Ravings of a Textual Deviant

Yesterday morning, I tried the “latin fusion” cardio class at my gym. It’s an 8:30 AM class, which is kind of early for a Saturday, but I got myself pulled together and went anyway.

I’m really glad that I did, because it was a lot of fun. I can’t remember the last time I actually had that much fun at the gym. The music is great, it’s an awesome workout, and I found the choreography a lot easier to follow than the TurboKick class. And did I mention that the music is fabulous? Also, it was only 45 minutes, which was probably a good thing, given the energy level. One of my classmates is an ex-ballet dancer and fitness instructor, maybe a few years older than I am, and she has been going for some time. She tells me that the choreography for each song is the same every time, so it gets easier as you continue to do it.

And while I could tell at the time that I had really worked, I didn’t have the feeling that I was going to either fall over or throw up when the class ended. Furthermore, there weren’t any unpleasant after-effects, either yesterday or today.

If your gym offers somehting called “Zumba”, I highly recommend giving it a try.

Fiancé went to the gym last night for our first TurboKick class.

The instructor totally Turbokicked our butts. She was very bouncy, and kept throwing extra jumps into what is already a very fast-paced, high-energy class.

That said, it is a very good workout, and I am content to be bad at it for a while as I learn the moves.

If I survive.

I picked up my wedding dress on Wednesday, and it’s the right size, color, etc. There were a few loose beads, but it was duly noted in my file that they will be fixed with no extra charge at alteration time…which is March.

My new challenge to is not make any drastic changes to my current physique between now and June 1st. I have put on about 20 pounds since I bottomed out at a size zero, and admittedly, about half of that was necessary. Still some of my pants are getting awfully snug about the tummy, so a little discpline at this point is not a bad thing. Having lost 70 pounds previously, ten just doesn’t feel like that much of a big deal.

In the mean time, I have cleared a couple of “vintage” prom dresses out of my closet, to be duly Goodwilled, in order to make room for the dress. One was bought as a costume, and is a mid-eighties peach-taffeta-and-lace, Scarlett-O’Hara-wannabe monstrosity; the other is of the same era, white taffeta and lace with silver glitter, and rather silly in its own way, with a handkerchief skirt and sleeves.

I like the new dress much, much better.

I’ve been engaged for two weeks now, and I have come to the conclusion that the first thing any couple should do is not look for rings, ceremony sites, wedding consultants, or any of the other things every bridal book, website, or TV show tells you to do.

The first thing to do is join a gym together (if you haven’t already)…and start going to the gym together a couple of times a week. Why? The usual reasons all apply, of course, but there are some additional ones I can think of that are specific to this situation.

As my psychiatrist friend has oh-so-wisely said on more than one occasion, even good change is stressful. And believe me, the stress can hit hard and fast. Exercise is one of the best ways I can think of to deal with stress, whether it’s yoga to help you calm down, or cardio kickboxing for catharsis. Endorphins are free, legal, and you can make them yourself.

It gives you something to do together that has nothing to do with the wedding; planning can take over your life, if you let it.

It will also be something that you can continue to do together after the wedding. I don’t know how many studies I’ve seen that indicate people are more likely to exercise if they have a workout buddy. This is the kind of real-life commitment that comes along with a long-term relationship. There’s so much hype, fuss, and adreneline around the wedding planning details that it’s easy to lose focus on the original reason for the wedding in the first place.

There’s going to be a whole lot of eating going on in the run-up to the wedding; parties, showers, lunches, the rehearsal dinner, and the reception itself.

For me, the fact that in the not-too-distant future, someone is going be taking pictures of me in a strapless dress is a big motivator for doing upper-body resistance work. (Not that I suffer from vanity, mind you. No, I enjoy every minute of it!) In adddition to wanting to look good, I am anticipating a long day with a lot of standing up, walking around, etc. I want to be in good enough condition at the end of the day to enjoy the evening, if you get my meaning.

The other day, I went out for  lunch with a coworker who has recently had considerable incentive to eat more healthily. We went to a Greek restaurant, and as I’m not eating red meat these days, my former first choice was out. I ended up ordering grilled fish (which was delicious, just for the record). My coworker ended up ordering the same thing. In fact, he said “I should have lunch with you every day, and eat the same thing that you do.” I’m not sure how I became the poster person for healthy eating, and I’m also not sure howI feel about that.  Especially when I’m the first to say things like “there’s room for chocolate in a healthy diet.”

Over the past month or so, my weight has finally(!) stabilized, and I’m able to eat most of the time, even with things being as stressful as they are at the moment. I have lost about 70 pounds, and I’m starting to get some serious muscle tone, especially in my core. A few months ago, I thought I had hit my “final destination” at a size 2. However, those pants from late July are now distinctly loose about the waist—not wardrobe-malfunction loose, but quite roomy nonetheless. Ever mindful of another potential incident, I decided to try on something smaller. So, I hit the stores and start looking around for a size 1.

There weren’t any.

The next size down is a size 0. I’ve never been than small; not even when I was in college. I started thinking, what the hell is that? Size 0? That means there’s nothing there. And I need a size 0 short, which is less than nothing? I don’t want to be less than nothing! I may not have been healthy or comfortable as a size 16, but at least I had substance. And paying for less than nothing? That’s just stupid. They should pay me to take them.

Needless to say, I left the store without pants. Well, other than the ones I was wearing when I went in. It wasn’t that much of a crisis.

And what a nice change that is.

