I Can Tell You All I Know, The Where to Go, The What To Do
Line from a Steely Dan song that I'm listening to now on continuous repeat. What did we do before continuous repeat? I have no earthly idea.
The whole line goes:
"I can tell you all I know
The where to go, the what to do
You can try to run but
You can't hide from what's inside of you."
I used to listen to this song (it's called "Any Major Dude Will Tell You," an inspiring title if I ever heard one) during my last period of behavior that was inexplicable to my friends, back in 1994. Let's say what started as a three week fling ended in me taking a ton of computer science courses and teaching Yale kids neat-o unix commands like "grep" and "cat." Needless to say, "cat" was a favorite of mine, but I've noted since that there's no word in the English language that communicates so efficiently the concept of "grep."
Well, anyway.
Flashing back to this time last year. If I had been able to forsee the events that followed, I might have had the following conversation with my two best friends (let's call them the Hello Kitty clique):
"So I'm going to do this crazy diet that will make me lose 32 pounds and blabber on at length about macronutrient ratios. Also, I'll stop being a vegetarian. And I'll develop a huge crush on a really skinny Canadian guy who is 34 but looks 22 and makes supplements for a living. Also, I'll start to read all this stuff by this British guy who has a very long beard and thinks we can cure aging. Eventually, I'll leave my extremely successful career to raise money full time for this thing that's a lot like the X Prize but involves mice."
Back before CR, my friends and I used to put away fairly impressive quantities of red wine. So they would have just figured it was the cabernet talking.
It all turned out well. I mean here I am, happy, healthy, feeling great about my life, doing work that is extremely important to me, and watching my mother feed catfood to a pair of geese who have taken up residence on her patio.
I don't know what CR will change about your life. If you're a woman, and if you've always been at war with your body, and you find that CR helps you lose weight and give your body the nutrients it needs, you will discover a way of living that you never thought possible. I don't know what you'll decide to do with all the energy you no longer expend in that ubiquitous American woman fat guilt, but I know you'll find a great way to spend your time that makes you happy. I'm so proud of my bloggiefriends who have lost weight and gotten healthy and are enjoying their new CR lives. One of the happiest moments of my blogger journey so far was when one of my bloggiefriends said she had lost 20 pounds and was wearing cute jeans again! Yea! Living a long time is great, but the brothers don't always understand what an amazing thing it is to love the body you're living in now!
People who don't do CR always talk about what a sacrifice it would be. I don't find it so. Doing CR has made such a positive change in my life that I can't imagine how a Dunkin Donuts bagel with cream cheese could possibly compete. Of course it's easier for women, where society reinforces skinniness as the ideal of beauty. But I'm not all that skinny... I would contend that even at 105, you wouldn't see me and think "She's skinny." You'd just think I was younger than I am and slim.
Eating more protein has been the key for me. I look at my detox week diet, and I see protein and unsaturated fats. My eggwhite breakfast with flax oil, my yummy, easy lunch with kale salad and cottage cheese. I just ate my brewers yeast and veggies dinner. One thing I find I do is compress my meals into a rather short period during the day. For instance, today I ate breakfast at ten. Lunch at 12. Dinner at 5. But I'll be full for the rest of the night. I'll go out with my mom tonight and have a nice cup of herbal tea with my calcium chewy supplement and be very satisfied. One thing that's weird for me when I'm at MR's house (I mean aside from the fact that after years of whining that I would never meet a guy who holds my interest for more than two dates I've met a guy who could fascinate me for 1000 years!) is that we eat breakfast an hour and twenty minutes after waking, and I'm not really hungry yet. I usually sit on the floor drinking coffee while he chops veggies for our breakfast salad, and we talk CR. By the time we sit down to breakfast, I'm awake, but I'm not hungry. Still, I enjoy my eggwhites. And I enjoy asking my CR guru all my CR questions while he eats a giant salad that would take me an entire day to consume.
I'm so happy for all of my bloggiefriends who are taking control of their health. It's great fun, isn't it?
The whole line goes:
"I can tell you all I know
The where to go, the what to do
You can try to run but
You can't hide from what's inside of you."
I used to listen to this song (it's called "Any Major Dude Will Tell You," an inspiring title if I ever heard one) during my last period of behavior that was inexplicable to my friends, back in 1994. Let's say what started as a three week fling ended in me taking a ton of computer science courses and teaching Yale kids neat-o unix commands like "grep" and "cat." Needless to say, "cat" was a favorite of mine, but I've noted since that there's no word in the English language that communicates so efficiently the concept of "grep."
