Eating is a two-faced, back-stabbing best friend. While it reminds you constantly with stomach groans and hunger pains that you need it to stay alive, it in turn wreaks havoc on your body in so many ways if you don’t do it properly.
March 8, 2011
Fat Tuesday
It has officially been two years, to this day, from the moment I decided I wanted to be a happier, healthier person. When I began writing this blog series I had good intentions of outlining how I did it, the nitty-gritty details if you will, but still in the form of a story. Because I am a naturally reflective, thoughtful person, I am having a hard time making it that simple. Drawing on the specifications, the exact changes I made, the foods I ate and the exercise I undertook is far too watered down for what it is I want to share with anyone who has known me for any amount of time and is reading this blog. If you’re one of those people, you know that change has become a facet of my day to day. You know that I now embody an entirely different person: physically, mentally, and emotionally. After spending a weekend at my mother and father’s house in Cleveland, seeing people I love and have known my entire life, I can only imagine what your perspective of me has become. It would also be completely unfair of me to omit certain portions of my experience, including what I am going through now: the struggle and heartbreaking difficulty of maintaining. Given my deeply embedded sense of nostalgia, of memories and of allowing the romance of the past woo me into the future, reflection will be the theme of this post. This is a glimpse into the day that began this journey, in celebration of the second anniversary of the first step.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Shrove Tuesday has always been one of my favorite days of the year. Beyond its more religious title it is nicknamed for a more cultural attachment which is spelled out for us in three letters given to this particular Tuesday—fat. A day of socially approved gluttony was like a gift from Heaven, literally in this case. This particular Fat Tuesday was beginning normally, like any other day in late February in Athens, Ohio.
Out the expanse of picture windows which glass plated the front of our house I could see drifts of snow sloping, heavily blanketing the stiffly frozen blades of green and brown grass left helpless from autumn. Large, puffy flakes were falling fast from the endless mass of heavily soaked gray clouds that hung wet above our home. That sense of nostalgic comfort that accompanies a blizzard like this in early December, anticipating the familiarity of another Holiday season, had long since passed and we were approaching the chorus, melodically speaking. We were entrenched in the bleakness of midwinter. Being a culture of people who always wait for the next big thing, getting through the slump of hibernation inducing winter weather isn’t easy. The day after Christmas is always anti-climatic, as the road that leads to Easter is long, and one could easily be lulled into believing, like Robert Frost, that there is no way out and perhaps laying down to sleep in pillows of snow will prove too enticing. These are the months we spend watching blizzards and ice storms come and go, knowing that an early, warm spring day will come, but with no guaranteed arrival date. So as I was on this day, we gaze out our frostbitten windows at the barrage of heavy, matted snowflakes crashing into the windshields of our cars, frozen in our driveways, and we wait.
However, thanks to some strategic spiritual planning, we have Fat Tuesday, stuck like a pin in a country road on the map between Christmas and Easter. Warming my fingers around a mug of freshly brewed coffee, snuggled comfortably in the aroma it sent creeping throughout my house, I looked down at the front of my neon orange hooded sweatshirt, marked in chocolate brown block by brilliant advertisers with the words “Cleveland Browns,” and like every other day, I acknowledged my more than average, too "uncomfortably full" to be "pleasantly plump" body. It was a given for me at this point. The world around me existed, literally, around me. There was nothing about my body image that touched fluidity, but rather rigidity in physical boundaries. My body required more space than other people's bodies. It had a greater presence, setting its own limits. In one of the cozy armed chairs in the front living room of our home, I pulled my feet up underneath me, curling and tucking my way into the warmest position I could endure. The lowest folds of belly fat careened over themselves and pressed deeply into my thighs as my body curled into the roundness that is required to imprison its own heat. Looking down at myself, thinking nothing exceptional of my body, but rather accepting it as known to me, I gently tapped my fingernails rhythmically against the coffee cup and tried to decide what to make of this day.
Our house on Columbus Road was very, very blue. The blue stretched from the room in which I was contemplating the morning, through a wood paneled door frame which led to a hallway, past and into a bathroom and around a corner to the sleepy blue, and cocoa brown bedroom where my partner was still tucked under the covers, asleep and unacknowledged of bitter chill. I’ve always been a morning person, and rarely did a day pass when she would wake to find me at home. She was typically greeted with a note, and a ceaselessly warming pot of what would be stale coffee by the time she roused to the kitchen. I had a pattern down, a sequence memorized, of where I could attempt to stealthily place my feet on the wooden floorboards so as not to evoke a creak or stir the furniture into the thunderous rumbling that would occur when I walked normally through the house. When I reached my side of the bed, where my clean clothes were stacked almost unrecognizably from my dirty clothes in the heap of a wardrobe that had developed on the floor, I swapped my love of the Dawg Pound for a slightly more fitted, certainly more insulated sweatshirt advertising the mighty terriers of Boston University. I left my sweatpants where they had been pulled off from my legs, and donned a pair of what I lovingly called “comfy” jeans, some heavy socks and my "way-past-their-expiration-date" Vans sneakers. My clothing reflected my body in shape, fit and my regard for them. T-shirts, hoodies, "comfy" jeans and worn out hipster shoes were normal, fitting loosely over me so the only confinement I felt came from the stretched surface of my own skin.
