body

“I know a man who gave up smoking, drinking, sex, and rich food. He was healthy right up until the day he killed himself.”
~ Johnny Carson

I had a startling realization about myself recently, I am to the diet/health connection what the deniers are to climate change/global warming. I know that all of the studies are true—it’s just so fucking inconvenient!

Case in point.

I love to eat. Food makes me happy. Almost happier than good sex with bad boys.
Most of the time I try to eat healthily but I’m far from fanatical about it. Unless you count donuts. Donuts are my Kryptonite and they are banned from entering my house lest I devour an entire dozen, naked and dripping in raspberry jelly in the space of an hour. And here’s the thing, my body doesn’t react in a negative way at all, at least not in an overtly obvious way. I’m sure the blood sugar spike is off the charts, I just can’t see it so it doesn’t exist. The only thing I CAN see is the shame on my face in the bathroom mirror so that is deterrent enough for me.

Denial. That has been my default setting up until now.

Last week my husband and I did a cleanse. Not one of those highfalutin celebrity cleanses that promise you clear skin, shiny hair and an ass you can bounce a quarter off of. Nope, my husband absconded with some literature (basically, the how to’s—whys — and what for’s) of a client’s wildly expensive, doctor supervised cleanse.

Never ones to take things at face value and because we happen to be as cheap as the day is long, we decided to follow the basic tenet of the program—but morphed it to our liking.

Instead of their spendy protein shakes twice a day (at breakfast and dinner), we drank what we had on hand, our old faithful, Shakology.
We also included coffee.
And pumpkin pie.

Just kidding, No pie.

The rest of the day you are required to juice and I know how lazy I can be, especially when I’m in full victim mode, like during a cleanse, so I went to the grocery store (ours has a juice station in the produce dept.) and bought some juices to go so I’d have no excuse.

The cleanse advocates a healthy lunch of fish or a lean meat and filling up on tons of fresh veggies and fruit. My husband was great about that especially since the dinner of a protein shake loomed large for him.

Me, not so much. Once I get in full deprivation mode I tend to run with it in a religious pilgrim kind of way. I swing to an unhealthy extreme. If I was into pain I’d self-flagellate.

I know, what can I say, I need help.

All week for lunch I switched between albacore tuna out of a can, a baked sweet potato, or raw apples and celery. Instead of juicing them I ate them raw so I had something crunchy to gnaw on in lieu of my own foot.

We were both diligent. Our stick-to-itiveness impressed even me and I have impossibly high standards.
He was dropping weight at a slow and steady rate. I don’t weigh myself (long, violent story. A lot of scales were killed along the way so I won’t tramatize you with the details). Suffice it to say my skinny jeans moved out of the torture device category and back into fashion where they belong.

Then this happened. Nothing. At least not what I expected.

I didn’t get tired. I was filled with energy.
I slept great. I woke up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (I finally know what the means).
I wasn’t angry about anything. My moods stabilized, giving me a perpetual skip-in-my-step giddiness.
I barely pooped and when I did it smelled like violets (okay, maybe a slight exaggeration).

I figure it even changed our character a little. We didn’t cheat. Not even little. And we kept on going through the weekend which is unheard of for us. It’s just a thing we’ve silently agreed to. We use the weekends, which of course start Friday night and last through Sunday, as neutral territory. Nothing sticks. No fight, no diet, and no freaking cleanse. Duh.

Except for some reason, this one lasted until a baby shower we were both required to attend on Saturday late afternoon.
I was reluctant to eat. I felt tentative around the crudites. Skittish. I eyed the cheese with suspicion.

He piled his plate with fresh bread and a perfectly ripe camembert but passed on the red wine.

Did you hear me? He passed on the red wine!

Who were we?

We were the freshly cleansed. That’s who.

After the smell of the dark, freshly baked bread took up residence inside my nose, hanging drapes and laying carpet, I caved too.

