He really is very slow in dressing and undressing himself, and in getting ready for anything. He – like me – has a problem with transitions. He – like me – also has a problem perceiving time. He doesn’t really feel how much time has passed, or how long things are taking. This is a real problem when he needs to get ready for school in the mornings, when he has to get home after school, and when he has to get ready for all his extra-curricular activities. His teacher even wrote about it on his report card. How much she doesn’t like reminding him every single day to get ready, get dressed and get home. Even the women who volunteer to help the children crossing streets are getting annoyed with him because he’s always the last one, and they stay there waiting and waiting instead of going home.

We have tried a lot of things, counting, setting a timer, not doing anything and sending him to school without breakfast, but what I mostly do is this constant nagging. It’s totally automatic by now, and I guess neither my son nor me listens to it. It’s just an unpleasant background noise. Sometimes I wonder why I keep doing it since my son has turned deaf to it anyway but then I found I keep nagging because at least that’s a way to release some of my frustration. So I nag, nag, nag, and then I get angry, and tap my foot.

The other day, when he was telling us that the volunteer women had threatened to report him to the school we thought about how he could become better at this. His problem is that he is easily distracted, and so when he puts on his shoes and clothes after school, and chats with the other children he won’t do both at the same time. He either chats or gets ready.

All of a sudden I realized that he doesn’t have a way to measure how much time has passed. He doesn’t know if he is going fast or slow, he is just doing one thing after the other when it occurs to him. He lives pretty much in his head so the fact that he is still standing there in slippers while most of the other children have already gone home doesn’t register with him. And it doesn’t help that the friend who walks with him is about equally slow.

So we talked it all through and for the first time ever I asked him about the other children. He said there were quite a few who were as slow as him. And we asked, “And do they live as far away as you? And do they have volunteers waiting for them as well?” Turns out that those boys live just across the street from the school. So I asked him about the children that are getting ready much faster than him. And there is one boy, his best friend who gets ready very fast. So I told my son to watch him, and try to match him. And he did, and at least he is only late coming home from school, not extremely late.

The problem is that apart from us and the volunteers waiting for him, and getting worried because there might have happened something to him, he also has two days when he comes home, has 15 minutes to eat lunch, and has to leave for school again. Now, this was his choice. We told him not to sign up for those things but he really wanted to, and so we sit there, wait for him with lunch ready on the spot, and then tell him to hurry up because he’s late.

Evenings have been getting better, and then I remembered that that was when I told him the exact time when he had to be in pajamas, and then when the lights had to be out. Of course he couldn’t know. My husband and I knew that we wanted him to turn out the lights at 8.30 but nobody had bothered to tell him. The minute we told him he could look at the clock and see how many time he had left. Of course it helps that he can read time now. You can’t really do that with most younger children but with a second-grader you can.

So yesterday evening I sat him down and told him that he has to wake up at 6.45, get out of bed at 7.00, be dressed and ready for breakfast at 7.10, brush his teeth and get ready for school at 7.25, and leave a little later than 7.30.

Well, today it worked like a charm. He did struggle a bit, and then I know it’s quite a tight schedule, but he made it. I sat the clock next to him while he was putting on his clothes, and for once he realized that he does not have time to read or play in the morning. He could sit down for breakfast and instead of me telling him, “You’re late, you’re late, you should be brushing your teeth now.” he was the one glancing at the clock saying, “I only have four more minutes before I have to brush my teeth.”

I know that our schedule in the mornings is a bit too tight but I also know that neither my son nor I are ready to get up earlier than we do because that would mean to going to bed earlier as well. And having more time does not always lead to having less stress. I know that when I have the feeling to have plenty of time for something I often end up doing everything so slow that I have to hurry up in the end anyway.

Of course, now that it worked (once) I’m a bit angry at myself for not realizing this earlier. And I’m a bit afraid that this might be one of those things that work once, and then nevermore. But then I know that when I, as a grown woman, finally realized that catching the 7.05 bus meant leaving the house at 6.55, and that meant brushing my teeth and putting on makeup at 6.45, and that meant having breakfast at 6.15, and that meant getting up at 5.45, and that meant setting my alarm for 5.30 – that felt like a revelation to me. “You mean in order to catch the bus at 7.05 I have to set the alarm more than 1 1/2 hours earlier? Oh, that’s why my timing never worked. No wonder I had to rush and scramble every single morning. Duh.”

Duh indeed. I really hope that I will cease to resent the way my son – slowly and diligently – pulls up the zipper of his jacket. Or fastens and unfastens the velcro on his shoes not once, not twice but at least four times each time he puts them on. And I really hope that I can become more than a nagging device for him.

Well. That’s not how one loses weight. At least not me because this is not about losing a pound or two. So let’s see: I started out on January 1st with 89.9 kg, and the 1st of February saw me at 88.6. That looks great, doesn’t it? I should keep that in mind for motivation.

The problem is that then my weight went up again. At the beginning of January it was easier not to drink alcohol because my husband was skipping his usual glass of wine in the evenings as well. But now I keep finding reasons why tonight is a night where I’m entitled to just this one beer. Just this once, today. For almost a month or so. Oops.

Also in favor of pleasure now like donuts, or chocolate I keep forgetting the Goal. I keep forgetting that I was determined, and still am, to get to a weight where my knees don’t hurt, and where leaning down to tie my shoes doesn’t mean I pinch my stomach fat between my ribs and my thighs.

So while I haven’t done really badly so far I have to re-commit to this whole thing. Which I hereby have done.

Oh, and something that almost made me blow the whole thing? In the middle of February I read some sort of headline somewhere (I know, I’m all about diligent documentation) going like this: “I’d rather be skinny than have sex.” Really? Really? Not me. Nope. Definitely not. Of course that’s not a real choice. But if it were down to that I’d rather be fat. Also if I had to deny myself any pleasure at all. There is a reason I keep choosing the comfort of eating and food above being skinny.

So I hit a bump in mid-February and started to feel like it would never happen but – then I lost some more weight. Ha! I’m at 87.6 as of this morning. Which is 2.3 kilos less than on January 1st. And that even though I had half a liter of ice cream on Monday. And donuts today. But I tell you something: I won’t be doing that every day. That was the first ice cream this year so far, and I have vowed to not buy any more until May or so.

In February I thought I’d never lose any more weight and then I just carried on, and now I even look a bit slimmer. Not slim, mind you, but slimmer. One day I might have visible cheekbones again…

What about you? I’ll keep you posted.

I also have to-do-list software. Then I found myself, after running, checking “running” off in three places. And then I thought that my journaling had gone a bit too far.

I started to record all these things in order to measure improvement. I wanted to achieve certain goals and I started of actually measuring whether I achieved them or not. Otherwise one can think that one exercises at least three times a week only to find that, oops, a week has gone by, and then another. That’s all very valid. I also love my morning pages, so I sit down and write them almost daily. And then I don’t for a few days, and then I go back to them. No problem.

I do love putting my exercise time in my calendar, and with the toggle of a button I can see all the days that I exercised in one place, and then I feel all virtuous.

The food journal, that’s another thing. I have started writing down what I eat many times in my life. And I started again on January 1st. At first I was all good, but then I missed a day here and there, then a whole week, and now I find that I’m really not all that interested in keeping a food journal. I don’t count calories or anything. I just write down “1 piece of toast with almond spread, 1 glass of orange juice, 1 cup of black tea with 1 piece of sugar”. Of course food journaling can help when you want to know what’s going on but I don’t need to write down “ate a whole bag of potato chips because I was bored and angry” to see why I have gained weight. There are people who eat better when keeping a food journal, I’m not one of them. I have food journal entries laying around the house from years ago that go, “Was completely pissed and therefore ate a bag of chips, one bag of gummy bears, half a chocolate bar, and two beers. Feel lousy and bloated. Half an hour later: finished the chocolate.” (Just typing this makes me nauseous these days. I think I have come a long way.)

So I try to be good with the food journaling but what’s the point. It helps to show me that the treats I give myself are not exactly treats because they happen just about every day. These days I’m rather good with food, mostly, and so I will skip the food journal.

But you know, every time I write a paragraph here I remember yet another journal of mine, and add it to the first paragraph. It’s clear that the record-keeping has gone out of hand. I’m not quite as insane as that list of journals implies, though, because there are quite a few of these journals that I no longer keep. But right now I’m on the verge of giving up on record-keeping altogether. These journals were meant to be helpful for me, not something to occupy me all the time. I think I might get rid of one or two.

It’s not like I bought about twenty notebooks one day and thought, “From now on I’ll record everything!” I just bought a morning pages book in 1999, well the first of many. And I’ve had general notebooks even longer than that. I remember going into the one big store in the small town where I lived until 1986 to buy a notebook because my life had reached a level of complexity too high for keeping it all in my head. That was about the same time that I started using a calendar as well. Until then there was the family wall calendar for things like doctor’s appointments and that was it.

Let’s see – the morning pages stay because I like them. Having several general notebooks makes it a bit hard to find things later but still I like it. And I have a system. Sort of. So they stay as well. Also the knitting notebook, and the place were I record my reading. I started cataloguing my books when I had bought the same book twice one day. I hadn’t remembered that I already had it. The gratitude journal didn’t really work out for me. When I read back it only made me realize how unhappy I really was. the control journal for housework never really worked either. I do know that I have to clean the house at least once a week. I don’t really need a checklist because a look at the house itself will tell me what to do.

I’m quite attached to weighing myself daily. I even have an iPod app that gives me progress reports on how I’m doing with weight loss. I think I’ll keep that. Apart from that I think I might take some time off from journals. I have taken a bit of time off from trying to improve myself in all areas at once anyway.

So for now I’ll accept that I’m both journaled out and self-helped out. I take a break. And I won’t create a new task on my electronic to-do-list that’s called: take time off from journaling, repeat daily until further notice. I promise.

But this year I thought I’d give it a try again. My one (not only but most important) goal for this year is:

Lose 10 kilos of weight or more.

I know. Pathetic, boring, and unexciting goal.

I thought I’d do it properly this time, think about my goal in advance, make it public, hold myself accountable, and such. Well, I did state it in December, I told my husband that this time I was adamant about losing weight, and that I would start January 1st. And I did. I made a few rules for myself because this time I am actually going on a kind of “diet”, and I did pretty well for about, um, two weeks. I will keep on trying, though, because defeat is not an option.

Now you might think why is my weight such a big deal? Well, for one I am heavier than I have ever been in my life. That would be quite okay if I hadn’t gained weight steadily for the past three years. While I might resign myself to be a somewhat overweight person, I can’t resign myself to be a really fat person in the near future.

I did lose weight between 2005 and 2007. My lowest weight in the past years has been about 70 kilos in the summer of 2007. this year on January first I weighed 89.9 kilos. And there were days when my weight was even higher. I could just see myself go over 100 in a few years. (And just for comparison that means that I went from a BMI of 23.1 to one of 29.7 which is quite overweight.)

Of course I had thought that if I just lived a bit better – getting enough sleep, exercise, and eat real food – that my weight might just drop by itself but it didn’t. Even adding running to the mix didn’t do it.

So after a year where I focused on becoming a happier person, I know want to focus mainly on becoming a slimmer person. My rules are:

1. No alcohol but on special occasions. (Like my husband’s birthday and such. I found throughout this month that there were quite a few special occasions which meant an average of 1 1/1 beers per week.)
2. No sweets but an occasional piece of dark chocolate.
3. No crackers.
4. No potato chips.
5. No grazing all afternoon or evening.

At the moment I just don’t buy any foods that I tend to binge on. After almost a month of this I did buy some gummy bears for my son again but I don’t get to eat any of them. I used to store some snack foods in my studio for afternoon snacks but I cleared them all out. Now I have to go to the kitchen, get myself an afternoon snack, and that’s it.

And yes, I feel a bit defeated because I need to do this, and when I succeed I want to do it for yet another year so that in the end I might just feel like myself again. Also I want to be able to wear dresses in the summer without my thighs rubbing against each other, and I want to be able to run without my knees hurting. I’m fine so far but of course all this extra weight strains my joints.

I’ll be using this blog to hold myself accountable but I won’t turn this into a diet blog. Just know that as of today I’m weighing 88.9 kilos, on kilo down. When I started this I had told myself that if I didn’t lose at least a kilo by mid-February I would have to join Weight Watchers.

While I’m happy to have lost any weight at all, I also found myself getting lax with my rules after about three weeks. One reason was that in the beginning my husband also didn’t drink any alcohol. But then he went back to his glass of wine in the evening. One reason is that I am obviously not able to stick to any rules for any amount of time. Well, that means I have to forgive myself and do better today. And tomorrow. And the day after that. For the next few years.

I just have to be all “only today” about it, otherwise I’ll be driving myself crazy.

I still long to be a person who just eats, and that’s it but so far it hasn’t worked.

These are the things I have been working on:

1. Go to bed on time.
2. Pick up after myself.
3. Write 500 words of fiction at least six times a week.
4. Think about the things I love about my family, students, and friends.
5. Exercise three times a week or more.
6. Play the piano every day.
7. Wear clothes that make me feel good.

Again, I did some of these things, never all of them, and then there was something else which I’ll tell you about later. First, how did I do these past months?

1. I tell you, “go to bed in time” is still not really happening. I did worse, and then better, and then much worse, and now better again, but frankly, if I can’t get enough sleep during summer break it will get even harder once school starts again. This said, the link between getting enough sleep and being a happier person is totally clear to me. Even if I enjoyed myself staying up late and thought it would be totally worth it I’m still grumpier and without much energy the day after. If I manage to sleep nine hours I’m feeling like myself again. So this is still top of my list.
2. I’ve been doing a bit better with picking up and housework. My husband said he had the feeling that “sit” was my default setting, and he is right. By the time I get up from breakfast he has been down to the basement and over to the annex ten times already. So I continue pushing myself towards being a tidy person. I feel much better when my surroundings are pleasant and tidy so I will have to continue working on this.
3. I did really, really well with the fiction writing until mid-July. Then the madness of the two weeks before summer break hit, and I was stuck on my current story, and with one thing or another I haven’t been writing at all since then. I definitely need to get back into that habit, though, when I do it I feel much, much better. What I did do was start writing morning pages in earnest again, and that helps a bit. Still, fiction writing is fiction writing, and I quite like the story I’m working on so I will have to find a way to ease back into it.
4. Thinking about things I love about my family, students, and friends, well, it went very well with my family. As always I enjoy spending time with my son and husband, we really enjoy our time off from school. Having a little break from students is also quite nice for a change.
5. With the exercise I didn’t do as much as I wanted but even during the time when I thought I wasn’t exercising at all I managed to do something once or twice a week. Since the middle of August I have been walking and running at least three times a week. While I had managed to get my fitness up to the point where I could run for half an hour some time in spring I had to start all over again. Which I did about three weeks ago. So far I’m still in the “run for two minutes, then walk for three” – stage, and only barely make it through my one hour of work-out but over all it makes me feel much, much better. Being on the verge of becoming a runner makes me feel much more confident, and I love my body better. It might be overweight, pale, have chubby knees and varicose veins but it’s tough enough to run. Not for that long but if I keep up I will be able to run about 10k at some point. Me. I would have thought I could never do that. I’m just not built for running. Ha! Definite happiness boost there.
6. Play the piano every day? Who? Me? Somehow this gets pushed back constantly. One thing is that my piano is horribly de-tuned again, and I’m secretly waiting for heating season again when it will magically pop back in tune. I hope. If it doesn’t I will have to get the piano-tuner to come over again.
7. The clothes part. That one was weighing heavier on me than I realized. I managed to pack away all the clothes that don’t fit me anymore at some point but then I was left with a closet that was quite empty. I don’t have a pair of shorts, I only have one pair of jeans (that is sporting a hole), I only have one faded hoodie cardigan, and about five tees, most of those black with funny phrases on them. An outing with my husband in May to buy a suit for him resulted in me getting a pair of linen pants that don’t fit very well, and a coat that I really like. (We also got a suit for my husband. He is really easy to buy clothes for. Just today we went into a store and an hour later emerged with a winter coat, pants, two shirts and two t-shirts. The only things he tried on were the coat and the pants, and they just fit as well. I wish it were as easy for me.) But things are looking up, I went clothes shopping yesterday after not wanting to spend any money for months, and I got two pairs of pants, a new winter coat (I still had one that worked perfectly fine so I didn’t want to spend money on one, ahem. That one is seven years old…), a pair of yoga pants, everyday sneakers, and next week I’ll go to another store and get myself a couple of new t-shirts as well. I will continue to work on this because it really makes a difference. Clothes that fit do lift my mood tremendously. Also at some point I will have to learn that buying new shoes and coats every five years is not over-indulgence.