Well, anyway.
Flashing back to this time last year. If I had been able to forsee the events that followed, I might have had the following conversation with my two best friends (let's call them the Hello Kitty clique):
"So I'm going to do this crazy diet that will make me lose 32 pounds and blabber on at length about macronutrient ratios. Also, I'll stop being a vegetarian. And I'll develop a huge crush on a really skinny Canadian guy who is 34 but looks 22 and makes supplements for a living. Also, I'll start to read all this stuff by this British guy who has a very long beard and thinks we can cure aging. Eventually, I'll leave my extremely successful career to raise money full time for this thing that's a lot like the X Prize but involves mice."
Back before CR, my friends and I used to put away fairly impressive quantities of red wine. So they would have just figured it was the cabernet talking.
It all turned out well. I mean here I am, happy, healthy, feeling great about my life, doing work that is extremely important to me, and watching my mother feed catfood to a pair of geese who have taken up residence on her patio.
I don't know what CR will change about your life. If you're a woman, and if you've always been at war with your body, and you find that CR helps you lose weight and give your body the nutrients it needs, you will discover a way of living that you never thought possible. I don't know what you'll decide to do with all the energy you no longer expend in that ubiquitous American woman fat guilt, but I know you'll find a great way to spend your time that makes you happy. I'm so proud of my bloggiefriends who have lost weight and gotten healthy and are enjoying their new CR lives. One of the happiest moments of my blogger journey so far was when one of my bloggiefriends said she had lost 20 pounds and was wearing cute jeans again! Yea! Living a long time is great, but the brothers don't always understand what an amazing thing it is to love the body you're living in now!
People who don't do CR always talk about what a sacrifice it would be. I don't find it so. Doing CR has made such a positive change in my life that I can't imagine how a Dunkin Donuts bagel with cream cheese could possibly compete. Of course it's easier for women, where society reinforces skinniness as the ideal of beauty. But I'm not all that skinny... I would contend that even at 105, you wouldn't see me and think "She's skinny." You'd just think I was younger than I am and slim.
Eating more protein has been the key for me. I look at my detox week diet, and I see protein and unsaturated fats. My eggwhite breakfast with flax oil, my yummy, easy lunch with kale salad and cottage cheese. I just ate my brewers yeast and veggies dinner. One thing I find I do is compress my meals into a rather short period during the day. For instance, today I ate breakfast at ten. Lunch at 12. Dinner at 5. But I'll be full for the rest of the night. I'll go out with my mom tonight and have a nice cup of herbal tea with my calcium chewy supplement and be very satisfied. One thing that's weird for me when I'm at MR's house (I mean aside from the fact that after years of whining that I would never meet a guy who holds my interest for more than two dates I've met a guy who could fascinate me for 1000 years!) is that we eat breakfast an hour and twenty minutes after waking, and I'm not really hungry yet. I usually sit on the floor drinking coffee while he chops veggies for our breakfast salad, and we talk CR. By the time we sit down to breakfast, I'm awake, but I'm not hungry. Still, I enjoy my eggwhites. And I enjoy asking my CR guru all my CR questions while he eats a giant salad that would take me an entire day to consume.
I'm so happy for all of my bloggiefriends who are taking control of their health. It's great fun, isn't it?
posted by April @ 9:10 PM
2 Comments:
At 7:09 PM,
Mary Robinson said…
Don't you feel like you are insane to listen to the same song over and over. I do - but I do it anyway. I get "addicted" to the song and have to listen to it 100 times until I get saturated.
Steely Dan is one of my old faves too. Lately, I went through a Jools Holland mania. And the current fixation is Al Green - who I missed entirely in my youth - I still have about 50 times I can listen to "Love and Happiness" and still be entranced.
I did my blog tonight before I read yours. Boy, were we on the same wavelength!
At 6:05 AM,
Martha M. Smith (Marti) said…
Help for Mid-Life Eating Disorders
April--I thought that some of your readers might like to know about the work now being done with eating disorders of mid-life women. Lots of binge eating as well as the usual. I know how this works since I was in that spiral for a long time. What a joy it has been for me to get into some healthy eating habits with Weight Watchers and April's good CR practice. Now 65 pounds later I'm living a very different life.
I'm getting stronger every day.
VSM
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