Self-help books - optimism or delusion?

I've always been really drawn to the transformation story; rags to riches, shy, retiring mouse to self-assured dynamo, plain Jane to goddess. The first ones to catch my attention were those ugly duckling, 'fat to thin' photospreads you get in magazines. The ones where, on one side of the page, a huge, marshmallow person stares apologetically at the camera. ‘I’m sorry I exist’ their sad, puffy faces seem to say - ruining your paper with my looks which don’t fit into society’s rigidly defined ideas of what is aesthetically acceptable!

Then, on the opposite page, there’s the transformation pic, the former fatty has shed 6 stone (or however many kilos that translates as) and is holding out their fat person’s, clown trousers out in front of them.
‘Look at what a fat joke I was.’ Their happy grins say, now I can walk down the street happily, without children pelting me with rotten fruit.

The most predictable New Year’s resolution

The thing is, my shameful little secret, is that there is a part of me that is still strongly drawn towards this fat to thin story, so that every now and again I’ll take a sneak peak at My 600 pound life or similar programme, on T.V. I just can't seem to stop being seduced by the lure of the idea that however bad it gets, change is still possible.

By the side of my bed, there is always a pile of books. Usually comprised of self-help books, the novel I’m currently reading and fiction books I started then put aside in favour of something a bit more interesting.
At this moment in time, at the top of the self-help pile is Freedom from Emotional Eating by Paul McKenna. And why do I have this book there, if I’ve claimed to support the body positivity movement and intuitive eating and the rest of it?
The answer to this is that I can never fully climb aboard the whole body positivity/fat acceptance thing because:
a) I don’t want to be fat and don’t feel comfortable at the weight I’m currently at
b) I do still see excess weight as having an emotional aspect to it.
c) I want to be as healthy as possible.

Now, please don’t come down on me like a tonne of bricks about this, I’m saying that I can’t embrace the whole whole ‘fat acceptance’ thing for me, I’m not talking about anyone else. I really do believe that I’ve always been an emotional eater, using food for comfort and not always just eating when I’m hungry and I want to address that. Although Mckenna’s book tends to oversimplify things, it does seem to contain basic truths. The only problem is that, I must have bought it a while ago, and it contains a hypnosis C.D and we have nowhere in our house that plays CDs and the whole point of it is to listen to it privately, on an MP3 player or suchlike but I don’t have the means to burn it onto my device but when I do we’re really going to see some changes! Clown trouser pictures to follow.

The impact of the past

The other transformations I like to hear about are the ones where people were addicted to drugs or alcohol, then had an epiphany, turned  their lives around and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro or something. I don’t think that I’m an alcoholic, I just like the narrative of having a problem to solve - one so huge and which overshadows everything, that needs to be overcome before you can realise your full potential.
Talking of problems to overcome, someone recommended to me a book about trauma, [The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma. Kolk, Bessel van der, Penguin 2015 ] The author propounds that trauma and its effects are a lot more widespread than most people think and the repercussions are manifold. Going back to the whole weight thing, one of the things he puts forward is that feelings of panic might be experienced as hunger, causing people to overeat. Also, that people who are disconnected with their bodies, not in tune with signals, may continue to eat past the point of fullness. I’ve encountered versions of this theory since reading Fat is a Feminist Issue by Susie Orbach (Although she talks of women subconsciously wanting to be fat, as a protection from the outside world).
The book about trauma is a difficult read, detailing case studies of traumatic experiences which can be harrowing, I’d only recommend reading it if you are looking to go into that field of work yourself or if you are feeling emotionally robust and read it in small bursts.

It’s all getting a bit heavy now, let’s move on 

Triumph over adversity: I’m also a great fan of those tales of women who were married to
feckless men (not that this applies to me!) and they had four children and their husbands left them but they picked themselves up by their bootstraps to become bestselling authors/successful business women/human rights lawyers. I bloody love those stories!

Like I said, I don’t have the feckless husband but am often held back by my own lack of confidence and have a tendency to self-sabotage, so to that end, when my brother asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I requested the book The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance---What Women Should Know by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman. He kindly got it for me, last December, I just need to read it now, to be brimming with confidence….(In my defence, December was really manic).
Tip 1: to get the most from a self-help book, make sure you actually read it!

