Yoga in France!

Today was a nice quiet one. After photographing my new digs and watching the sky on my tiny balcony, I showered and slept incredibly well. I woke up to Feather and Wolfie knocking on my door to invite me to lunch with them, Dolphin, and one of their friends. The friend was sweet and humored my poor jet-lagged attempts at conversing in French. The rest of the day involved playing with Wolfie, reading, grocery shopping, and making some dinner for Dolphin and Wolfie (who, it turns out, loves eggplant).

Aside from all of that, the other thing I decided to do was to look into taking yoga. I figure if I'm in France for a month I should settle in and figure out an exercise routine since exercising regularly is good for my mood. I've done yoga before and liked it, and I was inspired by this article to want to try it again. So I asked for recommendations and am going to be using this yoga studio while I'm here. They have tons of classes in a variety of styles. They've got prenatal, postnatal, family, and kid yoga classes so if you live in France this is a good place to check out.

And in case you need inspiration too, here are two awesome pics of Jessamyn Stanley, a black fat femme yogi, doing her thing. You can - and should - follow her on instagram. Her talent and the fact that she is fat like me makes me feel hopeful that I can one day be as strong and flexible as her.

Jessamyn Stanley doing the splits on a bridge in london in flowered spandex pants and a red leotard top. 

Jessamyn Stanley in blue jeans and a blue crop top doing a handstand yoga pose. 

Goals Update

I don't have anything particularly exciting planned for today, so I figure it's about time to update about goals! Here goes...

Books
I'm working on my goal of reading 116 books this year and I'm still on track.

A woman inside a ginormous book reading at night.

Here's a list of the books I've read since my last book update:

Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms by Paul Stamets
Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods by Suzanne Collins
The Joy of Pi by David Blatner
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards
Fables Volume 10: The Good Prince by Bill Willingham
Fables Volume 11: War and Pieces by Bill Willingham
Our Black Year: One Family's Quest to Buy Black in America's Racially Divided Economy by Maggie Anderson
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
Hollow City by Ransom Riggs
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind
Wuthering Bites by Sarah Gray
Specials by Scott Westerfeld
Extras by Scott Westerfeld
We Are Market Basket: The Story of an Unlikely Grassroots Movement that Saved a Beloved Business by Daniel Korschun
Blindspot by Jane Kamensky
El Deafo by Cece Bell
Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor
Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
Les Soleils des Indépendances by Ahmadou Kourouma
Un Papillon dans la Cité by Gisèle Pineau
Les Hommes qui Marchent by Malika Mokeddem
Mean Little Deaf Queer by Terry Galloway
Mirror Mirror by Gregory Maguire
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire

Diet
In case you forgot, my dietary goals were:

* Drink 8+ glasses of water a day
* Take a daily multivitamin
* Stick as closely as possible to the macro- and micro-nutrient breakdowns I set in myfitnesspal
* Avoid soy, MSG, and foods with long lists of unpronounceable ingredients
* Only eat when sitting down at a table with no distractions
* Stop and assess whether I'm actually hungry before eating or getting seconds
* Eat every four(ish) hours on a breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner schedule
* No food after 10pm

Chart of the dietary breakdown for vegetarians in the form of a plate.

I've got the water drinking, multivitamin taking, and soy/MSG/unpronounceable food avoiding down pat. I've also been really good about eating at the table. The biggest problems I've had are with meal timing and nutrient breakdowns. My work schedule is weird and includes both morning and night shifts, which makes eating on a regular schedule difficult. Sometimes I fail to eat breakfast because I'm just not hungry yet, and I frequently wind up eating random crap when I get home from my night job because my dinner was seven hours before so I'm starving by the time I get home. So starting this week my new strategy is to have a protein shake for breakfast every day. It's fast, it's easy, and I can grab it and take it with me. On days where I have more time and energy I can blend tasty healthy things into my shake and on days when I'm dragging myself along I can just stir my protein powder in some water and call it a day. And my new strategy for avoiding the nighttime binges is to bring a small healthy snack with me to work at night. I'm hoping this will tide me over until I get home and I can just go to bed instead of eating. I think that both of these strategies will help me avoid feeling overly hungry so I'll be able to make more intelligent choices about what I'm eating - aka sticking to the myfitnesspal goals - since it's really hard to plan a meal when you're too hungry to think of anything but shoving food in your face. And if I'm not too hungry to think, I'll have an easier time sitting down for a leisurely meal where I check in with my body as I eat.