The decision I made while brewing over coffee and blizzards was to go to Kroger. Being unemployed, it was difficult to entertain myself while also feeling productive and spending the least amount of money possible. We did things like splurge on the larger cable package, play endless hours of board games and cards, and place food consumption and therefore also food preparation in a place of high importance to help with this constant dilemma. Food consumption was a major part of our day, not just because I loved to cook, but because we both loved to eat. Eating is a two-faced, back-stabbing best friend. While it reminds you constantly with stomach groans and hunger pains that you need it to stay alive, it in turn wreaks havoc on your body in so many ways if you don’t do it properly. For two unemployed people, my partner still being a college student, spending money on food was an easy justification. We needed to eat, or we’d die. Therefore, trips to Kroger were almost a daily occurrence, and spending guilt amounted to almost none. Being the consumer of culture that I was, I decided that being Fat Tuesday, we really ought to celebrate. I remembered that Kroger sold boxes of Paczki each year, and that is precisely what I wanted to plop in my cart, along with some fixings for Jambalaya, and indulge in upon returning home.
My family has had a Shrove Tuesday tradition that paints my memories as far back as they go. I have the fondest, warmest, treasured thoughts when I remember those snowy, dark nights that dot my past every year on Fat Tuesday in the dead of Cleveland’s often viscous winter. I yearn now for the feeling to which I had grown accustomed with my family. Those Fat Tuesdays were always so familial and communal, as we’d crowd together around a hexagonal shaped kitchen table, with fruited Spode place mats, and a rustic chandelier flooding the table in muted yellow. This was my Aunt and Uncle’s house, and every year they’d drive to Garfield Heights during the day to get a dozen tender, perfectly fried Paczki to share with our family.
I suppose this story begins with my Uncle George. While my Uncle George was an import to my family, gaining status as uncle, brother, son and friend when he married my Aunt Liana, he was never an import to me, as I was born many years after they’d been married. In my mind, he was nothing other than my Uncle, and when I was five years old, I believed that we shared the same blood, the same breath, the same inherent structure. This is what constitutes family to me. What I would come to learn and understand later is that my Uncle George was Polish, and Jewish, which meant little to me, because in my heart he was just Uncle George and I loved him, which in turn helped me think nothing of and love the differences between myself and others in my future. Our differences, however, are not the point of the story, for we shared far more similarities.
My Uncle George loved food and culture, and was broad minded enough to embrace and experience multitudes of both of those things. Being Jewish, my Uncle didn’t observe the religious tenants of Fat Tuesday, but being Polish, it was probably nearly impossible for him to escape the cultural tenants that anchor that holiday to the calendar. Even though Polish Jews didn’t eat Paczki on Paczki Day (Fat Thursday, or the last Thursday before Lent) or Fat Tuesday, they make, fry and eat them during Hanukkah, to honor the tradition of eating foods fried in oil. Paczki are Polish, period. They are essentially glorified donuts, round and fried, filled with fruit and dusted with powdered sugar or glazed. They have a historical purpose. They were made to use up the sugar, lard and fruits kept in the house, so that deeply devoted Catholics would not consume those foods during the Lenten fast. My Aunt and Uncle would go to Charles Peters Bake Shop in Garfield Heights, after having ordered them at least a week in advance, take a hand written number from a flimsy nail in the molding of the door frame, and stand in the line that often extended to the sidewalk, down the street and around the corner. They’d bring the boxes home, and that night we’d gather.
I remember my mother bundling me up, and together we’d climb into the car to often brave snow and wind, up and down what seemed like treacherous country roads at the time, on the fifteen minute trek from our little white house in the suburbs to my Aunt and Uncle’s cedar sided home, tucked deep in the woods down a long and winding driveway. While it was familiar and felt like home to me, it was also always an adventure and I’d often imagine for myself stories of the creatures that lived in those woods, the ghosts that dwelt within the pines, and the characters that inhabited such a different place than what I knew at our own house. Through the darkness we’d be warmly greeted by mellow garage lights, and a forest green door that inevitably yielded a welcoming Golden Retriever or two upon opening, and either my Uncle George or Aunt Liana, smiling and asking for our coats to hang. Below our feet was a grid of red clay tiles, grouted in dark gray, puddles from melting snow collecting in the grooves between them. The colors in the long kitchen reflected the surrounding nature, the forest; deep shale blue, gray, hunter green, Terra cotta, and deep walnut, all draped in the warming glow of the chandelier, and deeply set pot lights above the kitchen counters. The surfaces were decorated with Fitz & Floyd, and Spode ceramics, where vegetables had been turned rigid and glazed, and suddenly a bundle of asparagus would dust black pepper when overturned. It was in this place, the uniqueness of it, where I felt so unconditionally loved.
