Spiral
Another year, my love, has come and gone
A spiral etched across celestial seas.
A decade now, not past, but lived along
A thirty billion mile arc that we’ve
Traced out like dancers perched upon a wire
Strung across a darkened, starlit stage.
The grace and wit of steps I so admire,
You pirouette through spaces I can’t gauge.
Each sun a pinprick orb that lights your way
A shadowless advance to future’s shore.
The business then of life is only play;
Our ten-year dance a prelude still to more.
The core of life sails on, a void swept through;
But anchoring my spiraled dance is you.
Dare.
I don’t know when my story changed or how.
No clear-skied thunderclap awoke my nerves.
No fearsome angel’s wail or battle howl
Bade summon up some courage in reserve.
I only know beside you I am brave.
I only know my stomach doesn’t quail.
I know my heart rides wine-dark swelling waves
where fearless souls alone can set their sails.
For you, aloft, ablaze, my guiding torch,
An icon rimmed in gold and holy fire,
Who clad in flame leads on and forth
Through dark and doubt and grime and fear and gyre.
I don’t know how we ended as a pair.
I only know that dauntlessly, we dare.
General Progress Report
I am doing very well in general. I have been working hard at a bunch of things lately, and applying the tools of incremental progress and commitment to process over result. That’s the key: I can’t control results. I can only control the process. Process and result are connected, but not in perfect accordance. Nevertheless, if I commit faithfully to the process, I know the results will follow. Maybe not exactly what I hope for or want, but something in the same general direction as I am working towards.
My biggest personal project lately is fitness. Obviously, I’ve been committed to health and fitness for a long time now, but over the past four months or so, I’ve been working extra hard specifically on weight loss. I’ve been counting calories, increasing protein, and trying very hard to drop fat and build a little bit of muscle. I’ve been maintaining somewhere between 500 and 1000 daily calories of deficit once you include exercise. This has resulted in dropping approximately 30 pounds in about sixteen weeks. It works out to 1.8 pounds per week.
As you can see, it’s a slow and noisy process. But the results are very positive. It’s been challenging but not awful. And the results are not just on the scale, but in my real world experience as well:
This shows the difference between March 21st and July 14th. So not quite four months. Obviously, still a long way to go before I look like Brad Pitt in Fight Club (I will never look like Brad Pitt in Fight Club), but impressive results, and presumably health-changing improvements in my metabolism (though I need to return to the doctor to get bloodwork done).
I’ve also seen dramatic improvements in my athletic performance. I can do 8 neutral-grip pull-ups in a row now, which is 2 more than I’ve ever been able to do in my life up until now. And I ran a sub-7 minute mile for the first time ever, a lung-bursting 6:44.3 as the second mile of a 4 mile run, last week. That’s stunning to me, that I should be setting new personal records in speed and strength only a few weeks from turning 47 years old.
When my parents were my age, they were both already basically disabled by obesity, sedentary lifestyles, diabetes, musculo-skeletal issues, etc., etc., etc.. I don’t even really know what a healthy 47 year old man is supposed to look and feel like. What does it mean to be capable and strong and fit at my age? I don’t have personal examples in my life. Like everything else, I’m cobbling it together as I go along with no personal role models.
Last week I climbed a mountain with a neighbor who is 58, very fit, and on the Search and Rescue team for my county. It was exciting to see what I have to look forward to over the next ten years if I stay on top of my health and weight and fitness. And I know very clearly what I have to look forward to if I don’t.
So I’m proud of what I’ve done, where I am, and I’m excited to continue improving.
Discipline vs. Obsession
I had an interesting short conversation yesterday based off of this tweet:
And my conversation partner said: “Well, you are obsessive about it.” Which is interesting for two reasons: their feelings about what constitutes obsession, yes, but also how I’ve represented my own behavior to them. I definitely talk about counting my calories, and explain how I measure things and weigh things, etc., and I can understand how that may come across as excessive to someone. And for the rest of this discussion, I’ll expand on ideas that got started in the conversation – but no more direct references. I don’t mean to imply that my conversational partner holds any of the specific attitudes I might go on to describe below.
But I am absolutely not obsessive about my calorie counting. And I say that as someone who has experienced and recovered from pathological obsession. I know what pathological obsession feels like, and this isn’t it. So I think it’s worth trying to informally define the difference between being disciplined about something, and being obsessive about it.
Discipline, or thoroughness, to me, means being careful and detailed, and comprehensive. It’s interesting that we often describe discipline and being detail-oriented as an asset professionally, and a shortcoming personally. Make it to work on time, prepared, and ready every single day? You’re a model employee. But commit to a 5 mile run every day at 5pm, and arrange your schedule around meeting that personal obligation? You’re a fanatic.