Well, it’s better to try and fail than not to have tried, isn’t it?

One thing that I realized through this project was that while all of these habits help making me happier they still didn’t help enough. Most days I was just sitting there depressed without energy. So I did some serious thinking and found that mostly the problem was my mood swinging back and forth almost daily because of hormonal shifts. And while things like getting enough sleep and exercise do help with that as well it’s still not enough. So I decided to go back on hormonal birth control for a short time. Just to make sure that it really was hormones. And, lo and behold, my mood and my energy levels have been much more constant for the weeks since I started that again. Now, I don’t really like the way I feel, it’s like a low-level meh-feeling. Not bad but not good either. I can’t take the pill for a longer time because I’m too over-weight and old for that. But for me this is proof that there is really something wrong with my hormonal system (and I know that thing is called peri-menopause), and I will make an appointment with somebody specializing in this kind of thing soon.

If I had to name the single most important thing on the list, though, it would be the exercise.

Today I went and bought myself some new shoes, and when I came back with not only one pair but two I suddenly realized that I have done the thing most women do when they have gained weight, and are unhappy with their clothes. They buy shoes because their feet haven’t gotten bigger, and so it’s easier to find something that fits and looks nice.

Only I have been buying a pair of running shoes, and a pair for hiking. After almost three months of running at least once a week, and after my knees started hurting because I’m running in an old pair of sneakers meant to be used for step aerobics I thought it was finally time to commit to real running shoes. (What do you mean you don’t own step aerobic shoes? Really?) The new shoes aren’t really pretty but very functional. And the hiking boots were on sale, and for years now I have wanted new ones. You know how it goes, you get pregnant and your feet grow bigger, and then every time you go to the Alps to hike you put on your boots, and you find that your toes hurt, and when you come back in the evening they feel like someone has repeatedly hit them with a hammer, and then you think that you really would like to have new boots, but then you think about the fact that you need three other pairs of shoes first (walking shoes, black Mary Janes, and sneakers for indoors), and that you only go hiking once or twice a year, and you don’t buy any, and this goes on for years and years.

And then you see hiking boots on sale just when you received the money from teaching one of your knitting classes. And somehow it feels very good to take the money from the knitting class and put it into athletic shoes. Those boots aren’t pretty either, so no pictures today. But I can’t wait to try them out. And I’ll go for a run outside tomorrow. Even if it’s raining.

On another note, I have been knitting things like crazy, and am still waiting for the sun to make a re-appearance to take pictures of those things. Right now it’s either light or I have time, never both.

And who knows, maybe I’ll tackle my closet this weekend. Stay tuned.

1. Go to bed on time.
2. Pick up after myself.
3. Write 500 words of fiction at least six times a week.
4. Think about the things I love about my family, students, and friends.
5. Exercise three times a week or more.
6. Play the piano every day.

Well, I had, let’s say, mixed results. Still, even trying has made me a bit happier. It’s not about succeeding all the time, it is about inching my way towards a happier me. So let’s see how I did:

1. I didn’t do well with the “going to bed on time” again. You could say I should just give up on this resolution but still I know that this is key to feeling better. When I manage to get eight hours of sleep or more I feel so much better. Of course, today I’m feeling smug because I managed to get enough for two nights in a row. I really hope I can continue this streak. I’m planning to give myself stickers again for every day that I manage to turn the lights out before 10.30. Wish me luck.
2. The picking up after myself goes really well. I even do the kitchen, and have managed to tame the laundry monster. I give myself a pat on the shoulder for that. Now I’d like to add some cleaning into the mix. That would be fantastic. I only don’t quite know when to do it but I fear this has to come out of my computer time.
3. I’ve been writing constantly, and I’m really happy about that. There was a point where I was totally unhappy with my story, and didn’t write because it felt all so arbitrary, and made up. And then I found that what was really bothering me was that I had all these characters at the beginning of the story that got abandoned, and then it all went somewhere else. So I decided to bring them back in, and now the writing is flying. So far I have written about 45,000 words on this. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? And all I do is spend about twenty to thirty minutes a day on this. The thing that I’d really like to do on top of this is edit another story of mine. I can’t seem to find the time to do that as well. May I’ll take that one along when we travel at the beginning of June. We’ll see. For now, while I’m mostly writing “only” five days a week I’m really happy with that.
4. Think about the things I love about the people around me. That’s quite hard to do for me. But I’m slowly getting there. Every time I feel myself dreading to teach I remind myself of what delightful people my students are, and then my work seems less of a drudgery and more enjoyable. Every time I think, “Oh, and now I have to get my son to bed, I’d rather watch TV.” I remind myself how much I love reading to him in the evening. Every time my husband goes on my nerves I reming myself of the things I love about him, and how much he does for me, and this family. And that makes me happier.
5. The exercising. Well, the good thing is that I am exercising. I exercised ten times in the month of April. Not quite the “three times a week or more” quota but still way more than last year. Again, I don’t quite know where to fit the exercise into my day. I usually have a bit of time after lunch but really, I don’t see myself going for a run on a full stomach. Still, I’ll be getting there.
6. The piano, well, failure. I blame others, of course. You see, there it is, my shiny new piano that I love. A few weeks after getting it I decided to have it tuned. I got a complementary tuning with the purchase. You’re supposed to let the piano sit for about three weeks before having it tuned, so I did. It was mostly okay, only a few notes out of tune here and there but there was a slight problem with one of the keys, and so I asked them to send a piano tuner over. The tuner came, he asked me how I wanted it tuned, I said, “Please, tune it to 440 Hz.” He said he probably couldn’t do that because it was a new piano, and a little “high-strung”. (One of these days I’ll get my piano tuned to 440 Hz. One day. One day when I switch from guitar to piano I won’t have the feeling that everything sounds shrill and out of tune.) So, this nice little man tuned the piano. He spent more than an hour on a piano that was almost in tune. Then he played a few chords for me, and left, and I felt all happy that my piano was finally in tune, and ready for my husband to record something with it. Until my husband stopped me that evening and said, “You know that your piano is completely out of tune, don’t you?” Well, I didn’t, and he was right. The piano sounds much worse than it did before the tuning. There are keys that play two different tones simultaneously, and obviously that tuner must have had a very bad day, and a problem with very high and very low notes because those sound horrible. This has somehow taken the joy out of my piano playing. I toyed with the idea of having him come back and tune it again but then I just decided to have my regular piano tuner come in, never mind the 100€ that will cost me, at least the piano will be in order afterwards. So I’m looking forward to this Thursday very much when he will come in, and care for my poor piano. While I didn’t play the piano that often I did start to practice guitar again, so things are looking up.

The thing foremost in my mind this month, though, was how much weight I have gained. I’m feeling quite unhappy about that. When thinking what part of it made me unhappy the most it is not how I look, or feel, it’s how my clothes fit. And the fact that I’m taking up more space than I think I do, I’m constantly bumping into furniture, and if I am in a tight space, and somebody wants to get past me I have to flatten myself against the wall. Also I’d like to become a bit fitter; but mostly it’s my clothes.

Last year I thought I’d be back to a normal shape in no time, and I wasn’t going to buy a whole new wardrobe but by now it’s about 20 kilos I want to get rid of, and if I manage to get in weight-loss mode again, and lose weight at my usual pace of about 300 to 400 grams a month, then – well, let’s just say, I definitely need a few bigger t-shirts until I’m back in shape. So that’s the thing I’ll concentrate on in May. So far I have been trying to sort my clothes into what fits and what doesn’t, and I haven’t quite been able to make time for that. Not even on the two ‘free’ weekends I had. Of course everything will be getting even busier as usual in the next two weeks so we’ll see how that works out. At least I went out shopping with my husband who needed a whole new wardrobe too (because everybody needs new clothes every three or four years, not because he ‘outgrew’ any of them), and now at least I am the proud owner of a second pair of pants that almost fits, a really great new jacket, and a blouse. Onwards and upwards, then.

The third month after a new year’s resolution is always a bit slow. Most years this would be the point where I gave up. Like most people I start with a lot of enthusiasm in January, fall of the wagon in February, and in March I’d be giving up. But not this year. As I told you before I’m making these resolutions to become happy. So far they are:

1. Go to bed on time.
2. Pick up after myself.
3. Write 500 words of fiction at least six times a week.
4. Think about the things I love about my family, students, and friends.
5. Exercise three times a week or more.

And I can tell you that I feel like I’m playing this party game (it’s German) where somebody starts by saying, “I’m packing a suitcase and I’m taking – a hat.” And then the next person says, “I’m packing a suitcase and I’m taking – a hat and an umbrella.” and the next, “I’m packing a suitcase and I’m taking – a hat, an umbrella, and an elephant.” and so on. Good thing the year only has twelve months, don’t you think? So here’s this month’s report:

1. I’m still not going to bed on time! I can report, though, that sleep is directly related to happiness. It’s very easy: if I sleep enough I’m easy-going, nice, patient, and happy; when I don’t sleep enough I’m cranky, irritable, forgetful, prone to mistakes, and don’t get anything done.
   Still, every single day at 9.30 I think, “Oh, it’s not that late, I can still watch something on TV, read, write, knit, whatever.” at 10.15 I think, “Well, I should be in bed by now but if I hurry it’s not that bad.” and then I just sit a little longer only to go to bed at 11.30.
   I’ve watched myself, I do this every single night. Any every night I think that something else is at fault. It’s my husband who wanted to watch an episode of DS9 with me, it’s my son who went to bed too late so that my evening routine got screwed, it’s the knitting project where I just want to knit one more row, it’s the fight I had that made me unable to calm down, it’s the book that was so gripping, it’s the e-mail that came in (and why I’m checking e-mail at that hour is fodder for yet another post), well, you get the drift.
2. I’m better at picking up after myself. As always when I become aware of it, the minute I do it I feel better. This doesn’t mean that the house is all tidy or clean but there are less small messes lying around, and that’s a very good thing. I have to keep working on it, though, already there’s a stray ball of yarn on the dresser, a half-empty water glass on the desk, and assorted papers all over the house. I also would like to find a solution for the stuff I’m currently keeping on top of the fridge, like my PDA, and it’s keyboard, pens, cables and such. the kitchen has become my second office/studio since I still have to spend my evenings there. My son is sleeping in his bed all right, but he still wants one of us nearby all the time. I don’t really mind spending my evenings there but I do mind the stuff I put there.
3. I will have to change that resolution to “write at least 500 words five times a week” because that’s the most I can get to. I’m still stuck with my story, and therefore I haven’t been as enthusiastic with my writing as I had wished for but I did write. Most weeks I wrote about 2,500 words, and today when I printed my story out in full I ended up with an impressive stack of paper. I think my problem with being stuck results from the fact that I only ever have written very small increments of this story, I don’t have chapters or scenes or even lists of characters. And because I’m acting under time constraints every single day I never find the time to look up the name of that tall blonde woman that keeps reappearing. And that’s just stupid. I downloaded a writing software and will use Easter break to go through what I have.
   I’m happy to report that writing those measly 500 words makes me happy every single time I do it. And it doesn’t matter if the writing is good or bad, or I’m feeling stuck or not, it never fails.
   Also, I remember when writing the one NaNoWriMo first draft that I still like I had the same feeling of being stuck and boring through most of it. And when I read it I couldn’t tell.
4. I’m struggling with the ‘”think about the things I love about the people around me”-resolution in a massive way. But every time I remember and try it it makes me happy. Instead of thinking about the fact that I have to work now, and sit there listening to the same pieces played badly over and over again I think about what I like about that student, and how he or she has come a long way. And by this little trick of the mind I find myself anticipating the students instead of dreading the work. This tool also makes me realize how much I still love my husband after all these years. We both work on being nice and polite towards each other, and of giving each other and our son frequent hugs. Definitely a win-win.
5. I’m especially proud to report that I am actually exercising three times a week or more. I have been doing my running and walking thing for six weeks now, and I’m actually able to run for twenty minutes straight (well, very slowly) without keeling over. I’m still doing this in the safety and comfort of my own room which is a bit silly, but when I ventured outside into the garden last week I found that, yes, running in the grass is very different of running very small laps inside, and that it’s hayfever season. So for now I’m staying indoors. After finishing my nine weeks of training I will go outside, and hopefully even run with my husband. He is very patient with the unfit.
   In related news I did lose about a pound of weight, not that much but still a very exciting new trend. And if I ever manage to get enough sleep I hope to maybe lose another pound in the near future.

I also went to a really nice tap dancing workshop one day, and did some yoga on two days. Seems I’m moving again, which makes me very happy, indeed.

My new resolution for this month is to play the piano every day. So far I’ve been playing and not playing on and off but I’m making a bit more time for it, and that’s a very good thing.

The other things that made me happy were that I bought two new spindles, and my new project of spinning and knitting a cardigan. I had been all sensible and told myself not to buy any new spinning fiber before I had spun up all that I had, and then I sat there spinning the same oatmeal colored roving day in and day out. This has been an ongoing project for years now, and while I will finish spinning that eventually I started to feel a bit down looking at that oatmeal brown especially when the weather was not at all spring-like. I went wild, ordered some new roving, and now I’m busy spinning bright orange silk and merino and I love it.

Sometimes it’s doing the sensible thing that makes me happy, and sometimes it’s doing the wild thing. As you know, “It’s not easy being green”:

It all started at the beginning of November (yes, that’s three months ago, almost) when he sat in front of TV to watch something about a zoo. At 5 in the afternoon there was a trailer for a murder mystery. In this trailer there was a tiny blip showing somebody wearing a halloween costume with a green mask and devil’s horns.

The night before was the last night my son has slept in his bed since then. And if that wouldn’t have been unnerving enough he is also afraid of being alone. So when, for example, he is playing in his room, and I’m sitting in the kitchen, and then I want to get something from the basement, and I’d be unwise enough to open the actual door and get down the stairs there would be a wailing child running after me. And when I’d get up again he’d stand there, mad at me and screaming, “How dare you leave me alone? You know I’m scared!” On the other hand he will totally go to the supermarket alone and buy a toy. No problem there. It’s just being alone at the house. Or rather somewhere where he doesn’t see or here another person because we never ever leave him alone at the house.

When he is going to sleep there has to be someone with him in the next room (we have drawn the line at being in the same room) at all times. So I’m no longer allowed to watch DVDs in my very favorite chair in front of our big old TV, no I have to sit on the hard and cold kitchen bench with my laptop who then decides it doesn’t like this particular DVD. After that I go into my bedroom without having talked a word with my husband (who is in the annex, working on his new album) and get to bed, the bed I share with my son. I’m not allowed to turn off the light completely, and I have to push him back to his side of the bed repeatedly and with force because for some strange reason I don’t like to share my pillow. Also, repeatedly through the night there will be a clear, ringing voice calling, “Mama?” in near panic. Which makes me more awake than him and then, just when I have gone to sleep again, he asks again.

My husband and I have been taking turns in “night duty”, and once or twice a week he sleeps at my mother-in-laws place to give us a break. I only really realized how much I feel like being on a leash when yesterday while my son was away with his grandmother I sat in the kitchen knitting, and then wondered what my husband was doing. I sat there for a while and then it hit me: I could just stand up, leave the room and go over into the annex without someone yelling at me! Wow. Sweet freedom.

