Critical Lessons

I've been told that a person who quits smoking for good does so, on average, on his sixth attempt to quit. I've mulled over this fact for a while. There's a similar (but less well-attested) fact about losing weight for good: it's really rare for somebody to do it successfully and permanently the first time around. I've seen the number five, but I suspect that's low. Whatever it may be exactly, it suggests to me two things: a) that it's harder than most people expect it will be, and b) people who eventually succeed do so because they accumulate critical lessons from their failures.

Who knows how many times I've tried to lose weight? I was startled, when I read back through my blog entries under the Whupping the Food Thing label, to find a 2013 attempt, which apparently lasted three months, of which I have no memory whatsoever. None.

I was a plump child. I skinnied down for a couple years when I was a teenager, but by the time I was in college my weight was drifting upwards, and it basically drifted upwards whenever I wasn't focusing on losing it. My mother was quite obese and she would predict darkly that my eating habits would lead eventually to me being terribly fat and (of course) miserable. I responded with my usual obstinate cheerfulness. Maybe I would be fat, but I didn't intend to be miserable.

But I took it to heart. In my inmost heart I knew I was going to be fat, and I was going to die early of cardiac disease, just as my maternal grandfather -- whom I strongly resembled, everyone said so -- had. He died at 62. (I have three years left, now, before I hit that ominous number.)

Anyway. I had a complicated relationship with losing weight. It was what my mother was always trying and failing to do. I didn't want to be fat, but I also didn't want to diet: they were both things my mother did. I wanted to be my own person.

But diets did happen. The first I remember distinctly was the Scarsdale diet. This was in the heyday of the vilification of fats and the glorification of grapefruit. One lost three or four pounds per week, if one stuck to it. One did not. One became extraordinarily hungry, and one white-knuckled one's way through for a few days, and finally one broke. So that was my first critical lesson: I was not going to win through this by brute force. Whether my will was peculiarly defective, I didn't know, but it wasn't up to the task I was setting it.

A couple decades later, along came Atkins, the vilification of carbs, and the glorification of meat. I LIKED that. I adore meat, and I love fat with all my heart and soul. Eggs! Hamburger! For quite a while, eating that way worked just as Dr Atkins said it would. I didn't even want to eat too much. I didn't want to binge. I was eating the food that spoke to my soul. I became a big low-carb convert, and swore by Gary Taubes, and regarded sugar as the Devil's own poison. Life was good.

Well, except. As the weeks went on, I got kind of sick of all that fat. I began to dream of carbs. I would fixate on them. They wandered into my daydreams. I knew they were wicked, and I wanted them. But my will held, until the Night of the Pepperoni. 

I wanted something to snack on, and I'd bought some sliced pepperoni (having carefully examined the label to make sure there was no sugar added, of course -- you'd be surprised at all the stuff they inject with sugar, these days!) I love pepperoni, but of course if it had no carbs it would not make me hungrier, and I would not binge on it.

I binged. I ate and ate and ate, voraciously and unstoppably. And miserably realized that it wasn't true, and I had gradually been realizing it wasn't true. I *could* binge on meat, and I would, and my present diet in fact was making me feel real crappy. My skin was breaking out. I was fatigued all the time. The low-carb magic was gone.

That was the end of the low-carb thing, for me. And the end of the Magic Macronutrient thing. Later I read more, and learned that the whole insulin resistance story actually had big holes in it. I didn't believe in the villainy of fats any more, and that was a plus, but I didn't believe in the villainy of carbs either. Maybe the problem was exactly what someone in the 1950s would have identified as the problem: I was eating too much. There was nothing wrong with sugar and fat except that they were calorie-dense and I was too fond of them, particularly when they teamed up, and especially when they were abetted by food scientist flavor-artistes. I read Stephan Guyenet's blog: he was writing about high-reward foods and dopamine signalling and so forth. Maybe my love of certain foods was not addiction -- he sensibly refuses to participate in that particular slugfest -- but it activated a lot of the same pathways and used a lot of the machinery of addiction.

The last thing I tried was probably the smartest, and might actually have worked eventually, if I had had the patience to wait twenty years. Rather than try to fight the demons, I'd try to simply go around them. Learn to make food in my own kitchen, and displace the high-reward foods by crowding them out with plain good foods that weren't so dense in calories and didn't produce such a pleasure-storm. This was probably a necessary step too, because I learned stuff about maintaining a kitchen and preparing food and planning stuff out that I needed to learn. 

But I wasn't losing any weight: in fact that steady upward drift was, if anything, faster. I was getting uneasy about the state of my knees and hips, if I stayed heavy. If walking became really uncomfortable, and I stopped exercising, what would become of me? Well, I knew what would happen. I have plenty of clients who are caught in that predicament -- moving hurts too much, and the only comfort for it is eating, which makes moving even harder, and comfort even more necessary. What happens is that you get really fat, and moving gets really hard, and eventually type 2 diabetes comes along to keep you company.

