The Effortless Beauty

May

Going it Alone

by J

Something must be said about the little joy of going to watch a movie on your own. It’s something I discovered by accident awhile ago, when I found myself with a few rare spare hours and nothing to do – I happened to walk past the cinema then so bought a ticket for whatever movie was on next, some really bad thriller with a Halle Berry lookalike.

now, since I’ve been taking time off recently, I’ve been doing this a lot more – usually spontaneously when I’m near a cinema and find myself with lots of free time (which is always these days!), or sometimes planned, like today, when I drove out with the sole intention of spending a few splendid hours all by myself in a cinema hall.

I don’t know what it is – but a movie is somehow so much more exciting and enjoyable when you’re watching it by yourself. Go in the afternoon or mornings when there’s only about 6 people in the theatre with you, book yourself a seat right in the middle of a bunch of empties and sit with your legs up. I can only describe that whole solitary experience as an extremely LOVELY one, and if there’s ever a definition for what it means to have your own space and get lost in it – this is absolutely it.

Categories: Musings

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May

TRA: Week 5

by J

It’s been a bit shit this week. First of all, the results from my last weigh-in were nuts – everything went back to what it was before. My weight went up, fat percentage went back up, muscle went back down, cms all went waaaaaaay up to what I was before. I was gutted – a whole month’s work for nothing?

This was weird, especially as the first thing Beth and Bryan had both exclaimed when they saw me was how much slimmer / fitter I looked now. Actually, a lot of people around me have been saying they see a difference and that the program must be working because I’ve toned up and slimmed down.

But not the scales or the measuring tape – oh no. They had a whole other opinion. Fuckers.

Thankfully, i found out later that results can fluctuate around the time of your period. And since I bloat like a whole bouncy castle just before my period, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that my measurements were so way off.

I was told not to cheat this week (hah). But then I had a real bad spell of wanting to just lock myself in my room with the xanax again and hide from the world. (yes yes, there are more good days now but there are also still bad days). So for about 4 days, the only thing that got me out of bed was having to eat that damn breakfast and drink the bloody shake. I also wasn’t in the mood to be healthy and all that jazz. I just wanted to eat Linda McCartney’s veggie sausages all the time.

Also haven’t been able to go to the gym because I’ve successfully bashed up my thigh muscle and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better. The medicated relief plasters I was putting on to reduce the pain gave me a rash – typical. I’m just not destined to exercise :p I’d be much better of sitting at home with a whole treacle tart to myself.

So heck, my weigh-in is probably going to be even more crappy tomorrow.

Categories: The Right Approach (TRA)

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May

How To Put Your Life Back Together: Rest

by J

I’ve been hanging out at home alone a lot these days – there is a remarkable peace in just sitting in the dark and being quiet. I’ve had enough of being busy all the time, and now, I’m reclaiming years of lost weekends and… rest!

Rest is under-rated. I think you might have seen my earlier post about sorting out your health and how, in the world we live in now, rest is pooh-poohed away as something only for the weak. In our over-achieving, over-aching, competitive need to keep going keep going keep going, we forget that there really is a thing as a burn out, or hitting a wall. Boom! I’ve hit the wall, so hard it almost split my forehead.

I keep screaming this thing about how if I worked just 8 hours a day, the quality (and quantity) of work that I’d be able to deliver (all wrapped nicely too, with a polka dotted bow) would be far better than if I just worked and worked and worked, 15 hours a day or whatever it is, non stop non stop non stop. Because I tell ya, once you hit that wall, no matter how many hours you force your nose to the grindstone, nothing decent ever comes out. For a long time, nobody would believe me, but then again, I guess it’s hard to these days, when we fill up our schedules with endless appointments and meetings and assignments and deadlines; followed by dinners and drinks and coffees and suppers. You couldn’t imagine what it would possibly be like to have a whole hour with nothing penned into it. But heck, I don’t really care anymore if nobody believes me. I’m going to do just what I want to – and that includes rest.

A wonderful friend, Anne Jones, said to me only recently that the best way to tell if something is wrong is to listen first and foremost to your physical body – it will tell you all that you need to know. And I am learning now more than ever how true this is. (There are also plenty of books out there which explain that the body reacts physiologically and physically to situations far before we are even aware of it mentally or emotionally. Read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, it’s fantastic).

