The Goddess Is Fat

Tags

american iconography, body image, cholesterol count, communities, doggedness, family, fearlessness, friends, Goddess, health, healthy-living, Inanna, mental-health, peg streep, persistence, responsibility, stubbornness, sumerian goddess, weight loss

Inanna ~ Fat Goddess

It wasn’t always a crime against nature for women to be fat. In many societies, it still isn’t. In America, it is.

Never mind that more than 35% of American women are considered obese. Men have caught up, by the way; more than 35% of men are considered clinically obese as well. If you examine the statistics more deeply, you’ll see that rates of obesity are higher in lower income groups, and higher among non-whites. Very few members of the 1% are obese. For the most part, it’s not a #RichPeopleProblem.

Is it possible to be fat, and be healthy? Yes, it is.
I’m fat. I swim laps four times a week. My IQ is higher than my cholesterol count. I can walk four or five miles before I feel any discomfort. My blood pressure is normal. I do not have diabetes. I cook from scratch almost every day, using organic meat, fish, poultry, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, legumes, olive oil, real butter, and no salt. We don’t drink soda in our house; we drink black coffee with breakfast, wine with dinner, and water the rest of the time. We avoid fast food and almost all processed foods. We eat real cheese, and drink skim milk. Where we go off the reservation is in portion control, but we’re working on that. We’ve both lost a significant amount of weight since I started swimming and walking in January.

When you see someone who is fat, what is your first thought?

The modern American iconography of fat is this:
Lazy
Stupid
Poor
Incompetent
Unemployed/Underemployed
Single
Unloved
Lonely
Depressed

Fat represents abundance, riches, sumptuousness, plenty in ancient cultures. The goddesses of pre-Christian times were portrayed as being ample of hip and thigh, buxom, callipygian.

The goddess illustration I posted above was one I did for Peg Streep’s book Altars Made Easy. Her name is Inanna, and she is the Sumerian Goddess of fertility, sexual love, and warfare.
She is said to have indulged in many behaviors that, in our culture, are now reserved primarily to skinny supermodel reality show housewives who have had extensive plastic surgery to enhance what God gave them.
Inanna came by her attributes naturally, though. She also took down a MOUNTAIN that offended her. Really, you have to be careful about what you say about certain fat goddesses.

I’m writing and posting this as a reminder that, as there are trends in fashion and music, there are also trends in thought. It’s trendy now to cite obesity as one of the things that is really wrong with America. If you want to know more about the truth behind this trend, read Fat Politics or The Obesity Myth.
If you want to see the kind of things that fat prejudice leads to, watch the video of Karen Kline being bullied by her charges on the school bus. She’s now almost $700,000 richer, thanks to the Indiegogo fundraiser that Max Sidorov started on her behalf. The bullies have been suspended from school for a year.

Just to be clear, I am not saying that being fat makes me better than any skinny woman with the same talents and experience as me. I am saying that it’s another one of my characteristics (middle-aged, white, half-Croatian, half-Greek, lapsed Catholic, aspiring Christian, liberal Democrat, artist/writer, creative type, stubborn, persistent, intelligent, no-nonsense, hard-working, pragmatic, idealistic are some others).

I am not my fat.
I AM MY SELF.

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Followup to “Are You Prejudiced?”

Tags

backstroke, body image, breaststroke, bullying, communities, conflict resolution, confrontation, doggedness, epithet, exercise, family, fast lane, fat prejudice, fearlessness, freestyle, friends, gain fitness, health, healthy-living, insult, intermediate lane, lap lanes, lifeguard, responsibility, slow lane, stubbornness, weight loss, YMCA

I want to thank each and every one of you who commented, retweeted, reblogged, shared on Facebook, and responded privately. I have never had this kind of a response to one of my blogposts. I will reply to each comment you posted.
I have touched a sensitive nerve among women (and men) of size, and all the people who love us.
I so appreciate the outpouring of love, support and concern. I want to reassure you that there is NOTHING and NO ONE that will stop me from exercising my membership rights at the Flushing Y.
I pay, therefore I swim; end of story.