Now, for those of you not familiar with my son, he is not 18 months old, no, he’s 7 years. He knows perfectly well that he is safe in the house. Ever since he turned three we could leave him playing in one part of the house and go to the annex, at least briefly. He has always been afraid of the dark so he there’s a light in his room, and for quite some time now there had to be someone in the next room when he went to sleep. Once he had fallen asleep whoever was on duty that night could walk out, and then only return when it was time to got to sleep ourselves.

I have a big problem with this. I can’t sleep properly. When I hear anybody scream “Mama?” I have to suppress the urge to slap that child whoever it is. I have told everybody I’ve met for the past three months about this. I’d say I have a problem.

Now, I know that he is really scared. I know that his fear isn’t rational and I remember how it is at that age. That’s why he has a light on while falling asleep, and that’s why there is someone near. But then I also remember that even though I was afraid there were bears in the basement I still went there. Telling myself, “There are no bears in the basement, there are no bears in the basement.” all the time. And you know what? I never saw a single bear there.

My son on the other hand, my son who knows perfectly well that there are no strange devils lurking in the corners of our house, my son ends every talk about how we just please want to sleep again, and how we know that he is scared but that he is perfectly safe with the same sentence: “But I’m scared.” Yeah, we knew that already, thanks.

I bought nice educational books, I elevated his stuffed giraffe to a monster-slaying super-toy (worked for half an hour), bought him a magic slumber mouse (he was set on trying to sleep alone but then he went off to his grandma’s and the next night he was – too scared again).

Everybody we have talked to so far has said the following things:

• every child is afraid of something
• there are a lot of children who still sleep in their parents beds
• this too will pass
• maybe stickers will help
• and the final thing, when we kept on saying, “Yeah, we tried that but it didn’t work.” or “Yeah, I knew that already.” then people say, “You have to get help.”

And you know what? They might be right. On the other hand it’s not as if I didn’t know anything about behavior modification or parenting. And our son is really, really stubborn. You know, I’m a pretty stubborn person but that’s nothing compared to him. I talked to a student who happens to have a son the same age as mine about what to do when your son is really rude and threatens to hit you, and he said, “Well, then he has to go to his room until he has calmed down.” And I looked at him, blinking for a couple of seconds with a blank look, and then I said, “And he just goes there?” And he said, “Well, if he doesn’t I make him.” That made me laugh really hard. I can, of course, lift my son up and carry him to his room, and I might even manage to close the door behind him but since we don’t own a key to that door there is nothing to keep him in there. I put him to his room, he comes out again, I put him back, he comes out again, I start screaming, he’s howling, I put him back… One time we spent 90 minutes pulling on opposite side of the door both of us screaming, and then he was only three years old. And when everything fails he just runs off to his grandmother.

Still I have decided not to let him oppress me any longer. He wants to wail behind me when I’m leaving the room? So be it. I also told him that he has to sleep in his room again. He’ll get a sticker for every night he spends in his own bed, and after two weeks we’ll go ice skating. Yesterday he actually fell asleep in his own room. My husband was lying next to him, but still. I went to bed at 11. At 11.30 he started calling me. Then he called again. Some time later he started crying. Then he called again. At 1 o’clock in the night I allowed him to sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor of my room…

Tonight we’re signing a contract, both of us. He will either sleep in his room alone without making a noise or he will go to my bedroom on tiptoes without disturbing me and stay in the sleeping bag. When he stays in his room until 6.45 there will be a sticker. 14 stickers equal a trip to the ice skating rink. There will be no discussions , no wailing, no nothing. I might have to add that we have a “no discussions about things I should do or buy for him after 6 in the evening”-rule. This child will have a debate about whether or not he will eat breakfast, come to the table or dress himself for school. I told him he’s free to not eat and walk to school in his pajamas, whatever he wants. Then he yelled at me for no making him stop reading when it was time to get ready. Very funny.

Wish me luck.

On Wednesday we all went to a fabulous concert, WeBe3 at the Unterfahrt. It was my son’s first time ever attending a jazz concert. We didn’t have a babysitter, and since he didn’t have to go to school this week too we decided it might be fun to have him with us for the first part. He behaved marvelous even thought the concert didn’t start until his usual bedtime. At first he was a bit disappointed because he had expected to go to a big concert like the rock concerts he has seen on TV in big stadiums but we were at a nice little jazz club. He was very interested (and well prepared, we had been listening to WEBe3 CDs all day long. At one point he said, “I wish this were on CD, and I could listen to it in my bed.” but he didn’t fall asleep. In the break my husband took him back home, and I got to stay and see the second set as well.

I always feel a bit strange at these concerts. I have been to many WeBe3 and Rhiannon (who is a member of WeBe3) concerts over the years. Just that day I met someone who told me he had attended one of Rhiannon’s workshops 12 years ago. I remember being at that workshop with him, and I doubt that it was my first with her. So, I know the singers on stage very well, and I know about two thirds of the audience as well, since there are a lot of singers who come back again, and again.

I know those singers, and I like them but we only meet for the workshops and concerts. It’s not like we were a community or friends or anything. So I get to experience a very familiar feeling, being part of something, and being apart at the same time.

Everything was wonderful until after the concert when I decided to say hello to Rhiannon because this year I didn’t attend the workshop. I waited and waited, and then waited some more, and then got to say hello, and then waited some more, and then talked some, and waited, until I had missed my train by four minutes. Blah.

That experience, combined with PMS and heavy sleep deprivation because I had been up until half past three, only to be woken up by my son at 8, sent me back to a feeling of not being an artist, and not being a real musician, and that crappy familiar mindset.

I decided to not take those feelings seriously, to just write my story for my writer’s meeting on the same evening. Of course I could have written that story two months ago, or one month ago but, as usual, I chose to procrastinate about it until the very last minute. I wrote about half of the story with gnashing teeth, then I hit a wall, and then I had to leave in order to get to the meeting.

That was one of the most interesting writer’s group meetings ever because besides me nobody else showed up. You can imagine how I felt at first, sitting in a café at a table on the sidewalk, waiting for one of my fellow writers to show up so that I could discuss my writer’s block, and general lack of creativity with them, and waiting, andcursing myself for being too busy to send out my usual “I’m coming who else will be there”-e-mail.

Fortunately I had taken the book “Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance” by Julia Cameron with me. I hadn’t want to at first because it’s heavy and I was already running a bit late. In fact I had left home with my hair still damp and no make-up in order to catch my train. I didn’t quite know why I wanted to lug that heavy book around but then I got to read for an hour, and I found myself just a bit more grounded, and a bit more optimistic, and I made a plan.

I decided that each, and every day I’d play the piano for ten minutes before switching on my computer. And I decided to, somehow, find the time to write three pages of longhand on something fictional.

I’ve done that two times already and I can say that: a) I feel much better, b) if I do that I don’t have time for doing something on the computer before three in the afternoon, this will be interesting when tomorrow my regular teaching starts again, c) the story I started for the meeting, and that I had wanted to be about 1,000 words long, now stands at 1,800 and has barely started, and d) I’m really excited, and am looking forward to even doing housework.

So, now I’m praying for the strength and discipline to continue with that. I also tackled things that have been laying around for ages, I have weaved in the ends of two lace shawls, and two pairs of socks, some of them had been laying around, finished, since the beginning of the year. I also finished a pair of socks, and finished spinning the yarn for a cardigan. I had started spinning that in August or September of last year.

And the most startling thing that I have been doing was that I helped my husband with moving and turning the compost yesterday. We worked in the garden, all three of us together. You probably can’t imagine the novelty of that, the last time I did any yard work (and that was before my son was born, mind you) my husband took a picture as proof.

When I can go on like this I will be able to ease myself into a new routine. A much happier routine. Because when I start my day with morning pages, and a bit of exercise (I’ve been doing morning pages and a bit of T-Tapp in the mornings before even getting out of bed for a couple of weeks now.), I can face the rest of the world, and life, and everything much calmer.

Last Saturday, when I went to another “day of mindfulness” I had an epiphany, in fact I had several but I won’t write about them all at once. I hope. The epiphany I had was that mindfulness might be the one thing that will save my life.

It’s no secret that I do have a couple of problems, for example just two days ago I told my husband that I really have a problem with my weight, and he said, “You don’t have a problem with your weight, you do have a problem with your eating habits.” Point taken. I’m dealing with depression again, and with hormones, and with depression triggered by hormones, it’s a bag full of fun here. At least I haven’t had an “overdrive”-episode since I started knitting obsessively again. I think.

The realization that cultivating mindfulness is the key to change my unconscious habits is not a new one for me, I have been knowing that for years now. I also have experienced the benefits of being more mindful. It’s only that with my life so busy I keep forgetting to make that a priority. In the drama of everyday life I keep thinking, “I don’t need to sit today, I’ll do it again tomorrow, and anyway, I already know how to do this.”

Well, as with music, knowing this doesn’t really count, you have to keep practicing. And, like with music, it’s not something that you practice for a while, and then you know how to do it, and that’s it for the rest of your life. You have to go back to it over, and over, and over, and over again.

I’m currently reading“The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness again. And I’m finding it very, very helpful. Now all I have to do is practice.

We all have these things that we think we should be doing more of, or that we want to do more of. I bet that each of you has a list like:

• write more on my blog,
• write more novels,
• write more songs,
• spend more time with my child/children,
• exercise more,
• clean the house more,
• spend more time with my significant other,
• be more happy,
• meditate more often,
• spend more time with friends,
• lose more weight,
• spend more time in the garden,
• finish more projects
• get more sleep

You all know your own “more of”-list.

And now I’m wondering, what is it that I want less of? Because you can’t always put more and more and more into your days. They are quite crowded as they are, aren’t they?

In my case I have this feeling that I already slimmed my life down to the essentials. I can’t really do less. Of course there are quite a few things in there that I don’t like doing but the consequences of not doing them would be quite unpleasant. Taxes, meetings with relatives, kindergarten organizational stuff (I just spent three days looking for my son’s recorder that got lost, for example. Three days of mentally being tied up with a dumb piece of plastic. I’m glad to say that I found it in the end, but still.)

So, most things that I could do less of involve either things that are really necessary, or things that are really pleasant. The only thing I’m sure I want to have less of in my life is procrastination. It takes a lot of my energy and time, and it’s neither pleasant nor necessary. And I might be able to streamline my time at the computer a bit, and my housework and such. But other than that I’m at a loss. I also know that I will be thinking about this for the next few decades so there is no need to rush it.

What’s with you, what do you want more of in your lives, and what do you want less of?

This is the third year that I have been choosing a word of the year. In 2007 it was “effortlessness” which made me give up on everything, in 2008 it was “healing” which made me realize that I’m far from healed, and also I got pointed towards therapy over and over again, I don’t know, maybe that’s a sign or something. Nevertheless some things got better, so there was actual healing in some areas of my life where I didn’t even realize I was in need of it, like my marriage.

This year I had the feeling that I needed something different, and so the first word that spoke to me was “discipline”. If you don’t know about the practice of choosing a word for the year, I got the idea from Christine Kane, who wrote about it at least here and here (the second link will lead you to a series of posts, go there – you’ll enjoy them).

So, discipline it was. That’s only fitting since this year seems to be all about getting back on track – again. I already had the feeling that I needed to re-cultivate my “inner parent“. Usually I know fairly well what I “should” be doing but mostly I don’t do it. Which is really lame, and has made me unhappier, more tired, and heavier over the past two years or so. For the whole time that I un-changed all of my new shiny and healthy habits, one at a time, I resolved to get back on track. Every single day. But every single day found myself, knitting in the midst of dirty dishes, dreading the grocery shopping, procrastinating for as long as five days about it. Each week I would firmly decide to do the shopping on Thursday, then Friday, then Saturday, and sometimes it would be Monday until I went and got something to eat for my family.

I know it’s pathetic, and it’s not very good for my self-esteem but I also know that I’m not the only one on the planet doing silly things like this. So, starting on December 27th or so, when I felt like this was about to be my beginning of the new year, I got a bit more no-nonsense about my decisions. So, right now, it’s no question of whether I tidy the kitchen in the evening or leave it until morning, I just tidy it in the evening, regardless of how I feel. Also I do my morning routine which consists of meditation, morning pages, and another round of tidying and cleaning.

For the past two weeks I even have been doing the grocery shopping on Thursdays, and some rudimentary house-cleaning on Fridays. I always want to put off the cleaning (and the shopping) until the weekend, and on weekends I always have the feeling that now is the time for knitting and sewing, and reading, and such. Then I think, “But I can always do it on Monday.” which I then don’t and another week goes by with dust bunnies all over the house.

So, discipline turns out to be a very good word for me for this year. Since I’m not procrastinating as much I have more energy, I’m going to bed on time (again more energy), and I don’t spend all my time and energy worrying about things I should be doing.

When I chose discipline, though, I had the feeling that if I only concentrated on that I would soon feel deprived, and resentful, and so I chose a second word to focus on – abundance. I want to concentrate on the fact that there is enough of everything in the world, even energy and time, that I don’t have to hold on to things I don’t love and need, and that there always will be more.

So far this also has worked very well. While there have been a few students quitting during the past months there seem to be more coming as replacements. When I’m not afraid that there never will be cake any more in my life it’s easier to eat just the one piece that makes me feel good instead of the two or three I usually would be eating.

2008 was not the best of years for me but I have the feeling that 2009 will be decidedly better.

Did you choose a word of the year? Will you? Tell me.

1. only eat at mealtimes. That is: breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack, and dinner.
2. exercise at least three times a week for at least 30 minutes. Walking while doing errands doesn’t count.
3. play guitar or piano for at least ten minutes a day.
4. post on my blog 3 times a week.
5. write at least 100 words of fiction every day.
6. meditate every day for at least 10 minutes, and write morning pages.

I did quite well for about five days by the way. I went walking almost every day, I played guitar and piano, I wrote my words, and I was quite consistent with the meditation and morning pages. Meditation and morning pages has been something I have been doing for years, and so it wasn’t that hard to get back into that. Playing music and writing fiction was a bit harder because I found I never got around to it until late in the evening, and so I really only played for ten minutes, and I stopped writing after 120 words or so. But even when I felt like I was much too tired for writing or playing I enjoyed it nonetheless. And a 100 words isn’t much. It takes me less than 10 minutes. Also I never got the feeling that the story was making much progress at that rate. But then I wrote about 700 words on it in five days.

And then I felt terrible because of the coughing, and then, and then, and so I let everything slide. I’m still doing quite well with points 2 and 6. You can see for yourselves that the blog-posting three times a week did not happen. I may have to resign myself to the fact that these days it’s more about twice a week if that.

You might have noticed that I didn’t write about the first goal on my list. Ahem. This is the goal that I didn’t reach once in the past two weeks. Not once. I definitely won’t be making any rules around food and eating for the moment. I don’t stick to them anyway. Which is extremely frustrating. But it doesn’t help if I pretend that it’s different.

So, I’m suspending the setting of goals again. What I did find out about myself was that I can only concentrate on one thing at a time. Before setting my new goals I was on the way to get a better grip on housework again, but the minute I concentrated on my new list, I got lax about housework again.

And then I got sick, and then I started knitting a sweater that I want to have right this minute, and that meant I have been doing nothing but knitting for the past week. I started it last Sunday, and if I can go on like I did last week it will be finished by next weekend. And while I really would like to accomplish other things too, there is something very, very nice about sitting around and knitting a warm ruby-red sweater while reading Miss Marple novels. So I’ll just do that for the rest of the weekend.

So for me, obviously, public accountability doesn’t work.

In response to my post about goals PiaPessoa said she wanted to work on exercising two times a week. I’d like to hear how that went. And Anne said that I should strive to reach the point where a new habit is like brushing your teeth. She is totally right with this, of course, and when I strive to form new habits it always helps me to remember how long it took me to brush my teeth twice a day without fail. You know, as a child I was taught to brush my teeth in the mornings only. And I did so for years. Then it occurred to me that brushing them in the mornings and evenings might be a good course of action. I think I tried to bring myself to brush my teeth in the evenings too when I was about eight years old. I never succeeded until I was about twenty. And then I lost the habit again, and had to re-install it when I was about ten years older. These days I never would go to bed without brushing my teeth first. So I finally reached that stage of forming a new habit where I do it every day without fail. But it took me about 22 years to reach that stage. 22 years!