This extends into things like eating – being more mindful about the foods we’re eating and how we’re eating. It extends into intuitive feelings that you literally and physically feel in the pit of your stomach, in your sweaty palms, in breathlessness etc (another post on that soon). It extends to that simple but powerful action of recognising that your body just doesn’t feel right and that you need to do something about it – right down to the basics of sleep and physical rest, or in some cases, physical exercise, sunshine and fresh air.

I thought Anne was oversimplifying things when she told me to listen to my body. But it’s Mind Over Matter, isn’t it? I would tell myself over and over, Mind over matter Mind over matter Mind over matter. I believed that if I was going to be in that complex business of working with my mind, if I was going to be a huge raving success of a legend, then I shouldn’t let a little tiredness and sleep deprivation get in the way of this Great Mind.

Thing is, if we’re going to think like that, then we may as well believe that we’re immortal, that we can jump off the 33rd floor and fly, that we can go for days without eating, that we can fart rainbows. And yes, while there may well be famous Yogis in India or the Himalayas or in some fantastical temple somewhere who perhaps can fly and go for days without eating, that would have been with years of physical training; not just because they decided, one day, that it was mind over matter and they would wake up the next morning and jump off the edge of a Himalayan cliff.

What I mean to say is that like it or not, our body does have physical limits and physical reactions to things. We’re all just bigger versions of a test-tube – the simple, basic scientific products of biology. That means our palms sweat when we’re nervous, we feel hungry, we need to fart sometimes, we have pain, we get pimples, we get fat if we eat too much (well, most of us), and our bodies sometimes, get a little tired. No matter how much we’d like to think we’re an impervious X-man with extraordinary powers, we’re probably not – our bodies, more often than not, know our limits and what we really need, and it could do a world of good to listen to this person that’s closest to us – ourselves.

Rest – is that too much to ask for?

So I’m enjoying this thing called rest. If I want to jump back into bed after breakfast these days, I will (well okay, for just a few more months, I don’t suppose I can do this forever – I’ll get bored at some point. There is also such a thing as sleeping too much!).

I’m earning about RM1,000 for a day’s worth of writing at the moment. Not too shabby, I think. I could be happy with that, or I could keep going keep going keep going to overwork, overachieve and get RM10,000 a week. But heck, is it really worth it?

I’m choosing to listen to my body and right now, it’s saying no, it’d rather have a nap today.

Categories: Health, How To Put Your Life Back Together

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May

Mobile phone

by J

I was watching Hitchcock’s Psycho the other day, and there’s this scene where the private investigator Arbogast has just finished checking out Bates Motel and needs to ring back to Lila to tell her what he’s found out. So he drives off to find a pay phone. Suspense, thrills and great black&white movies aside, all I could think of was “Gosh, it must have sucked back then not to have mobile phones.”

Up until only very, very recently, I would have what you could probably call a chronic dependency on my mobile phone. I’d check it precisely every 5 minutes. I couldn’t get through writing a single paragraph without checking my messages about 5 times in the process. (It probably didn’t help lah, that my phone would also beep constantly and every message was a potentially important / catastrophic / monumental one).

I would check my phone about 5 times when I went to bed at night… or as many times as it beeped until I fell asleep. I became so precisely tuned to the beep on my phone that I would hear it every time it beeped throughout the night. When I woke up, the first thing I would do was to check my phone (and find, on average, about 70 – 110 new, unread messages).

It got so bad one day that I heard my phone beep a few times (several messages coming in all at once, which was normal for every 15 minutes) and burst into tears. It was all I could do not to throw the phone off my 2nd floor balcony, but I couldn’t of course because I was as dependent on it as I was averse to it. What if Something Important came through just as I threw it off the balcony? Horror.

I would check my phone at traffic lights, while I was taking a poop, while waiting for a meeting to start, as I walked from one side of the room to the other, while the barista was totting up the cost of my coffee – just about every single moment when I wasn’t doing something else. I would check my whatsapp messages, text messages, emails, Facebook. Then, to “relax” in between the messages, I would check Instagram, Pinterest; for “maintenance”, I would go through the thousands of photos I was getting weekly and delete the ones that had been repeatedly sent 11 times. It was a real, proper, true-to-life addiction.

But now I’m trying a revolutionary new thing, and it has transformed a HUGE part of what I understand Peace to be.