I really didn't want that.

So I came up with the present program, which has been working for me for the largest weight loss, over the longest time, of any of these attempts. It's convenient. It's simple. It doesn't require fussing. I decided to go public with it, to add the threat of public humiliation to my motivations. And I banished one turn of phrase from my speech. I decided I was not going to say, ever again "I am trying to lose weight." That's what I used to say, if someone offered me something that I wasn't supposed to eat. "Oh," I'd say, apologetically, "I'm afraid I shouldn't, I'm trying to lose weight." 

But I'm not saying that any more. I'm saying, "I'm losing weight." That's all. And I'm not apologizing. I'm doing this thing.

Five and twelve

Arcturus setting last night, over the roof of the garage; the Sickle sweeping endlessly backwards; a mist rising from the streets. Vega so directly overhead that looking up at her, and turning to orient myself to the Summer Triangle, gave me vertigo. The desire for something afar / from the sphere of our sorrow.

All the things that tumble up out of the ground, or out of strollers, and take their improbable places as earthly powers, for a little bit, before they tumble down again.

Leaves going yellow. There will be floods and blockages where there were fires: detritus coming down the rivers, muddy water in the streets. But above the dirty clouds and the ruined air there are still stars.

Every morning I lie on my little Persian carpet on the concrete floor, and lay my hands on my ribs, which are gradually rising, like the basalt circles on the beach when a rough winter comes and the sand is washing away. Like that.

Ribs and hands, sets of little bones in parallel, go instinctively to each other, and play little mathematical games. With five and twelve you can do anything, anything at all.

The Birth of a Right

Al Franken wrote to me this morning—we're tight, like that; he emails me a couple times a week—and he began:

Dale, 

Health care is a right. It's not a privilege.

Now, I've been in favor of universal health care in this country since before a lot of you were born, so I'm happy to see my buddy Al take up the cause. But it was the language that caught my attention. I hear this phrase a lot, these days, and I'm perplexed. Because in my youth, health care was not a right. Not even us leftie commies thought it was a right. It was something we thought everyone could and should have: but that's not quite the same thing. Rights are inalienable. They're intrinsic to being human. They're something—to stick to the ground they grew in—they're something that God intended as part of every human being's humanness.

A lot of people don't live on that ground anymore. I never did, having been raised atheist. So I'm a little cautious of the rhetoric of rights. What exactly are we talking about? Jefferson knew quite precisely. "They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights." That's clear enough. But what do I mean, when I say that people have a right to free speech? Do I mean something other than "I think everybody ought to be able to speak freely"?

I think I do. Certainly we produce these assertions, not as our own whims, but gravely, as fundamental laws of human nature: we're not talking about "laws" like laws against jaywalking—our tone implies—but "laws" like the law of gravity. We may know that an ancient Greek would have been totally baffled by the notion that health care could be a right, (and would probably dispute that political rights could ever properly belong to someone who was not the male head of a freehold in the first place.) But we nevertheless hold that rights are—somehow—self-evident. Like my friend Al up there. He doesn't go on to argue it. You don't need to argue things like that. You state it and you're done.

You can see that this is true from the way the Republicans have fumbled the Obamacare repeal. You might expect Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell to say, "What nonsense. Health care is not a right. It's something you buy if you can afford it!" This is clearly what they think. But, as highly evolved political beings, they know, they can tell by its scent in the air, that to say so would be be political death. So they tie themselves in knots.

And at that point, when even the guys on the other side of the fence feel they can't deny it out loud, I think that we have to say—yes, health care has in fact become a right. Whatever rights may be, access to health care is one of them. So my question, dear reader, is—how did this happen? It's a sea change. A new right has been born in our very presence. Did you see it being born? Do you understand how it happened?

Or was I simply wrong, and has it been a right all along? Just because I was there to observe the waning years of the 20th Century, doesn't make me an expert on them.

I would love to know what you think! This one puzzles me.

Halfway

The halfway mark: I've lost 21 pounds, and I have 21 more to lose to get to 180, which is where I change things again. That landfall is scheduled for March 1st: at present I'm far enough under the blue line that it might happen as early as mid-February. At a pound a week, these things take some time: I've been four months under this regimen and I've got at least four to go. 

I chose 180 because it tended to be the upper limit of the "healthy weight" ranges given by various tables. I'm really not sure where I want my weight to settle, and I don't want to fix my attention on some particular number -- say, the 160 that the same tables tend to mark as the healthy midpoint -- in case it turns out that, for instance, 170 is fairly easy to maintain but 160 is hellish hungry all the time. I just won't know till I get there. But I'm pretty sure I want to get at least to 180. I'm a mesomorph, I lay on muscle pretty easily, but I'm no bodybuilder. There's no reason I ought to be way off the norms.