There must be a way to speed that up. Really.

That’s a very common pattern with me, I feel lost, I want to change something, I buy a book. Only this time I’m quite proud of myself because I didn’t buy the books but got them from the library. And I’m glad that I did because while they did help me with the thinking I don’t need to have them here to look things up or anything.

Anyways, I decided to set some goals for November, and so I made another list. For the next week (maybe longer) I will:

1. only eat at mealtimes. That is: breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack, and dinner.
2. exercise at least three times a week for at least 30 minutes. Walking while doing errands doesn’t count.
3. play guitar or piano for at least ten minutes a day.
4. post on my blog 3 times a week.
5. write at least 100 words of fiction every day.
6. meditate every day for at least 10 minutes, and write morning pages.

I’m very tired of thinking about food and being fat all the time. And I’m not even sure if I want to do something to lose weight. So the first goal is my attempt at minimizing the energy I’m spending on thinking about eating. Also it’ll minimize mindless stuffing of food into my mouth.
I know that 30 minutes of exercise three times a week doesn’t sound much. But it’s doable. And by not specifying what I will do I leave room to just go for a nice walk if I’m not motivated to do “real” exercise. By the way, since setting that goal two days ago I already have been going on walks twice.

Playing guitar or piano for ten minutes a day likewise really isn’t much. But I know from experience that I do much better with setting small goals so that I don’t feel like a failure. Often when I sit down to play I will play longer than ten minutes. Actually, once I have started I often enjoy myself very much. Getting myself to sit down and start playing, on the other hand, is quite hard.

I have been struggling with writing on my blog. I feel that three times a week is about the perfect frequency for me both as a blogger and as a reader.But often I spend so much time on the net reading that I don’t sit down to actually write down the blog posts that are floating around in my head.

It’s time for NaNoWriMo again, and it does make me kind of sad to not participate this year. On the other hand I’m also really relieved that I’m not doing it this year. So this is like my “Ersatz-NaNo”. I’m using the same kind of energy to get some writing done.

The last point is something I have been doing for years but I found myself slipping, and skipping more often. So I’m re-installing this habit.
Of course I’m writing this to make myself accountable. You, my dear readers, are the ones who will be helping to keep me on track. I’m doing this because next week will be fall break (yeah, I know there are a lot of breaks around here) which will give me about two additional hours in the day to do what I want.
I’ll tell you how it went at the end of next week. Anything you want to accomplish? You can post your goals in the comments, or on your blogs and I’ll link to them.

Since I never do that (part of me still thinks that if I miss a meal I’ll drop dead) there’s only one conclusion to draw: journaling my food intake isn’t working. I did find journaling useful when I first started to become more conscious about my eating habits years and years ago but these days it’s not as much about the unconscious inhaling of junk food anymore.

As of this day I release myself from the task of writing down everything I eat.

Phew.

So, now what to do about my size and weight? For the past year or so my motto has been “Eat more, move less.” with rather predictable results. Today in the morning before breakfast and dressing I weighed in at 79.2 kilos (174.6 lbs). That’s about ten kilos (almost twenty pounds) more than I feel comfortable with. Though I have to admit that when I was at that weight for the last time I still had the feeling of being too big. (My height is 1.74 m, a bit more than 5 ft. 8.)

In my head I’m still a lean person that’s just been a bit too heavy for a short time but if I’m more realistic I have to say that I have been overweight for about eight years now with a short intermezzo of being merely slightly too heavy for about half a year or so. In my head I have been on the verge of losing weight again any moment now. For more than a year. While constantly gaining.

And it’s not like I don’t know where it’s coming from, I am the one who, every single day, has “just one more treat”, “just one more sandwich”, or “just this snack”. “Just this once” is not helping me if it’s happening every single day. In the past few weeks there have been times when I stole my son’s candy, and when I broke every single rule about food that I ever made to help myself.

This is not about beating me up. It’s just my attempt at looking at the situation just as it is.

So. I’m heavier than I would like to be, and I’m not as fit as I would like to be. Is this really a problem?

No, really. What if I stayed at this weight for the rest of my life? It’s heavy but it’s not grossly overweight. I’m still fitting into regular sized clothes (thanks to stretch jeans). While I do feel a bit uncomfortable in my bathing suit that doesn’t stop me from going swimming. In fact, my weight doesn’t stop me from enjoying anything I like. The only thing is that I have put off buying a new pair of jeans for months now because I still hope to be able to fit into a smaller one. Any day now. It is as if I were secretly waiting for a visit from the weight loss fairy. One morning I’ll wake up and I’ll look the same as in 1996 again. And everything in between would have been a bad dream.

Why 1996, you might ask? Well, in the summer of 1996 I just had lost weight, and I was in the best physical shape of my entire life. I did step-aerobics, weight-lifting, and walking almost every day, and I weighed something around 65 kg. There’s a picture of me, taken at our annual summer party that year where I look really great. I had that picture of me on my fridge for years as a motivational tool, until I suddenly realized I’ll never look like that again, even if I weigh the same, and exercise the same, because I’m actually 12 years older now.

And that’s okay. This is not about turning back time. In fact I’m not so sure what this is about but I find that I don’t care about my weight or appearance enough to change my eating habits consistently. That’s the fact. All this talk about “I have lost a pound, hurray!” and “I have gained a pound, drama!” will amount to nothing.

My lack of fitness is the thing that bothers me more. I don’t like being out of breath so easily, I don’t like not being flexible, and I don’t like that beer cases and the groceries seem to get heavier every week. My current fitness regimen of a leisurely stroll every three days doesn’t really cut it. So, again, for about the hundredth time my goal is to do some moving every other day. Apart from my walks to kindergarten and grocery stores.

As for the eating I’m really tired of hearing myself setting goals and announcing the new shiny me only to revert to my old sluggishness immediately afterwards. On the other hand I was mightily impressed by another blogger’s account of how she quit smoking by just seeing herself as a non-smoker, and I’ll try that again.

You know, I don’t really care for sweets. They make me feel weak. And potato chips. Blech. Who would want to eat potato chips for dinner? I always feel so heavy and bloated afterwards. And really, I’m not that hungry. You know, I really have to move. If I don’t exercise for a day or two I’m going crazy.

Well, at least I’m trying.

Yesterday my husband and I had one of these mornings where we talk, and talk, and talk, about us, and our relationship, and especially the problematic aspects of our relationship.

This, in particular, went on about me not doing housework. Well, not much anyway, and much less than my share. My husband kept asking me what he should do to deal with this. A reasonable approach would be to tell me that he wants me to do certain things, and then I’d go and do them, and everything would be alright. Another approach would be to assign certain work to each of us, then both would do their share, and everything would be alright. Alas, though I know that he’s unhappy with both the state of the house, and the huge amount of work that he has, I keep procrastinating about everything. (Right now, for example, I should have done the kitchen already, made myself a pot of tea, should have written my morning pages, and be on my way to cook lunch. Ahem.)

We both tried everything reasonable, and in the end the housework status between us is little better than about 14 years ago when we moved in with each other. He, of course, like a lot of women do, could just resign to the fact that I’m a lazy chauvinist pig, and do it all himself but then he would have no energy left for his music, something much more important than clean sinks. Unfortunately, we both need to have clutter-free and reasonably clean surroundings in order to be creative.

When he kept asking me what to do, and I couldn’t really say anything besides “I promise to do better.” which isn’t really helpful because I promised the same thing decades ago and about a millions times since then (and I am doing better than that, only this better isn’t very good), I resorted to pulling cards. I figured that might be helpful.

I pulled two cards for myself, one for help with the housework problem, and one to look at my life at general. Well. The solution to the housework-problem obviously is (besides just doing it): Priorities. For everything new something old has to go.

“Current routines, habits and even types of free times must be sacrificed so that you can open up to new energies.” (Sonia Choquette“Ask Your Guides Oracle Cards”)

Duh. That’s where I got my headline from. The book that accompanies the cards, I mean.

Because I still need to lose weight. Another week of beer, beer, Bavarian food, and extra helpings of ice cream, and sweets, thrown together with a definite lack of exercise has somehow failed to produce weight loss. I wonder why that is. Of course I know that I have to let go of, let’s say, eating handfuls of gummy bears at night, only I can’t really grasp the concept that this particular, tiny, innocent looking gummy bear, there in my hand, is the one that makes the difference between weight loss and gain. Surely this particular bite of pork roast can’t be changing anything? If I eat a bit less for breakfast? Please?

Seems like there is still something for me to learn. By the way I pulled a card for my husband too, to find a solution to the “Susanne isn’t doing her fair share of housework”-problem, and his said: Celebration. Seems like there’s still hope.

The card I pulled for my life in general said: Live from Your Spirit, always a nice one. And there it was, saying,

“If you feel that everything you’re doing right now isn’t working, or that every situation you face is working against you, be glad!” (Sonia Choquette: “Soul Lessons & Soul Purpose Oracle Cards”)

What? Be glad. As if. And then it goes on,

“Above all take a close look at how much of your behavior is simply an unsavory, unconscious “goulash” of conditioning acquired from childhood, peer pressure, the media, society, or even past lives, and not a reflection of your true spirit.”

It said I should eliminate overthinking and bad habits. Oops. (In German I’d say, “Treffer, versenkt.” that hit right between the eyes.)

I’m at a point where I don’t have much hope left that I’ll be able to do it. On the other hand I refuse to remain stuck in my old habits. If only they weren’t so comfortable and familiar.

It’s funny because if you back into my archives and look at what I wrote in the beginning of this blog you’d see that at that point I was quite hopeful that I could conquer my old bad, unconscious habits and build new, healthy, shiny ones. Now I’m telling myself that I can do it again, and again, and again, regardless of how long I’ll have to practice, and how often I will have to start over. All the while my poor husband will be suffering. And all this about things like cleaning, and eating.

What would you do in our place?

So far I only read the book once, and – I’m sad to tell you – reading the book doesn’t really change much. I will have to change my behavior. Again. But that’s not what I want to write about today. I want to write about one of the first tools that she gives you, right after the Morning Pages and Daily walks, both things I have been doing almost daily for the past nine years. That tool is that you keep a food journal. It is for recording what you eat, and when, and how you feel, and sometimes for writing instead of eating.

I have found myself strangely reluctant to start this food journal despite the fact that I already bought one, and have been carrying it around in my purse for the past week, and despite the fact that I think it’s a great idea, and will help me a lot, and despite the fact that I unearthed food journals that I kept in 2001 and 2003 and found them very interesting to read. Or I might say insightful and a little disturbing. So, despite all this I was reluctant and kept telling myself I’ll start the journal tomorrow, or maybe next week, or maybe in September.

Then I thought about that for a bit because that’s what I do, I sit there and think, and I found that my reluctance partly stemmed from the multitude of journals that I’m keeping. I can scarcely look anywhere without stumbling over a journal of mine, and journaling already consumes quite a bit of my time. This is what I have so far:

1. Morning Pages journal (That’s three pages written by hand every day)
2. Practice journal (A notebook where I write down when I play music, what I played, and sometimes how I felt, or ideas for songs)
3. Quicken (In theory I record every cent earned and spent. In real life I have a high stack of bank statement and receipts sitting on my desk waiting to be recorded. I haven’t done that for about six weeks already.)
4. A gratitude journal (Every evening I sit down and write down five things I am grateful for.)
5. A general notebook (Filled with bits and pieces, phone numbers, ideas for blog posts, stories, notes on PTA meetings, everything.)
6. My “notebook” on ravelry (All the details of everything I have knitted since last summer.)
7. Flylady control journal (In theory this is where I keep track of housework and such, in real life I haven’t opened it for ages and, instead, transferred all the really important reminders to my PDA’s to-do list.)
8. And, not the least of them, this here blog.

So, self-improvement is a nice goal but right now I’m not sure if maybe I’m trying a bit too hard. Also who wants to keep a special nice journal just to record things like “Ate a whole bag of potato chips, and two candy bars because I was angry. Afterwards I felt bloated and still angry. Waited for fifteen minutes and ate a whole bag of gummy bears.”

I know there are people who change their behavior in order to not have to write down things like that. I also know that there are people who cheat when keeping a food journal. There also are people who are too lazy to get out the notebook for a handful of almonds and so they don’t eat the almonds. I’m not one of them. In the past I have written down minute detail of everything I ate and why and how I felt afterwards but it never kept me from eating still more even when I wasn’t hungry at all.

On good days I think about all these notebooks and journals as my legacy and hope that some future scholar will gain insight in the everyday life of our times (though that insight might be a bit warped). On bad days I imagine my poor son reading hundreds and hundreds of pages that his parents wrote. Every single day recorded. Poor thing. I better tell him that he can give that all away without ever looking at it.

So. Do you keep journals? Food journals? Do you think it will help?

(And, on a completely unrelated note, please remember to send me posts you read or wrote for the Just Post roundtable until August 7th. If you haven’t heard about that yet, just click on one of the little birds down on the right sidebar.)

So, why should I? Well, because it might be the one thing that can save me. I’m still a bit down, I’m feeling over-whelmed, and confused. These days that seems to be my natural state of mind. Especially the part about being confused. Some of it is hormonal (always, these days) some is the beauty that’s July, the last month before summer break with all the parties, events, barbecues, and social gatherings, because everything has to happen before August.

If I could get off auto-pilot and into the present moment I might feel calmer ad more at peace. Also I’d have more energy. I know that when I’m really in the moment all those worries, and fears, and unfinished things to do become a sort of background noise. They are less important and less overwhelming. And that often means that I’m getting more done, that I’m staying focused when actually doing something, and am able to follow things through.

I’m reluctant because I am afraid I’ll lose something crucial when giving up all this living in my head. Daydreaming is nice. Writing blog posts in my head while doing the dishes makes my life seem less mundane.

But in the end I’m fooling myself. When I’m blogging in my head while doing the dishes, I’ll be surfing the net while blogging, and knitting in my head while surfing the net, and so on, and so forth. In the end I will have missed most of my life because I wasn’t present to savour it.

So, that’s what I will be practicing for the next weeks at least. Doing the dishes while doing the dishes, blogging while blogging, be with my family while being with my family. And I’ll keep in mind the piano students of mine who say, “But I have been playing the piano for a whole year! Why am I still not brilliant?”. Because some things take a while.

It will be an interesting and unusual experience for sure.

Humph.

Did I mention that I still have about a gazillion things to do without even having touched any instrument?

Humph, indeed.

You know, I have bought myself a new recording thingy. And I already used it. Once. In April or so. Since then I have wanted to mix the recording. And I still haven’t done it. But here is the draft of the blog post I intended to write about it:

I actually got my own “connect the mike with the computer”-device last Thursday half a month six weeks ago. It’s called Onyx Satellite, hence this post’s title. [The post should have been called "I got my own satellite".] However, due to life, and yarn expeditions I only unpacked it three days later. And managed to record a very short and not that exciting improvisation. Of course I wanted to present you with something really great but then I thought I’d better just post what I have. Because if I wait for something really great I might never get around to post music on my blog again. Using that thing is much easier than using the big mixer my husband has.

So now I’m doing something that no musician should do. Ever.

I’m posting a raw first take of a boring improvisation. Without having listened to it again.

There.

Nice post, isn’t it? Even if it is a bit incoherent. The only problem is that I then had to listen to the improvisation again, and it had the deadly flaw of being far too soft. Not loud enough. When it started to play on my computer I checked and rechecked three times to see if the loudspeaker was on. So I couldn’t post it.