As I said I would, on Sunday night, as soon as I posted Are You Prejudiced, I forwarded my post to the Flushing Y’s Executive Director, Coordinator of Membership & Communications, Senior Director of Membership/Healthy Lifestyles, and Coordinator of Aquatics.
This is the note I attached to the forward:

My Bad Experience at the Flushing Y Today
Dear Mr. Nelson, Ms. Martell, Mr. Stabenfeldt, and Mr. Garcia,
Attached below is a blogpost I wrote and posted about an incident that happened to me at the Flushing Y this morning.
I want to reassure you that your staff was very sympathetic and kind to me. The lifeguard I referenced in my post, Opal, acted in the only way she felt she could. I spoke with Blair later, on my way out of the pool, and she assured me that the behavior I experienced would not be tolerated under her watch. Luisa, at Member Services, was kind enough to give me Mr. Stabenfeldt’s and Mr. Garcia’s email addresses when I told her what happened to me.
My question to you, after you read my post below, is this:
Is the Flushing Y a “safe” environment (emotionally, socially, culturally) for an overweight person to go to lose weight and gain fitness?
If you contend that it is, how will you handle experiences like the one I had today in the future?
Thank you for your time. I would appreciate a response.
~Claudia Karabaic Sargent
Member 065100029

On Monday afternoon, Mr. Stabenfeldt left a voice mail on my cell, expressing concern and offering to meet with me. I called him on Tuesday morning and arranged to see him before the mid-day adult open swim session.
I brought a legal pad and my swim fins, along with my usual swimming accoutrements. (The swim fins were for my twice-a-week drills; the legal pad was for meeting notes.)

I was very encouraged by our meeting. Mr. Stabenfeldt reassured me that there is, in fact, an official Code of Conduct that specifies that violations in the form of the use of derogatory language and/or the use of threatening gestures may result in suspension or termination of membership. This Code of Conduct is currently posted only in the Fitness Center. I asked why that was; he said they had just finished re-branding all the Y’s materials and were in the process of posting the new materials.
I said that the Code of Conduct should be translated into Spanish, Korean, and Chinese (at minimum– this is the most ethnically diverse county in the USA, after all) and posted in all public areas, including at both the large and small pools and in every locker room and public area.
Mr. Stabenfeldt printed out a copy for me; I scanned it and am posting it here for the record. So far, I have been unable to find it anywhere on the Flushing Y’s newly redesigned website, but it may be caught up in the rebranding.

Flushing YMCA Code of Conduct, July 2012

I will follow up if this Code of Conduct is not posted in the public areas within the week. I think it’s an important document for both members and staff to be able to point to in a discussion about civility and (in)appropriate behaviors.

He told me that they have a Manager-On-Duty (M.O.D.) system in place; that means there is an executive-level manager on site at all times. He said that if something like what happened to me ever happened again, I should ask for that person immediately.
I said that information should be posted as well. Members should be aware that there is a higher level of recourse if they are not getting the response they need from the first level of staff.
I asked why the young lifeguard never gave me the option to speak to the M.O.D.
He confirmed my thought that she was new; she had only ever worked with the kids’ swim teams on weekday afternoons. Sunday was her first adult open swim. He and her supervisor were taking the opportunity my incident presented to reinforce training with all of their staff.
He apologized for what happened to me and reassured me that the kind of behavior to which I was subjected was not and would not be tolerated.

I thanked him, and the Membership Coordinator who briefly joined us, and left his office to go up to the locker rooms.

I changed and then went down to the large pool, and swam for ninety minutes (1/2 hour breaststroke laps, 45 minutes of freestyle stroke  and butterfly kick drills with swim fins, 15 minutes mixed stroke laps).

