the morbs xiii: the end of some rope
A catch-up — on shame, bodywork, and my feeble female biology.
This is a special, free edition of THE MORBS, a weekly column about the specifics of my attempt to lose weight, which is usually for paying subscribers only. It’s one of three articles sponsored by Adaptive Bodywork.
For more free issues of MORBID: A SUBSTACK ABOUT OBESITY, please check out:
Pilot Episode
Notes on the Philosophy of Body Mass Index
Everybody Worships
and Pemmican Diaries
Writing these things has felt harder, lately. This project in general — weight loss, I mean — has felt harder.
Let me back up. I can explain.
Week fifteen
May 5th to May 11th
I said I would post about this week last Wednesday, and I did not. I’ve been making the choice to cut myself some slack, a lot, lately — one of those choices had to do with my calorie goals during week fifteen. Since I started this whole project, I have noticed a pattern of eating over my goals more frequently in the weeks after I ovulate. Figuring I needed something I wasn’t getting, I actually changed my caloric goals from the mid-1600s to just under 2000 calories daily. I assumed that would be more than enough to get whatever deficiency was delaying my period, while simultaneously causing me existential agony.
This didn’t go the way I’d hoped. Either due to a failure of willpower, or the weak female constitution that refuses to read the memo I have written it, in which I clearly state I have chosen to raise books instead of children, I ate over my calorie goals several times in the weeks leading up to my period.
My slips — the whoopses I defined in supposed former tumblr sadgirl as small, medium, or big, depending on their severity — have been getting more severe, as my time on this project goes on. This worries me, because I have a history of binge eating. I wouldn’t call any of the times I ate over my deficit in this week binge eating. But I might be lying — either to you, or myself.
I ate over by about a thousand calories — as in, I ate a thousand calories more than my just-under-2000-calorie goal — on a day I was gifted a belated birthday dinner by a friend. I’d started the day hungry and went into the dinner with a small budget. Wanting to enjoy myself, I said fuck it, and just sort of ate whatever. I read a book once, at some point in my lifelong struggle to figure out how to eat like a normal person, which suggested that when thin people do this, they simply eat less in the days after a large meal. In the days after, I continued to experience a maniacal kind of hunger, which made this strategy feel, if not impossible, at least so difficult I couldn’t see how it could possibly be worth it.
I continued to track my meals, attempting to mathematically accommodate this big dinner, but finished the week over my calorie goals. If I’m being very honest, this felt markedly bad, on a psychological level. Caloric restriction has been feeling harder and harder, less and less rewarding, and I have been feeling like more and more of a loser when I don’t pull it off. I can feel my willpower wearing out.
There are a few reasons here: maybe I’m getting bored. Maybe my motivation is waning. Having lost 5% of my starting weight, a huge milestone, I’m noticing the first real benefits to this project, and I’m starting to feel satisfied — in that dangerous way. When I ate too much a second time in the week, also by around a thousand calories, I felt myself putting up a big, avoidant wall. I believe this was part of the reason I didn’t get my article for week 15 finished when I said I would. I think it’s part of why I didn’t have something up by this past Monday. I really, really didn’t want to look at myself.
Shame is an inefficient motivator. I also don’t think it’s a useless emotion. So, here is what my shame looks like: when I eat over, I feel embarrassed. The rules I made for myself, for this project, include paying attention when I eat more than I should — noticing the surrounding conditions, and coming up with strategies to navigate those conditions without eating too much. I also feel a kind of obligation to you, the reader. I feel I am doing something wrong, when I don’t do what I set out to do, and then I feel like I need to explain myself. I go into rationalization mode. I don’t want the shame to consume me, because when I am consumed with shame, I experience it as an agony — and when I’m in pain, I usually soothe myself by eating.
When I critically examine what’s going on around me when I eat too much, what is going on is usually stuff that is precious to me. I’m spending time with people I love. I’m giving myself permission to enjoy myself in the way that feels normal to me. I’m facilitating closeness in the way I have learned to facilitate closeness. These are all things I’m very afraid I will lose, if I set new boundaries, and then maintain them.
That’s ultimately the hard thing about boundaries. I think, sometimes, people talk about boundaries like they’re only a positive thing, and they will only make your life nice, and as such being afraid of them is irrational. But it’s not irrational, is it? Setting boundaries is an act of losing things — losing things in the short term in order to build other things in the long term. It’s an act of choosing long-term happiness over short-term satisfaction. It’s a kind of relational surgery — an act of choosing acute short-term suffering in order to reduce overall suffering, over time.
Sometimes, when we assert our boundaries, things only get better, and we don’t lose anything incredibly important. In my experience, this is rare. Usually, when I work out and assert new boundaries, I make a choice to kill some aspect of my being in the world. By doing this, I let in other ways of being in the world. I have the space to pursue different things, which I have decided I want more. It’s not an exaggeration to call this act at least a little bit violent, on some level. Being passive all the time is not the same as being good.