Cut to a couple of hours later with me in the car, prone, my pants unbuttoned, moaning.
I felt like shit. Worse that shit.
I felt like the foul smelling shit on the bottom of shit’s shoe.

When we got home I went straight to bed without my shake. So did he. It was 7:30.

Never in my long and illustrious life as a foodie have I noticed the connection between food and how it affected the way I felt more than I did that day. It made me a believer. A convert. And now a zealot.

I’m currently on a writing vacation with my tribe, happily eating my way through Nashville but I have to confess– I can’t wait to get back to my cleanse and the way it made me feel.

Has this ever happened to you? I need to know.

Carry on,
xox

*Perhaps the best thing I’ve read about the connection between the mind and the body. EVER.
Hands down!
I know Liz did the wise thing and cautioned everyone regarding this method—but I say DO IT!
DO TRY THIS AT HOME!
What have you got to lose?

I advise the people who ask me, to talk to their body. Make friends,with it. It doesn’t matter if it’s weight, a “bad” knee or cancer. Your body is NOT your enemy you guys, it’s your ally and it wants to partner with you to achieve balance and health so you can both lead the best life ever!
Carry on to health,
xox

“PERHAPS I AM STRONGER THAN I THINK” — Thomas Merton

Dear Friends-
I’ve spent the last eleven days hiking in the Italian Alps.

And that is a sentence that — 15 years ago — I would never have imagined myself ever writing.

I used to have a bad knee. It started during my divorce, when every part of me was falling apart — head to toe, inside and out. But my left knee was the worst of it. I twisted it one day, and it was never the same again. I couldn’t even walk up a flight of stairs without pain. At the time I went to see a doctor about it, who said simply, “Well, that’s why they call it getting older, and not getting younger.” (Thanks, doc.)

For years, I babied my knee. I identified myself as someone whose knees were “bad”, the way certain dogs and neighborhoods are called “bad”. If I took a yoga class, and the teacher asked if anyone had any physical limitations, I dutifully raised my hand and explained that I had a bad knee. I was given special movements, and told to be extra careful. Every new doctor was told about my bad knee. My friends knew about my bad knee. I iced it and heated it and put braces on it and took tons of ibuprofen and kept my range of motion limited because of it. I visited all kinds of professionals — traditional and alternative, alike.
But my knee never stopped hurting.
Until 5 years ago.

Now listen — before I go on here, please don’t do anything stupid to your body because of what I’m about to say, OK? I’m not a medical professional, and you must be a wise steward of your own lovely physical being.

But here is what happened to me.

One day — and it did happen suddenly, one day — about five years ago, I asked my knee what it wanted from me.
I literally spoke to it. I got very quiet, and very sleepy, and I said, “Tell me what you need from me, dear knee. I’m listening. I’ll do whatever you say. Surgery? A replacement? More gentle care? More acupuncture? A change of diet? Reiki? Just give me the word.”

Then I got very quiet, and my knee told me what it wanted. I heard the answer in the depths of my mind, as clear as day. It said, “GO FASTER.”

Go faster, said my knee. Go running. Go climbing. Go dancing. Use me. Jump up and down on me. I am a KNEE. There is absolutely nothing wrong with me. I am wondrously designed, said my knee. I am not a weak point, but a strong one. I am part of your body, and I want to be used. I am not a symbol of your divorce. I am not a sign of aging. I am not a problem. Don’t baby me. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being treated like a Victorian invalid lady who has to take to her bed because of her fainting spells. I am not weak. Stop this. Please, please, please — said my “bad” knee to me — please stop using me as an expression of your weakness, fear, and emotional fragility. Please talk to your therapist about whatever troubles are ongoing in your mind, but don’t blame for everything. Please just trust me. Please just use me as I was designed. Use me as a freaking KNEE.

