My Anchor

This week's Weight Watchers goal was to find an anchor.  The anchor could be anything - a word, phrase, object, etc - that gives you the motivation to stick to the Plan (yes, they do capitalize the Plan).  The last time I lost weight was around the time Alias was on the air.  I watched it religiously, and I had a bit of a girl crush on Sydney, the main character.  I just thought she was the coolest thing since sliced bread, and I loved that when her life kept - repeatedly - getting knocked all to shit, she didn't wallow (like I would).  Instead, she fought back, both literally and figuratively.  (Seriously.  The girl kicked some major ass.)  On days when I was driving home and didn't feel like going to the gym, I'd think 'what would Sydney do?', and that would be enough to get me into the parking lot.  Or walking the tree trail at Ault Park and coming to the big stone steps in one of the hills, if I wanted to slow down or take a break b/c my legs were burning, I'd think 'what would Sydney do?' and instead of slowing down, I'd pick up the pace all the way to the top.  Fictional though she may have been, Sydney Bristow was my anchor, the person I wanted to be.  She's what kept me going.

I've tried the same trick this time around, but I've found that it's been too long since I was that into the show, and my WWSD mantra just doesn't provide the same oomph anymore.  But when we were sitting in our meeting last night and the leader was talking about anchors, I immediately knew what my new anchor was.

I no longer remember how, but a couple of years ago I stumbled across a blog written by a girl named Erin Saver.  She was from the midwest (as am I) and had moved to Portland (as I desperately desire to do), and at the time was thru hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.  I'd heard of the Appalachian Trail, but never the PCT.  Turns out the PCT, at 2,663 miles, is even longer than the AT (2,200 miles), and stretches from Mexico to Canada by way of California, Oregon and Washington.  And people hike it.  All in one go even, which apparently takes around 5 months.  I was fascinated.  Erin had a blog post for each and every day she was on the trail, and each post was full of her adventures that day, complete with pictures and often videos.  I found the blog a month or two into her hike, and I devoured the entirety of it in a couple of days.  I loved it.  The scenery was gorgeous, the stories entertaining, the people interesting.  Somewhere along the line I ended up trailing off (no pun intended), and I never made it to the end of her hike (a tragedy I am currently rectifying by going back through all of the posts again, starting from the beginning).  Reading about her experiences on the trail, being that immersed in and dependent upon nature, is so inspiring to me.  And the thought of how much discipline is involved in pushing yourself to walk 20-30 miles in a day when maybe you feel like crap and you've got blisters on your feet and there are bears and rattlesnakes and sketchy water sources...it amazes me.  It's the kind of person I want to be.  And every once in awhile, when I don't feel like doing this or that or I'm feeling lazy, I think of Erin and all the other thru hikers out there and what they go through, and I think about how they wouldn't sit around on the couch eating bon bons instead of washing the dishes (although I'm sure there are times they do), and I get up off my butt and I do whatever it is I didn't want to do.  My mantra is no longer What Would Sydney Do?  It's What Would Erin Do?

Because I'm a visual person, I decided I needed a visual reminder of my anchor.  Something tangible that would remind me every time I saw it of everything that my mantra means to me.  Now, when you're walking 20-30 miles a day carrying everything you need for your survival on your back, you don't pack extra outfits.  Consequently, in all of Erin's pictures she's wearing the same thing - chartreuse and navy.  Since I've seen so many pictures on Erin's blog, these two colors have come to symbolize Erin and thru hiking for me, so when I decided I needed a visual reminder of my anchor, something I would see and have with me all the time, two thoughts immediately occurred - chartreuse, and bracelet.  So off I went to one of my all time favorite stores, REI (not that I really do much outdoorsy stuff yet, but I can still spend hours and hours on their website comparing this tent to that one, this pack to that one - preparing for the day when I'm in shape enough to do it all, I suppose), to buy a paracord bracelet.  I'm not entirely sure what I was thinking when I decided upon chartreuse paracord for everyday wear - for those of you unfamiliar with paracord, something about it seems to intensify colors, so the dark colors are rather dark, the dull ones very dull indeed, and the bright colors are very...nauseatingly...bright.  So navy it was!  And now every time I see my wrist will be a little nudge to stay on track, to be disciplined, to be the kind of person who would leave everything behind to spend 5 months walking across the entire country with nothing but 20-something pounds of gear and their wits.

