Of Death and Calories

I'm watching a documentary titled "America the Beautiful" (2007). It chronicles today's fixation on appearance. The narrator follows various people in the beauty in-crowd and asks them, "are you accountable for anorexia, bulimia, and general low self-esteem of American women?" The answer is a resounding "no." It is as if the disease of self-obsession entered society as a mysterious fog that invaded our lungs simultaneously---nobody is to blame, and nobody can escape.

Few escape the fog. Those who do are mostly the people who are not able to critically think. Then again, if you're running on a handful of romaine lettuce, how can you think at all?

To be honest, I spent today worrying about how many blueberries and packets of splenda I dumped into my plain yogurt. Was I serving myself too much? I didn't want to go over my limit of 1300 calories.

My grandfather died last week. I have been on a semi-diet since then, reducing my caloric intake from 1700 calories to 1100 one day, 1010 the next. Grief made me think less critically about what I'm doing to my body. I have become obsessed with a number: 161, and how I can't make it drop more than 2 pounds below 161. Rather than feel pride that I've already lost 25 pounds since this April, I feel shame for my current weight. Rather than think about what my grandfather would have wanted---to be healthy, I started to procrastinate on my University term papers and closely monitor every portion of food I ate and every beverage I drank. I wake up, check the weight, make a food menu (vegetables with coffee, with some stuffing since it's Thanksgiving), and spend my days thinking about how I'm going to prepare that zucchini. I think about how I'm still sitting on the BMI fence between overweight and obese at 161 and 5'1 or 5'2. I think I can't stand another day of flabby belly and thunder thighs.

My research on linguistics sits untouched by my bed as I sit at my computer, mindlessly playing "Top of the World" by the Cataracs and wondering why I can't look like the Viddie girls. Then I started shopping on amazon dot com for movies on getting thin. I stumbled on "America the Beautiful" and I watched the trailer, thinking it would be another marketing movie that plays up the worth of vapid, egotistical supermodels and sends a message of hate and contempt to the everyday woman. Instead, I found a poignant, moving, and often disturbing view into our society and our drive to obtain a Western ideal of beauty.

Something dawned on my as I clicked the "rent now" button on amazon dot com: I'm not getting paid to give a shit about how I look. I'm getting grant money to write papers and learn the theory of linguistics. The real reason why I'm suddenly unhealthy in my diet is because I did horrible on several home-work assignments which I had to complete while my grandfather was in the morgue. First, I lose the only father-figure I have. Next, I lose my borderline A grade in two of my classes. I'm not afraid that I won't be able to lose another 25 pounds. I'm afraid I'll fail out of college and break the vow I made to my grandfather when he was on his deathbed. I'm fixated on weight and beauty right now because I feel like I failed in the part of my life that actually matters: my education.

Thank you, "America the Beautiful", for putting my priorities back in order. I am not what I look like, I am what I accomplish in life with my mind and my actions.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some homework to complete. :)

Confession on Confessional Writing

You don't know me. You are probably very bored of me just from these two sentences. So why do you keep reading the next sentence?

The problem with confessional writing is also the main reason why people are willing to read confessional writing. It is deeply personal. It is like eating dinner at a restaurant naked. Everybody around you wants to know why you're naked at the dinner table. Meanwhile, you pick at the lasagna.

Writing, to some, is an act of vanity. It is a way of marking your name on the internet like so much graffiti on a train car. I do not disagree with this. However, I feel that the real answer is a lot more complex and perplexing. I write confessional posts about my sordid life because I have an uncontrollable urge to create a narrative of my life. I have to write, it hurts when I do not write. I have to be honest because I am compelled to write the truth. Sometimes I may write little book critiques or diatribes against discrimination, but the common denominator is that I write what I'm thinking at that moment. Freckles, warts, and all, you see me as I am inside.

The one thing that I worry about is posting something in anger and then regretting it later. When I type, I type at least 35 words per minute, faster if I have had coffee, and it goes without saying that I'm not always consciously thinking about what comes next. What comes next is my thought....whatever that thought may be. I wish I could control my thoughts better. I wish I could have a brain that only thought about adorable cats, weight loss, sugar plums, and the like, but I don't. I get mad when I see youtube comments that are explicitly hate-filled. I come back here and I try to create a space where I feel that cyberspace is negated.

That is the whole goal of my blog. To create a cyberspace where people feel a little more at ease with what society labels as flaws. I tried looking on the internet for warm communities of people with mental illnesses. I found some sites but nothing that was geared to a high-functioning person. I looked for sites that were for overweight people trying to juggle losing weight with the knowledge that you can be fat and still be a good person. I really couldn't find anything like that. So I thought, well, I have an art blog where I post my drawings, why not create a blog where I just write honestly about my struggles and my discoveries of good books?

I'll try to steer clear of politics.....that is a sticky subject for any writer. Besides, all you need to know is that Noam Chomsky is my idea of a great role model. Enough said!