Exercise
I've done an awesome job of keeping up with the structural changes. I take the stairs whenever I can, I walk all over the place, and I take public transit whenever possible instead of using the car.

My specific goals have proved harder. I've stayed more active than before, a lot of which is due to the help of my swolemate. But most of that activity has been in the form of walking around more or running about with kids rather than any of the exercise goals I had. That said, I did take ballet as planned and found I really like it! But it's almost over.

A large asian man dancing ballet.

I think the next goal I'll focus on is yoga. It turns out there is a yoga studio near my friends' house in France that looks really good so my plan is to try out yoga on my trip. My other goals were: do a handstand, a cartwheel, and a split; run a 5K; and do 25 pull ups, 50 pushups, 200 situps, and 200 squats. I did start doing the couch to 5K program but I slacked off when finals hit and frankly I think this experiment may have shown me that I truly dislike running. I'm considering abandoning the 5K goal because the point of exercise is to have fun and get health - not to torture myself. As for the gymnastics - I found a place nearby called Esh Circus Arts. It looks amazingly fun and the studio is named after my cat! Well, not really but I can pretend. So I want to check it out. Fortunately so does Joy. And she wants to check out the kickboxing studio too! Hopefully when I get back from France we can try both of those things out. Now all I need is a rock climbing buddy. I actually do have a friend who climbs, but he's really in shape and really good at it so I feel (needlessly) intimidated. I know he'd be willing to go with me and he's probably the least judgmental person ever but I'm still embarrassed about the idea since I'm convinced I'll be bad at it.

Finances
And last but not least, my financial update. Nothing much to report. I'm still chanting my money motto ("I am a money magnet!") to myself and I think it's very slowly beginning to work. I'm on track with my car, credit card debt, medical debt, timeshare, and student loans. I'm still happy with my decision to switch my Roth IRA to Vanguard. I'm less thrilled with it debiting 5% of my income every two weeks when I get my paycheck, since I'm feeling the money crunch. I'm not sure how I'll increase it to 10% like I plan to do in September. At any rate, I'm sure my elderly self will be thanking me later. Still not doing so hot with the rainy day fund. My goal is to contribute 5% per paycheck so I eventually have $10,000 in there. But I keep wiping it out. Ugh. I'm hoping this will get easier in September when I'm back to full time work. At any rate, I still need to automate this and stick it somewhere less accessible so I can do the whole CD laddering thing.

Picture of a roll of money.

In a bit of financial posting that deserves its own paragraph, I'm still really happy about my $20/week charity donations. I've gotten into a rhythm where I donate somewhere every other week so I can give $40 each time. I'm hoping to increase that to $50 every other week soon. Last update I had given to Roxbury Youth Orchestra (an inexpensive learning orchestra for inner-city youth), Second Chance Animal Shelter (a nonprofit no-kill animal shelter that also does low-cost spaying/neutering, and subsidized veterinary care), Youth On Fire (a drop-in center for homeless and street-involved youth ages 14-24), and Trans Lifeline (a nonprofit crisis hotline for trans people). Now I've added to the list: The Network/La Red (a survivor-led social justice organization working to end partner abuse in LGBT, BDSM, and poly communities with organizing, education, and support services),  Daily Table (which I posted about here), IMPACT Boston (gives self-defense classes to women, children, people with disabilities, abuse survivors, and LGBTQ people, plus they collaborate with schools and organizations to do abuse prevention programs), and Mass LEAP (aka Massachusetts Literary Education and Performance Collective which puts on youth slam poetry festivals and works in schools to promote and support youth slam and spoken word poetry).