I don’t say this to argue that setting boundaries is not worth it — in fact, I have found that regularly examining my boundaries, working out new ones, asserting those, and then maintaining them is actually not negotiable. It doesn’t matter if I don’t like it, because I have to do it anyway. I’m not complaining. I’m just naming it as hard — hard enough that I struggle to succeed at it, and may have to try a bunch of times before I do. It is hard for reasons. It would be irresponsible, feel-good nonsense to suggest otherwise.
The things I don’t want to let go of, which tend to go along with my overeating, are social and cultural and familial conventions. They are certain ways I think about myself, or the world. They are things which are precious to me. Losing them will come with a very high price, and that economic calculation does not actually always feel worth it.
There is a very therapized part of myself that says I do not have to lose these things. My choices are not black and white, and that for every junction where a choice is demanded, there are a nearly-infinite number of possible choices to be made. There is another part of myself which says that if what I want is to lose weight, this process is not much more complicated than math — and that all of this emotional scaffolding I’m building around it it is unreasonable and inconsequential, at best, and at worst an intentional strategy of clinging to things that are hurting me.
Sure, says this part of me. There is a way that it is complicated.
There is another way, which is just as big and just as true, in which it is simply not complicated at all.
I have a dangerous amount of fat on my body and I want to burn it. To burn the fat on my body I must expend more calories than I take in. If that is what I want to do, I can do it. Not eating something is literally easier than eating something. If I would rather do other things, then that is fine — but I keep saying that this project is of the utmost importance to me. And then I make different choices. Making different choices is pretty clear evidence that other things are actually more important to me.
I want it to be true that burning fat is very important to me and also, simultaneously true that doing the things that make that slower, harder, or impossible are necessary — or, at least, very understandable. I want to explain myself. And then, when I do, I feel pathetic. Like I’m justifying hitting myself very hard in the head with a hammer.
To what extent is it a problem that I want to celebrate with food? Socialize with food? Eat whole, nourishing foods, to satiety, when I am hungry? Why does making the choice to eat or not eat feel so difficult, if what I want to accomplish can be accomplished with reason and math? Why does that even feel like a lie, when the gap between eating to celebrate and eating a thousand calories more than the very small caloric deficit I was aiming for is a very wide gap, indeed? It seems like there should be a simple answer. I also believe my feelings are an important part of being a human being who is alive, and on earth, and the truth is that it doesn’t feel simple at all.
Here is another excuse, or another reason: both times I ate a lot were immediately after I got bodywork done. I’ve been going to see John Sutherland at Adaptive Bodywork in Montreal for a 12-series — twelve consecutive sessions of ninety-minute manual intervention in my deep body tissue, in a pattern of one per week, for three months. I have chronic body pain. I’m doing this to try and reset some of the structural problems that make it hard for me to move. This is where I go into full disclosure — this article is free. It is free because John paid for it to be free. Let me explain:
I love massage. Massage feels like a cheat code that makes living in my body at least 30% less difficult for at least four or five days — which is massive, for me, considering how much pain I am in, all the time. I like bodywork the way a mountain likes dynamite. I want massage that is ruthless and deep and precise, and I want it to blast open something inside of me.
I find that there are two kinds of bodyworkers that I can get along with fine. The first is the kind that requires me to be the guide — I have to go in knowing what’s wrong, and they can take direction while I captain the ship of their hands.
The second is one who is able to take a co-navigator role, with me. They have the maps and know the terrain. They are an expert in anatomy and mechanical intervention. I am an expert in my own pain. With this kind of bodyworker, my suffering is not a useless weight that drags me down. My suffering is information. They can use it to teach me something about myself that I didn’t know before.
John is this second kind.
A few weeks ago, I was on his table, and he told me he was having a workshop in a way of administering this kind of bodywork clothed, in pairs, and while demanding the smallest possible amount of effort from the bodyworker.
“Since you’re good at talking about how you feel and what you want,” he told me, “I think you’d be a good candidate for it.”
I was flattered. Yes, I thought. I am a good communicator. I do — much of the time — know what I want, and how to ask for it. This is a skill that I have which is hard-won. It is a skill I have for which I had to suffer. It is nice, to see it recognized.
My problem, as always, was money. I could not afford the workshop. Over the course of the next few weeks, I gave up on going, and hoped John would not mention it, because I was embarrassed by my lack of resources. But he did mention it again, and I had to admit I didn’t have the tuition — I had budgeted out my Canada Council grant, as it remained, and needed to keep my eye on finishing my book. I got ballsy, though, and suggested I could exchange writing for it.
