she loses everything

Time keeps on slipping... slipping... slipping...

2010-08-01T22:59:00.000-07:00

Almost three months later...

Well here we are, middle of the summer. It's been awhile hasn't it? A lot's happened in the mean time.
I moved out of the dorm into an apartment then met a girl and fell in love and fell and twisted my ankle and went camping and went to Phoenix and got a new job and moved in with my girlfriend and went to Vegas for my birthday and joined Weight Watchers and lost one pound while celebrating my birthday in Vegas and then lost another two while entertaining a visiting friend and her friends...

I've been keeping pretty busy lately, to say the least.

Tomorrow I am going to the in town clinic to see if I can find out what's wrong with my ankle, as it still swells up and aches and isn't terribly strong even three months after originally twisting it.Hopefully the fix won't be "stay off it."

One Month Later

2010-05-01T22:35:00.002-07:00

Have you ever gone for a walk where you let your feet lead while your head occupies itself with things other than direction and location... then you look up and find that you're somewhere totally unexpected and different than where you thought you were headed?

When I moved to the Grand Canyon I came here as an alternative to one of the worst fates I could imagine for myself. I didn't necessarily want to come back here (I lived here two years ago) but it was better than the alternative of staying where I was. I wasn't excited and I was thinking of an exit plan before I even started to unpack.

A month later, just a few days ago, I was waiting for the bus to take me to work and I was thinking about what I was going to do that day and I started to smile. I was sitting and thinking and smiling and it struck me, I'm happy. I am actually happy right now. I have friends that I care about, that I see often. I am seeing some one who makes my heart go all pitter patter. I have a job that I enjoy. And to top it all off I have one of the most beautiful backyards that anyone can imagine.

Things aren't perfect here. There are serious complications with my relationship. I'm broke and have to get a phone bill paid off before they decide to send me to collections. I'm in dire need of a dentist and I really should get an inhaler but neither are going to happen until I have insurance.

But none of that seems to matter much right now. I'll take care of all of it when I can take care of it and until then... well until then I'm going to enjoy where I'm at. Ten pounds lighter, a pants size smaller, and smiling. Not a bad start I think.

The Gym Membership!

2010-04-26T10:14:00.001-07:00

Three days ago my friend called me while I was at work. She didn't want to work out she whined, she was already laying down in bed and maybe instead she would take a nap? I told her that if she worked out that I would get up amazingly early (7am!!) and go to the gym and work out. She was out of bed and changing clothes before I finished my offer.

That night I poked around the Internet and found a work out routine and wrote out my exercises on a piece of paper. The next morning I got up early and went to the gym and it was good. I felt awkward working out, rusty and unpracticed. I was self conscious and hesitant with some of the machines but I did it.

And then I did it again this morning!

I've lost 10 pounds since moving here which is wonderful and more weight than I've lost in ages but... I think it's more important that I've also lost my sedentary habits. I walk to work, walk to bus stops, walk to restaurants and the grocery store and the rec center. I hike at night on rim trails and wander through the forest.

Life is good.

No Kitchen Cooking: Veggie Pea Soup

2010-04-02T21:57:00.000-07:00

One downside of my current living situation is the lack of a kitchen. I have a dorm room and while there is a common room there is not a common kitchen. So when I came out here I packed up a slow cooker/rice cooker so that I wouldn't have to eat every meal out of a microwave or at a restaurant. I also brought a bunch of dried beans and peas and rice and fun things to cook! I will be, on occasion, posting fun things that I cook with my unkitchen, these will be for the most part one pot easy prep meals because I can't really do much else.

Veggie Pea Soup

Ingredients:
1 carrot
1 celery stalk
1 small green pepper
1 tbsp minced garlic
1 small white onion
1 tbsp oil (I used vegetable oil)
1 vegan veggie bullion cube
1/2 pound dried green split peas
salt and pepper to taste

Supplies:
Rice cooker
Immersion blender

Dice carrot, celery, pepper, garlic and onion. Put oil into cooker and turn cooker on to heat the oil. Put the chopped veggies into the pot to cook until onions caramelize. Turn off cooker and carefully spoon the veggies from the cooker into the immersion blender. Add a little water and blend until you have a paste. Add paste back to the cooker with 1/2 pound of rinsed green peas with bullion and add 3 cups of water. Cook until peas are soft, adding in more water as necessary. Salt and pepper to taste and enjoy!