Bucket List
You'll notice that I haven't updated on my bucket list. That's because no progress has been made. All those goals are HUGE and I'm nowhere near done with any of them. Also, I've been focused on other things. I do plan to get to them, though.

Drawing of a bucket with a yellow background.
The bucket says "Bucket List" on it in red letters.

Sun's Out Guns Out

Reader, have you heard the phrase "sun's out guns out" before? Here's an example to demonstrate the meme.

Woman who is very jacked posing with the caption "sun's out guns out."

Ok. So here's the thing. I'm sometimes nervous about taking my guns out because I'm fat. One thing that helped me feel more excited about getting dressed in less clothing for the summer was this article by Justin Hubbell. Another thing that helped me was the fact that I just dyed my armpits turquoise. A third  thing that helped is that it's horrifically hot out today (and yesterday, and apparently tomorrow too). And the last thing that helped was the fact that I spent all day with Secondo, who was home from school with a stomach bug. Secondo doesn't care what I look like.

So yeah. This entire post is basically here to say: I got my guns out today! Sadly I did not take any photos. You'll just have to imagine it instead.

Fuck Your Body Policing

Friends, I was minding my own business getting lunch at work today when an acquaintance who works at the cafeteria made some unbidden rude comments about my dietary choices. Why did this happen? Because I am an unrepentant fat person who had the gall to choose to eat macaroni and cheese for lunch. So this person decided to "concern troll" me about my dietary choices.

Image of a fat woman's giving the finger with the words "Fuck Your Body Policing."

Because I am feeling more angry than articulate, I'm linking to an article with 11 Reasons Your 'Concern' For Fat People's Health Isn't Helping Anyone.

Friends, my diet is my own business. Put simply, if I want to sit around eating doughnuts all day that is between me, my doctor, and the good people at my local doughnut shop. I do not need to justify my diet to anybody. The size of my body does not suddenly make my dietary choices someone else's business. 

If I were a thin person, would this acquaintance have gone out of his way to criticize my diet and imply that I was unhealthy because of it? Of course not! He only felt he had the right to do so because of all the bullshit we're taught about fat people (which he has clearly bought into). 

I can assure you that pretty much every fat person over the age of about seven knows that being fat is undesirable in our society and that you are supposed to exercise and eat "healthy" food and lose weight if you are fat. I know I'm fat and I know that mac and cheese is a calorie-dense food. I also know that I'm expected to hate my body and want lose weight. But you know what? I'm not doing that. My body is awesome and I'm focusing on keeping myself as healthy as possible. Part of that is stepping off the horrid dieting merry-go-round that was taxing my emotional and mental health.

Here's the thing: Let's say I subsist entirely on junk food. That STILL wouldn't be anyone else's business. As long as what I eat is not hurting you, you have exactly no say in my dietary choices. When I start eating meat and buying my food from incredibly far away places and from farms that spray the world with toxic chemicals you can criticize me. Hell, if you're vegan feel free to criticize me for eating dairy (and then help me strategize since I'm thinking of making the switch). But unless you are critiquing the labor impact, animal rights impact, political impact, or environmental impact of our food choices your opinion is worthless to me.

If this dude cares so much about what I put in my body he can advocate for more vegetarian options at the cafeteria. The vegetarian main dishes today were pizza, macaroni and cheese, and grilled cheese. How about something sustainable made with vegetables and no processed ingredients? 

Friends, what do you do for self-care in times like this? And also - do you have any fabulous retorts I should store up for next time this happens to me?

Health Goals Part II - Exercise Goals

As I said in a former post, I used to hate exercise. I viewed it as a form of torture inflicted on me as punishment for being fat. Then I discovered fat acceptance and I stopped exercising entirely for a while. What a relief! But a weird thing happened… I occasionally felt like being physically active. This had NEVER happened before. After all, exercise was something I associated with punishment and who would choose to be punished? But once I wasn't requiring myself to do it I found that sometimes I just wanted to move. And so I did. Then I noticed that on the days when I was more physically active I felt better. My mood was better, I had more focus, I felt less stressed, and I slept better at night. It turns out this is a thing.