There were no bullies in sight.
If any should come along and try to mess with me again, you know I’ll deal with them. Not just for myself, but for every one of you who was ever bullied out of a physical activity you truly loved.
We have rights, too, and we should NEVER be afraid to exercise them.

Happy Independence Day!

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Are You Prejudiced?

Tags

backstroke, body image, breaststroke, bullying, communities, confrontation, epithet, exercise, fast lane, fat prejudice, fearlessness, freestyle, health, insult, intermediate lane, lap lanes, lifeguard, responsibility, slow lane, weight loss, YMCA

I had a really bad experience today.
I was bullied and insulted out of a lap lane at my local Y by an adult woman. She was not a child or a teenager; she was at least 30 years old.  She was aggressive and confrontational; she pursued me into the adjoining lane after I left the lane I’d been swimming in.

This is what happened:
I got to my Y at 10 o’clock this morning. It was practically empty, because this was the first Sunday of the summer schedule; very few people were aware that the large pool had opened an hour earlier than usual.

There were only about ten people swimming, mostly in the shallow end, when I got there. The three lap lanes were empty. There was one young female lifeguard. There was no music. It was blissfully quiet. I thought it would be a perfect day to swim laps, at least until the pool got more crowded as we got closer to the regular opening time of 11AM.

I breaststroked out to the deep end, and asked the lifeguard if the lap lanes were open to swimmers wanting to use them. She said they were, and so, after warming up with a few more laps, I made my way across the deep end of the fast and intermediate lanes. The slow lane (the one I use) is the one against the far wall, across the the full width of the pool.

It was empty, and it was bliss. I swam several full sets of laps (breast/elementary back/free/back). As I was just past midway through a backstroke lap, my hand brushed against the shoulder of an elderly gentleman who had just joined me in the slow lane, and who was swimming freestyle in the opposite direction. I see Peter almost every Sunday; we often open the pool together. I apologized for brushing against him and we each continued swimming, him toward the deep end, me toward the shallow end. I passed the line of flags; in my peripheral vision, I could almost see the ladder at the pool’s end. My right hand brushed against another body; I righted myself, being almost at the wall, and turned to see a woman in a black swimsuit, black cap, and dark goggles, glaring at me.
The intermediate lane and fast lane were still empty of swimmers; the open swim area still had only about ten people in it, mostly in the shallow end.

“So sorry”, I said.
“WATCH WHERE YOU’RE GOING” she stormed. “JUST BECAUSE YOU’RE SWIMMING BACKWARDS DOESN’T MEAN YOU DON’T WATCH”.
“Um, I was in my lane, and I don’t have eyes on top of my head. You could have moved out of the way, since you clearly saw me.”
“Don’t be smart with me” she said.
Then, she VERY LOUDLY called me “fat”.

I told her that she should just leave me alone. There was plenty of room to swim, and she didn’t have to be where I already was.

I moved to the empty intermediate lane; breaststroked out to the deep end, elementary backstroked to the shallow end, where I was met by my abuser, who had pursued me into my new lane, bent on continuing the confrontation.

She told me I was “slow” and that I “didn’t belong” in the lap lane. She said “Go swim in the open area, go take care of yourself, you’re too fat to swim here.”

I swam to the deep end, and called over to the lifeguard.
I told her what had happened; that the bully had been aggressive, had called me “fat”, and that in response to her behavior, I’d moved out of the lane I was in, and she had pursued me and continued to insult me.
I said I didn’t think that was appropriate behavior for a place like the Y.  I’m a dues-paying member. I have a right to swim without being aggressively pursued and insulted.
I told the lifeguard how I had come to the Y to learn how to swim after not being in the water at all for the last thirty-five years. I told her how I worked my way through beginner and intermediate swim, and that I swam laps four days a week, and how I was the swimming program’s damn poster child or should be.
I was so upset that I was practically in tears.
I was five years old again, inside.
I felt exactly the way I had so many years ago, when I was bullied and pursued the same way by kids my own age for the same reasons and with the same epithets.