See, I’m in a new space now and it is very, very magically, wonderfully quiet. I have the Grand Luxury of being Totally Alone and Not Answering My Phone the first nanosecond that it beeps. So about a week ago I decided that just for one evening I would turn my phone to silent. I haven’t turned the sound back on since.

And I must say – what incredible, unexpected, unadulterated, beautiful, soundless, peaceful, stress-free BLISS it has been. Now, I leave my phone at home (for a whole 3 hours!) when I go to the gym. I don’t check my phone at a traffic light, I just breathe and listen to the radio instead. I can now sit next to my phone for hours, not check it and – wonder upon wonders – actually forget that it’s even there.

Freedom from your phone has just got to be the best healing therapy ever. There is a whole genre of peace just within not having to check your phone. Every professional should have a phone retreat a few weeks a year and it should be written into companies’ health policies and office codes. Doctors should recommend it as a whole treatment of its own.

So okay, maybe the question shouldn’t be how they lived without a handphone back in the 1950s. It should be how are we’re living – frazzled, panicked, addicted, obsessive-compulsive – with one now.

Categories: Musings

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May

You really should just eat that piece of cake

by J

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking (and looking at myself in the mirror) since I’ve been on this TRA programme thing. See, I’ve always been a chubby girl – pleasantly plump, as one friend described me – and battling the bulge has been a lifetime challenge for me. I’ve just never been the kind of girl that people would describe as slim and it has been a sore point of agony my entire life, a complete and total obsession.

So just diet and exercise, lah, I hear you say.

Well yes, but see, I also LOVE food and as much as it makes sense to go on a diet and just be really strict about what I keep shoving down my mouth, I really just LOVE food. So there’s this eternal battle between wanting to eat unlimited copious amounts of doughnuts and wanting to have Anna Kournikova’s body. I’m sure I’m not alone in this eternal fatty conundrum.

But I’ve also been doing a lot of reading of writings on body image, challenging beauty stereotypes, accepting different body shapes and identities, body confidence and that kind of thing. And I find myself, slowly, surely and happily letting go of that all-consuming, obsessive need to lose weight.

Instead (and TRA helps with this), I’ve decided to focus on being healthy and getting fit instead. The rest will follow: body confidence, feeling physically and emotionally good about the body, acceptance of different body shapes (i.e. it’s really okay if I don’t have a body that looks like Anna Kournikova’s). And, as a bonus, I might also lose a little weight and drop a few inches around the waistline.

Sounds like common sense really. It’s very obvious stuff. But you’d be surprised how often health is the last thing on our minds when we’re trying to just lose kilos: crash diets, new fangled detoxes, that whole deprivate-binge-starvation-binge cycle we love to get ourselves into.

If we focused on just being healthy and balanced instead, it becomes much easier. Then we won’t be so inclined to deprive ourselves of yummy things, nor stuff ourselves sick on it. We won’t feel awful every time we step on the scale and see that we haven’t lost 0.1 kilo since this morning. We won’t agonise so much about wanting to look like Kate Moss nor beat ourselves up when the buttons start to feel a bit snug.

With the TRA thing, I’m focusing more on getting my fat percentage and visceral fats down (because that’s what causes bad health and illness in the long-term), and increasing my muscle percentage so my body burns and works more efficient. I’m focusing not on stopping myself from eating or cutting out cupcakes, but focusing on eating the right amounts of the right foods. And heck, cupcakes, as far as I’m concerned, can also be a ‘right food’ if eaten in healthy-enough, moderate doses.

I’ve learn that it’s not so much about how much you’re eating, but what you’re eating. I’ve found that by eating good foods (home-cooked too), I’m getting to eat much bigger, more satisfying portions than I usually would when I was just eating rubbish on the go. And I’m feeling physically good about it – not that icky, sick feeling you get when you’ve just gorged on a packet of crisps, thinking that’ll do for lunch!

I’ve figured that if I sort out my health, my body will adjust itself to be where it needs to be at its optimal best, whether that means I stay the size I am or drop 3 dress sizes. If I’m healthy and happy on the inside, then what does it really matter what’s going on on the outside – if people aren’t happy with the way I look or think I’m still “fat”, then I’ll just have to tell them to go eat some cake and find a better way to feel better about themselves other than picking on someone’s fat quotient.