Who is She Anyway?

2010-04-02T21:32:00.001-07:00

Hi, I'm Chrissie. How do you do?

Did you know that the appropriate answer to "how do you do?" is "how do you do?" and not actually telling the asker how it is that you do. I know this because I've read Victorian etiquette books. I am an insufferable nerd. I am also a super hippie type nature girl which is why I now live and work in the Grand Canyon National Park. I'm an animal loving vegetarian who uses only eco-friendly vegan products. I'm a displaced New Yorker who plans on some day going home, even though after 12 years and 13 moves and 6 states I know that home isn't what I remember it to be. I'm a poetry eater and sometimes writer and point and shoot photographer who is lusting after a "real" camera.

A few years ago I lived in San Diego and had a gym membership and worked out every day and counted every calorie and lost 50 pounds. Then life and depression happened and I've since gained back every pound I lost.

This blog is about getting healthy again and doing so holistically. This isn't just about weight or size but about health and well-being. A lifetime ago a friend of mine became a registered holistic dietician. Or something. I'm not sure what it was that she was licensed to do but we did sit down and talk about life and health and happiness. She explained that her interest was in holistic living. She explained to me that health wasn't just about the food that you put into your body, but also the situations that you put into your life. It's about your friends and your family and doing everything that you can to make sure that you are healthy and happy.

At the time I thought it was a bunch of silly hippieness. At the time I wasn't much of a hippie myself. But as I get older and unhealthier and unhappier and hippier I'm starting to think that maybe there was something to the silly hippieness. So I'm going to give this whole holistic thing a try. Because of this I'm not going to count calories and I'm not going to get on a scale. I am going to walk and hike and join a gym and go to counseling and make friends and take trips and visit people and read good books and not hibernate in my dorm and allow myself to get all kinds of depressed again.

It's not going to be easy. I know that. It's hard to move after years of atrophy. It's hard to laugh after years of crying. It's hard to share after years of being a hermit, but here I am - for better or worse, working to be a better, healthier, happier me. Thank you for joining me.

T-minus 2 days.

2010-03-26T19:35:00.003-07:00

I set up this blog early, I think. I did that on purpose so that I could take the time to get it prettified before I am ready to actually start posting regular content. When will that happen?

Soon.

See, I'm in the process of packing and cleaning because I'm moving. And this isn't just a small move to a new house, I'm packing up and moving to the Grand Canyon.

I won't actually live IN the Grand Canyon, but I will be living in the national park and my dorm room will be on the rim. This is the beginning of a lot of changes for me and health is going to be a focus of mine while I'm there. This blog is going to be a record of that journey.

We're leaving on Monday. Woo woo!

Beth Ditto and Me

2010-03-04T22:25:00.006-07:00

Let me preface this post by saying that I love Beth Ditto, I really do. ~~The~~ Gossip is an ammmmmmazing band and I have been a fan since their early days (oh my). But the first time I saw a picture of Beth Ditto performing I was in SHOCK. SHOCK I tell you. A half naked fat girl on stage OH MY! But then I thought about it and thought about it and thought about it and decided, why not?

This gets NSFW

I spent a majority of my time in the 90s writing for zines and coding crappy geocities web sites about riot grrrl and third wave feminism and some of the most powerful imagery of that time for me were women not being afraid of their own bodies and using them as literal billboards for our message. Anyone else familiar with the movement remember this picture? ->

So where did this body and woman positive attitude go when I saw Beth Ditto for the first time? Dunno, but I'm glad that she shocked me back into the mentality that our bodies aren't things to be ashamed of. Our bodies are bodies, just the skin that we're in and regardless of shape, size, or color it's all beautiful.

It was Beth Ditto that actually reminded me that fat is beautiful because people are beautiful.

I mention all of this because Beth is featured AGAIN on National Enquirer's Best and Worst Beach Bods issue... which for some inexplicable reason is being published in March. Inside the magazine Beth is admonished for wearing a "skin tight" bathing suit. Wait what..? Yeah.