The next day — hand to God — I went running for three miles and I was fine. I’ve been fine ever since.
Again — PLEASE don’t go and do anything physically stupid to yourselves because of this story. I can barely explain it myself — how suddenly my “bad” knee was no longer bad. I have never been able to speak to a body part so clearly again, and I know it seems crazy that it happened at all.
But it happened.

There was pain (remember — that was my “divorce knee”) and then I was finally ready to put the pain away, and to stop using my knee as a pain-memorial.

All I know is this — that pain is a complicated and multi-layered force. Nobody experiences pain the same way, which is why it’s so difficult to treat. Some of our pain abides in the body, and some of it abides in the mind, and some of it abides in our histories. As pain moves through us, it passes through what scientists call “amplification centers” in our beings. Our emotions are amplification centers. our fear is an amplification center. Our imaginations are amplification centers. Our anger, too. All of these parts of ourselves amplify the pain in our mind, and sometimes commit to that pain fully — forever.

I had a friend once who injured her back during a hard time in her life, and it didn’t recover for years. One day, a doctor finally asked her, “What was the first thing you thought, when you felt your back go out?”
My friend said, “I thought, ‘This is going to hurt me for the rest of my life”.
The doctor, very kindly, said, “Maybe it’s time for you to stop thinking that.”
Her healing began there.

I believe that I did hurt my knee 15 years ago — but mildly, temporarily, and not in a way that it needed to cause me pain for a decade. I believe that my “bad” knee lived on inside my mind, not in my knee itself. When pain abides in the mind, it does not mean you are crazy, or that the pain is any less “real”. Trust me, my knee HURT. It just means that pain is living on within your body because — for some reason — it must. Because you are not done suffering. Because I was in heart-pain for ten years, and that pain needed a location. My poor knee took the pain for me. Until it didn’t want to any more.
Anyhow — what if you are stronger than you think?

I am all for people treating themselves with gentle loving care (and maybe part of my recovery from emotional pain was all about focusing on treating my knee like a poor, suffering baby — so that I could take care of myself with kindness at some level. Maybe that helped me to heal my heart.) But what if there are parts of your body that don’t want to be babied forever?

What if every single part of us longs to be USED?

What if our bodies long to be freed from the past, so that they can move as they were designed to move?

What if our hearts long to love?

What if our minds long to be creative?

What if our spirits just want everything to be forgiven?

What if your knee wants you to climb a mountain, to show you how powerful you actually are?

Wouldn’t that be crazy?

Wouldn’t that be freaking wild?

Wouldn’t that fill you with so much joy, you feel that your heart may burst from it?

ONWARD,
LG

http://www.elizabethgilbert.com

So…
I found this handy-dandy chart online and then I immediately lost the next two hours looking at the different energy centers—and self diagnosing.

Oh… anger is stored there…interesting…that explains SO much.

That old pit in the stomach. Fear. I knew that.

Shoulder and neck pain? Yeah, me too, like every day of my life. Carrying the weight of the world?
Hey! Me too! Wait a minute, If I’m carrying the world’s weight—and you are too—why does mine feel so freaking heavy?

I remember certain Yoga classes where a pose or a stretch would send me into an emotional tailspin, unleashing the Kraken and freeing up all the pent-up junk that had taken up residence inside my hips, torso and thighs. I would always feel a hundred percent better after class, a good cry, and an Epsom salt bath.

Yoga is great if you’re looking to release stored emotions. So is exercise. And dance. Anything that moves the body.

Rolfing is good too. Rolfing is a very deep tissue massage, you know, the kind that hurts so good. I don’t ever think I’ve left a Rolfing session without crying—partly from the pain, and partly due to the deep emotional release it triggers.

And that’s the thing you guys. You WANT to release those stored emotions, otherwise there’s a very good chance they’ll make you sick.

So get out there! Dance! Do some yoga! Walk in nature! Release! Release! Release!

Okay, I’m off to get a shoulder massage. I need to set the weight of the world down, just for a little while.

Carry on,
xox