Also, it helps to think of really healthy looking, balanced and body-happy (not necessarily super skinny) people and take inspiration from them – people like Pink, Beyonce, Anne Hathaway, Lena Dunham, Tyra Banks spring to mind, to name only a few. Remember too that being thin doesn’t necessarily guarantee good health or a long life. (and no, this is NOT a bashing session of thin people either!). My dad’s side of the family are all Skinny Minnies. They just can’t put on weight. But they’re also filled with a family history of diabetes, high blood pressure, gout, cancer heart attacks – okay, just about every bad thing in the book. My mum’s side of the family are all large as mountains, they love their snacks, they eat honey in tablespoons straight from the jar. And… they have no health problems. No diabetes, no heart problems, no cancer, no cholesterol, nothing. Just really long, healthy, jolly lives filled with cake.

Now I’m not advocating eating honey straight from a jar or gorging on cake; I’m also not saying that thin people have it wrong or that it’s wrong to be thin (goodness knows thin people have issues with body-confidence, health and all the rest of it too!). I am saying that it’s important to refocus on health instead of mere weight, for weight is only a small part of health, whether you think you’re too fat or too thin. Enjoy the process of eating delicious things, getting proper rest, exercising and learning just to feel physically good. How much we underestimate that wonderfulness of just feeling physically good – everything else falls into place if we can only just achieve that.

It’s not hard. Your body tells you what it likes so just listen to it I myself have been out of whack for a long time and I’d quite forgotten how nice it is just to feel physically good, as I do now. It was only when I started listening to my body and what felt okay or not okay that I realised just how much has been wrong with it for ages. Now that I’m paying more attention to health than just my dress size, I’m really learning what feels right and more importantly, learning how to enjoy feeling right.

One last thing: I’ve also found it useful, reassuring and confidence-building to get regular health check-ups (just a normal blood test at your local GP once a year or so). If things are in order and there aren’t any real alarming factors in your results, then celebrate. Feel really truly pleased and grateful to be alive, and to have all your faculties and health in tact.

Then go eat some cake (or a jar of honey, or a peanut-butter kit-kat, or whatever it is that makes you rumbly in your tumbly).

Categories: Food, Health

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May

Rainbow coloured magic

by J

Now I’m not usually one to do a hard-sell on a product. I am very scared of insurance and direct-sales agents. But I just HAVE to talk about this because it is magic and amazing and if it didn’t look so stupid, I might actually start building an altar to this bottle of stuff.

Shu Uemura’s Tsuya is REALLY TrulyMadlyDeeply amazing.

Being the cynical disbeliever I am (even as a giant fan of all things Shu Uemura), I would never believe that a bottle of stuff could make a difference. What nonsense. But they gave me a little free sample bottle to try and bam! I’m hooked. After a week, I felt like a whole new woman. It’s not like the usual rubbish they tell you at makeup counters, that this cream will do this and that! This one really does what it says it will – brighten, smoothen and reduce all that ugly dank sallow yellowness that loves to grow around Chinese faces.

And the serum itself is rainbow colored. I don’t know how they do it, but really – it’s shiny and silvery and when the light shines on it, rainbow colored rays radiate from it. It’s like when you open the bottle, you’re suddenly transported to a land of My Little Ponies, where clouds are made of cotton candy, and there are magical talking animals, and rainbows fly around the sky all day. How can you NOT love that they’ve packaged a rainbow into a bottle?

Categories: Beauty

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May

Happy Days

by J

I have decided to be happy now. (hah!! I hear you say).

Let’s see how long it lasts this time. I feel like I’m on some kind of crazy swinging pendulum right now – going from the extremes of rage and sadness to mad, tripped-out happy clarity. At least I know that I have it in me to have these moments of happiness. I had a hair wash and massage yesterday and felt like it was the best thing in the world – I was so happy just sitting there getting my hair washed. The day before that, I bought a bottle of Tsuya skin essence from Shu Uemura and that was enough to keep me happy for the rest of the day. Little things – they add up and help. The theory is that if I focus enough on them, then maybe it’ll balance out the pendulum a bit.

Or I could just be doing that thing of sweeping things under the carpet again and pretending that everything is great when really the emotions are still bubbling away under the surface waiting to blow up like a bad bout of diarrhea.

One of the best methods that’s widely recommended for emotional pots like me is to keep a gratitude journal and to focus on the good things that we’re happy about. I started one of these a few days ago, in a bright pink new Moleskin, no less (a beautiful thing in itself that we should be grateful for!) – but then I got bogged down by wanting to punch a hole through the wall and blind someone with an ice pick. I know you’re supposed to kind of force yourself to do this gratitude thing daily, so that there’s at least one positive moment of energy a day, but I just haven’t been able to in the past week.