But the National Enquirer's attempt at body shaming isn't really the point of this. Beth Ditto in a bathing suit is...

I was looking at the picture of her in her suit and thought to myself, my god she is so fucking adorable and again, she gave me pause and forced me to think about something.
How is it that I can look at a picture of Beth in a bathing suit that hugs her rolls and think that she's beautiful but when I put on a bathing suit... well I don't know what happens when I put on a bathing suit because I haven't for so many years. How is it that I can see her and the of other fat girls that work it and think about how stunning they are but when I mimic the looks I feel like a dowdy fraud? Why do I allow other fat girls to be fat and beautiful but refuse to let myself do the same?

This time I don't really have an answer to that.

Fat has four letters...

2010-03-03T23:55:00.002-07:00

Have you seen the Nightline Face-Off "Is it OK to be Fat?" I watched the 20 minute Nightline summary of the event, posted over on Roni's Weigh and plan on watching the whole shabang soon but I've got the jist of it pretty much now. A lot of people are voicing their opinions on the subject and I've been chewing on my thoughts on it for pretty much the whole day now and want to get them out there.

Back in my early 20s I was a pretty active girl. I worked in NYC and would, weather permitting, walk from the PATH station from New Jersey to the office, 2 miles away (so 4 miles daily). After work when it was nice outside I would walk another 4 miles or so down to the village or the lower east side to go to the parks. On the weekends I would go out with my friends to bars and dance all night long. I could jog up five stories to my friends walk up apartment and not be too winded to speak. I could run the 10 blocks between my apartment and the train station when I was late for work. I did this while weighing 200 pounds. I was fat, yes, but I was healthy. I was more active and healthier than some of my friends who weighed significantly less than I did.

A few years ago I had my gall bladder removed due to a horrible horrible attack of gall stones that almost killed me. After the surgery a doctor came in to talk to me about my health and life style and explain to me what I needed to do now that I was without the organ. But when we talked and he found out that I exercised regularly, that I'd been a vegetarian for years and that I don't tend toward sugary sweet foods (as confirmed by my mother, a practicing nurse) he said that I had probably avoided getting sick for a few years because I was so healthy. I was 240 pounds at that point.

In MeMe Roth's world I am not and can not be healthy because I was fat and not just fat but obese.

But I was. Am I still healthy now? No, that's the purpose of this blog, but I was and can be again and I can be while still being over weight. I will never be as skinny as MeMe Roth is and you know what, I don't want to be. If her vision of a perfect world is that all women ate just 1300 calories a day (or 1600 if they jog) then that's a world that I don't want to live in.

I want to be healthy but I don't want to be skinny, in my mind the two aren't always analogous. But even saying that I've always had a hard time supporting FA (fat acceptance) and HAEW (Health at Every Weight) because I'd wrongly seen the two as fat promotion, but reading the comments over at Jezebel and other places got me thinking about what the two are really about.

I think fat acceptance is all about the depathologizing of fatness, not about a dismissal of health concerns related to diet and exercise. - pichou @ Jezebel

Do I think there's a problem with the way that this country eats? Yes. Do I think obesity is an epidemic? No. I think the causes are endemic and THAT is what should be addressed. I am obese because I have an eating disorder. I am unhealthy because of this eating disorder. I am not unhealthy and do not have an eating disorder because of my obesity. Do you see the difference?

Shaming fat will not help anyone, ever. Embracing health (mental and physical) will. And health? It isn't always a size 0.

The End...

2010-03-02T21:36:00.001-07:00

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

T S Eliot

I used to blog, way back in the day. In fact one of my blogs was at one time featured as AOL's health and fitness "Blogs to Follow." That scared the bejesus out of me and I haven't really been able to consistently blog anywhere (except my LiveJournal) since. But I keep trying and I suppose that is important.

This is yet another attempt, obviously, at a regularly updated health/fitness blog. I'm not going to mince words, my goal is to lose weight, but health is tantamount. Weight loss will mean nothing if my health doesn't improve as well.

But this won't just be about my weight and the struggles to get from 280 to healthy. This is about self exploration and the filters through which I see the world and getting rid of everything that is holding me back.

So, here we go, again.