Finish what you started

So, perhaps my main New Year’s resolution should be to actually read my self-help books, right through to the end and, in the case of the ‘Emotional Eating’ one, actually watch the DVD, find some way of downloading the CD and follow the techniques. I’ll check in, this time next month to let you know if it’s started to work.

Drowning in chickpeas

Oh, friends, I’m in danger of turning into a giant chick pea! I’m eating so many of them, in one form or another. Plus, post-Christmas I'm looking somewhat spherical...

Vegan food isn’t gruesome - it’s not that different to what I eat normally; it’s just that you have to be a little more creative with your cooking and vigilant with your food labels. What I am missing most is being able to have cow’s milk in my tea (and the odd coffee). The old man feels the same. Now that I’ve found vegan ‘milk-style’ chocolate, I’m relatively happy with the food (although I had a truly evil tasting ‘chocolate’ Santa earlier - half price from the health food shop...).

However, I was rather alarmed to learn that it’s impossible to get vitamin B12 from plant sources. I've just read in the Observer that: A University of Winsconsin study found 92% of vegans were deficient in vitamin B12.
You are meant to eat fortified cereal and/or fortified plant milks or take a supplement.

When we first embarked on the Veganuary thing, the old man said: ‘I don’t want to eat a load of Franken-foods’. I agree with him - I’d rather eat natural, whole food where possible.

This is the nut roast I made the other day:

And I didn't really want to reply on nutritional supplements. I shied away from taking vitamins a few years ago after reading ‘Bad Science’ by Ben Goldacre. HarperCollins, 2008, and they also make me think of Sheldon, saying to Penny, in The Big Bang Theory, when he goes shopping with her and sees her stocking up on a load of vitamin supplements, that she’s basically just purchasing some really expensive urine, as there’s only so much the body can absorb.

I’m starting to feel somewhat uneasy with the health implications of becoming vegan and here are my Top personal concerns:

1. Vitamin B12 deficiency - this vitamin is only found in animal products - meat, fish, dairy and eggs. Only veggie source (apart from algae!) seems to be Marmite - but how much do you need? A jar a day??
2. Weight gain - nuts, avocado, even the humble hummus, chilli heatwave Doritos, vegan chocolate...all pack a large energy punch. (The thing about trusty old, non-vegan quorn is that it’s low fat and low cal) I can almost hear you shouting at me - telling me to eat less and stop shovelling in the vegan chocolate, but let's get back to the real world, shall we? It's freezing, I'm worried about the future and my children woke me up at 5:20 this morning, let me have my 'chocolate'!
3. Unsociable - couldn’t have any of daughter’s birthday cake (do not want to impose Veganism on kids) - not a health concern, more a societal one.
4. Don’t feel strongly enough about this to maintain the sacrifice - see previous post. http://msmuddles.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/no-animals-were-harmed-in-making-of.html Although I started out welcoming the challenge, I’m not really sure why I’m doing this. If it’s for health reasons then I shouldn’t have to worry about vitamin deficiency, should I?
5. Terrible, ferocious wind!

So….why am I doing this again…?

Oh yeah, so I'd have something to write about, wasn't it. ;)

The Critical Gaze

This is a post about body image. It’s been a lifelong preoccupation of mine and something that takes up far too much head-space for many women (and men). As such, should I even be writing about it? I think, yes, because I believe that you have to examine something and explore it, before you can move on. I'm not writing this from the standpoint of someone who is totally at peace with their body, far from it. I'm just trying to challenge the way in which I/we view our bodies.

I started last month with the determination to lose some weight and my reasons were twofold. 1) I think I must be one of the only people who has actually managed to put on weight AFTER Christmas, and I'm seeing a worrying slide into the ‘overweight’ category of the NHS BMI height/weight charts.  2) A family party is imminent and, as I keep quipping to my friends, ‘there are going to be all these judgemental old, women, looking at my arse!’ Of the two reasons for wanting to reduce in size,  the second one is rather unsound. (Plus, I realise it’s a bit mean describing the guests as a group of ‘judgemental old women').

Watch any decent teen movie and the message is clear: be yourself, don’t try and fit in with the group, discover who you true friends are and don’t latch onto that insecure group of bullies/bitches. (Unless you watch Grease - which seems to be giving you the opposite message - take up smoking to fit in with your peers and put on some tight, silky trousers!).

