If I were writing an owner’s manual for your child right now, and don’t you wish you had gotten one, this section would be the Shortcut for Tips to Remember.  Nothing I write about here will be given its full explanation.  Perhaps this will be an outline for a future book.

My intent is to give you some quick, effective strategies for getting your family back on track.  You create a vocabulary that is simple and clear.  You have a plan.  You’ve thought it out and practiced ahead of time.  You have back up plans.  You have a support plan for someone helping you when you don’t follow through on the plan.

Child raising is challenging and important.  Give it ample time and thought. Seek as much help as you would if you were remodeling your kitchen.  Do you know how to put in your own plumbing, or granite counter tops?  No?  Then you would seek help from people who have a lot more experience and more clarity than you have.
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If I had a magic wand and could give anyone just one gift, I would give them the gift of feeling gratitude — not thinking you should be grateful, or intellectually that you are a lucky person–but, instead, the whole body feeling of gratitude. That feeling is the ultimate Happiness Habit.

It’s much easier to feel irritated. We are invited, I am invited, into feeling irritated every day.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter very often, you know I am very grateful for my beloved husband Murray. He is a peach, and I let him know I adore him every day.
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Last week I wrote about an eating regimen I’ve been on since early August.  Believe me, showing my “before” photo was no fun.  My shame, or rather my shame about my shame, had me keeping the amount of my weight gain, 50 pounds, a secret from everyone including my husband.  Shame about shame shuts us up and lets whatever we are ashamed about get septic.

Exposing the truth in my newsletter I popped the boil, so to speak, and gunk spilled out.  I feel better, but I’m breathing through feeling the way I did in eighth grade when most of my friends needed bras and I was a “slow developer.” (Over-share?)  I just have to trust that this pealing back and revealing is helping someone besides me.

Anyway, this week I’m sharing some of the insights I’ve gained in this process.  It’s what I do.  Here is the list:

1. Losing weight could get addictive.

I know people with eating disorders and a warped body image. They think they need to lose weight when they are already too thin. I also know about addictions having been raised in an alcoholic home. Thankfully, I’ve never succumbed to bulimia or anorexia, but after being on an eating regimen for 3 1/2 months, I have a deeper understanding of how this could happen to someone.

It’s about control. I like control. I like losing an average of 2 pounds a week. I like buying smaller sizes. I like identifying with my slender self rather than feeling dowdy. I could get hooked on this. I feel the delicious Siren of Control beckoning to me. “Vicki,” it whispers to me, “you could get as skinny as you want. You weighed 118 pounds when you graduated from high school. You can keep on this program until you weigh what you did when you were seventeen years old.”

I have more empathy now for people with eating disorders. I feel more compassionate. That is always a good thing.

2. Trusting numbers vs. what I really look and feel like.

I’m finding it interesting that buying a pair of size 8 jeans excited me so much. Size 8 is only a number, and I hear they’ve been changing the sizes anyway, so who knows what the size really means. My weight right now is 144 pounds. I look like I weigh less, probably because my percentage of body fat is less as I’m a fat burning machine now. But still that number, 144 pounds, feels more real to me than how I look or how I feel. I’ve been brainwashed and I’m still giving away my power to an external authority – a   number, a number someone else made up.

3. I’m lighter in many ways.

Physically I feel lighter, obviously. Losing 30 pounds makes a big difference. But I’m also feeling lighter of spirit, more hopeful. I feel more lighthearted, a delicious lightness of being. This feeling of lightness motivates me to keep going even in those moments when I’m tempted to scarf down a warm piece of cheese pizza.

4. I was more discouraged than I realized.

Because I’m such an upbeat, optimistic person, I hadn’t realized how discouraged I really was. When reading a book and a character would be described as “fifty-something, slender,” I felt terrible. “That’s not me,” I’d think to myself. “I look more like the woman being described as dowdy or matronly.”  Now, I felt unattractive not because I was too skinny, as happened in eighth grade, but because I was too fat.  I don’t belief in self hate.  I don’t believe in “”fatophobia”, yet I was having trouble loving and accepting myself just as I am.

Let’s not kid around, though.  Being overweight is not good for joints, hearts, and it exacerbates all kinds of physical problems.  But self hate is not a motivator.  Self hate invites more self destructive behavior, which is why most diets don’t work and even backfire.