There was only one thing to do. I recorded another improvisation today. Which is based on a groove idea that I had on May 1. I carried that idea around in my head for more than two months. Then I connected my new recording device, everything was fine, I even remembered to check the levels, and then I sang it. It was beautiful. Really. Unfortunately you can’t hear it because for no good reason the computer didn’t record it. Which I found out after more than two minutes of singing. Then I had twelve minutes left before I had to leave to pick up my son. I recorded the thing again, well, something based on the same groove. I had seven minutes to mix it which is why I’m not completely satisfied with that artificial sounding reverb effect thingie.

But here, finally, is at least some music by me:

Download audio file (improjuly.mp3)

I had wanted to make a new category on this blog like the “Story of the Month”-feature. “Monthly music” or, why not go wild, “Weekly Improvisation”. But, alas, it seems that a month in music is like six months in real life for me. But who knows. Maybe there will be something else before Christmas. Though I’m sure there won’t be 50 songs in 90 days.

As for the question of the bathing suit I have to confess that I exaggerated for dramatic reasons, I actually own a bathing suit that fits me, and has done so through weight loss and gain for years. When I bought it in 1998 or so I weighed about 67 kilos and it fit me even in the first stages of pregnancy until I reached a weight of about 85 kilos. Right now, of course, I hope to be able to fit into my new bikini again though it will certainly be a bit tight this summer.

I have, as probably most women in the first world, a long history of weight gain and loss. I also am still suffering from an eating disorder, namely compulsive overeating, though I’m much better now and still haven’t given up on healing. In fact, that’s my word of the year for this year: healing.

I still believe that it is possible to just eat, and maintain a nice and healthy weight. I don’t believe in diets. They don’t work. I also don’t believe in any diet foods, in avoiding anything; now it’s carbs again, some years ago it was fat, and I’m just now too lazy to figure out which diet craze will have a comeback after the return of the Atkins diet (I know, it’s totally different nowadays, and it’s called low carb. Whatever.)

What I aspire is a life where food, and my looks, and the question of whether I still fit into my jeans aren’t that important. And I know that it can be done. My great role-model in this is Geneen Roth who spent deacdes on the diet-carousel, was anorexic at one point, and nowdays just eats and stays the same size.

Sadly, I’m not one of those people who read a book, get the idea, and then are changed forever. For me, everything I change has to be a practice. I stumble, I fall, I start over, I stumble, I do great, I fall,…

So, without making this into a mega-post, I just give you a list of the things I changed in the past, a list of things that worked.

1. I learned to love exercise and to do it regularly. I don’t do much, about 15 to 30 minutes every other day. And I do something I like doing. Something that’s easy to fit into my life. Going for walks, doing yoga with a DVD, things like that.
2. I slept more. In fact that was the change that gave me the most benefit of all. By only changing my bedtime so I got enough sleep, I lost weight. I swear. So now I only have to do that again, ahem.
3. I ate more real food. I found that there were three main reasons for my binges: a) I was tired, b) I really was hungry but didn’t allow myself to eat something real, and so I ate snacks upon snacks, c) I craved nutrition that I wasn’t getting, like when I’m eating only cookies they will never make me feel satisfied.
4. I sometimes stayed hungry for a bit. I was eating something like five meals a day before but then I decided that if I get hungry at 11 am, and I’m having lunch at 12, I maybe don’t need a midmorning snack.
5. I don’t graze. Either I eat or I don’t. No shoving of tiny little things into my mouth.
6. No food after dinner. Apart from that one piece of chocolate (it’s a big piece of chocolate, don’t worry). I might, occaasionally eat crackers in front of TV but only very occasionally, and not the whole carton.
7. In the evening I can have either a beer or a piece of chocolate, not both. I altered this rule later so that I’m not allowed alcohol during the week because I became worried about alcoholism in my family, and also about my son seeing me drink beer or wine with every meal, every day. And yes, it does count if you do it after they sleep. I try to model the behaviors I want my son to develop. Not only becausee it’s good for him, it’s good for me too.
8. I think about my mid-afternoon snack in advance, and buy groceries accordingly. It’s no use to think I’ll skip it, especially on teaching days. I need it, and so there has to be something for me to eat. Mostly I go with a handful or two of nuts and raisins.
9. Drink enough water. Apart from a cup of black tea in the morning, and those weekend beers, I drink water and unsweetened herbal tea. Somebody asked me about switching to alcohol-free beer. While I occasionally drink that it a) doesn’t taste that good, b) still has much more calories than water or tea, and c) is a very un-natural thing and I try to avoid these as much as possible in food.
10. I also stopped eating sugar last year, well, mostly and when I do I prefer brown sugar over white. But that had nothing to do with losing weight, I did it because I felt addicted to it. It messes with my feeling of whether I’m hungry or not, it makes me hyper, and I feel better when I don’t eat it. (I feel like a hypocrite typing this since I just had a lovely piece of cake, I’m sitting in a café right now. So, I have cake about once or twice a month. I do better without absolutes. I also savour every bite when I eat something like that. Last year we went out and had ice cream for my birthday. It was a very pleasant experience made more special by being the only ice cream I had all summer.)

To show you how much of a difference these tiny things make, and also the fact that I’m using my bike more often instead of the car and such, I have lost two kilos since the beginning of June. Without suffering, without battle, just like that. I know that you can’t do that always, I’m living proof for that, I’m the one who gained and gained over months despite knowing what to do.

What also helps me is realizing that ultimately it isn’t that important. I could just stay this size forever, and there’d be no harm in this. But also, my life doesn’t end because I don’t eat potato chips every day. There are more important things in life, much more important things, and that’s something I want my son to know not only because I say so but because he sees me living it.

I didn’t buy the magazine but I thought about “feeling fat” again. Feeling fat is not to be confused with being fat though when you are fat you have a higher probability of feeling fat too. And these past weeks I have felt especially fat. One reason for this is that I gained about 9 kilos between last July and this May. Last summer I bought myself I nice new bikini that was just a little bit too small because I was sure I would lose still more weight. Gaining that much makes me feel like a loser. Like my whole life is out of control; which in a way it is.

When I tell people that I gained weight (I had to do that quite a bit when I visited my parents and relatives) they usually ask, “And why did you gain that weight?” Well, I’d say I ate too much. And drank too much beer. And moved less. If I know somebody really well I tell them that I was depressed for months. But then I’m not sure whether I get depressed because I’m gaining weight or gain weight because I’m depressed. Nonetheless the two are related in some way.

I feel even worse because I was doing so well. I had been losing weight, and changing my old unhealthy and unconscious habits for two years, and I lost about 14 kilos. Not by dieting but by changing habits one at a time, doing small things. This wasn’t a speedy process. On average I lost about 300 grams a month. So I thought at least I’d keep it off. Turns out that when I revert to eating just a bit too much for every meal, too many snacks, sugar again, and about two beers a day I gain back a kilo a month.

It’s not as if I were asleep for months and then suddenly woke up to find myself much heavier than before, every month, every week, every single day of that months I vowed to change back, not to drink beer, not to eat my son’s candy, or five liverwurst sandwiches for dinner. But then I felt hungry all the time, I felt, well, depressed, and a part of me thought that nothing I’d do would make a difference and so I just ate more this once, and drank that beer “just today”, and that box of crackers that hardly makes a difference, and so on and on, day after day.

That’s one of my main problems in life, I see clearly what I am doing, and it doesn’t fit the way I intend to live and then I’m doing it anyway. In part it’s that kind of stubbornness that makes me stay up because my husband reminded me that it’s getting late. The part of me that didn’t clean my room because my mother said so even thought I could barely stand the mess myself.

If you look under the category changing habits in my left sidebar (or click on the link), and then go back to 2006 you’ll find quite a few posts about losing weight and such. I really thought I had it. Once and for all, I know how to do this and I was sure I’d never get fat again. The interesting thing is that obviously I chose to go back to my old unconscious eating patterns, and for months and monthsat a time  without changing back. I just gave up.

Of course the next thing I think is that this just doesn’t work. Like one of my aunts said, “For some people it’s just genetics. They can’t help it.” Sometimes I dream of having a magic pill that will let the pounds melt from me (over night and without a mess of course), and then I’ll live at 64 or maybe 65 kilos, wearing a size 6 or 8 for ever. But I doubt that will happen and it’s no use to wait for it.

I’d love to be one of those people who read the right book, change their eating habits and that’s it. Forever. For me, obviously, I have to practice new habits for years and years and years and years, and then I still can’t be sure of them. This is very frustrating. But then I thought to myself I have two choices here: I can either give up and get fatter and fatter until I die, or I can start over again. And over. And over. And over. Every single day, every single meal, every single bite.

While I’m writing this now, the worst seems to be over. I already lost a kilo, I’m back to not eating sugar much, and alcohol is restricted to weekends (with a very broad definition of weekends, like, three days a week). I’m also back to exercise, doing small things like riding the bike to the grocery store instead of taking the car, and a walk every other day.

I very much hope that I can keep myself on track and then some time in the future (maybe next year) I’ll be back to where I was last year. And I want to do this without obsessing about it, just behaving like a slim person. Because “feeling fat”, like I said before, is not about the size of your body, it is short for “how I feel about myself as a person”, or for self worth.

Still. If you were in my place, would you sew yourself a new summer dress? Would you buy yourself a new, bigger, bathing suit? I know I’m not the only one in this place.

It’s surprising the number of women who are unacquainted with their bodies from the neck down. Our mirrors are strategically placed for only blow-drying hair and applying makeup, then we quickly dress without a glance at our reflection. We know our faces intimately, but most of us wouldn’t recognize our bodies in a lineup. When a group of women were asked to identify themselves from a series of headless bodies wearing nothing but their birthday suits, only 20 per cent correctly chose their naked selves. The rest guessed wrong, choosing bodies that were bigger in size than their own! (Debra Waterhouse: “From Tired to Inspired: 8 Energizing Ways to Overcome Female Fatigue”, p 175)

It’s weird that people who are often obsessed with the way they look don’t even really know how they look. That about every single one of us secretly believes she is fat, regardless of actual size. That every single one of us has the feeling she should lose about ten pounds. It always seems to be ten pounds at least, I don’t know why. I know that in my case the number keeps getting adjusted down every time I lose weight so that I never am where I want to be. But today I’m not writing about weight loss (even if I’m thinking about it) but about our body images.

Debra Waterhouse goes on:

Whether we are familiar with our anatomy or not, what’s not surprising, unfortunately, are the negative comments we make about our bodies. It has been estimated that the average American woman makes eighteen critical comments each day about herself and spends one third of her waking hours ridiculing her physical self in some way – getting on the scale and obsessing about the number, getting dressed and grimacing at the way our clothes fit, taking inventory of our wrinkles, catching our reflection unexpectedly in a window and frowning, comparing ourselves to fashion models, measuring ourselves against other women, depriving our bodies from food and nourishment, agonizing over what we will and will not eat – the list goes on and on.

How much time did you spend criticizing your body today?

Just think about it. How much time and energy wasted.

I think that I would recognize my body. Every day I make a point of really looking at myself. From all sides. I have been working on making friends with my body for years now. It’s better to have your body for a friend, and to treat it nicely since you want him to do a lot of things for you. We are not mind alone, even if it might feel like that when we’re sitting in front of the computer communicating with invisible people through a friendly shining monitor screen.

Learning to like what I see in the mirror was hard at first. My body, of course, isn’t flawless. Nobody’s body is, by the way, and you all know it. After a while though I liked myself better. I found that I actually like big butts. Hourglass figures, strong legs. That’s not to say that I’m not working on changing the things about my body that I don’t like but I find that in the long run being free from back pain is more important than having thin ankles. And that, like in any stable relationship, I have to accept what’s possible and what not.

When I actually started thinking about something important to me every time I caught myself thinking about my appearance or weight or food that set free huge amounts of energy. It was about 2 1/2 years ago that I did that, and only a couple of weeks later I had written two songs.

Energy follows attention. Being heavier than one wants to is not a full-time occupation. No, really, not even very heavy people eat all the time.

So, I’m giving you homework this time:

1. Step in front of the mirror, naked would be best, and say something nice about your body. Say it out loud. Repeat. (This is an exercise from one of Geneen Roth‘s books.)
2. Think about what’s really important to you. Maybe something creative. Every time you find yourself thinking about how fat you are or how you should lose weight think about that important thing instead. Bonus points if it is something creative.

I never know whether my mood changes because of the things I’m doing or because of some weird brain chemistry shift. Though I’d say that the way I live my life also influences my brain chemistry. It’s not as if my brain weren’t connected to the rest of me. While I do know what to do to make me feel better I have been strangely reluctant to change my behavior in any way. It was as if I threw myself wholeheartedly into the vortex. There’s this cycle of not caring for myself, not sleeping enough, eating more junk, not making music, spending too much time mindlessly surfing the internet, not doing housework… I have become even more stupid, forgetful, unreliable, and overweight than before.

It would be nice if there was a magic pill. I could go to a doctor, take it and feel happy and healthy again. But I doubt that it works that way. I’m not really clinically depressed. In fact I am a cheerful person despite the fact that life looks a bit grey all the time, and everything I do feels like pushing a big boulder uphill. Even things like doing the dishes, getting out of bed, or taking a shower.

The reason I’m writing this now is that I actually do feel a bit better. I have been getting enough sleep for almost a week now, and I have started to tackle things that have been lying around and weighing on my conscience for months now. Like reading a friend’s manuscript (I told her in September that it would take me a couple of weeks, ahem.), like starting to sew a bag that I originally planned to make in August, starting to knit something that I bought the yarn for in October. Since it has been such a long time since I cared for such a lot of things I couldn’t finish everything that I started or wanted to do since August in the past week but I made a start.

It seem that I really need structure and routines to feel good, even if that structure and routines don’t feel good when I’m in the midst of them. Like exercise. I only feel good after I have done it. Somehow I have to remember that dreading and procrastinating something often takes more of my energy than actually doing it. Maybe I should make a banner of that and post it over my piano.

So, to celebrate feeling better I’d thought I’d post a list of things that make me happy. in fact, I encourage you to do the same, whether you feel good or not, because it lifts your mood anyway.

1. The first flowers peeking out under the snow.
2. My son starting to spell words.
3. My son starting to play the very first chords on the guitar.
4. Hearing my husband play his guitar through the wall.
5. Taking out the guitar not with the notion of, “I have to practice for work.” but just for fun, and playing around with it for a whole afternoon. (In fact I found out that I think of my two guitars as “work guitars”. When I use them I have to be efficient, and to the point. Get the most out of limited time. So I took one of my husband’s for play.)
6. Writing blog posts again.
7. Baking bread.
8. Eating the bread I made.
9. Pulling out an exercise DVD that I used to work out to three times a week, and finding that I’m not totally out of shape.
10. Seeing my son dragging around his new bunny and playing with it.
11. Waiting for my hibiscus to blossom.
12. Watching my son singing along with “Sky Children“.
13. Having no unread posts in my feed reader.
14. Being almost able to sing again after weeks of throat problems.
15. Not having to teach until next week.
16. Knitting the Scheherazade-stole with exquisite Wollmeise-yarn, something I have been looking forward to since at least four months.
17. Giving up on being perfect all at once, and instead just changing one thing at a time again.

What have you been happy about lately?

The first time I remember being drawn to meditation and such was when I was about 12 years old. However I didn’t know how to do it, found the prospect of sitting still unbearable and so forgot all about it. After being drawn into Christianity for a while, and then slowly becoming disappointed with my church, and then becoming agnostic again, I didn’t think about spiritual matters for years. That changed when I read “The Artist’s Way”. At first I found all this talk about the creator and spirituality off-setting, then I felt drawn to it again until I felt comfortable with spirituality once more. Not Christianity as such though.

I think it was in 2005 when I found the book “Coming to Our Senses” because I was looking for a parenting book. I loved it. And how can’t you. The subtitle is “Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness”. I was hooked. I ordered the guided meditation CDs and started practicing. Learning more about mindfulness meditation, I became interested in Buddhism which led to a visit to the local Vesakh celebration in Munich. We made that into a sort of family tradition (because we already have been going twice, you know). There you can check out all the different groups of Buddhists there are in Munich. We’re fortunate because there are so many to choose from. In 2007 my husband and I thought about joining a group. There were several that sounded interesting, I researched them on-line, and found that the “Gesellschaft für achtsames Leben” held a day of mindfulness every month. No membership required, you can just show up, meditate with them and practice mindfulness for a day.