Words "I <3 ME" written in the sand.

Here's some proof: I just read a NY Times article: Rethinking Exercise As A Source of Immediate Rewards by Jane E. Brody. In it she talks about the findings of Dr. Segar, a psychologist whose specialty is helping people start and keep up with regular exercise habits. Dr. Segar wrote a book I want to read called "No Sweat: How the Simple Science of Motivation Can Bring You a Lifetime of Fitness." Basically Dr. Segar and others have found that prescribing doses of exercise like medicine for weight loss doesn't work. Duh! Instead, what does work is noticing the immediate rewards of exercise - the ones I discovered by accident - and deciding those are important to you. Exercise is one way of prioritizing your own self-care. As Dr. Segar says, "I like to think of physical activity as a way to revitalize and renew ourselves, as fuel to better enjoy and succeed at what matters most." I like to think of it that way too. I can exercise because I deserve to feel good in the body I have right now and I matter enough to take care of myself, not because I'm fat and I need to change myself. This is, coincidentally, exactly what Health at Every Size focuses on. (Here is a link if you need one.) The idea behind HAES is threefold and I'm showing it in pictures:

Respect, including respect for body diversity.
[Picture is the word "respect" spelled from news clippings.]

Compassionate Self-Care - eating in a flexible and attuned manner that
values pleasure and honors  internal cues of hunger, satiety, and appetite;
finding joy in moving one's body and being physically active.
[Picture says "Keep calm and practice self-care."]

Critical Awareness - challenges scientific and cultural assumptions;
values body knowledge and people's lived experiences.
[Picture is a man with jigsaw puzzle in his head holding a puzzle piece.]

So that's what I'm trying to do. I'm maintaining an awareness of fat phobia and the lessons I've learned through fat acceptance. I'm working on respecting people of all body types, including myself. And I'm aiming for compassionate self-care. The most relevant part to this post being "finding joy in moving one's body and being physically active."

So there it is. My primary goal with exercise is to focus on easy structural changes that make me more active and also on finding physically active things I love to do so I won't feel like I'm being punished when I exercise. This means no treadmills EVER.

Pug doing a handstand.

Here are the structural changes: 
* No more elevators or escalators. I will take the stairs unless I am with a disabled person who needs my help pushing elevator buttons.
* Walk or bike everywhere under 5 miles. This also helps the environment so it's a win-win!
* Take public transit to work. Why waste gas and pay for parking when I can take the bus? This gets me exercise because I have to walk to/from the bus stops, it saves me money, and it helps the environment.

Here are my specific fitness goals:
* Be able to do a handstand.
* Also cartwheels.
* Be able to do 25 pull ups, 50 pushups, 200 situps, and 200 squats.
* Do a split - either type.
* Run a 5K - maybe a color run? - ideally with a friend.
* Take a ballet class.
* Do some yoga.
* Try the kickboxing studio in the center of town.
* Find a rock climbing buddy and go climbing.

Picture of a fat woman hoola hooping that says
"Yes, I work out! No, I am not trying to lose weight."

Do you know about Health At Every Size? If so, have you tried applying the ideas to your life? How has that worked for you?

Health Goals Part I - Dietary Goals

I had my final post-surgical follow-up and am now officially cleared to exercise! Huzzah! In celebration of this fact, I am posting my new health goals and plans, in two parts. Here's the first part:

Dietary Goals
I'm fat. I'm fine with it. I have a good life as a fat person which includes great friends, great housemates, and some pretty awesome men who find me attractive as is. So I am not attempting to change my weight through these dietary goals. Let me repeat that: this is NOT about losing weight. I have exactly zero intentions of restricting my eating, counting calories, or depriving myself of the foods I like. Life is too short and chocolate too tasty for that nonsense.

Game of Thrones Meme: What do you say to dieting? Not today!