I worked on my attitude, but I didn’t realize how much I was working on it, and how unsuccessful I was at loving myself 50 pounds overweight.

5. Mindful eating leads to mindful living.

Many people have commented over the years about how fast I eat.  I use to almost inhale my food. I was always moving on to the next activity, and eating, though I would enjoy the taste of my food, was something I did fairly mechanically.

In this program, we are encouraged to take at least 15 minutes to eat our meal. This means I’m paying attention to every bite, leaving space in between bites. I recognize this mindfulness because this is a habit I was forced to develop when I lost my vision. I had to start paying attention to each foot step, one step at a time. I had to pay attention to where I put my glasses, where my pens were, where I put my purse. This mindfulness because of my low vision has been a great gift.

Mindful eating has been a great gift as well, and I fully intend to eat this way for the rest of my life.

6. Other people’s responses to my eating regimen have been very interesting.

Some people keep trying to get me to take bites of their food or sips of their alcoholic drinks, even when I am quite content and not longing for anything. This reminds me of what happens for addicts in recovery. Unless the people around them get some treatment too, they will invariably invite the addict back into behaviors they may have been complaining about for years.

Addicts in early recovery are often accused of being boring or no more fun anymore. “I liked you better when you were drinking” is a statement that is unfortunately not rare.

My guess is that people are feeling guilty about their own eating habits, their own weight, or they liked it better when they were thinner than I was. These are very human reactions, and I’ve been guilty of all of them myself.

It’s important to remember that whenever we make a change, a healthy change in our lives, we are going to be rocking the boat. A little rocking never hurt anybody, but it’s a good idea to be ready to steady yourself when someone you had counted on for support turns out to be a crab dragging you back into the pot instead of letting you climb free.

7. Making one choice to be on an eating regimen is much easier than making dozens of choices all day. Or … I do not miss standing in front of the refrigerator.

Since I don’t drive, shop for food, or cook, I’ve often found myself standing in front of the refrigerator, trying to figure out what I can eat. I usually settle for something that’s quick, though not necessarily healthy or low calorie.

With this program I make one decision to be on the program, and then I’m just choosing what kind of packaged meal I want to eat, and which vegetables and lean meat to have for my one Lean and Green meal per day. It’s much, much simpler, and it works very well with my kind of brain and personality.

8. Since I haven’t been drinking or going out to dinner as much, the program hasn’t cost me that much more than I was spending before on food and drink, maybe even less.

Other people are having a harder time with my not drinking than I am. Yes, I miss having a glass of red wine every now and then, but it’s no big deal compared to the joy of pounds melting away. And, since my husband fixes the delicious meals here at home, we don’t eat out very often anymore. I haven’t figured it out exactly, but I’m pretty close to breaking even with this program. How cool is that?

9. Nothing tastes as good as thin feels.

A friend of mine shared this statement with me, and I found it very useful to say this to myself when I get a hankering for cheese stuffed manicotti.

10. Slow and steady; there is no race.

This may be my most profound lesson. You probably heard Aesop’s fable of the Tortoise and Hare. The moral is slow and steady wins the race. But what I’ve learned in this program is that as long as I believe there’s a race, I’m tempted to start pushing.   Whatever is happening is not enough.  Instead of enjoying the ride, I’m fretting that I’m not going faster.

Most weeks I lose weight, but some weeks I gained weight. How could anybody gain weight on 1000 calories a day? Answer: our bodies are mysterious. There is a metabolic recalibration going on, and water retention varies.

So even though every week I don’t get reinforced, I’ve learned the power and value of slow and steady. I am gratefully appreciating the peace of mind I receive every time I take myself off the hook and out of the race. The race is a story in my mind and it does not serve me. Believing and trusting in “slow and steady; there is no race” does serve me well.

That’s enough for now. As always, I love comments and I’d love to hear what you’re thinking about what I’m writing.

When I was in middle school, known then as junior high school, I was the brunt of many jokes about being too skinny. “Vicki, if you turn sideways and swallowed a P, you would look pregnant!” This was embarrassing on a few levels. Since my older sister had gotten pregnant at 17, dropped out of high school, got married and then divorced, the idea of my having a baby was not at all funny to me.

These jokes, though my definition of a joke now is that it’s only a joke if nobody has to pay for it and certainly I paid for these “jokes”, made me feel rgly and sexless. I feared I would never be attractive to the opposite sex, I would never have a boyfriend, and I would grow old and alone. Every time I heard one of these comments I was mortified. Mortified. I wanted to die, be invisible, or at minimum be someone else.

