Weighty Matters

. . . that I’m really hard on myself sometimes.   I’m sort of a sporadic perfectionist.  Marti, who comments here sometimes, and I have known each other about 50 years.  She has said that I’m a type-A personality.  I don’t normally cite Wikipedia as a valid source, but this appears to be a pretty accurate description of Type A:  “. . .ambitious, rigidly organized, highly status conscious, can be sensitive, care for other people, are truthful, impatient, always try to help others, take on more than they can handle, want other people to get to the point, proactive, and obsessed with time management. People with Type A personalities are often high-achieving “workaholics” who multi-task, push themselves with deadlines, and hate both delays and ambivalence.”

Type B people are supposedly the “. . . perfect contrast to those with Type A personalities. People with Type B personalities are generally apathetic, patient, relaxed, easy-going, no sense of time schedule, having poor organization skills, and at times lacking an overriding sense of urgency.

Based on this I’m more A- / B+.  I can be very laid back and procrastinate with the best or worst of them.  I’m organized in my own fashion when it comes to tasks and projects, but my office overfloweth with piles of unfiled papers.  Status conscious?  Not so much.  Low resistance for dithering — absolutely.  Apathetic?  Rarely. High achiever — at least in the workforce.  And so on and so on.

I do know that I have more patience with someone else’s screw ups than I do with my own.  It’s like it’s okay for someone else to be human and make mistakes, but I don’t tolerate it so much in myself.  I’ve written before about my less than stellar performance in college, but when I graduated and went to work I was super responsible, productive and driven to be the best copywriter that radio station had ever hired.

Even before that, when I was a teenager and we had some issues at home with ill grandparents, my mom developing alcoholism, and other stuff, I had the reputation as a champion coper.  No matter what, I could handle it.

I’m proud of the job that I do and always, always, always want to do it to the best of my ability — and I consider my ability to be pretty high up the scale.

So it puzzles me how I could not drive myself to achieve a healthy weight for most of my life.    I wonder if, deep in my subconscious, overeating became my outlet.  Perhaps when I was a teenager, instead of always being proud that I could cope so well, my folks should have stopped and said, “But is it fair to ask her to cope with so much?”

On top of the Type-Aish overachieving stuff, remember that I also battled horrid body image and low self-esteem.  I think to some extent, I used overeating and being fat as a way to invalidate myself.   It occurs to me that the self-esteem issue made it a challenge to accept my strengths, creative abilities, and successes.  The same time that I was working so hard to measure up, inside a fearful side of me worked to demonstrate that I never would manage the task.

Thinking too highly or too little of ourselves isn’t healthy.  Balance and objectivity about our qualities — both positive and negative — keeps us on an even keel.  It’s good to take responsibility in appropriate measures, but harmful to beat ourselves up over less than optimal results or situations.  I’m not saying that we should be egotistical and arrogant, but at some point in our lives we should own that which is fabulous about ourselves.

Several years ago, I was introduced to a quote by Marianne Williamson.  (At the time, it was attributed to Nelson Mandela.)  It reads:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

It occurs to me that I need to study on this some more and find that balance.   It’s okay to be imperfect.  It’s perfectly okay to not beat ourselves up over it.

Do any of you watch Chopped on the Food Network.  Chefs have limited time to make dishes out of surprise ingredients.  It starts with four chefs each making an appetizer.  One gets chopped so the remaining three move to entrees.  The final two each make a dessert.  The winner gets $10,000.

They don’t know in advance what each round’s basket will contain in terms of the ingredients they must use, supplementing them with a wide variety of other things in the pantry and refrigerator.  I have to admit that the show often includes ingredients I’ve never even heard of, let alone eaten, and I sure as hell don’t think I could decide how to incorporate some of them into a tasty dish in twenty minutes.  (That’s the typical amount of time for the entree round.)  This competition fascinates me.

Tonight I sort of had a Chopped moment.  This morning I remembered that I had a package of ground turkey in the fridge that I’d planned to make into meatballs for dinner.  I knew I had to stop at the supermarket on the way home from work to get milk, an onion, and a green pepper for the meatballs, plus a few other things.  I’m sure this would have been a perfectly tasty meal, but by the time I left the office, it all felt sort of boring.

I didn’t want to waste the turkey, however, so I tried to think of options.  Chili maybe?  Nah, that bored me too.  Then I thought about meatloaf.  Yes, meatloaf could practically pose as a synonym for dull and unexciting, but I wondered if I could jazz it up.  For some reason, my recently discovered love for sauteed baby spinach came to mind.  That might add something interesting flavor-wise to the meat mixture, I thought.  It would also help me incorporate more vegetable matter into my diet.