Discipline means committing to specific behaviors that are beneficial even when they’re not fun, or I don’t feel the immediate motivation. Healthy food when I want a pizza. A run when I feel like loafing. And yes, measuring the peanut butter so I don’t end up eating 300 calories when I meant to eat 200 (a difference of a mere tablespoon).
Obsession is an entirely different animal. It means, first of all, that the activity disrupts my life and interferes with my ability to do the things I want to do. My obsession with alcohol was like this: I would perseverate and panic about how I could acquire it. I would hide it around the house, I would not go places I couldn’t drink. I arranged my life around the thing, rather than choosing the life I wanted, and working towards that.
My calorie counting isn’t obsessive in the least. I don’t think about it when I’m not doing it. I don’t refuse to eat foods that I don’t know the exact calorie value of. Saturday I went out for a seven course tasting menu and just guessed, “Eh, probably about 1000 calories, whatever.” When I weigh my yogurt into a bowl, I lick the spoon and don’t try to figure out how many grams of yogurt that was. I don’t care.
My calorie counting is liberating, not confining. I am able to achieve my goals for having the body and metabolism I desire while still enabling myself to eat any types of food I want. Either by having reasonable portions or by relegating them to my weekly cheat day. The result has been that my life is less anxious, less frustrating, and I like my body better.
I’ve lost 22 pounds now, in two and a half months. I haven’t starved, I haven’t been miserable. I’ve been thorough. It’s been work, but it hasn’t been an agonizing slog.
I think often times, we want to see people who are successful at things we ourselves are not as secretly miserable or mentally ill. “That person must work 90 hours a week to be so financially successful, how sad for them they don’t get to enjoy their money.” “Oh they lost weight, sure, but look how horrible they feel, starving all the time and obsessing about each leaf of lettuce.” It makes us feel better about our own inability to achieve at that level.
And obviously, there are people with disordered eating, exercise, and professional habits. But fundamentally, I think a lot of us want to see all kinds of success as either unattainable or attended by secret misery. A person who saves and invests is a pinchpenny who never enjoys the fruits of their wealth. A person who is very fit is starving themselves and relentlessly agitated. It’s an attitude that’s about protecting ourselves from ourselves. From our own challenges with committing to something and seeing it through. From making lifelong changes that sometimes means denying base instincts.
There’s a whole swath of industries and advocacies devoted to finding, or demanding, easier ways to do things. Insisting that success is accessible without effort. We should all have high paying jobs without having to work long hours or attain advanced credentials. We should all be able to be fit and sleek without calorie counting or exercise. We should all be healthy and considered attractive without investments of effort in our physical bodies. But it’s all just cymbals.
You don’t have to be obsessed to achieve – but you do have to be thorough and detailed. In any endeavor. It’s not easy for anyone, but that doesn’t mean that those who achieve live lives of hardship or insanity. It’s about cultivating a lifestyle of taking satisfaction in productive effort.
Sobriety in the Time of Covid
Confession: I haven’t been to more than two or three AA meetings over the past year. I hate Zoom meetings. I went to several in the early pandemic, and I gave up. I didn’t connect. Frankly, I haven’t connected to the AA community here well since moving to Seattle. I attended a fairly large number of meetings in 2018 and 2019, but when the pandemic hit I let them drop off and I haven’t missed them. Neither have I felt any rise in my urge to drink. But I’m aware it’s a dangerous game.
I don’t make friends too easily. Not real ones – acquaintances, even close ones, at work or other such environments pass quickly when the opportunity to interact frequently dissipates. I have only a few friends left from my time in Philadelphia, perhaps only one from AA, two or three from work. There are others I continue to interact with professionally from time to time, but they’re not friends.
Here in Seattle, I made no friends in AA in the two years I was regularly attending meetings. I am feeling out of place and uninteresting. I’ve been asked to speak a few times, and I have. It didn’t lead to actually meeting people and connecting. A few men I thought would make connections clearly don’t have time or interest. Seattle is known for being a place hard to make friends – they call it the “Seattle Chill”, and it’s very real.
So my sobriety has been being maintained by a few things – my few close friends who are sober and interested in staying connected, with whom I speak regularly. And by the fact that I find the prospect of alcohol utterly and totally uncompelling. I have no desire to drink, no interest in inebriation, and cannot fathom developing one again. My partner keeps beer and wine in the fridge and I don’t even notice it, except on the rare occasion when I check if there’s a tablespoon of white wine to cook into a risotto (and I’m careful to cook off all the alcohol).
