The Uber Fit

We need new words to describe fitness. The more I read about fitness, the more I know. Or rather, there is a lot of ignorance to be had, and after much reading, it is shocking to find out exactly how much ignorance I had. Shocking because my parents exercised with us when we were all little. On their own they ran and walked and did light weight training. With us they walked, biked, skated, swam, and played badminton, softball, ping pong and occasionally tennis. So I should be on the more knowledgeable side. There shouldn't be much of anything that shocking.

The shocking part has been to learn exactly how much work goes into looking like you're fit. Or rather, to look like the people described as fit on TV and in magazines. The conclusion I've drawn is that is 110% ridiculously horrifically ludicrous to describe those people as fit. Fit as an adjective should be attainable by everyone. Kind of like the words alive and breathing. If you're alive and breathing you can be fit. If your main focus in life is getting into the top 5% of human fitness, alwaysX10 focusing on what affect your training is having on your appearance? There should be a different name for their results. I should get to call my results fit. I can walk 5 miles and pick things up off the floor without any fear at all of hurting my back. I can dance for an hour and climb two flights of stairs and carry my own groceries. But I feel entirely prohibited from doing so. People like me are supposed to call ourselves “relatively in shape” and I just think it's bullshit.

Super fit. Uber fit. Obsessed. Compulsive. Really really fit. Really really really dedicated. Professionally fit (they can and invariably do make money off of it.) Professionally in shape. Having the appearance of a fitness model or a personal trainer or an action move actor. Shockingly fit.

Or even “fit in appearance.” Which would leave me and myself with “functionally fit.” Because a lot of the uber fit have pretty major injuries they have suffered, are suffering, or are perpetually recovering from. Not all, but a lot. They are certainly also functionally fit, but in the bigger picture, I should "fit" and they should get "uber fit."

Maybe now my heart will be free

I am still fine tuning what I want to write about here. But I think I'm finally back to my original idea, which was to share my daily crazy thoughts and experiences. The pressure to have a blog that is all on one topic is strong -- never overt, invisible really, but strong.

So here is the one thing today that made me laugh so suddenly I inhaled my own spit. In my gmail account which advertises to me based on words and phrased it finds it my e-mails, was this ad:

He Lying To You? - TakeBackYourHeart.com - Learn "Secret Reason" Why You're Attracted To Jerks & Players

Snort.

New round

I am starting over on my food allergy diet. I am sick of all the dishes I've been cooking - I need new dishes. Some of the food in my freezer is way too old, so every meal is a process of tasting first, and then deciding whether or not it's edible (yuck). Plus I've been eating out regularly for a whole month, which means it's hard to get back to strict, especially given the two previous sentences.

For this round of strictness, I plan to focus on eating less meat. I can't have dairy, and I'm sick of nuts that aren't peanuts, and I can only have beans every other day. So there is no way to have a daily routine, which I usually find comforting and easy to follow. So on bean days about twice a week I plan to make a bean-containing-salad in the evening for dinner, and eat the leftovers for lunch the next day. For the other bean days I will make bean soup with or without small amounts of meat, and well seasoned ground meat patties I lovingly refer to "sausage." For non-bean days I will make pureed soups consisting of fish, and veggies and fresh herbs from the farmers market, and more "sausage." It gets a little weird, given I have to rotate my herbs and spices, but I have a "sausage" recipe for every day in the rotation. It's the only way to prepare meat right now that doesn't turn my stomach.

Being strict also requires a hefty supply of pancakes and muffins.

I have some ideas for entirely new things to eat. (The paragraph above, while newish, is all stuff I've done variations of before.) This summer I plan to seek out new green leafy vegetables I especially want to try escarole after having it braised in Las Vegas. I am also planning to take toasted nori sheets I bought at the co-op and try making sushi-inspired rolls with grains and fresh veggies. It won't taste like sushi. I will be satisfied with edible.

Also, I have decided this blog should be more casual. I am not enjoying the complete thought and sentence process I have been trying to sustain in previous entries.

