastiness making the rounds.  I unsubscribed a few more people.  Taking this action felt a lot to me like I was helping out my own happiness.

It strikes me that we don’t protect our happiness often enough.  This doesn’t mean being selfish, grabbing our happiness at the expense of others.  I think there is plenty to go around.  I also believe that happy begets more happy, so by protecting ourselves to foster joy, we actually till the ground to grow more.

With this in mind, I’m going to be alert for additional things that I can do to help out my happy.  It might mean making time to catch up with a friend on the phone, or shutting off the tv and taking a relaxing bath.   On days when I have a lot of errands to run or other responsibilities, I can make sure to schedule in “me” time and indulge in something that makes me smile — like sitting on the porch hugging my dogs for a few minutes or going for a walk.  One of the local florists sells a $5.00 weekly special bouquet.  It’s always a gorgeous mix of flowers.  That’s a great happy-boost.

Just like I already know to guard myself from getting too hungry, angry, lonely, tired or stressed (H.A.L.T.S.) in order to avoide compulsive or distructive eating,  protecting and nurturing my happiness caids my daily recovery.  Setting boundaries for how much icky crap infiltrates my life qualifies.  I support everyone’s right to their opinion and political views.  I also support my right to ignore it when negatively expressed.

What can you do to help out your happy?