And so my sobriety is clicking along. I don’t think about it much, because I don’t have to. I’ve been sober more than thirteen years now. My life is inestimably better. I’ve got no desire to go back. But I also wouldn’t recommend these actions to anyone in the program. Like a frog being boiled, it’s hard to know when the danger is approaching. And I’ll go back to meetings once they return to in-person status, whether I feel comfortable or not.
Progress and Plateau
When on a journey associated with personal improvement, we tend to imagine a goal that, once we achieve it, we are finished. For example, I am trying to lose weight, and I set a goal of 23 pounds (chosen because it gets me to a round number that felt like a good endpoint). In my imagination, I can lose weight by dieting and exercising for a few months, and then I’ll hit my goal and I’ll be done. This is an excellent way to succeed in the short term and fail in the long run.
The reason of course is that while I may feel like I’m done making progress toward a goal, my mind and body are not done succumbing to entropy. We often talk about plateauing when we are trying to reach a goal but not making progress despite putting in the work. But our goal is also a plateau of its own, in our minds: the mountain top that we can stay on, rarified and perfect. We are hoping to reach an eternal plateau.
But the truth of it is that as soon as we stop making progress, we start to regress. Without vigilance and effort, we start to deteriorate from the pinnacle we’d like to stay perched atop. In systems engineering, these are called “unstable equilibria”. A ball on top of a hill, perfectly placed with no momentum, will stay atop it. But the instant there is a puff of a breeze, it begins to roll back down.
I am almost to my goal weight. I have lost 20.2 of my 23 pounds. Based on how I look and feel, I will probably extend my efforts out and set a new goal for another five or ten pounds of weightloss. But I’m not sure yet. I’m committed to not changing my goal until I achieve it. As always, my fundamental goals are around not developing diabetes, and feeling fit and capable. In that sense, I’m being successful.
So I’m working out now how to reach and stay at the plateau I’m aiming for. It will involve continuing most of the behaviors I’m currently committed to: calorie counting, food weighing, exercise tracking, cheat day management of cravings, etc.. I will just work on adjusting my calorie count until I find a level that maintains an equilibrium rather than continues to result in losses. It will be challenging because weight is a noisy measure, sensitive to hydration, hormone cycle (yes, men have them too!), constipation, etc., etc..
I don’t know yet how I’ll manage that aspect. I don’t want to get trapped in trying to respond to noise, and becoming reactive and oscillatory in my daily eating – that way lies disorder. So I will probably set a time-factor on changes. Something like, “I will add 100 calories daily to my budget, and check after two weeks if I am level, down, or up,” rather than looking at my morning weight and saying, “I need to eat 300 fewer calories today.”
I am, in this, discovering that I can be successful if I am committed, assiduous, and conscientious about my adherence. If I address my anxieties head on and embrace the discomfort of knowing that my body is not going to react precisely how I want it to on my timeline. Like everything else in life, I need to practice acceptance and patience.
Cultivating a Relationship with Pain
Biochembelle and I are watching an extreme race show called “Race to the Center of the Earth”. I’m enjoying it. But there’s a contestant on it who annoys me. She is incredibly fit, and describes herself as “gritty”, but she is complaining constantly about pain. Now, I’m not going to try to judge her pain. I don’t know her actual physical situation or how it’s edited. But it is making me think a bit more about my own relationship with pain, voluntary suffering, and endurance.
As any longtime readers will know, I am an amateur endurance athlete these days. I have competed in many half-marathons, marathons, ultramarathons, and mid-distance and longer triathlons. I really enjoy them. And I do regular training and fun runs of up to 20 miles, hikes of many miles, and minor peakbagging. A day in the mountains with 15-20 miles and 5,000-8,000 feet of ascent does not really intimidate me any more. Nor does a 50 mile bike ride.
That doesn’t mean they’re easy. They’re not. Training and playing in the mountains, or a long effort on the bike, are fun. But they’re painful, challenging, and involve a lot of suffering, generally. During and after a long day adventuring my feet, core, legs, knees, shoulders, and crotch may all hurt. I’m tired, and my hips and back ache. I may be sunburned or chewed up by bugs. I am not infrequently bleeding. I haven’t done a lot of camping yet, but when I do, I don’t sleep well.
Now, my weightloss journey is similar. I am often hungry between meals in a way I wasn’t before. It used to be that feeling the first hunger pangs meant I would grab a snack or start preparing a meal. Now, I sit with my hunger for a while, generally. It gets stronger. I work out hungry; I delay my meal by bathing or watching a show or playing piano. Because I want to eat closer to bedtime so I’m not going to bed hungry, which is awful. But it happens sometimes.