The bully approached; the lifeguard said she’d speak to her. She told the bully to stay in the slow lane, and told me I could stay in the intermediate lane. She told the bully to stay away from me.
That was the extent of what the lifeguard did.
Was it enough?

The bully continued swimming in the slow lane, using a kickboard, along with Peter, who is also a slow swimmer. I continued swimming in the intermediate lane, alone with my thoughts.

These are my thoughts:
Why is fat prejudice still an acceptable prejudice?
Why isn’t it treated the same way as other forms of prejudice?
If I were a black woman, and the bully had called me “nigger”, would she still have been allowed to stay and swim?
How about if I were Latina, and she’d called me a “spic”?
How about if I were Asian, like 90% of the people who use my Y, and she’d called me a “chink”?

I joined the Y to improve my health through swimming.
I went from not knowing how to swim to swimming laps four times a week for at least an hour in the last six months.
I average five to six hours of laps every week.
I’ve lost eighteen pounds since I started in January.
No one except my husband will ever know what it took for me for finally get out of my studio and into a swimming pool.

My bully doesn’t know any of this about me.
Because when she looked at me, all she saw was a 222 lb. woman with very big thighs.
I think she thought that was the only important thing about me.
I think my very presence was distasteful to her.
She doesn’t know that I’m an artist and a writer.
She doesn’t know that I sang lead at church for many years, and that I sang solo at each of my sisters’ weddings.
She doesn’t know that I have been happily married to the love of my life for thirty-four years.
She doesn’t know that I was one of the best students in my high school graduating class, or that I missed being salutatorian by .75 of a percentage point because I had cut gym so often it affected my marks.
She doesn’t know that two years ago, I spent four days looking for my missing elderly father.
She doesn’t know that I’ve had to rebuild my life several times over.
She doesn’t know that swimming is one of my lifelines now.

All she knows is that I am fat, and I was in her way, and so it was okay to bully and insult me, loudly and repeatedly, in a public place.
Because calling someone “fat” is not the same as calling someone “nigger” or “spic” or “chink”.
Because fat prejudice is the one prejudice that’s still okay to express out loud.
That’s why the kids who bullied Karen Klein, the Bus Monitor, thought it was okay to talk to her the way they did.
No one’s going to start an Indiegogo fund for every fat person who has ever been bullied for their weight. And while money is certainly very nice (and I did contribute to Karen’s vacation fund), what would be nicer would be to live in a world where my worth as a human being is not gauged by the number on my scale.

So, are you prejudiced?
No?
ARE YOU SURE?
What’s the first thing that goes through your mind when you see someone who is chunky, or overweight, or fat, or obese, or as big as a whale?
Do you see the person? or do you see the weight?
Is he or she less of a person to you, because of his or her size?
Why do you feel that way?
Do you think those thoughts and feelings are valid, or are they based on mindless prejudice?
Are some types of prejudice more acceptable than others?
Is any kind of prejudice acceptable?
Why or why not?
What would you have done if you were me?
What would you have done if you were the lifeguard?
I really want to know.
I really want the Y to know, too. I’ll be sending the link to this blogpost to the Executive Director, the Membership Director and the Aquatics Director.
Thank you, in advance, for sharing your thoughts.

How Eddie Langer Changed My Life

Tags

backstroke, body image, breaststroke, creativity, exercise, fearlessness, freestyle, health, healthy-living, learning, mental-health, persistence, sitcom, St. Teresa of Avila, student, teacher, teaching, tragedy, weight loss, whiffle ball, writer's block

In January, I joined the Flushing YMCA to learn how to swim. I blogged about that decision here. As I said, this was no ordinary decision for me; it was unusual, in that I hadn’t been in anything larger than a soaking tub for more than thirty-five years, and haven’t even owned a swimsuit for that long. I thought that swimming would be a safe, easy way for me to start exercising regularly.
I didn’t expect I would LOVE it.