Big Light on "Beauty"

What makes people so obsessed with being beautiful on the outside? Why does it equate to being un-lovable? The more I get past my own obsession with it, and the feelings of insecurity that go along with it, the less logical and more compulsive it seems. It's illogical because most people aren't that attractive, and most people have people that love them. It's compulsive in the way that a compulsion makes you focus on one thing and exlude other things. I compulsively focused on my outer appearance and over-looked my positive inner qualities, in addition to all the obvious life success of people that aren't that attractive. It is also compulsive in the way that a compulsion makes you focus on one thing as the solution to all problems, which makes it easier and easier to avoid dealing with problems at all. I focused on my outer appearance in order to avoid looking at the unattractiveness of my insides. And I was convinved that the inside didn't matter, that only my outer appearance needed to be good. For me the extraordinary power of wanting to avoid my insides is what made being beautiful seem all important.

I'm speaking in the past tense to highlight my progress in this area, but I still do often fall into the trap of obsessing about my outer appearance.

Our culture is currently not very supportive of working on the insides. It's almost like working on your inner beauty means you're ugly and you've given up trying to be less ugly. What a horrible message to send! There is this imagined ultimate-validation that comes with being ultra beautiful. It doesn't exist. The ultra beautiful are just as insecure about their appearance as the rest of us. I think we should be trying to bring about an age where good hygiene and a modicum of attention to one's health are all that is needed to be beautiful, and people spend their energy becoming loving, tolerant, generous, patient, and kind. Think about how much more beauty would exist in the world if that happened? Where people like themselves because they're likeable, and their beauty shines out of them like a big light.

Home-Made Reality

A woman alone in her kitchen cooking for no one except herself. This is not what people think about when they think about cooking. The celebrated ideal is cooking fabulous food and inviting over all your friends to enjoy the food together. How many times have I felt horrible about not being able to please other people with my recipes? 100? 1000? In my own world, where it's just me and my body and my kitchen, it has been a monumental accomplishment to learn to cook for myself. Monumental, glacial migrating, intergalactic, stupendous, epic, life altering achievement.

A lot of factors have contributed to my not cooking for other people. 1. Most people, even if they prefer healthy or home-made food to processed or uber-seasoned, still want a certain level of sophistication or complexity in a dish prepared by someone else. 2. I'm not a genius at cooking. 3. My super sensitive body has never tolerated soy sauce, wine, cheese, MSG, teriyaki, horseradish, sugar, or dried fruit, and at various periods I have also had to forgo tomatoes, potatoes, dried herbs, garlic of any kind, fruit, vinegre, yeast, and salt.

I have struggled in my life to find and honor my own voice, and keep it from getting drowned out by other peoples' voices and the voice of the world. In my kitchen, the sky is blue, and I value simplicity, freshness, and abstaining from anything and everything necessary to heal my body. I don't need to be the girl that throws dinner parties, and I don't need to be the girl whose nail soup makes people swoon, and my boyfriend doesn't need a mom-girlfriend, he needs a healthy happy partner.

My voice in the kitchen has been feeding my body and my soul for quite awhile now. I would like to thank myself for all the hard work and improvement in cooking. I choose to no longer be swayed by whatever weirdness other people have with food. I know what works for me and I know how to please myself. I'm not alone. I have centuries of other cooks behind me, and it's my own decision to count myself among them, and not excluded just because my voice is different.

Home-made fish sticks are what turned this tide. Last night I bit into a bite size piece of tilapia battered with a mixture of ground pine nuts, arrowroot starch, flax meal, and dry mustard powder, and fried in walnut oil. I didn't even mean to make a fish stick, it was an accident. I didn't even know I missed fish sticks. But a fish stick is what is was, and it was way better than the ones from the box. I whine sometimes about not getting to eat processed food, complex, and uber-seasoned food, but slowly and surely I really am learning to prefer better food.

I am my own chef

This morning for breakfast I crushed 7-8 brazil nuts and 2 walnuts together and stirred in stevia, cinnamon and flax oil. Then I cut up a banana and threw it in. It was super yummy. It was all the warm fuzzy of banana nut bread.