So at 180 I enter the "maintenance" phase, in which I'm basically eating as I intend to eat for the rest of my life. Here's how it goes, in theory: whatever my daily dole at that point -- I cut out the last of my breakfast toast, last week, and I expect I'll need to cut out something more before I hit 180 -- I get to keep. I just go on as I was when I hit 180. But I'll get to add some 300 calories daily: my notion at the moment is that I will take that largely in bananas (which I find myself craving!) and undressed potatoes. But basically it will still be the Tom's-and-Burgerville diet.

Should I cross back above the 180 line, I'll ditch the new stuff and revert to the regimen that originally got me there, till I get a weekly average of 180 again. But what I expect is that I'll still be running a slight deficit, and my weight will drift down a bit and hit whatever level it likes. That number -- whatever it may be -- will be my genuine maintenance weight, the one to stay within a couple pounds of.

So, is it Burgerville for good? Well, I hope not. Gradually I'll substitute other calorie-equivalent meals for the Tillamook-cheeseburger-and-half-a-small-milkshake, taking extravagant care with my measuring. But the Burgerville dinner will be there as my fallback. 

That's the plan, as it stands now. I have no reason to think that my appetite will ever function normally. I will never -- I've fully accepted this now -- I will never eat ad libitum again. Which is not such a dreadful thing. It's just food. There are liberties that are more important to me.

Lifesaving Writers

It's been a long time since anyone helped me live. Time was, writers arrived regularly to save my life: Tolkien, Lloyd Alexander, Ursula Le Guin, CS Lewis; then William Butler Yeats and TS Eliot and William Blake, then Tolstoy and George Eliot. Then they stopped. Oh, writers came along to amuse me. Charles Dickens. Patrick O'Brian. PG Wodehouse. Terry Pratchett. I enjoy them, I appreciate them. But no one is saving my life, nowadays. I've grimly taken my own path. I don't believe much of anything, anymore. So perhaps I've removed myself from the game. I find it hard to get far in novels now. I get impatient. "Yeah, yeah," I say, "you're just making this up: you'll find the world as it really is a harder row to hoe." And I toss it aside.

Modern poetry is a different matter. Lifesaving is not part of its agenda (or when it is, I find it tiresome.) It's observing, savoring, appreciating, paying attention. I like that. That helps.

Maybe it's that I don't believe in lifesaving any more. Or maybe it's that the song has gone out of me. Or maybe it's just that I'm not so impressed by literature's devotees anymore, even if they have read Milton and Shakespeare and all those other highfalutin Greeks. They're all interested in understanding life: but the point, as Herr Marx would have said, is to change it. And how long do you think we have, anyway? It takes hours to read a novel. Meanwhile the boats are drifting down the river, and the surf is getting ugly by the bar.

Triste

Still smoky -- Mt Tabor a ghostly silhouette, and the West Hills simply not there. The sun a baleful red disk, when she shows at all: I think there's a thin overcast above the smoke. But the air doesn't stink so much, now, and the feeling now is less apocalyptic than resigned. Triste.

A new sprinkling of ash on the car, which swirls as I open the door; absurdly, I try to shoo the ash back out as I get in. 

The temperate rain forests burn, from time to time. The scars of the Tillamook burn, out in the Coast Range, are still plain to see, and that was in 1933. So global warming does not necessarily have much to do with it. This was the driest summer I have ever known, in the maritime Northwest, and I suspect climate change, but I can't convict it. But in any case the weather has changed: the cloud-shapes are different. The state I grew up in has vanished.

What happens now depends on the weather. September is often -- was often -- a pretty dry month. A couple good soaks would stop the fires now and probably leave some of the beautiful places more or less intact, or in shape to recover in a few years. But if it stays dry, and the wind chases the fire back and forth, up and down the gorge, for weeks, that's a different story. So we won't know for a while. I dread the time when we finally go up to have a look, whether it's two weeks or two months from now.

The Oregonian is already posting sad stories about how much people will miss the Gorge, which does not land well with me. We don't know yet how much we've lost, or how much we'll miss it. And in any case, I've got plenty of time: I'll be sad for the rest of my life. I'm in no particular hurry to start.

Almost Black

After a long time quiet on the table you suddenly ask:
"what color am I tonight?" The question falls
like a weighted plume. It strikes, and I say,
"Oh! -- let me check" -- stalling for time -- but I know
I am bound to tell the truth: "you are purple,
deep purple. Very deep." I don't say "almost black."
You know. I'd mention the midnight sky or raven sheen,
but a lie that plain sticks in my throat:
I can invent a color, if I'm quick enough,
but I can't lie about one, once told.
"Not a usual color for you," is the best I can do.
As I pull your arm over your head, stretching the lats,
your hand comes to rest on my ribs: a touch
you sometimes allow yourself on nights
when you are purple, deep purple,
almost black.