Well, now it’s almost five months later; I swim laps four times a week for an hour to an hour and a half each session.
I have four strokes that I feel solid with, in order of preference: breaststroke (read about why here and here); backstroke; elementary backstroke;
freestyle (admittedly, my weakest stroke, but I’m working on it).
I’ve lost just over sixteen pounds, without dieting. I’m almost halfway to my goal of losing forty pounds this year.

How on earth did this happen to me? How did I become a swimmer?
I practice a lot. I take swimming seriously. Things happen to me in the water that don’t happen anywhere else. I never would have discovered those things without a guide.
I took a beginners’ class hoping I wouldn’t make a fool of myself–I mean, I’m a heavyset, middle-aged, extremely nearsighted woman who hadn’t been in a pool in almost forty years. It could have been a sitcom or a tragedy, depending on the writers and the actors.
I GOT SOOOOO LUCKY.
I got Eddie Langer for my teacher. And he is an awesome teacher.

I’m luckier than many who come to learn swimming in midlife. I am not afraid of the water; I’m especially not afraid of deep water. I came into class knowing how to float. In fact, one of the benefits of too much body fat is that it keeps you buoyant; I can’t touch the floor in the deep end unless I JUMP into the pool.

What Eddie gave me is the confidence to try absolutely anything in the water. He is very precise about form, which makes sense to me, because I’m visual. If one way of showing me a stroke, or teaching me a drill didn’t work, he’d try another, and another, until I got it. He was confident in me, so I was confident in myself.
The best thing was finally breaking open the breaststroke. We worked on it every week for about a month. I worked on it by myself during open swim sessions. For weeks, whenever I tried it, I looked like a drowning crazy frog. We won’t even discuss what it felt like. At this age, I can swallow public humiliation in a public pool (along with all the swallowed pool water).
When I came upon a video of a drill that I thought would work for me, and asked Eddie if he could help me try it, he was game: I did, he did, WE DID, and it worked.
As Saint Teresa of Avila says, “Patience attains the goal.”

So, fine, you’re saying to yourself: Your teacher taught you. How did that change your life?

I was the brainy girl who always cut gym. I am the only person I know who once broke my own eyeglasses playing whiffle ball by fouling a ball up into my own eye. I have absolutely no athletic skills (except for a decent volleyball serve, but that was many, many years ago).
What learning to swim, and swim well,  has given me is a level of confidence in my physical abilities that I never had before, not as a child, not as a teenager, certainly not as an adult.
Swimming has become a physical form of meditation for me. The world disappears. It’s just me and the water, my body making shapes through the water.

I’ve been writing a book, a memoir about my family, and–for about six months–was blocked on writing the day my father was found after he disappeared one June morning. Swimming opened that block. In the past month, I’ve written more than forty new pages. I started this blog when I started swimming. I started to draw again; I carry a sketchbook with me, in case the mood should strike. I am licensing my artwork again. My creative self has re-emerged.

What this tells me is that grief, sadness, frustration and disappointment are water-soluble (in both senses of the word soluble: able to be dissolved, and able to be solved). Joy, creativity, love and persistence are waterproof. They float, and can carry me across any roiling sea.

So thank you, Eddie. You did so much more for me than just teach me to swim. I’m going to keep practicing all summer, especially my freestyle (still my weakest stroke).
See you in September.

~Lap[s]! Dancing!~

Tags

backstroke, body image, breaststroke, doggedness, elementary backstroke, exercise, family, fearlessness, freestyle, friends, health, healthy-living, lap lane, lap lanes, persistence, prescription goggles, traffic jams, weight loss, YMCA

It’s not what you think.

I am ready for the lap lanes at the Y. I am very, very happy about that. Dancingly happy, about being ready for laps; hence, the title of this blogpost.

Not only is my breaststroke now solid (and is my new second favorite, after the elementary backstroke), but I am expending less energy per stroke as my kick gets stronger, which means I am not tiring as easily.