Last Tuesday, I had a suspicious mole removed. To be honest, I’ve always been suspicious of that mole, for as long as I can remember. It looked like a mole that was up to something, or at the very least, desperately wanted to be up to something. Recently, it started to change shape and texture ever so slightly. I was happy to finally have an excuse to have the damed thing removed so I wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore. As it happened, I needed a followup visit for my weight problem, so I decided to only make one copayment and address both problems in one visit.

The good news is that my weight is no longer in freefall; I was down a little bit from my last weigh-in, but no more than could be accounted for by water weight. I passed my take home test, as expected, which means that my digestive system problem is most likely IBS and certainly not something malignant.

The better news is that my suspicious mole came up benign in laboratory tests. I think that’s a generous description, given the amount of worry I’ve expended on it, but I’m ever so pleased to know that there’s definitely nothing more be concerned about.

More than one person has, of late, commented that losing weight as quickly as I have isn’t healthy. I’m aware of that, thanks, and even if I weren’t, the feeling-like-crap part would probably have been a good clue. Bowing to the collective wisdom of friends and family, I hied myself to the family doctor today. Best to deal with this while I am still at a healthy weight than to let it go until I am underweight and worse off. (Seriously, I am at something like a healthy weight; I am coming in slightly above the top of what the computer at my gym considers ideal. When you know that your mom reads your blog, sometimes you have to be really explicit about the fact that there’s nothing to worry about.)

Without going into too much distasteful detail, the doctor is indeed convinced that I have a digestive-system problem, and has ordered some tests. One is a take-home, which I sha’n't describe, as I’d have to think about it. I’ll also be leaving some blood in test tubes at my friendly neighborhood medical lab tomorrow morning. I have an as-needed presciption for the digestive problem, which I hope I won’t need very often…but hey, if I didn’t have a problem, I wouldn’t have been to the doctor in the first place, so who am I trying to kid, here?

The doctor also suggested that there may be some depression going on, and he wasn’t the first person to bring it up. Frankly, I’m skeptical; I’ve been depressed and this doesn’t feel like it. I turned down the idea of an antidepressant; my doctor tends not to write a lot of prescriptions anyway, and brought it up mostly as something that might be appropriate in the future. If he doesn’t think I need it now, and I don’t think I need it now, there’s no point.

By a truly amazing coincidence, when I got in my car to go back to work, the local public radio station was airing a program in which the participants were talking about the selfsame digestive-system condition that the doctor suspects I’ve got. The really interesting part of the discussion—and something the doc didn’t mention, probably because of time constraints—was the role of neurotransmitters in the gastroenteric system. Fascinating stuff, and wonderfully relevant, too. I felt a lot better about the problem when I heard actual medical experts saying that stress can cause the problem, and it may or may not have anything to do with depression. Just the possibility that the fact that I have the digestive-system problem doesn’t automatically mean I’m depressed is quite a relief. I’ve been saying all along that it feels like a nasty stress reaction. It’s nice to know that I’m paying enough attention to my body that I might be right.

So what with one thing and another, I realized that it’s been two years since I started going to the gym regularly. I’ve lost a total of 60 pounds, which was 1/3 of my starting weight. The math is left as an exercise to the student. I’m within sight of my undergraduate weight, and for the moment, at least, my driver’s license is accurate. (One of the things that prompted me to start working out in the first place was not the realization that I had lied about my weight on my license, but by how much I was off without even knowing it.) Lately, I’ve been losing weight by stress non-eating—which I really, truly don’t recommend, any more than I recommend stress eating. It’s not healthy, and being healthy is the whole point of the exercise.

Now, I’m starting to think about maintenance, and it’s startling to realize that I’m going to have to get used to eating more, for the first time in two and a half years. One of the reasons that I’m glad I’ve done (most) of this process slowly is that it has given me time to adjust to new eating habits, new capacities, and new capabilities. What with the recent upheaval, though, I find that I have absolutely no idea how my metabolism works, and I have to reacquaint myself with my body—and that’s not even how it would work normally; it’s how it works under the kind of stress I’ve had the past two months. I have no idea how things will settle out once I’m not this tightly wound. Looking forward to finding out, though—whenever that happens.

A few years ago, I ran into one of my few local high school friends. I hadn’t seen him in years, and therefore we absolutely, positively had to go out and get caught up over a good meal. One of the things that I got caught up on was that he’d accidentally become a vegetarian.

I had no idea how that happens, either.

It turns out that he hadn’t known his roommate—who did all the cooking—was a vegetarian. Both of them were eating all their meals at home (or bringing lunches to work) to save money, and my friend somehow didn’t notice that he wasn’t eating meat. Three months later, he went home to see his parents at Thanksgiving, ate a lot of turkey, and had a very bad night of it. At the time, I wondered how you fail to notice what you’re eating.

Now I know.

Starting a couple of months ago, I went about six weeks or so without eating red meat, for various reasons. I certainly didn’t miss it at the time; of course, I didn’t particularly miss food at the time, either. Some people are stress eaters; I even used to be one of them. Now, it seems that I’m a stress non-eater. (I don’t recommend it, by the way.) After the stress started to go away, it got too hot and humid to eat, and I was living mostly on fruit and cheese. Finally, I got to the point where I felt I could eat normally and ended up having a small portion of beef at lunch. My eating habits had been so badly out of whack that it took me about six hours to figure out why my stomach was doing such awful things to me.

I haven’t touched red meat of any kind since that afternoon, which was about two weeks ago. And while I find that I do kind of miss red meat, I don’t miss it that much. I haven’t decided whether or not I’ll try to get accustomed to it again; right now it seems like it’s more trouble than it’s worth. I’m still eating chicken, fish and seafood, but there are plenty of days when animal protein just doesn’t appeal.