I am trying to eat in ways that make my body feel good. I've found that doing so actually does involve a bit of regulating what I eat. I've noticed that I feel like shit when I go too long without eating, when I fail to drink enough water, or when I eat certain foods *coughSOYcough* so I make sure I regulate that. I've found that I do best with a higher protein diet, more of some micronutrients (potassium, vitamin B, iron), and less of other micronutrients (salt). I also tend to eat when hungry, angry, lonely, or tired (aka HALT) as a holdover from other stupider addictive behaviors, so I try to stop and assess whether I'm actually hungry or whether one of those other factors is making me think I'm hungry before I start eating.

Tiny turtle eating a ginormous strawberry.

To track what I'm eating, I use the myfitnesspal app on my phone.  The app also keeps track of water intake, workouts, and how much you weigh. It even acts as a pedometer - or it would if I carried my phone around with me more. The app has a social feature too if you have friends who use it, so that's cool. So how do I use the app?

Well, I don't track my weight on the app because weight tracking stresses me out and I'm not trying to lose weight. I also don't track my workouts on there because the app will automatically factor those calories burned into your calories for the day and I want to exercise for my health not because I'm trying to burn calories. I do like the water tracking feature, since I feel better when I'm hydrated. I also like the pedometer since it's kind of neat to look at the graph and see how many steps I took each day. But the thing I really love about this app and the reason I use it every day is that it breaks everything you eat down into easy to digest graphs (see what I did there?).

Picture of myfitnesspal app.

There is a daily pie chart showing when you ate the most calories (breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks), a pie chart breaking down what you ate by macronutrients (carbs, proteins, fats) and a chart showing what you ate in micronutrients vs the how much you need. You can customize your objectives to say what you're aiming for in total calories and what percentages you want to be eating of the macro- and micro-nutrients. If you're trying to lose or gain weight you can put your weight and what you want to weigh and your activity level so it'll make goals for you. I chose not to input a weight goal and instead to make up my own objectives based on what my doctor and nutritionist told me. For example, I set the macronutrients to 30% proteins, 30% fats, 40% carbs because I wanted to eat more protein than the original myfitnesspal recommendation. I've left most of the micronutrients alone but I set my salt intake to 2,300 mg per day (lower than it started with) and my potassium to 3,500 mg per day (higher than it started with). I put in the caloric intake my nutritionist said I should do. Basically, this is a nice and customizable app that works for me.

Cat eating salad and looking weird.

Cat eating a snow cone and looking weird.

It should be obvious but in case it isn't, this app is for adults. Not for kids. If your kid's doctor recommends it and you're looking for something similar for kids, you can try Kurbo which is made for kids and which uses a traffic-light system (red is eat rarely, yellow is eat sometimes, green is eat most).

Ok. So far this post has been all about how I track what I eat. What are my actual goals? They are:

* Drink 8+ glasses of water a day.
* Take a daily multivitamin.
* Stick as closely as possible to the macro- and micro-nutrient breakdowns I've set up in the myfitnesspal app.
* Avoid soy, MSG, and foods with long lists of unpronounceable ingredients.
* Eat only when sitting down at a table with no distractions.
* Stop and assess whether I'm actually hungry before eating or getting seconds.
* Eat every four(ish) hours. Aim for something like an 8am, 12pm, 4pm, 8pm eating schedule.
* No food after 10pm.

See? Totally do-able and it focuses on my health, not my weight. If you're interested in modifying your diet, I'd recommend a similar approach. It's so much better and more sustainable than dieting.

Pink spray painted graffiti that says "Riots not diets!"

Do you have dietary goals? If so what are they? Are they health-focused rather than weight-focused?

On Fat Acceptance and Fitness

Readers, I'm fat.

I do not mean this as an insult to myself but as a simple true statement. But the fact that such a statement needs to be qualified should show you how denigrated my body type is in this society. If you don't agree with this basic premise, you need to go elsewhere because I am not going to try and argue something so obvious. Instead, I plan to tell you about me because it's my blog and on my blog I get to be a narcissist.