Today, I spent over an hour in the water, giving myself only a few seconds rest after touching the wall at the deep end before going back the length of the pool. I would freestyle or breaststroke out to the deep end, backstroke or elementary backstroke to return to the shallow end. I made at least forty trips back and forth today, with very little rest between. The lap lane beckons, enticingly.

I figured out my optimal sequence of strokes for doing laps. When I go on Friday, I will breaststroke out, elementary backstroke in, freestyle out, backstroke in, and then repeat the cycle. I am really looking forward to trying it; there are no traffic jams or people cutting across your lane when you are in the lap lanes. When I am in the open swim area, I must always be aware of who is doing what around me (hard to do when I’m backstroking).  I’ve learned to pay attention to the ripples around me becoming waves and splashes, signifying a nearby swimmer. It’s further complicated by my extreme nearsightedness– I simply cannot see other swimmers until they are very close. (Prescription goggles may be in my future…)

I won’t have to worry about collisions or near misses in the lap lanes. The lap lane swimmers are serious, and good, and focused. I can’t wait to join them…in the slow lane, for now, but who knows where I’ll be by summer’s end? Twelve weeks ago, I hadn’t been in the water for more than thirty-five years. Now, I’m twelve pounds lighter, and doing laps.

Persistence is its own reward.

~ I Beat My Breaststroke!~

Tags

Balkans, body image, breaststroke, collaboration, doggedness, exercise, fearlessness, friends, health, helping, persistence, stubbornness, teaching, weight loss

Persistence, stubbornness, perseverance, doggedness, determination, resolve, stick-to-it-tiveness, sheer cussedness– call it what you will. I’ve got it, in spades.

I was born to it. My parents were both from the Balkan countries– my mother hailed from Greece; my father, from Croatia. They don’t call those mountains the Balkans for nothing; my people balk at everything. One of the things that we Balkans balk at most enthusiastically is the idea that we can’t do something we want to do. If the problem is we don’t have permission, if we are sure it’s the right thing to do, we do it anyway, and take the responsibility if it goes wrong (and claim the credit if it goes the way we thought it would all along). If the problem is we don’t know how, we learn. If the problem is someone thinks we’re not good enough, we prove them wrong. If the problem is we’re that someone, we tell ourselves to quit complaining, start practicing, keep practicing, and don’t give up until we get it.

These were the lessons of my childhood, and I have used them well all my life to accomplish the things that were important to me.

I’ve been using those lessons in the past twelve weeks, since I began learning to swim. I applied myself with great diligence this past week, in my effort to finally learn the breaststroke. I wrote about it here last Thursday.

Today, I came into my class set on making it all come together. As soon as I got into the pool with my instructor, Eddie Langer, I told him what I’d been working on this past week, and that I wanted to work on nothing but breaststroke for our entire class.

He had me show him my freestyle and backstroke first, then my elementary backstroke. Then, I showed him what I’d been doing on my own, my breaststroke drills– kicks only, strokes only. He saw that my kick had markedly improved in the two weeks since he’d seen me, and agreed that my arm stroke was strong.

“I found a swimming video online that showed a practice drill with two kicks, stop, then armstroke, then repeat. Can I try that?” I said.

“Go ahead!” said Eddie.

I tried it, and the discipline of starting the next stroke only when the previous one was finished was working. It helped my timing, which has been my problem all along.

“Okay,” said Eddie, “let’s try two arm strokes, two kicks, repeat. Slow it down, don’t start the next one until you finish the one before.”

I did. It was working.

“Let’s try one arm stroke, two kicks, repeat. Keep it slow.”

I did. It was working really well. We were on to something.

I kept up with the drills, just that way, back and forth across the deep end of the pool, when he said.

“Try it one armstroke, one kick, keep it slow.”

I did.

It worked.

It kept working. I was finally doing a proper breaststroke.

“Woo-hoo!” I shouted after going down the long side of the pool and back.