This isn’t real suffering, of course. Not in an existential sense. But it is voluntary suffering, and the pain and challenge are real. I have come around to the emotional position that comfort kills us. Being too comfortable in life is bad for the soul. It breeds softness, gluttony, laziness, and entitlement. We need challenges in life – challenges difficult enough that sometimes we fail. Challenges that leave us half-broken whether we succeed or not. Without them, without suffering for them, we can’t achieve what we are capable of.
And the challenges need not be physical (though I definitely recommend some of that). Intellectual and emotional challenges are also crucial to development. When I was first sober I was terrified that I couldn’t hold a job – I almost didn’t apply for them. My fear of it made me too uncomfortable. I had to learn to let that wash over me and through me. To live in the discomfort of my fear. As a result of doing that many times – of taking leaps of faith and making major moves – my career is flourishing. Do allow yourself to ossify by only being exposed to comfortable thoughts and opinions you already hold.
I have come to love the pain associated with endurance. Long runs and hikes on challenging terrain are fun not only despite the pain, but because of it. Weightloss is satisfying not despite the hunger, but because of it. I am mastering this carcass that shuffles me through life. This is my body. This is my pain. This is the experience I am capable of having in this place, at this time, in this moment.
I am a thing made of edible stuff in a constant battle not to be eaten by microbes. It is a battle I will lose. While it rages on, I will thrash myself against the edges of my world, stretching the cellophane boundary of my place in it as widely as I can. I love the pain. And that is why I love my place in the world.
The Little Voice of Self-Destruction
I am continuing my weight-loss and fitness journey, and I am objectively having success. I am back down to about my lowest adult weight from a few years ago. Although I am softer and weaker than I was three years ago, and have a ways to go before I recover all my strength. But I’m doing the work. I’ll get there.
If I’d written this post two days ago, I’d have felt differently. I went through a period of 9 days where I lost no weight despite strict adherence to my fitness and diet regimens. Including a massive, 19 mile, 8,100′ mountain trail run that burned 3,500 calories all by itself. And yet the scale was stubborn. I was despairing. I invented narratives: I’m fitter and my resting heart rate is lower, so I’m burning fewer calories.
That might be true. Certainly my RHR is down in the 30s now. But then, in the past two days, a bunch of weight came off the scale reading. It’s possible I was retaining water while healing from the big run. Or who knows what. Weight loss is a noisy process even when doing everything “right”. Only perseverance and commitment to a goal works for me over the longer term.
But the rewards are real; expensive clothes I’d given up on are in the rotation again. I like how I look and my energy is better. I’m sleeping better. I’m feeling productive and capable as I redevelop my strength and fitness. I’m achieving goals. So why is my brain trying to sabotage me?
Just now, proud of everything I’ve done, I was taking a walk and wondering about what I’d have for lunch, and I find myself thinking, “You’re at your lowest adult weight! You can have anything you want!”. I have a habit of self-sabotage that I have to stay on top of. I constantly try to convince myself I “deserve” things that I know are bad for me. While I haven’t had those feelings about alcohol in a long while, I have them about food, or a cigar, or skipping work, or you-name-it.
And that’s precisely why “diet and exercise don’t work.” They are only effective as long as I am able to adhere to the program. Monitor my intake. Don’t “reward” myself inappropriately. It’s far easier to eat a thousand calories than to run a thousand calories. And I’m not even at my first goal yet. I have 5.5 more pounds to go before I reach the initial goal I set for myself. My plan is to reevaluate when I get there, should I keep dropping, or increase my daily caloric intake to hold steady?
Whichever I choose, my old way of approaching food is over. I am not “on a diet”. I am trying to find an overall strategy of diet and exercise that results in health and satisfaction. A good relationship with my body and my fitness. Eventually, I think, I will increase my intake by a few hundred calories a day, and on days I exercise I’ll eat a little more to compensate for the extra burn. But I will be mindful about it, not subject to guesswork and a sense of “deserving” more.
Much like sobriety required a shift in how I think about my life, or how becoming an amateur endurance athlete required a shift in how I live and train, having a healthy diet and fitness routine to maintain a healthy metabolism is something that has required a fundamental change in how I think about myself and my eating. And it will require vigilance against my own sense of entitlement.