I have come to cherish these days. I’m still not really sure if I am a Buddhist or not but taking the time to slow down for a day, sit, walk, and eat in mindfulness feels very joyful, refreshing and makes me a bit calmer.

It isn’t that easy to organize. My mother-in-law has to be available to take our son for the day. We’re all busy people. We have to get up at six in the morning, pack lunches, tea, meditation cushions, and such and catch the train at ten past seven. The train ride takes about 90 minutes. It takes us through Munich, out of the city again, and then, finally, to a beautiful lake in view of the mountains. To be frank this view alone would be worth the trip. There are quite a few people taking the same train so we go to the village together. Everybody says hello, gets out the cushions, takes off shoes, and puts on socks. After a bit of chanting we sit for a while, and then walk in meditation, then sit. We have tea in meditation, then we’re allowed to talk and have a short break followed by a lecture. Then eating lunch, partly in silence, walking meditation outside near the lake, then some singing, walking meditation back, talk about the morning’s lecture, sitting meditation again, and then it’s over.

The first time I went there I was sure I’d go nuts, trying to be silent for so long but actually I’m a bit sad every time the bell rings and we’re allowed to talk again. Being silent and mindful all of a sudden seems a rare treat. Which it is in modern life, especially when you have children.

It also is a good way for me to remind myself how good mindfulness feels. Lately I have been trying to wriggle out of it. But that’s not doing me any good. Trying to be mindful on the other hand has done me a lot of good. I have to keep that in mind…

I tried to get back on track by re-subscribing to flylady again, and then I couldn’t stand all the e-mail. I didn’t do anything different and so, I have to confess, the e-mails didn’t do the housework.

Joanna answered in a comment

Flylady was invented for people who have 3 billion hours in a day. The routines look great on paper but they do not work in this house!!!!

And this had me thinking about a reply for weeks now so I decided to make it into a blog post. I hope Joanna doesn’t mind.

First, as I have written too, one of the problems seems to be that the routines and e-mails really don’t do any work. Sadly, housework still has to be done by oneself, or – in my case – by my husband. Which isn’t fair and so I have been working on improving my homemaking skills. That is not Flylady’s fault.

Second, Flylady was not invented for people who have 3 billion hours a day, it was invented precisely for people who don’t have much time, who are easily distracted and therefore a bit challenged on the organizational or cleaning side of life.

For those of you who don’t know who or what Flylady is, Flylady is the nickname of an American woman who started a yahoo-group to help people with organizing and housecleaning. The system is a bit unusual but I can testify that it works beautifully when you do it. Which might go for every system out there, I don’t know, but I can say that I started using Flylady’s methods five years ago and even though I have been off and on in applying them there are a few things that have stuck, and the house never looks as awful as it did before.

Right now I’m working on getting back to where I was before. It seems like that’s what I’m doing in all areas of my life at the moment. But there are things that I started because of Flylady and that just stuck.

Dressing down to shoes first thing in the morning.
While I don’t take a shower or put on make-up in the morning, each morning I get up and then dress into jeans, a sweater, my indoor sneaker, and I put on earrings and a necklace. So, if everything goes haywire that day I’m already dressed adequately for almost all the things I’m doing on a day-to-day basis.
Before I started doing this I changed clothes about six times a day. Sweats in the morning, then dress for doing errands, back into sweats, working out, dress in clean sweats after taking a shower, dress for teaching, back into sweats, then pajamas. Then I found that stretchy jeans and a sweater or tee are almost as comfy as sweats, and I can wear them all day long. Yes, I even work out in jeans sometimes. Then I take a shower and change into clean clothes. I still wear pajamas at night, just in case you may have wondered.

Wearing lace-up shoes in the house
When I first read this I thought this woman must be crazy. Why should I trade my Birkenstocks for anything else. Well, here is why: I’m less prone to stumbling and falling down stairs, I feel like I’m in work-mode, and my feet don’t hurt.

Picking up after myself
My husband will be the first to tell you that I’m not very good at this but I’m really much better than I used to be. Often I even put the dirty dishes away right after a meal. And I’m always glad when I do because it’s just so nice when you come back and hour later and your kitchen is actually clean and tidy.

Dealing with laundry in a timely fashion
Again, I have been better at this at one time but usually laundry gets washed when there is enough for one or two loads, it gets hung up as soon as it’s washed and it gets folded when it’s dry and put away immediately. I fold the clothes on the thing where the laundry dries, put it in a hamper, carry the hamper to the bedroom and just put everything away. Magic. No piles. And since we don’t iron anything…

Put everything into my calendar and check it at least twice a day
Really helpful. Everything is in there, and I check it in the evening, in the morning, and often in between. When I have something like “Bring two eggs, a pair of pantyhose, and a net to kindergarten.” it really helps to know about it the evening before. Because mornings are stressful enough as it is, I don’t have to add the stress of looking for discarded pantyhose and eggs on top of that.

“Housework done incorrectly still blesses the family.”
Yep. Picking up a few dust bunnies by hand is better than doing nothing at all. Taking a bit of window cleaner and wipe at the bathroom window is much better than waiting for those two empty days where I finally will have enough time to clean all the windows in the house.

Making the bed every day.
Yes, you read that correctly. Every morning after breakfast I go and make the beds, and tidy the bedroom. You might think this doesn’t make much of a difference but it does. Every time I go into our bedroom I feel relaxed and a bit more peaceful. Because it’s tidy and the beds are made.

Wiping the sink.
While I still struggle with the ongoing cleaning of the bathrooms every sink in the house gets wiped out after use. Almost every time. Also I wipe down the shower stall after taking a shower. That takes all of twenty second and it looks as if I were really cleaning them every day. Which I don’t.

Small steps done consistently make a difference.
I know, my mother told me that one long ago but she isn’t very good at this either. And I have a really hard time being consistent with anything. Since Flylady taught me that I don’t have to be perfect I have been practicing and becoming better at it. And if I’m not consistent for a while? Then I just start over again. And again. And again. And again.

And here is one last slogan from her (and I should post that one on my mirror):

Progress, not perfection.

So, while not everyone has to use Flylady’s system, and there seem to be a few people who don’t need a system at all (I’m living with one, for example) how do you go on about that? And are you happy with your surroundings that way? Or aren’t you?

I just love to hear how you deal with it.

Yesterday I “tried” going to bed earlier and I succeeded, only it wasn’t early enough. Judging by the way this has been going since 2005 (when I slept enough every night for about three months) I’d guess that today I’ll be a little later than yesterday and tomorrow I will be back at my much too late bedtime.

This morning I pulled a card from one of my oracle decks which I do most days and there it was: “Back to Basics”. In the booklet it says things like:

If you neglect your basic needs, your higher awareness will diminish, leaving you to operate on adrenaline and anxiety.

Duh. And there are some questions for me as well as for you:

Are you taking loving care of your body without guilt? Are you getting enough sleep, drinking enough water, eating healthy and lovingly prepared food, and getting adequate exercise?

I even have thought of keeping track of my new “going to bed on time”-habit on my blog. But that seems so pathetic. Maybe I’ll go back to the old “sticker on the calendar”-method of motivation and keeping track. And maybe in a month or so I can report back and tell, “I did it! I’m feeling fabulous! I slept eight hours a night for four weeks in a row!”

Somehow I doubt it though. And 8 hours still isn’t enough for me, it’s just better than my usual 6 1/2. What I need is 9 hours. I know I’m insatiable. Do you even know how many hours of sleep you need?

(And speaking of healthy and lovingly prepared food, my dear husband stepped in and cooked a marvelous minestrone (which I forgot to photograph, but I was hungry). And he even cooked it on top of the wood stove!

(And just when I had posted this I read a post by Gretchen from the happiness project:”One easy key to happiness: get more sleep. That means turning off the light!” The universe is definitely trying to tell me something. She cites studies saying that sleep has a major influence on your mood, and getting one more hour of sleep would make you happier than more money…)

I always thought that if you are a real artist you enjoy the whole process of making art from start to finish. I thought for example that real musicians (unlike me) enjoy practicing. Maybe not every single minute of it but seven out of their eight hours a day of it for sure. I have to force myself to play. And every day I have to do it again.

I have heard that it takes 27 days to form a habit. Haha, really funny that. I have had practiced daily for months or years without it becoming a habit.

But back to that epiphany: Lisa Liam wrote somewhere in her blog that she dislikes cutting out the pieces for sewing. And she loves sewing so much that she has made it into her profession. I had thought it was only me! Disliking the cutting, swearing all through the sewing and leaving the almost finished piece for months without sewing on the buttons. Or dreading blocking and sewing the knitting together so much that I’d rather stop knitting the sweater with half a sleeve unfinished.

Or having to kick myself to practice by setting a kitchen timer and saying, “You won’t leave this keyboard until the bell rings. No, no daydreaming. Play. – I can hear that you’re not really working. Get back. Do your scales.” And it’s even a little harder with making music because you’re never finished. It’s just like being an athlete in training.

Or never writing anything but the beginning of a story. Only signing up for NaNoWriMo made me finish a first draft. I recently spoke to a fellow NaNo-participant about signing up for the next one (I’m still undecided, but this time I’ll tell my husband first.), and he said, “The hardest part is starting to write for the day. Once you have written a few sentences it just keeps going.”
Ha! As if! With every writing project apart from writing blog posts I had to force myself to write every single paragraph. Not that I didn’t have periods of free flowing prose where all I had to do was typing fast enough to keep up but once I reached my quota for the day I couldn’t get away from writing fast enough.

So for me doing something that fills me with joy isn’t necessarily about doing things that are fun or pleasurable. The question is why I keep on doing these things even though I find them tedious and hard? There comes Robert Heinlein to mind who said that he felt awful when writing but even more awful when not. (That’s somewhere in his biography which I can’t access now because it’s in the room my son is sleeping in.) I always compare this to climbing a mountain (or going for a walk) versus plopping down in front of TV all day.

The difference is how you feel about life and yourself at the end of the day. The climb or the walk makes you feel strong, confident, happy, and tired in a good way. Sitting on a couch watching TV all day might be pleasurable but at the end of the day you feel sluggish, drowsy, and unsatisfied.

Still, even knowing this, I’d like to change my perspective in a way that I could just enjoy the walk, or the process without feeling bad most of the way. That’s why I made “effortlessness” my word of the year. And I don’t think this is all about being blocked, or my inner critic giving me a hard time. Maybe this is about me thinking that life should somehow be easier. Maybe it’s time to grow up. Without becoming all dead serious and dividing my days into tiny little slices, into a sequence of to-dos. I tried that and while I got a lot of things done it never was enough and I managed to squeeze the joy out of life.

So, do you have any ideas? Are you good about enjoying the process? Did you learn that somehow, or were you always like that?

One of the most helpful comments to me was the one Anne wrote. Sadly there are no posts in her blog. I hope there will be. She also addressed several ways of asking a child to do something. I like her emphasis on teaching the actual skills versus the chore aspect of this. Obviously meno’s daughter has the most things to do which isn’t surprising since said daughter is about 16. Sober put it best when she wrote:

All the things that Anne said – not actually being responsible for a task, but learning alongside, taking turns doing things that he can do and watching you do the things that require the precision of an adult.

In addition to your comments I have done a little thinking on my own and pulled out a copy of “Kinder fördern im Alltag.” (Petra Kunze, Catharina Salamander)“. So, a preschooler like my son should be able to do the following:

• pick up his toys
• dress and undress himself
• set the table (in our house somebody else will have to get the dishes because he can’t reach them)
• fetch things from the fridge
• help to peel and cut vegetables
• rake leafs, help with yard work like watering (my son has his own little rake and watering can), pull weeds, put seeds into the ground, pot plants
• pour juice, milk, or cereal
• sort laundry
• put dirty laundry in the hamper
• put fresh laundry away
• load and unload the dishwasher
• help with grocery shopping, fetch things that are on low shelves, take a little shopping cart and push it through the store (my son also often gets to decide which cheese we’re buying, which fruit or vegetables
• put the groceries away when home
• put his own things back where they belong
• clean up spills

So there are a lot of things that even a preschooler can do. My next question of course is, “How do I motivate him to do any of this?” I’m a little reluctant to make any of this things his “duty”. This is not how our family works. While there are things that one or the other of us does more frequently (I do most of the shopping and errands while my husband cares for recycling, for example.), mostly everybody does everything as needed. Sometimes on of us cooks, sometimes the other, sometimes both or all three. Sadly our son isn’t interested to join us. He’d rather sit and draw a picture or look at a book. (Yes, he truly is his mother’s son.)

As a friend pointed out to me, “After a while it just isn’t fun anymore.” Well, I didn’t know housework was supposed to be fun, I just know that it has to be done regardless of how you like to do it. And I definitely know that spreading it around and doing it together helps in making it more fun.

I have noticed that my son is especially reluctant to help if he thinks he won’t be able to accomplish the task. So sometimes all it takes is to show him that he can do it. He’s very eager to try things like make his own sandwiches. And when I get him to help he is always very pleased with himself. Like today I put everything that was needed to set the table out and he did the rest himself. After a lot of whining, “Why do I always have to do so much?”, and us pointing out that there are people actually doing more than him, he was perfectly happy to have set the table on his own.

Housework isn’t such a big deal but it’s the first and easiest way our children can contribute something to family life. And everybody has to learn how to care for himself or others.

Thank you for all your helpful suggestions. After reading your comments I kept thinking of more and more ways to involve my son. He doesn’t appreciate it now but he sure will in the future. As Hel wrote:

I hated doing chores as a child but now I am able to create a pleasant living space free of old crusty pieces of bread and unwashed cups.

On the subject of responsibility and hovering parents I might have to write another post soon.

But I’ve found something new! Sleep deprivation. Makes you feel even worse than having eaten 1 1/2 bags of potato chips, a bag of gummy bears and lots of chocolate in one sitting. Just train yourself to go to bed at 11.30 when you have to get up at 6.45, when you need about 8 1/2 hours of sleep and voilà, there’s your new obsession.

First you don’t get out of bed on time because you haven’t slept enough yet. Then you stumble through your day, bleary-eyed and barely conscious. You promise yourself a midday nap only to find something really important to do, like for example reading blogs, and that’s it for the nap. You promise yourself to be good from now on, to go to bed on time. “Ah, tonight”, you think, “tonight I’ll snuggle in my cosy bed just when I’m getting tired and then close my eyes. Bliss!”. For the whole day you think of bed. In a wholly platonic way. Sleep. Sleep! SLEEP! Interestingly when evening comes around, you get awake again. There’s just this one thing more to do before going to bed. After all it isn’t that late. And it’s not good to go to bed too early of course. So you still have, let’s say, 30 minutes. So you can start to watch an episode of “Angel”. And of course you will be really good today and stop watching it right in the middle. Don’t you? Only this time it’s that interesting, never mind that you already know it. And if you stay up just a little longer you’ll be past some critical point in your knitting. Or you talk to your husband and just forget the time… Never mind the reason, the result is always the same: You go to bed at 11.30. Rinse and repeat.

After a while you are too tired to exercise. You are too tired to play with your son. You are impatient and cranky. You are too tired to make music. In fact, you are too tired for doing anything much, and everything you do takes twice the time it should take because you’re so slow. You get so tired that you shouldn’t be allowed to drive a car anymore.

So why do you continue going to bed too late? Even though you know that you never can sleep in? And you know that sleeping in isn’t good for you either. better to have a consistent routine, like, going to bed at 10.30 and getting up at 6.45. (We’re not talking about you pre-motherly goal of having nine hours of deep, relaxing, and uninterrupted sleep every night here. Just eight hours for a start.)