So here we go, I’ll put a whole week’s worth of gratitude journal entries (and more – and not in any particular order) here. Stay positive and remember the good things! (This is going to be long so I don’t expect anyone to read this really. It’s therapy for myself more than anything).

- Friends throughout the different stages of my life (in no particular order – Sharon, LiKim, Susan, Shantini, Vera, Sarah Morgan, Elisa Bray, Angie Marr, Tom Smithard, Pete Biggs, Laura May, Louise Redvers, Suzanne, Josie, Isabelle, Fang-I, Vonny, Daven, Christie Liem, Heather Behl, Farida, Jay, Berlyn, Pei Lin, Shirley, Simon Tong, Rachael, Philip Augustine, Usha, Veronica, Brenda, Angela, Nontobeko, Jenny Lee, Anne Lise, Tom Barton, Becca Smith, Adrian Butler, Andy, Samia, Dhruv, Nikos, Bruno, Sam Reynolds, Marie Cheng, Sim Sim, Louise Logan, Dessy, Thouraya, Mamiko, Jennifer Reischel, Nivi, Shilpa, Petya, Mabel, Nigel, Jenny Wade, Steph Perkins, Michelle Djekic, Milica Djekic, Karen Yu, Arlina, Tamanna, Chin Lai, Lan Shing, Krystal, Teoh, Steven Lim, Anna Chew, Miin, Alina Davis, Anansa, Aisha, Sheena, Anna Williams, Mika, Jess de Gaye, Aisha, Sheena, David Lai, Lanse, Abby, Eleni, Narumi, Sam Flannery, Tim Wheelhouse, Hayley Clarke, Christopher Heather, See Ming, Fang, Judy, Deborah, Lynsey Sumner, Lucy Poore, Vivian, Poh Lin…).

Okay, this list has become a little long and I’m sure I’ve left out loads of people too (I’m sorry if I did!). But whew, just putting this one list together has been an incredible enough exercise to remind me of the thousands of good, happy times I’ve had with every single one of them. There is much to be happy about in these memories alone.

PS if you’re found yourself on the list and feeling a bit freaked out because we haven’t actually been in touch for over 15 years or whatever, please don’t. You’re there because you have brought many happy good times to my life that I still remember, no matter how obscure and minor you might think they are.

- Having all my faculties, limbs in tact and being physically healthy – so that I can physically do pretty much anything i want to, move with ease and enjoy things like: BodyCombat, pound the shit out of the cross-trainer, drive, walk up and down stairs, walk; see, hear, listen, taste and touch wonderful things; type and write, travel freely, dance, breathe, do yoga, have the option to play lasertag, eat and drink whatever I want, have great sex, scuba dive, ride everything at Universal Studios, swim, go on picnics, wear anything I want (well, almost anything).

Gosh, how much we take for granted for what we can do when we have good health. Don’t know what you got til it’s gone (or when you’re recounting things to be grateful for)

- Shu Uemura’s make-up counter – especially in 1Utama, big shout out to Anges! Also, all the amazing things they have – the eyelashes, their Depsea skincare collection, Tsuya (!!!!), mousse foundation, pencil eyeliner, lipgloss, eyeshadows. Okay heck, everything in there.

- Family – a beautiful mum and dad who celebrate every joy I have and are there to catch me when I’m down, cousins who are always there and ready to give you a hug, laugh at your jokes and come to the rescue, aunts and uncles who love you like you’re their own children. My gong-gong who taught me all my first lessons in compassion, kindness and the magnificent joy to be found in sugar.

- Phil – who showed me that it was okay for me to really open up my heart as widely as I have and who loved me even at my worst and lowest <3

- Literature, books, writing – because this is really where my roots are, all the way from the books I read at GCSE to my university degree; because just know that there are wonderful books in the world is what has kept me buoyant, inspired, hopeful, imaginative, alive. Thank goodness – and I’m ever so grateful – for Sarah Waters, Jeanette Winterson, Jamie O’Neill, Alan Hollinghurst, Daniel DeFoe, Shakespeare, Racine, Moliere, Aeschylus, Euripides, Jack Kerouac, Sophie Kinsella, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Jane Austen, John Galsworthy, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Camus, Nerval, Vogue magazine (especially the ones from the 1920s!), Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Hanif Kureishi, Ben Okri, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Amy Tan, Evelyn Waugh (okay, this is list will go on forever).