I used to hate myself. There were a lot of reasons for this and most are more relevant to my therapist than my blog readers. Because I hated myself, and my body was a manifestation of many of the things I disliked about myself, my body became an easy target for that self-hatred. I was a queer man in a world that hated queers. I was gender-fabulous in a world with a very strict gender binary. And I was fat in a world that hated fat people. Since I couldn't become un-queer and I consistently failed at following gender norms, I focused on trying to "fix" my body. Even the other queers and gender non-conforming people hated fat folks. And since they were my only hope of acceptance and safety that meant I needed to lose weight - my survival as a baby queer depended on it. So even though I hated exercising I did it for several hours every day. Even though I love food I was always restricting what I ate. Sometimes this made me lose weight - though never enough for my BMI to drop down to "normal." Mostly it just made me miserable.

Cartoon rhinoceros running on a treadmill next to a picture of a unicorn.

Finally I was in my 20s. I was a vegetarian who had just gone vegan for lent. I was working as a dog walker which entailed walking dogs for 5 hours and biking ~12 miles between the houses each day. I was fat. I was the only dog walker who was fat. After a work party I went home with my boyfriend and started bemoaning this state of affairs. And he introduced me to the fat acceptance movement. Readers, there is a special place in heaven for the people who introduce self-hating fat queers to the fat acceptance movement. (For what it's worth, this same boyfriend also liked that I was swishy which was AH-MAY-ZING.)

Graffiti: Buddha triumphantly lifting a bicycle.

Fat acceptance changed my life. I read everything I could get my hands on. I intentionally made fat friends whereas I'd had NONE before then because I was grossed out by fat people. I completely stopped dieting and exercising. I questioned ideas I had accepted about how terrible my life as a fat person would be. How could I believe that shit when I saw fat people who were married, who were professionally successful, who were good at sports, who were stylish dressers, etc? So, for a while I swung the opposite way. I did not exercise at all and I ate whatever the hell I wanted - including one day when I literally ate cake for every meal. I think most fat people who finally discover fat acceptance do this. I also think it's why you see all of those posts by newly revolutionized fat people that other people accuse of "glorifying" obesity. We've finally escaped from the hell of others' expectations and we're overzealous in our identification with the cause. I've met a lot of people in this stage and it's an important stage to reach because hating yourself sucks and it's important to put an end to fat phobia.

Fat David sculpture.

So anyway, after a couple years of being very RAH RAH about fat acceptance, a funny thing happened. My eating gradually settled down on its own. Because food isn't a scarcity for me and no foods are "forbidden" I no longer feel the need to eat everything in sight. There are some days when I want dessert and I eat it, but there are other days when I really crave spinach or brussels sprouts or a nice big salad. I NEVER craved that sort of thing before. But my appetite has finally balanced itself now that I'm not periodically starving myself. I've also found myself craving more physical activity. I've always hated exercise but now that I'm not making myself do it to lose weight, the idea of movement is appealing. I've discovered that I love dancing, swimming, rock climbing, weight lifting, yoga, and biking. Basically, I've gradually and accidentally come to embrace the idea of Health At Every Size (an idea you can find out more about here).

Sparkly scale that says "Yay!" and has positive phrases instead of numbers.

I've finally made peace with my body which has included making peace with being fat. Paradoxically, this peace has given me the space I needed to be able to set some fitness goals this year. I'm ok with my weight and at the same time, I want to be more physically fit. I never thought I'd be able to separate fitness from weight loss. But apparently there is one more thing on the other side of fat acceptance. It's getting more healthy for yourself, because you love yourself and want to stick around for as long as possible in the best condition possible. So bizarrely enough, now that I've accepted my fatness, I've decided it's time to improve my diet and exercise. I even made it one of my New Year's resolutions.

And now that you've gotten through all of this, here's a post from Nerd Fitness: How Fat Acceptance Doesn't Have to Glorify Obesity and Shame Fitness. I'm not 100% on the tone of this piece, though I think it was probably difficult to tightrope walk this issue in print. Tone aside, this article expresses some of my thoughts rather well. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on it.

And in case you need a boost of fat acceptance in the form of music videos, here are two of my favorites: "Sista Big Bones" by Anthony Hamilton (warning: there is a brief instance of problematic orientalism in this video) and "Big Girls (You Are Beautiful)" by Mika.