In a way, it’s perfect. You get to complain, which is always good, so that people don’t get jealous at you. You life has focus and you never have to shift it because nothing changes. When you’re tired it only shows how hard you work and what amazing things you do. Of course you can’t be expected to do anything for anybody before being rested. You don’t have to be creative because you’re much too tired for that. Better to dream about your projects than have them fall short in any way. You get to eat more because you’re always hungry. And since you’re so low on energy you just deserve a little chocolate to make you feel better. And then, of course, a beer in the evening to help you sleep better. Never mind that alcohol doesn’t help with sleep. At least it feels relaxing.

This of course is wholly fictional and doesn’t bear any resemblance to real, ahem, almost forty-ish singers any of us knows.

But I wanted to write about cloth diapers. I only realized how much I care about them when my husband’s cousin had a baby a couple of weeks ago; she took all the baby stuff I had left and when I forgot that the cloth diapers were still sitting in a closet in my bedroom, and told her I’d bring them over, she just made a vague noise and shrugged it off. And since then I have been wanting to force the cloth diapers on her. And to persuade her to use them. But I can’t. And I know perfectly well that most of the people reading this blog don’t have children of diaper age, or are well set in their ways. Nonetheless I’d like to tell you why I like cloth diapers so much:

1. They don’t smell as much.
Really. When my son went to play group the teachers there often didn’t realize that his diaper badly needed changing because there was not that much stink. On the other hand, when – for travel reasons or such – I had to use disposable diapers I kept thinking that he had a poopy diaper when in fact he hadn’t.

2. You don’t need to haul immense amounts of diapers home from the super market.
And

3. You don’t need to pay insane amounts of money for diapers.
When I first contemplated the cloth-or-not-cloth-issue I stood in the diaper aisle of the grocery store thinking, “Oh, they aren’t that expensive.” And then I started to do the math. Let’s take an average of 4 diapers a day for 2 1/2 years, and let’s say one diapers costs about 25 cent (which it doesn’t in the grocery store, I just found a discount price on the net right now), and then you’ll pay 912.50 € for diapers. At least. (That would be 1.234.25 $. But then I don’t know the cost of diapers in the US.) And I know that washing things also costs money, and cloth diapers cost money, but not that much. Which brings me to the next point:

4. You often can get used cloth diapers very cheap or for free.
Most of the diapers I have been using for years were given to me by a friend. She used them for about two weeks and was very glad to give them away. I have bought some new diapers over time because some were worn out, and I have been using disposable diapers from time to time, but the money I spent was nowhere near 900 €.

When I was pregnant I read tons of books about pregnancy and babies. In one of them the author said, “Imagine yourself on the balcony, folding nice clean diapers with your baby in a sling, while everybody else is stuck in a traffic jam because they have run out of diapers and have to get new ones in a panic.” I thought she was a little cuckoo. But really, some of my fondest memories of my son’s first year indeed involve me hanging up or folding diapers while carrying him in a sling. Of course I don’t think that much about the days when I had to do everything wearing him in a sling while he screamed on top of his lungs, and I had to rush around, sterilizing my milk pump and washing diapers. (And I am a sling fanatic too. Not that I practiced Attachment Parenting, but I really have to stop myself from pressing a sling on every new parent. It literally saved my life. I even volunteered to teach people how to use them. If you’re anywhere near Munich, drop me an e-mail, come to my house and I’ll show you.) I seem to be a bit of a missionary at heart. Sorry.

5. Cloth diapers are better for babies with sensitive skin.
My son developed a rash every time we went on vacation and he wore disposable diapers more than two days in a row.

So now about the things that people don’t like about cloth diapers:

1. You have a bucket of smelling, dirty diapers sitting around all the time.
Yep. True. Make sure to get a small bucket with a fitting lid. Contrary to popular belief you don’t have to swish them in the toilet though. Or iron them. You don’t even have to touch them after changing, or soak them. Just get a laundry net, hang it in the bucket like a trash bag, roll the used diapers up, and put them in there. Close lid. When the bucket is full, take it to the washing machine, grab the net, close it, toss it in the machine – well done. You have to clean the bucket once in a while, though. Think of it as training for when your child uses the potty.

And really, a diaper bucket doesn’t smell more than a cat litter box. And trash cans with disposable diapers in them smell too. Unless maybe you use those thingies that wrap each and every diaper in plastic, and really how environmental unfriendly do you want to get because of a little poop smell?

2. Your babysitter, day care person, or some such, won’t know how to use them.
Well, most people can be trained. And there are cloth diapers that work like disposable ones. The only two things people have to keep in mind are: a) don’t throw the cloth diaper away, and b) most types of cloth diaper require a kind of cover since they are not water-proof per se. In our family the challenge was to prevent my babysitter from putting a diaper cover on my son when for some reason or other she had to use disposables once in a while.

At first when my son was in play group (without mothers), I put him in disposables to make it easier for the teachers. But since they never changed him anyway, I just put a little plastic bag in his backpack with a fresh cloth diaper and a big handwritten sign saying: “Please us this diaper. Please put the diaper cover over it, and please put the soiled diaper in the plastic bag.” Voilà. No problem.

3. It is too complicated and time consuming.
Again, look at this:

or this:

4. They leak when the baby gets older.
Well, yes. I almost gave up when my son was about nine months old. Then I bought a couple of extra layers like these:

And there was – no more leakage.

5. But who wants to do all that laundry?
Come on. You’ve got a child. You’re doing laundry all the time anyway.
I was surprised at the amount of laundry we had after having a child. And I only changed his clothes about twice a week or so. Since then I made peace with the five loads a week concept. (Of course now I have less laundry than when I still had to wash the diapers. That’s true.)

Have I forgotten something? I stole all the pictures from the excellent shop “Wickelkinder” by the way. I can only recommend it. For Germans anyway. What do you think about cloth diapers? Have you tried them?

A couple of weeks ago I decided to give up eating sugar because I felt like I was addicted to it. In fact I haven’t been giving it up entirely. This is the amount of sugar I eat every day:

It’s all brown sugar, I choose the very dark chocolate that has brown sugar as the last ingredient on the list (I even tried chocolate with 99% cocoa in it, bleargh.) I don’t even remotely like dark chocolate. But I’m starting to get used to it. Better than no chocolate anyway. The müsli has a tiny amount of brown sugar in the corn flakes. I could eat the same sugar-free müsli as my husband but I like this much better. And the sugar cube shows my weakness, I can’t bring myself to drink black tea without sugar. And no, I won’t try artificial sweetener (Are you nuts? There are enough weird chemicals in my food as it is, and besides they taste horrible.), or splenda. (I don’t even know if that is available in Germany.) But from what I read about it I’d rather eat some honey or brown sugar, or even white sugar, before I tried that.

I know that when I’m writing about this “no-sugar”-thing I trigger every woman’s “I’m not eating healthy, and I should lose weight anyway.”-trip at once. Especially now that everybody is going the Atkins-route again, and carbohydrates are flailed right and left. I love carbs. I still eat a lot of sweet things. And I don’t think everybody should stop eating sugar. Only, when I start eating sugary things I instantly crave even more. And then, often, I can’t seem to stop before all is gone.

I still feel calmer when I don’t eat much sugar. But I’m getting used to it. At first, every time I ate something like cake I’d go completely hysteric. Or depressive. Now it doesn’t affect me that much. When I’m invited for cake, I eat cake. I only eat one piece though, not three. On Tuesday I even had iced coffee with ice cream and whipped cream with sugar in it. And stayed reasonably calm. I never eat those kinds of things at home though. My son’s candy is firmly out of bounds.

So it would be quite easy to say, “Oh, now I got it. I can have some white sugar on a regular basis without becoming all addicted again.” But I don’t think so. Every single time that I eat a piece of cake or a cookie I end up craving sugar even more than before. So this craving seems to be insatiable for me.

I’m still getting used to this. I miss baking. Every time I go to the grocery store I recite, “I can’t have this, and I can’t have that. ” “No sugar, no candy, no cake, no cookies, no ice cream,…” But it’s getting better. There are whole aisles I’m not going into anymore. And I’m finding peace in that. I don’t miss the bloated and disgusting feeling I had when I ate a bag of potato chips, chocolate, and a bag of jelly beans in one sitting. I don’t miss that feeling at all. And I don’t miss all that discussions going on in my head like, “But I want only one more piece of chocolate. And then I’ll stop.” and the mother-me saying, “But you already had four pieces. And you know that you will keep on eating, so why don’t you just stop now and eat the rest tomorrow.” – “But I waaaant toooooo.” – “Stop it.” – “Waaaaaaa.” – Sigh. “Okay, but just one.”
(After writing a screen play for three weeks I still haven’t got the hang of formatting dialogue. And in case you’re interested, 13,491 words so far. I know, I’m way behind.)

Oh, and if you think of cutting back on sugar for weight-loss reasons, I can tell you that eating two pounds of nuts for snacks every week will take care of that. I mean, the weight loss. Or, the lack of.

Back as a teenager when I was still very Christian I tried to give up candy for Lent every year, I only managed that (and it was real hard) when I still ate big amounts of cookies and cake every day. I don’t think I ever had a day in my entire life where I didn’t eat sugar at all.

In the past years I made a lot of changes: I never eat candy against hunger anymore. I don’t have something sweet after every meal. I restrict the amount of chocolate I eat. And I was very, very proud of myself to finally having that problem under control.
Only I hadn’t. After two years of making little rules around my candy consumption I had to realize that I still am not able to sit in the kitchen and read in the evening without eating much more candy than I intended to. When we visited my parents on Christmas my mother made a point of putting big bowls of candy and cookies right under my nose (she is a little jealous because I lost so much weight and she gained a little). I couldn’t resist. And not like “Oh my god, I ate TWO COOKIES!” But still like “I don’t know how and when but I just inhaled the whole bowl.”

So when I thought about addiction in my family I realized that maybe my biggest addiction might be to sugar. And that maybe ties in with my compulsive eating. There are other things that I turn to when I eat compulsively (and I do that less and less) but most involve sugar. In the past when I went on a binge I was after the sugar high. I didn’t mind throwing in some bags of potato chips and a couple of beers but if I had to choose I’d have taken the sugar.

So now I can report how it feels to have abstained from sugar for a whole week. And I haven’t even drunk much. It is the third time ever that I even tried. The first time I started after reading Christine Kane’s post about “How to give up coffee in 7 easy steps“. I don’t like coffee and avoid it wherever I can but in that post she mentioned sugar and so I thought, “Why don’t I try to cut back on candy?” Notice that I didn’t think “Why don’t I cut back on sugar?” Because I knew of former experiences that if I wanted to reduce my candy consumption there had to be cookies or cake in this. The first time I tried for a week I succeeded. The second time I cut the week short due to something really important I no longer remember.

Then suddenly a week ago on Saturday I said, “I’m addicted to sugar. I won’t eat it anymore. Period.” Immediately I begun to see how much sugar I really was eating. It’s not only candy or chocolate. It is yoghurt, it is ketchup, soda, sometimes even vegetables. And I began scheming: what would I tell people when I was invited in the afternoon (eating cake and drinking coffee is an integral part of German social life), what would I tell my mother, whom would I tell? All this was completely irrational and only showed how important sugar was to me. There was no need of a big declaration. No need to prepare for if I ever would be invited to a party, I’d just say thank you. But in my mind it was a very big thing.

That Saturday we had a party at our house, about fifteen people, some with children. The first thing was that my mother-in-law made cake. I love cake. Of the people that came three brought cake and three brought chocolate. Two brought fruit salad. It was potluck but usually people bring more salad. The whole buffet had only three salty things and all the rest was sugary. Never have I been to a party in my life where there were so many sweets. That was my first test.

I failed. I started with trying the cake at 3 in the afternoon and only stopped for sleep. The next day I continued with cake and chocolate until at 3 on Sunday my husband said, “What are you doing I thought you didn’t want to eat sugar because you are addicted to it. I’d like to throw that stuff away.” And I nodded and said, “Go ahead.” He put the rest of our candy in a hiding place that is hard to reach.

Since then I have stayed “sober”. The first days I thought about sneaking candy while running errands. Every single day after lunch and dinner I get this craving for chocolate. It feels like it’s sucking me in. How can one end a meal without eating a little chocolate-y goodness afterwards? The first days it felt like there was a little, furry predatory beast inside of me that howled, “Feed me! Feed me!”

I didn’t. I haven’t felt withdrawal much. Yesterday we went on a walk and then into a café. I decided to give myself a treat. I ate a piece of cheesecake. I didn’t like it as much as I thought I would and it felt as if it was too much but of course I ate it anyway. And the little piece of chocolate that came with my latte. Yeah, I had it all. Milk which always sits very heavy in my stomach, coffee which I don’t like and cake and chocolate. We went back home and I thought, “That’s the way to go. Have sugar as a treat on Sundays.”

All was well. Only my PMS worsened. And I felt very moody. And I couldn’t sleep well. And I yelled at my husband. Of course that’s all the coffee’s fault.

Or not. Because during the week without sugar (apart from one cube of brown sugar in my enormous cup of morning tea) I felt calmer than ever before in my life. In the midst of my midlife-crisis there was a calmness inside of me that I have never known before.

So I’d say that I react sensitive to sugar. And I’d say my son does this too. He is devouring sweets and sugary yoghurts like crazy. And afterwards he is hyper. And in a bad mood. Angry.

Interestingly this week hasn’t been hard for me. It was a little weird when I went grocery shopping and realized what I couldn’t eat anymore but so what. I still don’t quite know what to eat for an afternoon snack. This week it has been nuts and raisins. (I don’t like fruit in its natural state.) But I’ll continue this. I feel better. I don’t want addiction in my life anymore. By the way I have been avoiding alcohol too. It just doesn’t appeal to me anymore.

Who would have thought that possible…

So. Sleep. Just to think of it. Becoming oblivious to the world, resting, dreaming, nesting under warm duvet covers. Bliss. So why do I never sleep enough? I could blame my son; that would be easy. And for years he has been the source of my lack of sleep. But since he turned two years old he has slept beautifully, only disturbed when sick. And, for some reason unknown to us, he keeps on waking up an hour earlier than usual on Saturdays. But since I have heard of children waking up at 5.30 or something, I won’t say anything against him.

I really have no problem with the sleep itself. When I have the feeling of having tossed and turned for ages before getting to sleep, my husband (the official tosser and turner in our family) informs me that it took me all of five minutes to start snoring. (And yes, I really often snore, I am allergic to mold and thus have a year-round snotty nose.) No, when I go to bed, everything is fine. I’m that kind of sleeper who after a nighttime thunderstorm gets up in the morning all rested and when asked, “Wasn’t that a terrible thunderstorm?” says, “What thunderstorm?” I come from a long line of sound sleepers, my parents are famous for their never-disturbed sleep. I lay my head on my pillow and that’s it until morning. When I have a particular restless night, I might wake up and look at the clock, or maybe go to the bathroom. Then I go back and sleep again. This is a very useful talent to have. Especially when faced with a sick child. Wake up, tend to child, go back to bed, fall asleep. Rinse and repeat. (Hey, I should have posted that as my hidden talent in the meme I answered two days ago. Ability to sleep under all circumstances.) I used to be able to sleep in rooms full of people, light and noise, but that’s where I feel my age, that’s no longer possible.

The time when sleep was most precious was, of course, when my son was a tiny baby. When he was born I thought to myself how amazingly easy it was to cope with the lack of sleep. I need a lot of sleep and was very much afraid that I’d be constantly overtired when having him. Well, the real sleep deprivation kicked in a little later. When I was working three days a week, still nursing him around the clock, and then, when he was eight months old, the teething started and he woke me every hour to use me as a human pacifier. Fun was had. At that point I was so tired that I dozed off when my husband told me something and paused for about one second.