The summer after my freshman year however, a 6 foot four graduated senior, all-star athlete and winner of the athlete of the year award from our high school, asked me to dance at a party and then we started going out. He had his own car and so much hair on his chest, which was sexy then, that it sprouted out the top of his T-shirt.

After being chosen by the  God of Maleness, I let myself believe I was attractive, that my skinniness would not prevent me from being loved. From that time on I have always felt attractive enough. Not beautiful, not alluring, and not even sexy, but attractive enough. From that time on I have never had any problem having a man in my life if I wanted one.

In college skinny filled out to slender and I stayed that way until I hit menopause.  When I was forced to make a choice, I could continue to be slender or feel homicidal and crazy. I chose to risk the weight gain for a gain in sanity.

When I met my husband Murray, I weighed less than he did. Since then, I gained 50 pounds. 50 pounds! I have the personality of a slender person, whatever that means–I think of myself as a slender person, and I could carry all this extra weight better than some women could. But when I saw a video of myself with the bones of my face hidden because of my weight gain, I no longer recognized myself.  I desperately wanted to go back to the time when I recognized myself and was healthier to boot.

I did not like the way I looked, I did not like how much energy it took for me to get up off the couch, and I did not like this feeling of frumpiness that was starting to define me.

Many of my friends are still slender, and I felt more and more like an outsider in my own life–an outsider to my own history.

No Diets for Me

I was slender all my life without much effort. If I gained a few pounds, I just took a little bit more care about what I ate, and the pounds went away. I have never been on a diet. I can’t do deprivation and suffering. Setting a goal out of self-hate contaminates the goal. And many diets are physically harmful, and I wasn’t interested in harming my body to alleviate my discomfort.

Because I had gained so much weight, almost overnight it seemed, I felt discouraged about how to take this all on. I’m legally blind, I don’t drive, I don’t do the grocery shopping, and I don’t do the cooking, so having to make specialized meals didn’t feel like an option that would be fun. And I’m all about having fun.

I’ve tried various strategies, various healthy strategies, to lose weight such as Acai Berry, gluten-free diet, and drinking Body Balance, which helped two of my friends lose a lot of weight. Nothing worked.

Take Shape for Life

Last July while I was in Portland staying with my friend Sue and teaching a class for teachers, I tagged along with Sue and her husband to a meeting with a health coach who was working with a friend of ours. This friend had lost 25 pounds in 2 1/2 months, and my interest was peaked.

He described a program which was developed twenty years ago by doctors. You eat five of their meals a day, one meal every 2 to 3 hours, and one meal you prepare which is called Lean and Green. The program felt sane and doable and self-loving to me, so I went home and did some research. The program has been studied at Johns Hopkins and is healthy and effective. I decided to give it a try.

That was at the beginning of August. I was wearing a size 16 then and just the other day I bought a pair of size 8 jeans. La Dee Dah!

A Typical Day of No Suffering or Deprivation

Here’s a typical day of eating for me: wake up and within a half an hour I have coffee mixed with a cappuccino meal. My meal is delicious, high in protein, sugar free and it’s only 110 calories.  Two hours later, I have oatmeal. For lunch I can eat stew, chicken noodle soup, tomato soup, or lots of other choices. For my fourth meal of the day I usually have cheese puffs. Granted, they aren’t as good as Cheetoes, but I like them just fine.

For dinner my beloved husband cooks us a very delicious Lean and Green meal. I get a big helping of chicken, fish, shrimp, or beef. Add to that a cup and a half of vegetables, flavored with Brag, an amino acid soy sauce substitute, and I’m eating well.

For my last meal in the evening, I have a chocolate bar, chocolate shake, chocolate pudding, or soft serve chocolate mint ice cream. (You might have noticed a chocolate theme here.)

I’ve been losing about 2 pounds a week, which is healthy and steady. Sometimes I want to lose more weight, faster, I want to push the river, and that gives me plenty of material to take up with my Angel Committee.

I feel great, look great, and can drink one of my little chocolate shakes and watch people eat a full meal and not feel pangs of envy or loss. Yahoo!

I’ve lost weight and gained many insights in this process, and I will share them next week in Part Two of my Time Traveling.