Which is all to say that this article is sponsored by Adaptive Bodywork, a bodywork studio that specializes in structural integration and is based in Montreal, Quebec. I’m going to write two more articles that will focus on this aspect of my project, also sponsored by Adaptive Bodywork, over the course of the next few months. I am honest, arguably to a fault — so this sponsorship has not swayed any perspectives I relate here. All opinions are mine.
In terms of exercise, I did yoga every day (no days off! To my surprise!) but very little else. Not unlike my supplement routine, I think it might be true that the moment exercise becomes complicated is usually the moment I want to quit. I didn’t go to ballet class. I barely did any other exercise at all, aside from walking my dog.
Looking back on my week, I see that I didn’t weigh myself on my usual Thursday weigh-in day — but I did weigh myself the day before, and my weight had fluctuated back down again from where it was when I got back from Vancouver, but there had been no changes from the week before that.
Week sixteen
May 12th to May 17th
The next week was the week my period was due to start. It was a good week for yoga: I did yoga every day, making it two weeks with no interruptions. This is the longest streak I’ve had since I started writing MORBID. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I’ve been able to consistently do yoga every single day since I abandoned my ambitions of doing any other exercise. Despite having purchased an under-desk bicycle, I haven’t used it much. I have plans for how I will use it, but I’m trying to focus on what’s working — and what’s working, right now, is yoga, bodywork, this project, and doing enough of my job every day. I think maybe it will be most fruitful if I build from there. I didn’t do any ballet. Since I started getting the bodywork done, my posture has been changing, and a lot of the ballet exercises I was doing hurt. I’m sure I’ll come back to it, but for now I feel demotivated in that direction, as well.
Another thought I’ve been fiddling with, which is also posture-related: I’ve been trying to start writing at a standing desk, and I keep on ending up back on my couch with my laptop. The dancing I have done suggests to me that this has something to do with the way that my body and my mind are the same thing. I have been writing from a physiology of being hunched over my laptop. This has informed my voice. When I stand, my voice changes. I have to get to know my standing-voice. I feel like this will sound crazy to weight loss or fitness types who are not also tortured, melodramatic artists — but I very much feel it’s a thing.
Eating was not so good. I ate over my higher calorie goal four times — twice were medium-severity (or a medium whoops) and twice low side of high-severity (two big whoopses).
Some time during this week I basically gave up on calorie restriction until after my period. I didn’t weigh myself. I’ve been bellyaching since this whole project started about how my period has been late every single month, and proceeded by ten days or more of premenstrual dysphoria black and rotten enough to constitute a serious psychological problem. Late periods prolong my PMS even harder, which freaks me out, because it’s a state that threatens my wellbeing on almost every level — financial, psychological, spiritual. My motivation was rock-bottom low. I really felt like I needed a fucking break.
So, this is the excuse I want to offer, and then struggle with having offered, for the frequency of my overeating: I ate over my calorie goals, mostly in sushi, while in a delirious state of amphetamine withdrawal during one of my monthly medication reset days. Twice, I spent the day eating almost exclusively pizza, and I liked it. I also drank chaga tea every day, several times a day. The chaga comes from my aunt’s land in New Brunswick — she sent it to me after her and her family moved there, several years ago. When she first sent it to me, I was so excited about this new cool thing that I drank cups and cups of it, for a week — and triggered my period, two weeks early. I proceeded to not drink it for several years — until this month, when I decided to try to do that on purpose. I boiled a huge cauldron full of water and scraps of tree fungus. I drank it with milk and maple syrup.
I don’t know if it’s fact that I didn’t restrict what I ate, or the fact that I’m several months on that extremely expensive multivitamin powder, or if it was the chaga tea — but it worked, and my period arrived on time, for the first time since December. I experienced a noticeable dip in energy and focus during my luteal phase, but otherwise aunt Flo arrived without much fanfare or black mood to speak of at all. The two devils inside me — fat loss über alles and the part that is fine dying young and fat and smart and happy — say this is either good, or bad, depending on which one you listen to. The fact is that if I had gone through another late, miserable period, I think I would have quit.
I got to Thursday, where I measure the end of the week for this project, bleeding and bloated and heavy. The honeymoon period of this whole affair has really fucking worn off by this point, you guys. I was staring down the barrel of the two-day structural integration workshop — and the knowledge I would need to find some spark for the fire of my motivation somewhere in this big stupid world, very soon. Or else.
I’m not going to post my body composition data, because this will be a free and public article, and I’m shy about, and would like to keep that stuff behind the paywall, please’n thank you. I’ll tell you that my weight was higher than the week before, but it was not as high as the weight I was at while I was experiencing premenstrual syndrome the month before. What does this mean? It remains to be seen.