- Cupakes – because you can’t help but feeling happier once you look at a cupcake

- The most comfortable bed in the world – and with this, I mean everything that comes with it: electricity, light, an attached bathroom (because god only knows how much you miss this when you don’t have it), running water (ditto), knowing that no matter how bad things might get, I can always be safe and quiet and peaceful here.

- Les Mills – thank you for existing and creating things like BodyCombat, BodyStep, BodyBalance and all the wonderful things that, for the first time in my life, showed me that exercise is not only possible even for flubby Janes like me but so immensely, crazily fun.

- UWC and university – where everything was possible: that wonderful hope, idealism and energy of being 18, incredible friendships that you make for life, stupid adventures that you will remember forever, intelligent, brilliant experiences, first boyfriends & kisses, those sorts of conversations you only have at that age, not caring about being fat, meeting people from all around the world (and staying friends with them for years to come) – now if only I could tap out some of that energy and botox it into my brain now.

- Gaston – my little fur baby who I rescued off the street with some friends when he was suffering the worst case of scabies and mange that the vet had ever seen, a broken pelvis and bad digestion problems. He’s big, beautiful and strong now, with a gorgeous coat of fur (well recovered from scabies!) and two years on, seems to still remember those first few months when it was just me and him and a bottle of Malaseb. He greets me and grabs hold of my trousers / skirt with his teeth every time he sees me, a sign he wants a cuddle. He’s shown me strength, endurance, patience and courage, because I’ve really never seen a being so wretched and sad as he was when we first found him.

- Good food & drink – gotta be grateful for good food. It can and does make a world of difference in the happiness quotient of things. Things like: cheese, crusty white bread, arugula, chocolate, cake, nasi lemak, sausages (Linda McCartney’s veggie ones, of course!), chips, avocados, macaroons, hummus, Marks&Spencer’s crisps, pop tarts, truffles, La Risata, yow char guai, Rakuzen, milkshakes, pizza, Boost juice, fried mushrooms, bagels, char kuay teow, laksa, mashed potatoes, nachos, cendol, rojak, Indomie, the buffets at Jakarta’s Mulia Hotel, sushi, everything on an Indian restaurant menu etc etc

- Not being in the running as a contestant on “The Biggest Loser” – see no matter how much I gripe about being fat, I am grateful that I can still fit a size 10 dress at Bebe and not want to pass out each time I climb a flight of stairs. Kudos to how hard the people on TBL work to lose the weight and this is not meant as a disrespectful jibe at them. I’m just glad I’m not that big myself because surely it would make life so much more difficult, painful, tired? (and you couldn’t fit a size 10 Bebe dress).

That’s it for today. It’s a long enough list and enough to keep me pumped and buoyed for the rest of the week. Add on other things you think create Happy Days, or what works for you. I’d love to know. Have a happy Monday and a lovely, gratitude filled, week filled with many happy days.

Tags: gratitude, happiness, happy, love
Categories: Musings

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May

TRA: Week 4

by J

Wooooh! I’m well on my way to good health! Am almost a month into the programme and really loving it. The results of my weekly weight-in have gone up and down a bit over the last 3 weeks but apparently this is to be expected in the first month or so as the body tries to balance itself and figure out why it’s suddenly being healthy again after so many years of being pumped with unhealthy shit.

At the last weigh in, my weight, fat percentage and visceral fat have dropped, and muscle percentage has increased. The cms didn’t go down though, which was a bit weird; in fact, they went up! I’m putting this down to the fact that whenever I start exercising regularly and vigorously (more on this later) and try to be healthy, my body usually gets a bit bigger / bulks and bloats up a bit before it goes back down. I see the beginnings of a more toned tummy though (I can’t dare to call them proper abs yet!). So I hope it’s nothing to be worried about.

Have also been hitting the gym more furiously than ever. It’s been the best way to manage all the incredible rage I’ve got running around inside me. I’ve found myself so full of rage, so angry, that I literally feel like I’m going to be violent and start punching out walls. But rage can be useful, I think, when channeled in the right way – it’s been the fuel for some of the best novels, songs, journalism etc in history after all. So I go to insane combat classes and pound the shit out of the air (it helps to visualise the people or things you’re so intensely angry at), and / or pound the shit out of the cardio machines for 2 hours until I feel so completely exhausted that I don’t have enough energy anymore to feel angry.