At Publix I picked up some organic baby spinach and an onion, but opted out of adding green pepper.  I got home, pre-heated the oven, and crushed some garlic into olive oil in the fry pan,  heating it up before adding the spinach.  While that cooked down, I opened the fridge to pull out the meat, an egg, and the milk.  That’s when I spotted the fresh chunky salsa.  Hmmm.  What would that do if I added it to the mixture?

About this time, I heard the voice of the Chopped host, Ted Allen, in my head intoning the instructions he gives to the contestants each week.  “Chefs, please open your baskets.  For your entrees, you must use . . . ground turkey. . . baby spinach . . . and salsa!  Your time starts now!”

I didn’t have the time pressure on me, but I dove into the preparation.  I sauteed the spinach as the aroma of garlic infused the air.  I broke the egg into a measuring cup and topped it off with some milk, then beat the two together before pouring it over the meat.  Breadcrumbs provided binder.  From the pantry cabinet, I randomly pulled out a variety of dried herbs.  When the spinach was finished, I chopped it with a mezaluna and stirred it into the meat mixture, then added a couple good scoops of the salsa.

A quick spritz of olive oil spray prepared the pan and I patted and fondled my creation into a rough loaf shape and slid it into the oven.   My dinner was officially cooking, but I had absolutely no idea how it would taste when finished.  I hoped that the spinach and salsa would give it flavor and also keep the mixture from being too dry, but who knew if I’d be successful?

An hour later, it was time to find out.  I let my loaf rest out of the oven for a few minutes.  (Let my loaf loaf?)  It looked okay, but the proof would be in the tasting.  Eagerly, I cut off a slice and took my first forkful.

YUM!  It was everything that I hoped for, and a little more.  Moist, tender, and with a melange of flavors that made my taste buds smile.  Or they would if taste buds had mouths and teeth and the ability to demonstrate facial expressions.  Pssshaw — a technicality.  The point is that my spontaneous creation was delicious.  I savored every bite and then happily wrapped up the rest for leftovers that I will enjoy again this weekend.

It’s really cool to realize that only being able to eat a little bit doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy cooking.   Experimenting isn’t ruled out.  In fact, I think I’m encouraged to try out new ideas more often.  With a little imagination, I came up with something that tasted good and was fairly healthy with reduced fat and calories, and nutritious veggies.  Who knows what I might come up with the next time that I improvise?

So go ahead and play with your food.  The results may surprise you!

I’m a little older than some of my friends.  I hit a few medical milestones ahead of them.  Lovely experiences, like having a colonoscopy when I turned 50.  One of my friends  commented to me about liking the fact that I went first so she could learn about when it was her turn.  I joked that I felt like a canary in the coal mine — going into these experiences first to sniff out potential problems and warn my friends what to expect when it was their time.

As you might have guessed by the way that I write about the surgery and everything connected to it, my recovery, my eating disorder, my history, etc., here on the blog, I’m pretty comfortable talking about this stuff.  Honestly, doing the blog has helped with that comfort level.  I don’t mind being open and if a conversation goes overly long or heads into an area that I feel is a little too intrusive, I’m also comfortable saying so and changing the subject.

Since the operation, I’ve had a few people, including friends ask me for personal reasons about the surgery and life since.  They are also obese and are thinking of having surgery themselves, or someone they care about is obese.  I’m glad that they feel comfortable asking me about my experience.

Taking this action can be a big, scary, thing.   I was afraid for years and strongly resisted.   When I had my epiphany a year ago and decided that I needed to now pursue the surgery to rescue my life, I wish I’d had a few people I knew that I could talk with and ask questions of to help me in those early days.   Instead I dove into research the best way that I knew — the Internet.  There was a lot of confusing information but I soon lucked out and hit ObesityHelp.com and its forums.  Those forums were populated by people who had either had surgery or were in the process.  I soon learned that there wasn’t a single question I could think of that someone couldn’t answer — either from the benefit of their own experience of because they knew a great resource for the information.

I wish I’d had a few personal canaries to talk with about weight loss surgery, but at least I had the forum folks.  By sharing their stories, they taught me about a lot of things I needed to know before, during and after.   I’m still learning.  It reminds me a lot of OA where I sat in rooms as a complete, confused newby and gratefully listened.

Pink Pelican is a regular commentor at this blog.  She had weight loss surgery about six months before me.  I learn a lot from the things she says in her comments.  She might be pink and a pelican, but for me she’s become a bit of a canary, too.  I appreciate her knowledge a great deal.

I’m sort of in a reflective mood thinking about all of this tonight. I know without a doubt that being a canary for others is a good thing — for me and, hopefully, for them.   I’d just like to say if there are some of you out there who have questions, go ahead and ask.  If you aren’t comfortable doing so in the comments, send me an email:  mary @ mary-stella.com.

Everyone, please keep singing with me.