PANOPTICON

Last semester I took a political science course with a self-proclaimed Marxist professor. He was handsome, charming, brilliant, and vehemently against the exploitation of the masses. One day he lectured on what is known as the "panopticon" model of surveillance.

Panopticon refers to an architectural structure of a building that is so high that it can see into the houses below. The houses below are all built with a see-through roof, like a glass ceiling. Every see-through house is placed so that 100% of what goes on inside the house is visible to those in the great tower.

According to my professor, prisons and mental asylums were built on this principle. Though I've never been in prison or committed any felonies which warrant imprisoning, I have served time in psychiatric facilities.

The triage room in the Emergency Room is built Panopticon-style. They place you in a room with no door and no light switch so that you are bathed in light, rendering sleep an impossibility. Over head, a camera captures every second you spend in the room, and you are never allowed outside the room except to use the bathroom. If you use the bathroom for too long a security guard bangs on the door, taser and baton on his belt, and orders you to come outside.

To make matters worse, they force you and the other mental patients into a common blue hospital shirt and pants. This seems to be part of the process of stripping your personality down to its barest bits. I remember taking my hospital issued socks off because I hated what the padded soles represented: institutionalization. A guard, having watched me remove my hospital-issued socks, entered my space and ordered me to put them back on. It seemed like such a trivial detail: socks. However, we both understood the socks to be compliance, to be a part of my shaming costume of the mentally unfit. The socks weren't just socks, they were fuzzy shackles I had to wear, as a ward of the state. I put them back on. Later I removed them again, frustrated and unable to think straight in my manic-induced psychotic state. Again, the guard entered and ordered my socks back on.

After 48 hours of constant, bright fluorescent lights, cameras and security guards watching my every move, and a cocky doctor casually signing my life away on my medical chart, I was restrained on a stretcher and moved to a long-term psych ward. There, patients were allowed to get in my face and threaten me without reproach and the staff were cold, manipulative, and contemptuous. Sometimes, I hated the outside of my room so much that I refused to leave my bed. A doctor told me I was just making it worse for myself, why wouldn't I comply with the program. I insisted I was on strike. He upped my dose of anti-psychotics and anti-depressants. Eventually, spurred on by artificial chemicals, I got out of bed and grudgingly showed up for group and lunch.

This pattern happened more than once, more than thrice, even. Being a poor person who can't afford health insurance, I wound up being hospitalized quite a number of times before the State realized it would be cheaper just to pay for outpatient services than to have to warehouse me in another panopticon institution for the rest of my life.

What's my point? Panopticons exist. They are a form of thought control, of behavioral modification. Yes, I am better for being so humiliated, stripped down, and drugged, but I wonder if there is not a better way to help mental invalids?

If you're in the mental health field, please consider alternatives to this opticon method of treatment. While I am obedient with my mother, the University, and society, a part of me remains that mental patient that rolls of the gray, padded sock and tosses it on the ground. Maybe you should, too. Not all panopticons are as obvious as psychiatric hospitals. Some panopticons exist in the mind.

Comment on "An Unquiet Mind" by Kay Redfield Jamison

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the amazing Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, I'll catch you up to speed. She went through medical school and became a successful psychiatrist and researcher.

Despite her long list of outstanding achievements, she was hiding an ailment not too far out of her field of research. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder by a colleague, she, like many of us disordered patients, went through the stages of denial, fear, and secrecy. For the first time, a doctor came out to the medical field as being a patient as well as a healer. Rather than sink into an oblivion of despair, she penned an autobiographical account of her trials, titled "An Unquiet Mind."

Written in lucid, bubbling prose, with plenty of references to various manic poets, Dr. Jamison captivates the reader with her tale. One part that stands out in my mind is the page where she describes experiencing mania after work. She begins to run loops around the parking lot, a rather perplexed colleague watching as she sprints to and fro.

I can relate to this energy, to this temporary high-spirited state. Though outsiders might consider me first and foremost a paranoid schizophrenic, I mostly experience mania, then after several months of mania, I spiral into psychosis, the paranoid schizophrenic type. I rarely experience cognitive misperceptions such as thought insertion, paranoid delusions, and visual hallucinations without the accompanying mania that precedes it and I am convinced I am a psychotic variety of bipolarity, and not a pure schizophrenic. But now I'm having flight of thought...heh heh. Back to the book....

I can relate to the author's experience of being resistant to treatment. For years, I went on and off medications. I believed if I could make the dean's list, how could I possibly be disabled? Disability and hospitals were for people with one leg, or a heart condition. Psych wards were for people who talked to themselves on the street corner and didn't shower. It was hard for me to fit myself into this category of disability, but like Dr. Jamison, I eventually came around to long-term treatment.

Though I haven't earned my B.A. yet (I'm graduating in May, 2012 with a B.A. in interdisciplinary linguistics), I feel that I have done fairly well with myself, considering my past as a pothead, party girl with no money and little ambition.