Additional benefits of pounding the shit out of things at the gym: I sleep better, I will (hopefully) lose some cms around the flabby parts and best of all, I feel I have the excuse to eat a bit more cake for the week. Yum!

Also, because you need to take these carb and fat blocker pills (all herb-based, no chemicals, yay!) before meals and to drink a nutrient-loaded meal-replacement shake, I’m finding that it’s magically making me have less cravings, less inclinations to snack and overeat. In fact, (and I would never have believed I’d say this), I’m finding myself forcing myself to finish my meals now because I get full up so quickly. And there really must be something magical in this program, because I really am eating loads (I’ve been cooking my own meals and have terribly poor judgment of food portions, so I end up with oversized bowls of food), but the results are still good, my fats are still dropping and I’m physically looking slimmer too.

Still a damned long way to go… but at least I’m headed in the right direction!

Tags: diet, eating, exercise, fat, fit, gym, health, skinny, weight, weight management
Categories: The Right Approach (TRA)

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May

The Perfectionist

by J

My perfectionist tendencies are so pronounced they’ve become a bit of a joke between me and my friends – we laugh about my neurotic, impossible thoughts, the way that I start haemorrhaging at the mere sight of a spelling error or beat myself up if I do so much as print out a wrong document.

I don’t know why it is that I’ve become like this, that anything remotely bad becomes catastrophic – and well, in my tiny worldview, just about everything, if not completely bad, could always be better. Then I discovered this book, Being Happy by Tal Ben-Shahar which, for the first time in my short but agonised 31 years of life, perfectly describes that mean, self-effacing, punishing Perfectionist persona that I have so artfully honed over the years. As far as definitions (and ironies) go, I am the perfect personification and embodiment of the Perfectionist that Ben-Shahar describes in every line of every page of that book.

According to Ben-Shahar, there are three main things that characterise a perfectionist:
- intense fears of failure
- rejection of difficult or painful emotions
- chronic inability to accept or appreciation success

Ultimately, what this means is that the perfectionist creates this little utopia inside her head and can never (or doesn’t want to) face reality – which has failure, difficult & painful emotions, ups & downs and *shock horror* real successes that can be celebrated.

This is completely true. I have a perfect vision of how everything should be done – from a trip to the mall, to writing that perfect article, to getting the perfect grades at school, to relationships, to even cooking a meal. Any slight hiccup or deviation from that planned trajectory upsets my world tremendously and frightens me. I cannot bear the thought of that vision / plan going wrong or going any other way than what I think it should be. Should something go wrong, it becomes catastrophic for me. If one little thing upsets the plan, I must give it up entirely because I am convinced, utterly and completely, that it has been doomed to fail from the onset.

Then, that messy, yucky thing about emotions: if something bad happens or if I feel anything at all uncomfortable, unpleasant or painful, I will do only one of two things – I “ruminate over the emotions obsessively” or I pop Xanax, one after another after another, and sleep, because when you sleep, you don’t have to face or feel the emotions. You can numb them out. (Hence my previous post). The book talks about how truly happy people are able to accept their emotions, see them for what they are, let them rise and stay and then finally go away. I can’t. For me, the emotions either move in with their entire extended family, or they shouldn’t be there at all. The problem with this, Ben-Shahar explains, is that when you block off negative emotions, you also block the good stuff. So perfectionists exist either in a constantly tormented state or they’re anaesthetised to feeling anything.

And success. Well, no, I don’t really know what it means to enjoy success because as far as I’m concerned, it could always be better, more, bigger. When I wrote my book and people congratulated me, I felt perhaps they were saying it only because they were my friends. In my own reality, I hated the book. When I got to the end of it, I thought of scrapping the whole thing and starting again. I hated that it wasn’t as good or as successful as a JK Rowling volume, or written as eloquently and beautifully as a Jeanette Winterson novella. It was, and will probably always be, just mediocre.

I don’t expect rousing cheers or sympathy when I feel this way. It’s not some kind of reverse psychology to fish for compliments and I resent it when people think that this is what it’s about, or when they double up on the cheerleading because all it does it highlight to me really just how unsatisfied I am with what I’m doing / feeling / fearing.

