 Life with More Life in It |
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My grandmother died a year ago yesterday. And I am trying to think of a way to mark this somehow. I still haven't really read her journals. They are carefully lined up by year on a shelf in my hall closet. It's not that I don't want to read them, it's that I can't read them. Because they are too sad. Because I see too much of myself in her. Both the best parts of myself and the worst parts. Her love of her dog and her favorite television shows like Jeopardy and The Young and the Restless and her loneliness and unforgiving heart. I loved my grandmother. She lived almost one hundred years. She was admired and loved by as many who feared and resented her. She could be as sweet as the sugar in her homemade pralines and as mean as a snake. I don't want to end up like my grandmother. I don't but I do. She loved her books and had more amassed knowledge about the depth and breadth of the literature and poetry of this world than anyone I've ever met. She had an indomitable faith. All of this thinking about my grandmother and the overall state of my life boils down to the fact that I need to take better care of myself. I am not a healthy person. I can feel it down to my bones. I don't eat right. Other than a fleeting flurry of gym attendance earlier this year, I don't exercise. Ever. I don't sleep well which is surely a symptom of all of the above. I want to change these things about me. I just passed my twenty-nine and one-half year birthday mark. I am going to be thirty in six months. It is time to stop being such a lazy, hollow, slug of a person and start taking care of myself. So I'm going to try the new Core foods plan of Weight Watchers. Mo and Linda are saying some really interesting things about it, so check them out because they say it all better than I could. I enjoy a lot of what I read online about dieting and nutrition (see above and of course also Erin), but I find talking about it in real life, especially in terms of myself, to be mindnumbingly dull. But I want to say a few things here. And that is that I think what attracts me to this plan is that it's based around food that is actually food. When I try to eat "well," I count points. But I end up trying to wring each point within an inch of its life, which means often eating low-point, low-nutrition foods like fat free Pringles and fat free jell-o pudding and just a lot of crap that makes me feel like what it is. Crap. I am ready to eat some real food, even if it means having to spend more time cooking and preparing. Real food. REAL FOOD. Food with more actual food in it. With the idea that if you veer off into the land of bread (also real food) and frappuccinos (not real food but life is meaningless without them), which I will because I believe that life is too short to deprive oneself of those things altogether and that it is psychotic to try to do so, you really need to record that and measure it and track it, but with the other stuff, the "Core" stuff, you just eat it. You eat it and you measure it by how you feel. And you know when you're done because you feel like you are. And it really doesn't take much real food to fill up a human tummy. The non-real foods I mostly subsist on? It takes lots. It takes infinite amounts. I never feel full or satisfied, so I eat Skittles or one hundred tiny pretzel twists. And that's not doing anything but making me one tired, prematurely aging 29.5-year-old whose clothes are ceasing to fit. I'm out of shape, and I'm above the weight where I'm comfortable, but mostly, this is about how I feel. I FEEL LIKE CRAP. I would stay at this weight forever if learning to eat this new way would allow me to have a damn spring in my step. There is not a moment of any day when I don't feel completely and utterly drained and exhausted. And I'm hoping that changing what I put in my body and actually getting it moving again will change that. Because I'm realizing that it's a big part (along with my insane phobias that I am working on) of what is stifling me and draining me from having the energy and the confidence to do what I really want to do, which is to meet new people and try new things. And I know myself well enough to know that that's part of the reason I've eaten so poorly and been such an exercise slacker. It's the easiest excuse in the world to stay in the box. You don't take care of yourself, so you don't look or feel your best but rather like shit on both counts, so you want to hide. You get to hide. But I'm tired of hiding and I want to feel better. My grandmother lived to be 97 years old. I hid her cigarettes in my Barbie Town House. She drank that instant coffee that smelled really good, tasted really bad, and that was in that dumb commercial where those women reminisced about their French waiter named Jean Luc. She made the world's best angel food cake and peanut butter fudge. She never lost at Scrabble and got up at six in the morning when I was a little girl to teach me the very best way to cut a grapefruit and to eat it with me. Soon I will eat some real food like grapefruit for breakfast. And I will not think about the points contained therein. She wouldn't want me to. I will just eat it, and I will squeeze out every last drop of juice that is both sour and sweet, and I will think of her. About this time in ...
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