TORTURE AND STARVATION

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All of my yearly maintenance exams got rescheduled and landed all in the same week. I spent three days a couple of weeks ago being probed, prodded, joints popped into place, blood drawn and weighed. I waited in three different waiting rooms. It was quite the adventure. When I finally sat down with my doctor that deals with my cholesterol, she told me that I looked great. She looked at my chart and told me that I had lost weight, almost twenty pounds since the last time I saw her. Then she asked me how I’d done it. How on earth did I perform this miraculous feat? I looked her square in her masked face and said “Torture and starvation.”

This is not far from the truth. I started with torture first with a strength training class twice a week. The class consisted of jumping around a lot with weights and I hated it. Every time I did a jumping jack, I felt all of my body fat jiggle. Every exercise we did in that class made me hyperaware of my gross flabby body. Then I would get angry with myself. How could I be so out of shape when every day I spend thirty minutes on the elliptical, do an hour of yoga and walk a bazillion steps?!?! But I stuck with it because the instructor was/is cool and super supportive. She knew that I hated all of the things she made us do and she encouraged me with an appropriate amount of cheer. Eventually, I stopped hating the class. I didn’t love it, but I no longer hated it and I lost ten pounds. So it was obviously working.

Then I started the starvation tactic.

Starvation is a pretty dramatic word. The scientific word that really applies here is ‘fasting’. I did a lot of reading and research about intermittent fasting and then I sent my findings to Michael. He was immediately on board, which kind of surprised me. He usually needs more convincing, but intermittent fasting would mean giving up breakfast and he’s never been a big fan of breakfast. I on the other hand needed more convincing to give up something that has always been a part of my life. I was raised on breakfast. Just ask my mother about that phase I went through at age three or four when every morning for three weeks I requested one poached egg whenever she asked me what I wanted for breakfast. Eventually she stopped asking me what I wanted and made what ever she felt like making that morning, but we ate breakfast every single morning. If we were going to do this fasting thing, I was going to have to wrap my brain around not eating breakfast.

There was something else that made me hesitant to do fasting. I have been aware of my weight for most of my life. I have never ever felt skinny and as a teenager, those feelings created a dangerous relationship with food. There was a lot of eating and not eating and then eating a whole bunch going on, which was made worse by a ‘eat everything on your plate’ rule. The contradiction of being told to ‘watch my weight’ while at the same time being told to ‘clean my plate’ did not make for a healthy relationship with eating. I worried that intermittent fasting would once again lead me into an unhealthy eating relationship. I worried that my growling , hungry belly would cause me to just eat all of the food all day long. Honestly, I was really scared to start an intermittent fasting program. So of course, I went ahead and started an intermittent fasting program. Do the things that scare you and all that jazz.

I lost another ten pounds.

My doctor got very excited when I told her that I had been intermittent fasting during the week. I told her that I have either a green smoothie or avocado toast around 10:30 in the morning. Then I go do some form of exercise, usually yoga, and eat lunch at noon. Then I said “And I haven’t murdered any one yet!” I do not eat all of the food all day long. I eat reasonable amounts of food and I do not deprive myself. If someone brings in apology cake to work, I eat a slice of that apology cake (apology cake is the best cake). My doctor was thrilled with this news. She said that researchers have seen that intermittent fasting has helped Type 2 Diabetes patients get off of their insulin. She also said that I was doing every thing right, which is all that really matters to me, validation that I am doing everything right. So torture and starvation is how I have managed to perform the miraculous feat of weight loss at my age. Though the strength training and fasting thing really do not feel like torture or starvation any more.

It feels more like a mild annoyance.

YIN

Imagine you're standing on a beach. Your toes dig into the sand. The sun warms your face. You close your eyes and feel the warm salty air.

6 Likes, 1 Comments - Cindy Maddera (@elephant_soap) on Instagram: "Imagine you're standing on a beach. Your toes dig into the sand. The sun warms your face. You close..."

I received a supplemental Yoga Journal last month that was all about building a daily yoga practice. It included a chart for a six week program with different poses and plans and then told you what pages of the journal you could find those routines. One of the classes they recommended was a series of nine poses done in a Yin style of yoga. Yin yoga is a passive style of yoga that uses seated or supine posses to stretch the muscles and connective tissue in the hips and legs in order for you to sit longer and more comfortably in meditation. The idea is to hold each pose for 3-5 minutes. It is also the kind of practice that aids in lowering cortisol levels, a stress hormone that messes with your immune system and encourages the body to hang onto fat. 

My yoga practice has never been Yin. That doesn't mean I have a hard core Ashtanga practice either. I'd like to think my practice is a nice balance of difficult and relaxing. I start off with several rounds of surya namaskar, followed up with a focus on a few key poses. I try to throw in poses I generally do not like to do because one day they will become poses that I love to do. I finish off with some twists and a nice fifteen minute savasana. You see, a long time ago, way back when I learned about doshas, I read the part about how Kaphas tend to be overweight and sluggish and just went right ahead and declared that I was predominantly kapha. It is not true and I know that now, but it's still there in the back of my head whenever I get on my mat or the treadmill or find myself in a step aerobics class. That little kapha voice in my head says "Cindy, you are fat and slow so you better push yourself or you're going to stay fat and slow." Isn't that little kapha voice mean?

The other day, I rolled out my yoga mat and told that little kapha voice to be quite. I sat down on my mat and then proceeded through the nine poses in the magazine, holding each for five minutes. It was torture. You know how Professor X can hear thoughts from every person in the world and it's just a constant noise of chatter in his head? It was like that in my brain except all of the thoughts were my own. When the inside of my brain wasn't screaming in a million voices, I was the little kid in the back seat of a car saying "are we there yet?" over and over. And it was not like I was forcing myself to stay in the most difficult of yoga poses. They were the kind of poses that I typically do to cool down and prepare for savasana. They were the kind of poses that are yummy for the brief amount of time I had been usually holding them. Five minutes is a really long time. It's a life time. I wouldn't have been surprised to discover that years had passed while I had been on my mat in that practice. 

Yet I persisted, holding each pose until the timer dinged to move to the next pose. I took note of what the mind chatter was saying. Most of the chatter is me writing up entries in my head. How to write the story? Maybe that chatter wouldn't be so loud if I actually sat down and wrote the damn story. Eventually, I reached a moment when I was able to reel in all the mind chatter and settle into savasana. I got up from my mat knowing full well that I am more pitta/vata than kapha and feeling a little lighter. 

I got up from my mat knowing that I need to write the damn story.