Meeting Lapses
“Meeting Makers Make It,” is one of the most common phrases you’ll hear in AA. It’s said all the time because it’s true. Regular meeting attendance and sobriety maintenance go hand in hand. We tell newcomers to go to 90 meetings in 90 days, more if they need to. People who makes excuses about why they can’t attend? They don’t usually stay sober long. I don’t know if it’s the meetings, or if it’s being the kind of person who makes excuses. But finding yourself “too busy” or “too inconvenienced” to go to meetings regularly when in early sobriety is a bright shining hallmark of people who tend not to stay sober. There are exceptions, of course.
I haven’t been to more than about 4 meetings the entire pandemic. That’s not good, of course, but Zoom meetings just don’t work for me (he says, making excuses). I don’t feel any connection the way I do when I’m in person. I’m hopeful for a return to in-person meetings soon. Truth be told, my meeting attendance had been slipping before. I had settled into a twice a week schedule, then once a week. Then every other or so.
Moving, and losing the core group that you’re in sobriety with is hard. I don’t make friends easily, not even in a room full of people just like me. I’d been feeling uncomfortable and disoriented in meetings my entire time in Seattle. It took me 2-3 years before finding a group of sober friends in Philadelphia. Now I’ve lost that again. I have a few important sober people in my life I am in constant contact with, which I see almost like “little meetings”. Connections with people who know me, understand sobriety, and I can connect with.
I do not feel that my sobriety is in any danger. Missing meetings isn’t ideal, but I nothing about the plague year has been ideal. I’ve been sick with anxiety multiple times, had minor running injuries, been unable to go to they gym, had long hours of frustrating work. It’s been a massively challenging time for everyone – and I’ve been extremely fortunate to be healthy, employed, and sober for the entire thing. There’s been alcohol in the house that BB drinks sometimes, and I don’t even notice it. Right now I know there’s wine in the fridge – but I couldn’t tell you how much or what kind. Or if there’s beer or not. Neither answer would surprise me. I just don’t see it.
But I wish I could recapture the feeling I had in St. Louis among the men of my Wednesday night men’s group. I miss it.
Progress not Perfection.
One of the bedrock principles of AA is progress, not perfection. We do our best, as much as we can, sometimes we fail, sometimes we quit, but for the most part we move forward towards better lives and more peaceful, serene existence. I’ve mostly succeeded at that throughout my sobriety, and one of the other bedrock principles – practicing the steps of AA in all of our lives – has enabled me to establish a life I enjoy, feel at peace in, and enjoy the fruits of accomplishment in. I’ve become a goal-setter and achiever. Not always, not successfully every time, but I’ve learned how to make progressive improvement in crucial ways.
Today, I am in the midst of weightloss. The reason, fundamentally, is that I went to the doctor after a year of the pandemic, and while I hadn’t put on weight, a few of my blood numbers were trending in the wrong direction for a person at severe risk for metabolic disorders like diabetes. So, I decided on the spot that I had to do something serious. My consistent exercise is no longer doing the whole job, and I need a way to maintain my heath that doesn’t rely exclusively on every-lengthening endurance athletics.
That means losing weight. I know it’s fashionable these days to say people can be healthy at any size (and surely, a few can), but generally speaking, excess weight comes with health morbidities, and I was, 40 days ago, somewhere between 20-30 pounds overweight. So I set a goal of losing 23 pounds, which would get me to a nice round number, and reassessing. Technically speaking, I’ll still be slightly overweight if I reach that goal, but I think I will have made a dramatic change in both health and appearance.
So for the past 40 days, I’ve been limiting myself to 2125 calories a day, except for Saturdays when I increase my calorie budget to account for my long run. This has been very effective. I am down 12.5 pounds in 40 days, and my belt is in danger of needing new holes soon. I’ve taken a few specific steps designed to help with the weightloss beyond the calorie budget:
- I record every calorie I eat, by logging foods
- I exercise in moderation – not extending out my weekday runs beyond 3 miles
- I added strength training to maintain muscle
- I eat less dense calories (fatty meat, baked goods) in exchange for voluminous ones
For the first week or so I was routinely hungry. Now, I am generally not, except before mealtimes, which it makes sense to be hungry for. I have changed my relationship with food: instead of eating whatever I want whenever I want and trying to run off the excess and failing, I am constructing an intentional, meaningfully nutritious diet that I enjoy eating and deviate from for treats according to a plan and schedule.
I’m very much at peace now with this system. It’s working, I’m enjoying the sense of a little more control over my diet and health. I’m hopeful of a dramatic change in my appearance, and of fitting into my fancy Philadelphia suits again. And I’m succeeding – slowly, steadily, and with purpose.
Infactorium 