Back to School

It's been a tough few months. When things aren't going well, it's so easy to just crawl into my burrow and snuggle up. I've had two vacations in the past month, and they've done quite a bit to smooth me out. Plus, most of my crises are not resolved, but simmered down to sub-crisis level. So before going back to work tomorrow - and school starts for my youngest on Tuesday - I thought I'd take a hard look at what's up with me on the diet and exercise front.

I weigh myself every day, on a scale that transmits the number over wifi to a database. So every day I see that number, and when I want I can call up a graph on an app on the iphone. So I have been aware of my weight, and generally satisfied that it's staying within bounds. But now, with two vacations just behind me, its time to buckle down.

The orange line is the weekly average weight, the green dots are the actual daily weight.

Here we are with the standard pattern - buckle down, hit the hard floor, and creep back up again.

But I took the time for the first time in a much longer while to look at my activity levels. I wear my calorie and step counting arm band every day, and look at the numbers, but there is no app that easily shows me the trends. That is up to me to organize - export the data, and then manipulate it into a form that gives meaning. This is an exercise I love doing, but its fairly inefficient.  I finally did this for the first time since February.

Here is the sad story of my progressively more slug-like experience:

The faint green line is the daily calorie burn, then there is a running 7-day average in dark green, and the flatter medium green lines are monthly average calories burned.

I am burning fewer calories than ever!  My good friend has a slow metabolism, and struggles mightily to keep the activity up and the weight down. As she pointed out with anguish, the reward for losing weight is that you naturally burn fewer calories just living, and so have to cut food or up the activity even more because you have been successful.  So the first year I collected activity data - when I started this blog and focused on losing weight - I was burning on average 150-200 calories more each day than I am now. But I've been at this weight, roughly, for two and a half years. And so far this year, I've really almost hibernated.  I haven't averaged burning 2000 calories in a day since last December, and you can see the "high activity" days in 2013 are much lower than the high activity days in previous years.

I kind of knew this, I kind of felt it, but it is useful to confront the stats.

I think I'm done sitting at the computer for now, I'm off to take a walk. With a Mary Richards bounce and smile.

Choose Mary, not Rhoda

That would be Mary Tyler Moore, or really "Mary Richards" from the eponymous show, of course. A book was published about the show this spring, and the author made the rounds of the NPR shows I listen to. So I haven't read the book, but the interviews made me think about it.  During my post college years, my room-mate and I often watched the show together, enjoying seeing women pictured on a sitcom who were more like we were than any other show on TV. But we were both Rhoda, not Mary, wanting to be darkly funny and knowing, laughing at Mary's sunny and bright naivete.

I've gone through life identifying as Rhoda, the sarcastic, wise cracking, sidekick. I have always mentally used adjectives like sardonic and cynical to describe myself, and thought of myself as the outsider. I was the family photographer, standing at the sidelines with the camera, not an actual participant. I liked that.

But as I struggled through some very stressful and unhappy times this spring and summer, I wondered if its possible to consciously change. I am forced by circumstance to participate more actively in life. Can I move myself so that I can turn the world on with a smile, suddenly take a nothing day and make it seem worthwhile? Make people happy to see me, by bringing happiness into the room?

Is the way we relate to the world inherent or under our conscious control?

All the reading I've done on resilience and happiness and depression and cognitive behavior therapy - and physical survival and adventure - says yes, we control this. The big lesson from the adventure / survival literature (of which I've read a bunch - lost at sea features heavily) notes that you cannot control what happens to you, but you can control how you respond to it.  I've taken some profound thoughts and turned them into pop culture images in my mind of how to meet the world, with some small amount of success.

My first clue came from the clear realization that while humor may work with teenagers better than confrontation, sarcasm directed at them will simply outrage them. So I cut out the wise cracks, and tried to substitute more sympathy and empathy, directing my humor at the situation and the world in general, not them. Well, duh. Who wouldn't rather have that response?

Now I'm trying to act on these pop culture images in a physical way. When I walk, I think of Mary Richards, striding along with a bounce in her step and a smile on her face, joyfully anticipating whatever the world will bring her next. ("... with each glance and every little movement you show it...")  It helps me, it really does. Even thought it's embarrassing to admit it.  (This is far from all I am doing to cope with multiple issues, but it's one I can write about now.)

So I'm back, sort of. Today, with the humidity low, the sun out, and all the windows open, seems like a day anything is possible. What happened to my weight during the last couple of months since I've been gone from this space?  Amazingly enough, nothing. I weigh now more or less what I have weighed for the past couple of years, which I have to keep reminding myself is quite a bit lower than I weighed for many years, while not as low as I would like to be.  I seem to have changed some habits enough to sustain me through periods of less paying attention.

Excelsior.