Meanwhile, love yourself just as you are today.  If you need to listen to ‘Off the Hook‘, which I sent out in last week’s newsletter, feel free to do that. I’ve also included my song Love Me Just as I Am with this article to help you keep your sense of humor about life and its mysteries.

Note:  This article is part of a book I’m writing.  My new proposed title is: Habit of Heart:  Remembering What Matters Every Day. What do you think?

Since I’ve always felt like an alien in my family of origin, I’ve had difficulty coming up with ancestor gratitude.

I’m very grateful for my mother’s enduring love, for my singing and performing ability which I got from my father, and for my nurturing grandmother, who baked bread, canned cherries, grew flowers, and cooked the best fried chicken in bacon fat you ever tasted.

This morning, though, when I was dialoguing with my Angel Committee, I started tracing back my current gratitudes. I’ve been on an eating regimen for three months and have lost 26 pounds, thank you very much. I feel great, look great, and am enjoying the process of giving away my clothes that are now too big for me. Yahoo!

Here’s the anatomy of this gratitude:

• Phil, my health coach
• Sue, my friend I met when I was working for the Oregon Department of Education as a Distinguished Oregon Educator, who introduced me to Phil.
• Dan, the principal who nominated me to be a Distinguished Oregon educator.
• Sarah and others on the hiring committee, who hired a high school English teacher to be an elementary school counselor when she had no experience in elementary school whatsoever.
• Chris, who gave me a job as a teaching assistant in the English department at Oregon State University, which allowed me to go to graduate school.
• Tom, my first husband, who supported my decision to stop teaching and go to graduate school to get my masters in counseling.
• Eldon, the principal who hired my first husband and me to come and teach at South Albany Highest School which got me close to Oregon State University where I could go to graduate school.
• My Dad, who hired me to work in his bar in Phoenix, Oregon where Eldon met me when I was working as a waitress and hired me to work at Phoenix High School where I met my first husband, Tom.

I was amazed at this Gratitude Anatomy led back to my father. I’m not used to being grateful to my father for anything except the above mentioned singing and performing ability. My dad was a narcissistic violent alcoholic, who slept with other women while married to my mom, embarrassed me in front of my friends, and invited lecherous drunks into our home. He died in May of this year, which I found out by looking on the Internet in September. I had not seen him in 17 years.

Why is this important?

I just read The Survivors Club, and at the end of the book the author talks about the “Illusion of Isolation.” We are never alone; we never have been alone, but sometimes our shame convinces us we are broken and excluded.

Because I always felt like an alien, I had felt disconnected from the Mother Ship, as it were. Like an astronaut on a spacewalk, I felt my lifeline severed. I’ve been floating in space, enjoying the spectacular view and the freedom, but I’ve missed the solidity of being able to lean back into a line of ancestors supporting me, bringing me to this exact point in my life.

And guess what? When I trace my gratitude for my eating regimen to my dad, I run smack dab into my mother as well. And if I’m going to be grateful for my mother, I have to be grateful for her parents. Her mother died at age 34 when my mother was 15. Her name was Beatrice Lela and I think I would’ve liked her a lot. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a violent gambling sociopathic alcoholic. I never did like him.

But after having done my Anatomy of Gratitude, I think I’ve established a pattern that will support me the rest of my life. My ancestors, no matter how flawed, were essential in my being the person I am, with the wounds I have, and the wounds I’ve transformed into gifts. My ancestors have got my back.

And my guess is if I could get to know ancestors further back than these two generations, I might find an artistic, philosophizing, world changing woman thriving a hundred and fifty years ago. She would recognize me as her kin, see me for who I am, and share my triumphs and defeats. I might just dialogue with her tomorrow!

What does this have to do with you?

I invite you to do your own Anatomy of Gratitude. Pick something in your life right now for which you are grateful. Then trace back all the people who contributed to your having this wonderful thing in your life.

I’d love to know how this works for you. If you would be willing to share your process, I might even be able to share your results in my newsletter, anonymously of course.

Our brains and bodies love gratitude. There is no habit that connects spirituality, relationships, service, physical health, mental health, and emotional health better than the habit of gratitude. We can completely shift our energy by just taking a few minutes to really let ourselves feel our gratitude for the miracles that surround all of us every day.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.  If you’ve read this far, I invite you to assume your Angel Committee is at work again, and that you are being called to create your own Anatomy of a Gratitude.