We were both so happy– we had finally found the secret, the missing piece that solved the breaststroke puzzle for me.

“THANK YOU! You’re a great teacher! I couldn’t have done it without your help!”

And then he said the magic words that all of us stubborn Balkans love to hear; “It was you, you did it!”

I did, but with a lot of help, and a lot of well-applied lessons from childhood.

Thank you, Daniel and Julissa, for helping me with my form; thank you Frank, for listening to my endless self-criticism and nonetheless always believing that I would get it; thank you Eddie, for being a great teacher and collaborator, for searching for and finding the thing that helped me to accomplish the thing I so wanted to do.

I BEAT MY BREASTSTROKE.

~Beating My Breaststroke~

Tags

AHA! moment, backstroke, body image, breaststroke, exercise, fearlessness, freestyle, frustration, health, healthy-living, intermediate class, persistence, weight loss

Almost three months ago, I started swimming again, after avoiding any body of water larger than a soaking tub for almost forty years. I wrote about my decision to join my local Y and start taking lessons here and here.

I am happy to report that I am doing really well. I LOVE swimming. I finished my beginners’ class at the end of February, and am halfway through my eight week intermediate class (which turned into private lessons because I was the only person who signed up for Sunday mornings). My backstrokes, both regular and elementary style, are good mechanically and feel great. My freestyle has really come along; one-sided breathing is now natural, and I’m beginning to work on bilateral breathing. My Sunday classes are often a series of drills to work on particular aspects of my mechanics or form. When I go to open swim during the week, I do drills for about half the time, and just swim for the pleasure of it the rest of the time.

But, no matter how many drills I do, no matter how I break it down, and even though this week I’ve concentrated on it to the practical exclusion of everything else– I cannot do the breaststroke. Yet.

This past Sunday, my regular teacher was away participating in a race, so I had a different instructor. He asked me what I wanted to work on, and I told him that I wanted to spend most of the class on breaststroke. We drilled on the kick; he gave me very useful feedback and corrected my form. It was very helpful to have a different instructor’s point of view on what it was that I was doing wrong. The previous week, my regular instructor had told me to try thinking of the part of the kick where the legs open up as a plie. That made sense to me. Between that advice, and this week’s teacher breaking down the kick into three basic stages, I began to make to make some progress.

But putting together what my legs are supposed to do with what my arms are supposed to do just didn’t work. I ended up feeling like an insane frog gasping for air and I am sure I looked like one as well.

Daniel, my substitute instructor, kindly and diplomatically said, “Well, it’s not terrible.”

So, before going to open swim on Tuesday, I did some research online to see if I could find something that would make it all click for me. I found an animated gif of three views of what the breaststroke is supposed to look like on Wikipedia. It was an AHA! moment. I was crumpling in the middle; what I should be doing is imitating an inchworm. Both instructors had told me that my timing was off and that’s why it wasn’t working, but I couldn’t see it until I saw this animation.

So I went into Tuesday’s open swim on a mission. Half an hour of kicking drills, going back and forth the long way, with a kickboard, doing the frog kick (the s..l..o..w..e..s..t kick in the world), but getting and keeping my form. Next, the arms, in proper form, with NO kick at all– back and forth the long way, over and over and over again (MUCH faster with arms only than with legs only, by the way).

Then I put it together, looking less like a crazy frog, only spottily successful, but definitely making progress.

I went back today, and did the same thing. Kicking drills with the kickboard, stroke drills with no kick, putting it all together, and…doing my crazy frog imitation. At least I’m not gasping for air anymore. The stroke drills have me naturally coming up for air as I bring my arms back together; the kicking drills are doing the same. Just like Tuesday, I spent about an hour with nothing but breaststroke, making slow progress, two steps forward and one back.

I’ve befriended one of the lifeguards there. As I was making my …s…l…o…w… progress across with a kicking drill, I said hello. She asked how I was doing, and I told her about my battle with the breaststroke. She reminded me to point my feet out before the whip part of the kick. AH! I said, and that made my progress across the second half of the pool a little faster.