Reading "An Unquiet Mind" allows me to feel hope for the future. It taught me that even a doctor can have bipolar disorder and still maintain her position within the field...and more than that, she can change the way society perceives mental illness and the potential of people with a diagnosis to go on with productive lives. She taught me hope. Thank you.

Weight Loss: 25 pounds in 6 months

My martial arts instructor commented last week about how I had lost 5 pounds since the start of the semester back in August. I laughed because he had hit my number right on the mark! What he doesn't know is that I've actually lost a good 25 pounds since the Spring semester. Fad diet? Jenny Craig? Gym membership? None of the above.

I started weighing myself this April. 184 pounds, tipping the scale into the obese range, and lugging around a lot of extra flesh. I decided the weight had to go. As a senior in college, it always bothered me that I was the heavy girl in class. I wanted to be fit, not the svelte, model-thin bodies that stroll around campus with chips on their shoulders, but active and healthy. Despite how I feel about fat prejudice, I understood that I was doing harm to my body and that I should take steps to improve my blood pressure, nutrition, and activity level---not for vanity's sake but for my internal health. So I started a improvised system of weight loss---it's not weight loss, it's weight control.

The key is to see life events as obstacles to control. If you have a bad day you feel like you're not in control. If you buy a fast food meal, then it's really out of control. You haven't just lost temporary control, you've set yourself back a week! I decided that I wanted control over my life. I wanted control over my urges. Maybe I couldn't squeeze back into the size 5 pants from 5 years ago, but I could work hard and lose a dress size, and I did.

I started writing down everything I ate and drank. Yes, drinks too. I realized those super market flavored drinks were around 160-200 calories each! That's not even something that would make me feel full! I saw that my spreadsheet of meals included lots of meat. I read up on meat. It turns out Americans consume way over the recommended allotment for protein by our meat-eating habits. I have always been fond of microwavable chicken patties. It took some time, but I finally acknowledged that the calories, the salt, and the excess protein was bad. So I quit meat cold turkey (pun!). Then, I started to count calories. I read the ingredient list if I was eating a microwavable dinner. I searched for calorie counts of different items like white rice versus brown rice (if you're going to eat rice, get BROWN! White rice is luxurious but man, will it cost you in terms of calories!) I even read the caloric count on the bottle of healthy olive oil I was using to saute my vegetables (count: 120 per tablespoon).

Slowly, things started to get easier. My blood pressure became healthy. I started to lose weight, slowly but surely. I stayed under 2000 calories and above 1300 calories most days. How much I ate depended on how active I'd been that day. If I'd just done homework, cleaned my room, took an hour walk, I'd have less calories. If I exercised for at least 20 minutes, I allowed myself to eat an after-dinner bowl of cereal (I have an odd habit of craving Honey Bunches of Oats at night).

Then, when I had some income, I purchased a moderately inexpensive rowing machine. I found that it worked both the arms and thighs and was easy on the joints. I began to use it, first for only 10 minutes a day, a few days of the week, then 20 minutes most days of the week. I tried to jump into it at first, going an hour, but the next day I was too sore to do any exercises. I learned that with physical activity, it's better to start off in the shallow end of the pool and slowly move to the deep end. I now have the rowing machine, a stationary exercise bicycle, a pilates band, a 10 pound weight, and several belly-dancing exercise DVD's. Yes, I actually use them. When I started the Fall semester at the University I enrolled in a martial arts class. It was very hard at first, especially for somebody who was about 165 pounds (I'd lost 20 pounds by then, eating healthy veggies, counting calories, working out, walking, and reading up on binge eating and other eating disorders).

Now, about 3 months in, I finally broke that weight plateau of 165 pounds and lost another 5 pounds. I feel more energetic, my health is good, and I feel in control of my academic life and my personal life. I've been a vegetarian 90% of the time since this April. My main staple dish is sauteed zucchini with coriander, cumin, and turmeric. Boiled cauliflower comes in a close second. First, I boil the cauliflower, then I put a tablespoon of olive oil and some teaspoons of spices in a pan and saute the softened cauliflower. It tastes good. My craving for high-salt, high-butter, high-oil foods has decreased. Sure, I have my bad days, but I just concentrate on regaining my control the next day.

I intend on staying in control from now on. I intend on managing my mental diagnosis by taking my medicine daily and keeping all my doctor's appointments. I intend on managing my schoolwork by keeping up with my home-work and readings. Lastly, I intend on managing my weight by keeping up with a healthy life-style and another semester of aerobic exercise classes.

I look through the internet trying to find people's success stories but they usually come with a hyped-up product to sell with the promise of extreme weight loss. Even though I'm not at my goal weight of 145 pounds, I'm slowly getting there. I'm 25 pounds closer to this goal. I did it the healthy way, not the pill-popping, starvation diet, lock your self in a gym and don't eat anything that's not raw way. I feel pretty good writing this. Hopefully, in a few months, I can write about how I lost another 5 pounds and describe all the new methods I will have learned!

Thanks for reading!