As well as outlining the traits of a perfectionist, Ben-Shahar also presents the happier alternative – the Optimalist (not to be confused with an Optimist), who is someone who will make the best (optimal) out of every situation, who is flexible enough to accept reality for what it is, warts and all, and adjust himself to enjoy the experiences along every journey, the good, the bad and the ugly. (The perfectionist doesn’t care about the journey – she just wants to get to the goal, as quickly and as painlessly as possible.)

So there are plenty of exercises in the book that I will need to work through, which make me cringe to even think of doing them because I know it will mean having to face some of those nasty emotions, and also because the exercises are about a journey in themselves; the perfectionist in me is already revolting. She’s asking why I need to spend so much time, so much energy and effort on this. Where is that magic switch that I could just flick to go straight from Perfectionist to Optimalist in as little time as possible?

But Being Happy isn’t about making that sudden switch from being a pure Perfectionist to a happy-clappy, Brady Bunch Optimalist. It explains that all of us exist somewhere on a continuum between the two, and the point of the book is to try to get us to move more towards the Optimalist side of the scale. It’s going to be a hard journey. A lot of the descriptions about Optimalists and the way they react (so much more positively) to situations around them feel completely foreign to me. I just can’t understand how someone can be so happy about accepting things as they are, actually accepting failure and using them as springboards for feeling happier. It’s about as real to me as a story about rainbow-coloured unicorns…. and you know it’s not easy to find a rainbow-coloured unicorn.

I’ve only just finished reading the book though and now the real work begins. More insights along the way as I (try to) learn to let go of the many tight bonds I’ve wrapped around myself and let loose a little. A perfectionist begins her journey to being less than perfect – and to enjoy it.

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May

How to Feel

by J

Even if you’ve managed to get yourself out of an unhappy place, there will often be times when you still Just. Feel. Awful.

And there will be most definitely be people around you who will tell you that you shouldn’t feel that way, you’re already out of it so you should just let it go and move on. That’s all easier said than done. When I first left, I tried to live by that. I’d tell myself that I wasn’t in that physical place anymore and I wasn’t surrounded by things / people / situations / talk that were so upsetting anymore. I’d shove all the unpleasant feelings under a very thick carpet and pretend that I was alright.

But I’m sure we all know that carpets – no matter how thick – can only hide a certain amount of crap before it starts to bulge in a giant mound and then, one day, explode in a mess or trip someone up. A few weeks after leaving, I suddenly felt everything come up again. There I was in my room minding my own business when the carpet exploded and everything came flying out all around me. I felt awful.

When I tried to speak about it, some people still told me again, that I was thinking about things unnecessarily. I was out of the situation already, so why get upset about it? Just let it go. It shouldn’t affect me anymore.

Except of course, that it did. You can’t invest your whole life, love, heart, soul, thoughts, time for 8 years into something and then just step out and it’s all left behind. It’s like being in a relationship for that long a time and then being told that you shouldn’t miss that person anymore when you break up. You. Just. Can’t.

When the feelings came back, they came back stronger than ever and I could no longer pretend that they weren’t there. There just wasn’t any more space under that imaginary carpet (even if I do have an exaggerated imagination). I met up with a friend and emotionally vomited everything out – all my sadness, resentment, hurt, disappointments, fears – and amazingly, she sat through the whole two hours and listened like it was the most important thing in the world (You know who you are, and thank you).

Then she said this, just a little bit of wisdom that has helped in such a tremendous way. She said, “You know Jamie, those feelings will be there. And you have to know that they will be for a while. You should accept that – accept the feelings, know that they’re there and feel them. Don’t try to fight them or deny them because those feelings will be there for awhile. It’s okay to acknowledge all that anger or sadness or whatever, and feel them. Cry if you have to. It’s okay.”

It’s okay. Just like that.

It’s okay not to feel like an impervious Wonder Woman straightaway. I felt like I had been given permission to just… feel. And what a strange relief it was.

Thing is I’m still struggling with how to do this. I don’t really know what it means to just sit in an emotion and watch it or acknowledge it. I find myself swinging to extremes – either I pretend it’s not there or I plunge myself into it completely and obsess over it like it’s going out of fashion.

The truth is, I think, that I’m just too afraid to see that emotion for what it is or to really face it, like it’s a beast in my head. It’s there, it feels unpleasant and well, truth to be told, I’d really rather not look it in the face.

God, I’m just way too fucked up for my own good.

Categories: Musings

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