Erin's blog is called Walking With Wired (Wired is her trail name).  She's currently walking the Continental Divide Trail, another Mexico to Canada trail, and at 3,100 miles, it's the longest (and apparently most dangerous) of the three major trails - the PCT, CDT, and AT - which together make up the Triple Crown of Hiking.  (Incidentally, I grew up in Kentucky.  As much as I've been reading Erin's blog, I still can't hear Triple Crown without thinking of the Derby.)  This is her second of the three.  Go read her blog.  Now.  You'll thank me.  (Or, more appropriately, her.)

Crossing Over to the Dark Side

I've never been a big fan of organized dieting.  It seems like every diet out there has some wacky strategy that may be very effective as far as short term weight loss goes, but that's not actually very healthy or feasible for the long term.  If you want to lose weight for an event - wedding, graduation, Dragon Ball Z convention (not sure where that thought came from...I don't even really know what Dragon Ball Z is...) - then fine, diet away.  Just be prepared to gain all of the weight back as soon as you stop said crazy diet.  But long term weight loss & maintenance, in my opinion, is a lot more complicated than that.  It involves changing one's entire relationship with food - you have to rewire how your brain thinks about food and eating.  Permanent change requires more than just the latest fad diet.

So when my mom suggested a few weeks ago that I could join Weight Watchers with her, my initial reaction was less than enthusiastic.  Weight Watchers, while obviously not qualifying as a fad diet (it's been around for more than half a century, after all), seemed to be the epitome of one of my least favorite dieting techniques - counting.  The thought of counting calories and staring at boxes and bags and adding up this and that has always made my brain cringe.  And then there's all the weighing in.  While I've always had a general number in mind of what I'd like to weigh, my biggest goals for losing weight have always been 1) to be able to do the things I want to do (hiking, jogging, walking around the zoo for more than half a second) without feeling like someone's trying to drive a railroad spike through my lungs, and 2) be healthier.  Yes, I want to be smaller and cuter again (ah, the good ol' days), but mostly I just want to feel better and do more.  Obsessively tracking every tenth of a pound lost just didn't seem to fit into that equation for me; my goals are qualitative, not quantitative.

But I liked the idea of the meetings.  For several months now, I've been toying with the idea of looking for some sort of eating support group or the like.  I felt like I needed to be able to be in a room full of people who have the same problems with food that I do and be able to talk about it, share strategies for reworking how we deal with food and eating, etc.  I really do feel that food is an addiction for a lot of people.  I've read accounts of drug addicts and what goes through their minds when they're thinking about drugs, and the physiological effect that drugs have on an addict's brain, and I could swear I had written said accounts about my thoughts and reactions to food.  I had even gone so far as to look up local Overeaters Anonymous meetings, although I never could quite bring myself to attend one.  Not necessarily b/c of the stigma (though that was part of it), but more b/c of the 12 step thing.  I just couldn't identify with the religious aspect of the 12 step program, and I figured that around here (otherwise known as Catholic Central) it would be pretty hard to escape that.

Ultimately, I decided what's the worst it could do?  Work?  So three weeks ago I joined Weight Watchers.  And I have to say, it hasn't been what I expected.  Yes, there's counting, but there are apps available that make it a lot less labor intensive than I had anticipated.  You just type in the food you want, and up pops the point value.  The selection of restaurants that have menus pre-loaded into the app is mind boggling, although they are mostly chain restaurants - if I want to go to a unique local place, I have to resort to guesswork.  And as a bonus, I've found that tracking everything through the apps feels a little like a game to me.  Kind of like constantly checking in to FarmVille to water your crops.  Which, of course, appeals to the geek in me.  There's the obvious benefit of becoming more aware of your eating habits, since you have to write down (or, in my case, type in) everything that passes your lips.  And it's really helped both with portion sizes, and with balancing out what I eat.  So if I want to eat a cheeseburger for lunch, I can, but I have to compensate for that by eating something healthier for dinner.  I hadn't ever really paid attention to that before, so that's been a nice bonus.