How easy, though, is it to be your own person, without worrying about what other people think? We are social animals, tribal beings. Are we able to disregard the (imagined) mutterings of the wider community?

I was struck, when I read Stephen Fry’s autobiography - More Fool Me, Michael Joseph, 2014, by the fact that whenever he talked about any of his creative projects, he always imagined a (hypothetical) hyper-critical, scathing review from Time Out magazine. This impacted on me because I often imagine a hectoring Greek chorus of censure and criticism accompanying anything I post on social media. It was strange reading that someone so successful could also be so insecure. Of course, Fry’s mental health issues have been well documented but I imagined (perhaps naively) that in his professional life, he’d be more confident. Maybe everyone does that - imagines a hostile and unkind response, to anything we've put any effort into. In this frightening age of the Twitter troll, perhaps this isn't such a paranoid notion. But the right thing to do would be to pay it no heed - right? Just carry on regardless.

Do we also imagine a critical, hostile audience judging us for the way we look, too?

I stumbled across this article from The Elephant Journal last year:

http://www.elephantjournal.com/2015/04/loving-our-bodies-in-the-face-of-fear/

The basic gist of the article is that we can’t control what other people think of us and that when we focus on our supposed flaws, we magnify them. If we get can them ‘fixed’, our insecurity simply moves on to another focus point (seen in people who are addicted to plastic surgery). What we really need to do is reach a level of self-acceptance.

We may have received a lot of criticism for our appearance when we were growing up but I’d be willing to bet that, as an adult, our harshest critic is ourselves. Just think about what you say to yourself when you look in the mirror - do you ever throw a barrage of abuse at your reflection?

We spend far too long worrying about what is ‘wrong’ with our bodies and not nearly enough thinking about all the positive things it does for us; recovering from illnesses, carrying babies, winning races, taking us along charity runs, taking us up the stairs!

Our bodies are so much more than how they look.

I wonder if all that sounds too abstract?

Around 5 years ago, before I had my first child, I suffered from an ectopic pregnancy. (A pregnancy that is not in the uterus. The large majority (95%) of ectopic pregnancies occur in the Fallopian tube.) We had been ‘trying for a baby’ for a year and the day I discovered that I was pregnant - with a very faint plus sign in the pregnancy test window, was the same day that I started bleeding, and it was discovered that it was an ectopic pregnancy. I was devastated, I grieved but I also felt a deep sense of guilt and shame. It was my fault, or, specifically, it was the fault of my defective body!

‘You must stop blaming yourself and your body for what has happened to you’ - One of the moderators from the Ectopic Pregnancy Trust told me, in response to one of my posts on their website. Easier said than done.

What usually happens with an ectopic pregnancy is that the fallopian tube bursts open, leading to excruciating pain and the woman having to have emergency surgery to remove the tube. My case was slightly different in that the pregnancy dispersed on its own and my hormone levels were closely monitored for a few weeks until they went down enough to indicate that the pregnancy had gone (this treatment is called 'expectant management'). I had to go to the hospital every two days to have a blood test and was told to call an ambulance if I suddenly suffered excruciating pain! I bled, heavily, all that time, it was a grim, painful and drawn-out process but what happened was that, eventually,  my body effectively healed itself. I wouldn't wish the experience on anyone but it did prompt a sea change in the way that I viewed my body. With the help of some therapy (yep, that again) I began to see my body, not as a faulty, unreliable (and grotesque) machine but rather as a highly efficient mechanism that, when things had gone wrong had saved my life (E.P can be very dangerous). It had successfully dealt with the unviable pregnancy on it’s own, without need of surgical or medical intervention and I felt grateful towards it. The only other time I had felt anything approaching this was when I was training for a charity run, years before. Look at my long, efficient legs, I’d thought, running away! (yes, I know that sounds a bit bizarre and narcissistic). I’d never felt like that before.

So, I just want to reiterate the need for us to focus on when our bodies served us well, and be less preoccupied by how they look. Yes, I wrote a blog post about losing weight:

http://msmuddles.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/the-weighty-issue-part-two-goal-weight.html

But I believe that before you can make any sort of major change in your life, you have to come from a place of happiness and acceptance. So, paradoxical as it may sound, if you want to reduce your weight, you have to approach it from a point of feeling kind of happy and accepting towards your body, rather than filled with loathing for it.