The salads I've been making with savoy cabbage give me a similar warm fuzzy about a salad my mom used to make. My mom's salad was savoy cabbage thinly sliced with cubed chicken, crushed ramen noodles, roasted slivered almonds, and a sweet but tangy dressing whose contents I don't remember. My salad is just savoy cabbage, roasted slivered almonds, oil & vinegre. I was very happy the first time I thought to add the almonds. I've missed that salad a lot.

And this is a weird example, but I also have a recipe to replace stuffed peppers. I never ate them as a kid, but I was missing the smell (and the flavor I thus imagined) of them cooking in my parents' house. I cooked wild rice and let it cool, and then mixed it into ground turkey. Then I made meatballs and put them in a stock pot with oil and cubed green pepper. I cooked it on medium until the meatballs were browned, and then simmered for another 15 minutes. The flavors all cooked together it and it smelled right and tasted even better.

These recipes don't make me sick, and they scratch the itch to eat those foods.

For the first year I was on the rotation diet, I didn't eat flour of any kind. There were so many other things to worry about, I didn't try to bake anything. I was reacting to corn and potatoes, and sweet potatoes were not on sunflower seed day, so I didn't have any chips to eat either. When I first got down the recipe book to try buckwheat pancakes, I felt pretty pessimistic. The ingredients are buckwheat flour, oil, water, and salt & vitamin c crystals for leavening. But I made them and sat down to eat one. It felt so luxurious spreading the tablespoon of walnut oil over the pancake. The emotion of it hit me when it touched my lips, before I even tasted it, and when I tasted it... I cried. It was so smooth and delicate and sweet and the stress of all the deprivation in the prior 12 months and the strange austerity of the whole project, feeling like a monk living alone in the woods. The pleasure of it was just so intense and the sudden full knowledge of exactly what I had been going without.

Healthy Food

I've been wanting to start writing here again but the little voices of self doubt have been standing on a tall stool lately.

Healthy food. I'm on a long road to making it a familiar, comfortable part of my health. A long, long road. I am a very, very emotional eater. Pizza, mac n cheese, and canned soup were like my best friends. I had a very limited taste range that I liked and was/am very attached to -- salty, sweet, savory, and the texture was basically "processed" -- mooshy, flaky, smooth, consistent. In itself such a narrow range is not healthy. A variety of foods is healthy and the foods with the most vitamins rarely fall in that particular range.

Lately my strategy for healing my food sensitivities and preventing future ones is to eat the widest variety of foods possible. I am eating things that taste weird to me even after a whole decade of avoiding MSG, and a whole two years of eating okra and buffalo and quinoa on a regular basis. I grew my own brocili sprouts - they tasted fresh, which I do really like, but they were also bitter, and had some other flavor I couldn't identify. I've been making salads with Savoy cabbage. Normally this is fine - I splurge and use a little vinegar to make it taste like salad, but every once in a while I taste the cabbage-y of it, and it kind of turns my stomach a little. And last night I made a salad out of soy beans, water chestnuts, carrots, fresh ginger, oil & lime juice. Last night it all went down fine and I was happy with myself. But I ate the leftovers for lunch today and my brain and stomach are talking to each other about how gross soybeans are. The rest of the ingredients covered up the flavor of the soybeans so I could totally enjoy the freakishly yummy texture, but still... it will take some getting used to.

Last weekend I also finally tried dinosaur kale. The stem goes all the way down the very narrow leaves, which meant a lot of cutting up. (The stems on regular kale are dis-gus-ting, so I made the leap and assumed the same with the dinosaur.) I simmered cubed lamb roast for 2 hours, then added cubed sweet potatoes (the real sweet potato, light brown outside, and very pale orange interior) and the sliced up dinosaur kale, and simmered for another 1.5 hours. It was super yummy. No complaints about this healthy soup at all. I love kale, I just kind of loathe cutting out stems.