The meetings are the best part, though.  My friends know that I'm not big on crowds, and I'm even less big on large groups of people I don't know.  But the meeting leaders are overly peppy and friendly, and are very good at putting everyone at ease.  There's a topic to each meeting, which I didn't expect, and we get little assignments to work on.  Even if I don't participate much, it's so nice to know that I'm in a room full of people who are all going through the same experience - albeit in their own ways - and we're all there to provide support and encouragement to each other.  And as much as I rail against the quantitative aspect of the whole thing, it does provide a structure for me, which I do often require.  Much as I like to delude myself with the myth of my own spontaneity, I generally don't accomplish much unless I have a deadline or clearly delineated goal to aim for.

All of this was my (extremely) long way of getting around to this week's goal.  But seeing as I've probably lost most of you by now anyway, I will talk about said goal in my next post.  Ta-ta for now.

Game On

Have you ever had the feeling that something - anything - in your life has got to change?  Not just a little thing, like hair color or new glasses, but something major.  Drastic.  What's the phrase?  Something's gotta give.  I've been having that feeling a lot lately.  Sort of this niggling little irritant in the back of my brain urging me to make a major change in my life, sell everything and move cross country, or some such insane idea.

The thing about me is that I don't generally do drastic.  I have a love/hate relationship with change.  On the one hand, I'm all for progress, moving forward, discovering the latest and greatest - and lord knows I have a definite instant gratification streak.  But on the other hand, I loathe the unexpected.  I'm a planner.  A control freak.  A turtle who likes to hide in her shell with detailed maps and itineraries, researching and planning every last little detail of everything until I've sucked every last morsel of joy and spontaneity out of whatever it is I'm obsessively researching.  The problem with that is that I never have enough data to make what I feel is an informed decision, and so one of two things happens.  1) I get so tired of the indecision that I make a choice - any choice, generally with utter disregard for all of my careful research and planning - just to be done with it.  Or 2) I become so overwhelmed by information and am so terrified of making the wrong decision that I end up making no decision at all.  The former is how I ended up with my first tattoo.  The latter is why, 8 years after graduating from college with a degree I no longer had any idea what to do with, I still hadn't figured out what I wanted to do with my life.

The choice I made back then - 8 years out of college, newly laid off, faced with a desperate search for a job in a career I despised with every fiber of my being - was the first drastically different, and I think the most genuinely *me*, thing in my life I'd ever done. At first glance, choosing massage therapy might not seem like such an odd thing, and to fully explain why would require a bunch of boring information that no one really cares about.  Suffice it to say that both of my parents have graduate degrees, and from the age of 8 I had declared - loudly and often - to anyone who would listen that I was going to be a doctor.  My decision not to attend medical school was bad enough.  Choosing something that was not academic, rational or cerebral?  Sacrilege.

One of my favorite quotes is from a Doctor Who episode:  "When you're a kid, they tell you it's all...grow up.  Get a job.  Get married.  Get a house.  Have a kid, and that's it.  But the truth is, the world is so much stranger than that.  It's so much darker.  And so much madder.  And so much better."  And it is!  I've always lived on the weirder side of life, but - again - only with the smaller details.  The bigger things?  Normal, rational people just didn't live life that way.  They made safe choices.  Non-risky choices.  It took me 30 years to grasp the concept that making big decisions against the mold wasn't just something other people did.  It was something I could do, too.

My forward momentum on the 'be more me' front did continue past my initial decision to go to massage school.  After I'd been in school for a few months, my mom and I were talking about...well, I no longer remember what exactly, but it was probably something to do with holistic practices or organic foods or some such...and she made a comment to the effect that she wasn't surprised that I had gotten into these weirder things after starting massage school.  My response was that massage school hadn't caused the 'weirdness', it had just allowed me to be more comfortable expressing the side of myself I had always kept tucked away.  But those were baby steps.  Little things.  The drastic changes began and ended with that one brief burst of brilliance (no alliteration intended) three years ago.  So here I am, 32 years old, filled with the absolute certainty that I need to turn my life on its ear...with my feet firmly planted to the ground in terror.  Something's gotta change.  And this is my first step.

For as long as I can remember, I've had this image in my head of the person I want to be.  I was hit with the realization recently that I don't have to become that person, I already am her.  She's the real me that's been locked inside all the crap and conventionality and safe decisions that have been piled on year after year for over three decades.  All I've needed is a plan to get rid of all that flotsam and let her out.  So this is the story (all about how my life got flipped, turned upside down...true though that may be, now that I think about it, I digress) of how I plan to Make It So.