When I was getting ready to leave, she came over to me and said, “You know, when you first started, you could barely get across more than a couple of times. Now, you go back and forth like it’s nothing, your backstroke looks great, your freestyle looks better all the time. You WILL get this. Just keep practicing. Soon, you’ll be a pro.”

I am a very persistent person, almost pathologically so. I don’t ever like to give up, not on people, not on problems. I have always thought that anything can be solved with the right approach, and that a solution is often just a matter of taking a slightly different point of view. I’ve had really good feedback from three different teachers now, and each of them has offered useful advice, and expressed absolute faith that I will get the breaststroke, that it’s just a matter of time and practice.

So, I WILL beat the breaststroke: the breaststroke will NOT beat me.

I think I’m going to go again tomorrow.

Mindful Eating

Tags

body image, flow, mindful eating, sensuality, weight loss

This article in today’s NYT Dining section gave me food for thought (sorry, couldn’t resist!). What would the experience of eating be if approached with mindful consideration, if one took the time and made the effort to really taste the different flavors present, feel the textures, appreciate the colors of what is on the plate or in the bowl, to experience all of this in silence?

We live in an always-on, always-connected world; constant distraction is our default state of being. How much more would we enjoy our food if we truly immersed ourselves in the various sensual stimuli that food itself provides?

My plan for dinner tonight is a pot of chick-pea soup, with a plenitude of roasted root vegetables and kale and parsley stirred in. I’m going to make the preparation of this meal a mindful act, and the consumption of it a mindful act as well. I want to see for myself how changing me changes the experience.

~ Swimming ~

Tags

body image, exercise, fearlessness, health, weight loss

On January 7th, I joined the Flushing Y so I could take swimming classes. For most people, this would be a very normal thing to do at the beginning of the year, when everyone is making their exercise and weight loss resolutions.

This was NOT a normal thing for me to do. THIS WAS HUGE. A sea change (pardon the pun).

I swam all the time as a little girl, and as a teenager. When I was growing up, we spent all our summer weekends at Jones Beach. I learned to swim in the ocean at Beach # 2 and at Zach’s Bay. I loved the water.

I stopped going to the beach as I started putting on weight. The years of keeping a freelancer’s schedule pretty much destroyed my circadian rhythms, which I now know is a contributing factor in my struggles with my weight. Sleep loss, hormonal imbalances, and weight gain are very intertwined; I also happen to be a very good cook, and love to eat well.

The bottom line is I hadn’t owned a bathing suit in 35 years. I hadn’t been in a body of water bigger than a soaking tub in that long either.

So, how did I end up joining the Y, taking a Beginner’s Swim Class early Sunday mornings in January and February, wearing a bright lipstick red swimdress?

I recognized the absolute need to disrupt my thought process and attitude about my body, about exercise, and about the rest of my life. I needed to do something that was wildly different. I needed a reboot.

I thought I’d like it; I didn’t know I’d LOVE it. I joined the Y so that quitting would be an expensive failure. I needed to invest more than cost of the class to make this work the way I wanted it to. It was quitting insurance– I paid for a yearly membership to ensure I would go.

So far, so good; I’ve been going three days a week, once for my lesson, and twice for open swim in the big pool. There is nothing so relaxing as floating, silently, letting the water carry me.

This week, I feel confident enough to go into the deep end. I am amazed that swimming has come back so easily. I have no fear of the water at all; when I go into the pool I feel embraced by the water, as though it has missed me. I have no weight at all in the water; I glide, I float, I paddle, I bob, I stretch my arms and kick my legs and move faster than I ever thought I would.

It is magic. Swimming doesn’t just make me happy; it gives me joy, and connects me with the child I still am deep inside. It’s not just exercise, but an almost mystical experience. I enter the pool, and the universe enters me.