Here, around this table, my Aunts, Uncle, Mother, sister and I would sit. The Paczki each had been cut into quarters, revealing a great mystery of what filled each round, and we’d share, taste, talk, and laugh over pieces of tender fried dough smeared with prune, apricot, lemon, apple, custard, poppy seed, and raspberry fillings. We weren’t really preparing for Lent as much as we were celebrating one another’s company, our shared fellowship, our bond as family and lovers of culture and food. Thus began my love affair with prune Paczki, and with food, and specifically with the cultural relevance of food in general.
Being reared around such people, I could not escape this binding tie with food preparation and food culture, with love from my Mother’s kitchen, with trips to the West Side Market with my Aunts, and with sharing those experiences with others. That’s how I knew, on that day when I came home from Kroger with my half dozen of prune Paczki and then decided to throw them in the freezer, giving up dessert for Lent, that walked the path which began to lay out before me wouldn’t be easy. Sitting in the chair in my living room on that snowy day, I felt stuck, stationary and wedged into a life that didn’t really belong to me. There had to be more than the day to day living, more than the folds of fat that weighed heavily under my skin, the board games, the occupancy of time wasted. I lost my Uncle George in August of 2006 to leukemia. My beautiful family had spent too much time, too much energy expended, too much love given for me to sink into that sea. I was too smart and possessed too much burning potential to allow my feet to submerge any further into the wet concrete of my turbulent early twenties. No more looking out the windows, no more waiting for the next big thing. I had to save myself.
March 8, 2011
I thought re-creating that day might help inspire me. I have hit, without question, the hardest part of the process I'd outlined in my mind, thus far. On January 8, 2011, I stepped on the scale and saw the number 186 for the very first time. I had lost 101 pounds. One hundred was my goal, and I went flailing about my apartment, dancing up and down the hallway, clapping my hands and yelling for joy when I read it. That was the peak for me. Suddenly the anxiety and heavy burden I'd been carrying of working constantly on a seemingly impossible goal for almost two years had melted away. I'd made it. I had been anticipating this moment.
What I wasn't expecting was to gain back five of those pounds in the two months following that blissful day. While five pounds may seem like nothing to the average person who hasn't embarked on a weight loss journey, let me tell you, it's a source of major anxiety and disappointment. Many times in the past several days, I've thought to myself that I've created a monster. The diet and exercise I've incorporated into my life are my new sense of "normal," and no matter how much I want certain aspects of my old life back, I cannot have them without consequence. I have created a monster and now I have to live with it, and perhaps even more challenging, I have to love it.
While many people view great achievements as having a price, I simply can't look at it that way. I will learn to love this monster. Giving up my old food philosophy, my slothful habits and my need to cling to the familiar has not been a price paid, but rather a change that was necessary, a change that occurred and now it is a part of my life-a real transition. We spend our entire lives fearing change, then being flung to emotional, mental and physical polarities when we are faced with it. What I tried to do, and am still trying to do, is embrace change and learn how to manage it well, because at the end of the day, it is now and always will be a part of my life. Why have I gained back weight it took me two months to lose? Because change is inevitable and welcomed, and because learning how to balance the many facets of our lives is the moral of the story.
Learning how to maintain my weight where I have felt the happiest (between 185-187) is going to be a continual challenge for me. Over the past two years I've become intimately familiar with my body, scrutinizing it daily in the mirror, while changing my clothes, or sitting at my desk. I am keenly aware of it's shape, it's boundaries, it's nuances. I knew I'd gained weight back, even a pound or two, without ever stepping on the scale. My physical awareness is heightened, but that was necessary in order to overhaul myself into a healthy human being. I am working on finding a healthier way to look at my body again, without sliding back into an oblivion of hopeless obesity. I am slowly, painfully coming to terms with the fact that I will probably spend the rest of my life balancing in order to maintain. Some days that is a daunting thought, and others I try to remind myself of how far I've come, that I've done it before and I can do it again. I believe it will get better.
Where I find myself today is so drastically different than the story I told of this day (Fat Tuesday) two years ago. The person who wore that Browns sweatshirt, staring out the picture windows is a ghost that dwells in the dark spaces of my heart. Today the light is shining. Today I am in love: new love. Today I deeply know those I love and defend, and who love me deeply in return; they are no more than a handful, but I hold them tightly in my palm. Today I use my mind, my soul and my kindness on a daily basis to help others. Today I have a plan, I have ambition and my path will always lead to other paths. Today I am open-ended, I am eager for new experiences and the ability and desire to change and grow flows through me every single day. Today I am the healthiest I've ever been in my life. Today I have done everything I can to live. Today has never felt so good. Tomorrow awaits and I am more ready than ever for all of its magnificent glory. Amen.
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