As I said, I'm not writing this from a pinnacle of Zen-like forbearance but I'm hoping to get there one day ;)

So, going back to those (hypothetical) judgemental, old women* that I spoke of earlier; perhaps, of the two motives for wanting to lose weight, it would be better to concentrate more on the desire to slide back into the ‘healthy’ section of the BMI chart than to appease the imaginary critics.

*I should also note that the 'judgmental old women', whilst being based on past experience, are actually a collective figment of my imagination and embody my own feelings of insecurity. Just as Stephen Fry's 'Time Out' critic was a projection of his own feelings of self doubt!

Stranded with my Cosmopolitan

There I was, in a packed pub, getting hotter and hotter in my coat, scarf, jumper etc. All my friends; all the people I wanted to talk to, were embedded deep into other clusters, like chocolate chips who had sunk to the bottom of a cheap, badly made sponge cake.  My drink was precariously balanced, I stood on the brink of an abyss. The vultures were circling - two women; women who I knew but wasn’t particularly friendly with, looked me up and down. Yes, they did! They did that scanning thing that some women subject other women to, like the Terminator doing his 1980s, computerised assessment. Age - wrong side of 40, weight - fatter/thinner than me, clothes….

Why do some women do this? It is immensely unsettling. If you are born into a gender that is constantly judged on its appearance then it is somewhat inescapable. Your weight, especially, is under constant scrutiny and because of this, you turn it (the scrutiny) on the other members of your tribe to ascertain whether they are fatter than you. It is total bullshit and I do try to avoid it at all costs. I wasn’t brought up in a bubble though and there was almost a sense, in my house, that the thinner you were, the more morally superior you were. I try to resist, at all turns, being drawn into discussions about my own or any other woman’s weight, but, I am ashamed to say, that I do notice it (I just try not to comment on it).

Anyway, there I was, undergoing the Terminator scan, neither of these women said ‘hello’ by the way, wondering what they could find to assess, as I was cloaked in my heavy winter coat and massive scarf. My scarf is hectares long and a silvery grey colour and really thick. Wearing it feels like being enveloped by a benevolent yeti. It seems extravagant to say that you love an item of clothing but I bloody love that scarf (I also love my slippers). Perhaps the Terminators were admiring my scarf?? Perhaps I’m being paranoid in imagining that I was so interesting to them (this is entirely plausible and brings back memories of changing rooms and my my mum saying - ‘no-one is looking at you!’) But, if we are being uncharitable, then perhaps we can assume that I was being assessed, (perhaps) being found wanting and trying not to spill my (expensive, ill-gotten cocktail - the barmaid had rolled her eyes when I’d ordered it). I circumvented the group of lions (so it wasn't an abyss then, more of a savannah; pick a metaphor, stick to it) went round to the other side of the massive group and a male friend of mine cheerily called, ‘Alright, how’s it going?’

Now, I don’t want to turn my back on the sisterhood here, most of my best friends are women and I fully realise that men are just as capable of doing the Terminator scan (and not just for assessing how fuckable a woman is). I know plenty of men who talk about people’s weight and appearance and plenty of women who don’t. But, if you are a man or a woman and someone comes along to join a social group, hovering uncertainly on the edges like an ungainly bison at a watering hole; don’t just do the full body scan, smile and say ‘hello’!  

The Weighty Issue: Part Two. Goal Weight nearly reached

I hesitated before posting this. It all seems a bit narcissistic (but then again, this is a Blog, what do you expect?) But it’s all a bit

“Look at me, look at me! - I’ve lost weight!!”

(But, honestly; have you seen me? I have lost weight! ;)).

I’m not skinny now and I don’t have this toned, buff body but I am now comfortably within the ‘healthy’ range of the BMI charts, which was my goal. If you want facts and figures then I’ve lost nearly two stone since January.

Why am I writing about it? Is it that important in the great scheme of things? Probably not, particularly as I detest body fascism (or fascism of any kind, for that matter). I really don’t like the way in which your worth, especially if you are female, is tied up with how much space you take up or how much flesh oozes over the top of your jeans. But weight isn’t just about aesthetics, is it, it is also about health. According to NICE In 2007, the direct cost of obesity to the NHS was £2.3 billion and the direct cost of being overweight, but not obese, was £1.9 billion (Foresight tackling obesities: Future choices).