But this is long past, we treated this with daddy on night duty for two weeks, teabottle at the ready; mama sleeping in the spare bedroom (soundproofed annex! hurray!) being off duty until 5 am. So after that I could have slept enough. Alas, I didn’t. What I do is this:

I go through my day tired, uttering frequently, “I’m so tired, I’m so tired! But today I will take a nap for sure.” Until it is time for the nap, then I’ll find something really important, like reading blogs, do that until my free time is over, then go through the rest of the day with glazed eyes announcing, “But today I will go to bed on time for sure!” every thirty minutes or so. After bringing my son to bed very slowly, because I’m so tired, I go off to my room, play a little piano or guitar, watch an episode of “Buffy” or two, talk to my husband, say, “Of course I will be going to bed on time today.” sincerely, then switch channels, watch some silly documentary about playboy bunnies or some such, get off the couch at 11, go to bed half an hour later, sleep until my alarm goes off at 6.45. Repeat.

You might say, what is she whining about, if I understand her correctly she gets a whole 7 1/2 hours of sleep. And nowadays everyone and her grandmother seem to think that six hours is enough and seven is plenty. I, on the other hand, do need at least 8 1/2 of sleep, better 9 to feel good and have a functioning brain. And from what I’m hearing and reading I’m not alone. A friend of mine recently told me, “I don’t know, why I am so tired, I am sleeping a full six hours every night.” Duh! I have a book (a good book) “Outsmarting Female Fatigue: Eight Energizing Strategies for Lifelong Vitality” (Debra Waterhouse) which say that most women need an average 8 1/2 hours of sleep. And that everything between 4 and 11 hours is considered normal. That doesn’t mean that it’s normal to sleep only 4 hours, it means that it might be normal for you. But if you’re tired, cranky, constantly hungry, forgetting things, and doze off in front of your TV every night, maybe you need to get more sleep. And maybe you’re somebody who needs 11 hours a night. Ever thought of that? Very inconvenient, but there is no fighting it. When you don’t get enough sleep, you’re tired.

That’s what I’ve been trying to teach my son. When you’re tired, you can eat all you want, it doesn’t help. Only sleeping does. Since having him, I know why people overeat when they’re tired by the way. Tired babies nurse to sleep. So eating provides everything good at once: company, cuddle contact, food, and help to get to sleep. When he was about a year old, he sometimes would literally eat himself to sleep. Fall asleep chewing. Stuffing tremendous amounts of food in his little mouth. That’s when I learned why I am constantly eating when I’m tired. And I like to eat more sugar in times like that, because with the sugar high I get a little boost too.

I’m a little older than a year, so I should know better. I do know better, I only don’t do better. So I’ve been giving myself stickers for going to bed before 11. For three years. Three years! I feel a little pathetic. Um, not just a little. I’ve invented a couple of little tricks. I clean my face and put on moisturizer when I have put my son to bed. I put on my pajama before sitting down to watch my show. I programmed my PDA to beep on bedtime. I have asked my husband to please remind me that it’s time. And for every evening that I have found my way triumphantly to bed before eleven there are two when I just stayed a little longer and went half an hour later. Or two hours later.

I fear I have to get my priorities right. Sleep. Is. Very. Important.

Or like I tell my son constantly: When you’re tired playing is no fun.

Go, have a nap on me.

Technorati Tags: sleep

First of all, I’m really not there, but still trying. And for those of you who didn’t read my too long series about non-dieting and weight-loss, this is how I look now:



(When I first saw this picture I thought, “That can’t be me. I’m not that thin.”

But here they are, 11 ways to get out of diet mentality:

1. Focus on what’s right with your body. Is it living? Breathing? Able to walk, talk, think, nurture? Good.

Jon Kabat-Zinn says somewhere (sorry, but I didn’t find it again) that as long as you’re living there’s more right with you than wrong.

2. Learn to love your body the way it is now. And dress in clothes that feel and look good.

I know, that’s a tough one. But it works. Stand in front of the mirror each day (preferably naked) and say to yourself what you love. Be specific. Imagine that you just fell in love with this person. The least you can say is, “I love that you carry me through my day.” “I love that you gave birth.”

3. Focus on positive change. Set intent (Christine Kane says it better than I ever could.) Follow through.

When you fail (and you will), pick up yourself, and start over again.
Diets don’t work. Ever. Not for losing weight. Not for becoming happy. They do work, when you have a food-related illness like diabetes.

So the trick is to concentrate on things to do. Like when I’m hungry in the evening and crave chocolate, I’ll drink a cup of tea instead. (Well, that’s the plan.) Or I go to bed instead. My craving for chocolate is not a sign of hunger bur of tiredness.

4. Get rest. Sleep enough.

(And no, contrary to popular myth, not all adults can exist with a max. of six hours of sleep per night. I need 8 1/2 and so do most women.)

5. Do something nice for you every day. That’s an order. And nice does not mean chocolate every time.

Sit down with a cup of tea, read a book, do something different, smell the roses, nurture your sense of wonder and adventure.

6. When you find yourself thinking about being fat ot what to eat, think about something really important instead.

Like your music or your writing, your blog or your children.

7. Do the thing you love. The thing you really love.

For me that is making music. It works every time. I sit down, cranky, bored and not willing to play, and after some playing and working, and improvising – instant happiness.

8. Eat real food that tastes good. Geneen Roth adds to this that you should eat one warm meal every day.

Try to have quiet and enjoyable mealtimes. (I know how hard that is with children around.) Really taste your food. And be mindful of your body while eating.

9. When the meal is over, stop eating. No grazing, no stuffing leftovers in your mouth.

10. Focus on the life you want to live.

Do I really want to be someone who is stuffing herself with junk food all the time? Does it really feel good? No, it doesn’t. So until I become healthy and sane, I’ll fake it. Pretend until it gets real.

Technorati Tags: Debra Waterhouse, diet, diet mentality, FlyLady, Geneen Roth

• Diet mentality means going through your day thinking, “I’m fat. I’m fat. I’m fat.”
• And, “I shouldn’t have eaten this. Should I eat this? I shouldn’t eat this. Oh, what the heck. Now I’ve eaten it. I shouldn’t have eaten this. I’ll make up for it by not eating [insert food or meal of choice here].”
• Diet mentality means that you’re defining yourself and your worth by the number on the scale.
• Diet mentality thinks, if only this number were right, everything would fall into place.
• Dieting means, you’re trying to starve yourself or live on a restriction for a finite amount of time and then your life (and your eating) can turn back to “normal”.
• Diet mentality focuses on the number of the scale like, “Oh, I lost 2 pounds already. Now I can reward myself with ridiculous amounts of chocolate.” Or, “Oh, I gained 2 pounds. How could that have happened! I’ll eat only bread and water (or more likely vegetables, yoghurt and water) until they’re off again.” (Unless you believe in water-retention like I do.)
• Diet mentality means trying to fight for losing the same 5 pounds over and over again.
• Diet mentality means that if you’d only manage to be good for a few weeks, everything will be fine again.

But guess what, nobody’s going to give you a medal for “being good” or losing weight. (Well, apart from Weight Watchers, maybe.) And like Geneen Roth says,

“Thin people get cellulite, get sick and die, too.”

(I couldn’t find the source of this quote, but I can recommend all Geneen Roth‘s books. For starters try “When you eat at the refrigerator, pull up a chair.“)

And when you’ve finally lost that elusive two pounds, there will be the next goal:

• When I weighed 84 kg, I thought, “If only I were back at my pre-pregnancy weight of 78.”
• When I weighed 78 (before that) I thought, “If only I were back at 71.”
• When I was at 71 I thought, “I’m real fat, if only I were back at 69.”

And then 67, 65, 63, 60, 56. There it stopped, because I never weighed less as an adult or teenager. I was 16, I was love-sick, I was depressed, and I looked like a stick figure with ears for handles.

Look, stick-figure Susanne:

And here big Susanne:

Which one looks happier? (I know you maybe can’t see it, but big Susanne is much happier than stick-figure Susanne. Even though she feels fat all the time.)

So, the question is: How do you come out of diet mentality?
Stay tuned…

Technorati Tags: diet, diet mentality, Geneen Roth

So here’s the choice: eat when you’re hungry and with pleasure – that would be leading to growing weight – or you take the advice of an aquaintane of mine, who’s counting calories with every bite, and when she reaches her calory count for the day, she stops. Even right after breakfast.

I still believe that food is good when you’re hungry, for pleasure and the soul, and that I can trust my feelings. Those feelings just have to get a chance of getting through almost forty years of habitually overeating.

To spend my life counting calories, or hysterically avoiding certain food groups would be perverse. To stuff myself because of every mood known to man would be too.

When your bathing suit doesn’t fit, throw it away and buy a new one. Bigger or smaller, who cares. I started losing weight after I threw all clothes away that didn’t fit anymore. (Apart from a cashmere turtleneck, three Tees, and hot red undies). I ordered “happy size” clothes by the dozens, after two years of hoping to lose the fat soon. Then I started using my brain again: if I lost weight immediately and lost about two pounds per month, I’d have to lose weight for about one year and a half. My beloved clothes from 1996, which I found real cool, would be outdated by then. I thought if ever I lose weight it’s worth new clothes.

And if not, at least I look good now.

P.S.: Thank you for your patience. When I started writing about dieting I didn’t know it would take so long. You know – I tried to keep this real short.

Then my weight started dropping.
I put my thinking cap on and realized that maybe, hungry or not, I didn’t need a second breakfast or snack at eleven, when twelve is ouur designated lunch hour. Against my habit I could maybe stay hungry for about thirty minutes.
Further I found that I’m not having one snack in the afternoon (unless you count continious grazing between two and six as one snack only). And I had to count my usual bedtime treat of one beer or some chocolate as a snack in itself. So maybe two afternoon snacks are enough. In November I thought that maybe I don’t really need to drink wine or beer to lunch and dinner every day. Since I don’t live in Italy, and am not napping, my lunchtime glass of wine made me a tiny bit drowsy.
I reduced drinking alcohol to two times a week, and one or two glasses. (Gave myself stickers for this too!)

Wow! I lost about two pounds per month. In spite of eating everything. Chocolate and sweets everday, and real food too, of course. Greek yoghurt with ten percent of fat, cake, cookies and alcohol. Even christmas was a breeze!

I thought I had it. This time I’ll stick with it. Lose a little more, then slow down, and then there’ll be a weight where it’ll stop. I’ll call taht my designated comfort weight and live happily ever after.

At first I didn’t even tell anybody about it. I’m such a motor mouth, but I didn’t want to talk about weight loss or eating any more. And I wanted to keep it to myself. My mother still doesn’t know.
(She’ll probably notice it when we’ll be meeting next time. “Have you lost weight?” “Whatever.”) If I talk about it, she’ll shower me with so much tips, I’ll probably be heading straight for the candy drawer again.
A propos, potato chips had to be rationed. Only one bag per month, because I just can’t stop eating my favorite junk food. Even ‘though they’re without mono sodium glutamat.

So now I’m really happy, because I’m eating like a healthy person.
Even if I’m still needing rules to do it. I hope it’ll get automatic behavior someday, and I’ll leave compulsive eating behind.

(to be continued – but not for long. promised)

In spring 2005 I was almost back at my starting point. Frustration hit.
Then there was the time when I thought about joining weight watchers. For the first time in my life I really doubted that I’d be able to eat like a sane person.

Digging deeper I realized this wasn’t about losing weight. This was about gaining control over compulsion. I was so fed up with being fat and losing weight.

Since flylady‘s system (and my husband) helped me to gain control over housework with minimal effort, I decided to apply the flylady-system to the change of my eating habits.

First I gave myself a sticker each evening that I got to bed before half past ten. This took two months. Because I’m prone to eat when tired.
Second, I made up the rule that I’m not allowed to sit in the kitchen and read at night. Because I never eat only a little chocolate, when more’s in reach.
There’s a sub-rule to this rule, saying that I’m not allowed to go back into the kitchen at night for any other purpose than putting a sticker on the calendar at half past ten.

A little later there was an amendment to this rule: Only one beer or a certain amount of chocolate. Not both.
At first I didn’t lose weight at all, or only very little. I didn’t use the scale anyway. But I was so disgusted by my never-ending whining. About being tired, about eating too much candy. Who wants to hear this every day? 25 years was enough.

We planned going on a bike tour during summer vacation. One has to train for something like this. In June and July we rode our bikes a lot, and in August we went on tour with tent and child and stuff for a week. I looked like a complete idiot in my biking shorts, but at the end of the week my legs looked better than before.

Lose weight I didn’t, but I grew a little firmer. If I find it, I’ll show you the most embarassing picture anybody ever has taken of me. I’m really glad that I don’t see myself from behind every day.

(still to be continued)

P.S.: I found it:

In the beginning I hated every single minute of it. Later I liked the feeling of power, strength, and muscle-tone. When I was pregnant and a friend told me to be glad that I didn’t need to exercise anymore, I just could stare at her. I wasn’t even allowed to to my regular walking routine! Much less dancing or strength training. Now, as a mother, I have switched to walking and yoga. My regular walking routine consists of putting my three-year-old into the stroller and pushing him through the neighborhood for 35 minutes. When I have a babysitter I’m turning into one of those ridiculous nordic walkers.
Yoga, I’m doing in front of my computer with a dvd, while my son clings to my leg, not knowing whether he wants join me or not. Mostly he wants both at the same time, throwing a fit while I’m trying to follow the soothing voice of the yogi on screen, and to breathe in and out in synch with the people on dvd.
So, working out is something I’m capable of doing. Even in not quite ideal circumstances.

But back to my subject: diet. I’m a big fan of the anti-diet-movement. My heroines are Debra Waterhouse, Susan Powter (with growing reservation), most of all (without reservation whatsoever) Geneen Roth. Geneen Roth’s books have helped me tremendously in unearthing the cause of my eating disorder. I kept journals, did the homework, and wrote down what I ate when, and how I felt, for weeks.

For most people that act of writing it down is enough to change their eating habits. They find having to write: “I ate two bags of potato chips, because I was bored.” so embarassing that they stop eating the chips. Not so easy for me. My eating journal contained things like:

2 pm: ate two plates of spaghetti bolognese, salad, had three glasses of wine. afterwards half a bag of jelly beans for dessert. feeling good, a little stuffed. food was delicious, felt satisfied before the jelly beans but wanted something sweet.

3.30 pm: one bag of potato chips, still stuffed from lunch but bored. procrastinated folding laundry

So I already knew when I ate more than I needed. And why. But that didn’t stop me from eating all that junk anyway.

Some time in the fall of 2004 I had enough of me whining the hole day:

“My God, look at my stomach, how fat I am!”

“I know, I shouldn’t be eating this, oh, only one bite, and another, and another, tomorrow I’ll eat no sweets at all, oops, all gone!”

“What, dinner time already, I’m still stuffed, but I have to eat real food once in a while…”

Ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

I woke up, and asked myself: “Is my weight, food, and the way I look really the single most important thing in the world?” “Why do I spend every waking moment thinking about it, instead of being glad about my marvellous family, and spending my energy on my
music?”

(to be continued)

So, why do you have a bathing suit that doesn’t fit? What good is that? Oh, it’s helping you to eat less. So why didn’t you? And did it fit last year but not this year? And if we’re talking about fitting yourself into the bathing suit, I’d have to hurry and gain twenty pounds in order to fit into the bikini that I bought the year before last. Then I had been at the point where I wrapped myself into a pareo when watching my son playing in the lake.

Never would I have thought that I’d come this far. I thought that if I ever turned so immensely fat, I’d at least not try to hide it.

So my relationship to this whole diet-loose weight-eat healthy-subject is ambigous at best. Because of my mother, myself, because of me being as tall as now when I was thirteen, and only growing bigger since then. And it has to do with the fact that I’m a compulsive overeater. A term that I like way better than “addicted to eating”, that would be “esssüchtig” in German.

I have been a skinny child by the way. I was told continously to eat something, to eat more, because my bones were sticking out. This hasn’t been true for the last decades.

This month I’m proud to announce, my BMI is less than 25, so now I’m officially normal weight and not over weight.

What’s this, you say? First a rant against diets, and then I’m proud to have lost weight?

(to be continued)