A more recent estimate of the direct cost to the NHS in 2006/07 of people being overweight and obese was £5.1 billion.

So I thought I would share how I reduced my weight, and a couple of the positive side effects of being more active, just in case anyone else was interested in doing the same thing.

People are a bit brutal about the whole weight thing aren’t they? They say; it’s just calories in vs calories out, as if any of us who are overweight are just plain stupid. Move a bit more, eat a bit less, they say, but again, it is getting the motivation to do this and doing it in such a way that doesn’t feel as if you are going to be living the rest of life as some kind of ascetic; wearing hair shirts, drinking tepid water and eating nothing but raw kale. In the past I have just given up on the whole attempting to reduce my weight thing, citing the ‘you only live once and I want to enjoy my life’ ethos as an excuse for abandoning the diet. (A quick word about the word diet here, I hate it and avoid it at all costs. I do believe that traditional ‘dieting’ makes you fat and as soon as you tell yourself that you are on a diet, you will unconsciously try to sabotage yourself as an act of rebellion...Or, is that just me?)

You may think that I’m being disingenuous here and that there is no way to lose weight without being on a ‘diet’. And, yes, I have lost weight partly through eating less, but I don’t consider what I did and am still doing to be a diet, not in the traditional sense. I ate/still eat the same food, just less of it. I do try and stick to a daily calorie limit and I do eat relatively healthily but I also have the odd bit of chocolate and glass or two of wine (two of my favourite things in the world), just probably less than I used to. And if I eat toast, I’ll have one slice instead of two (but I do have butter on it - meticulously weighed out). So that whole - ‘eat a bit less, move a bit more thing’ can be ever so slightly expanded upon in my case in that:

1. I did and still do lots and lots of walking
2. I did and still do Calorie counting

Firstly, the walking:

Walking is brilliant: it’s free, you don’t get (terribly) sweaty and you don’t need any fancy equipment. It’s good if you can monitor how much you are doing. I got myself a Fitbit tracker* and aim to do 10,000 steps a day. I usually meet my goal; even if it means stomping around our tiny living room for half an hour, avoiding perilously placed toys and children’s hands as I go. Whether you are hiking around the lakes, walking along a dual carriageway or moving from living room to kitchen and back again in an endless loop (like a caged polar bear) you are still moving and it still counts (despite the fact that my husband says it’s cheating). You know those patronising magazine articles, where they tell you that perhaps you should try and make small changes and get off a bus stop earlier to build more exercise in your life, I think that it would be more realistic if they told you to get off four stops earlier, or skip a bus journey all together.

*other fitness trackers are available.

The calorie counting:

I used and still use an online calorie counting ap (I’m sure you know the one I mean but I won’t do their advertising for them). The great thing about the fitness tracker is that it syncs in with the calorie diary thingy and tells you how many calories you’ve earned through exercise. So you know exactly how many calories you can eat. This panders to the anally retentive part of me that loves to be in control and know exactly what I’m dealing with, it’s far more accurate than thinking - oh yeah, I walked to the shops, how long did it take? Was it fast or slow pace? And trying to add it manually to the food diary. You might think that this calorie counting spoils your enjoyment of food but I have found that, for the most part, it is helpful to know that you can happily dig into that jacket potato with gay abandon and know that you still have enough calories left for your dinner later on in the day. I’m not saying that I never feel hungry but then being hungry isn’t so scary and helps enhance your enjoyment of your next meal. (I’m fully aware that I sound rather sanctimonious here, so sorry, but our society is geared towards us eating and consuming constantly and never experiencing hunger which is very unhealthy!)

So anyway, this combination worked for me; try it, don’t try it, it’s up to you. We all know that exercise is good for us. My other half wears the fitness tracker too and his blood pressure has gone down since he’s been using it. I find that I sleep better and find it easier to destress. So, just as weight is not just about appearance, exercise isn’t just about losing weight. (Again, apologies for the sanctimony, bit hard to write about weight loss without it.)

Now that I’ve lost weight, can I now bear seeing photographs of me and do I now feel happier and more confident in my own skin? No! Now my insecurities have found myriad other channels, but that’s another issue, right, just focus on the partner’s lowered blood pressure and my better sleep!

NOTE: I am very well aware though that this weight loss is only significant if I can maintain it, so come back and see me this time next year, where, hopefully I won’t be looking like the librarian from the Blade films.‘bye…