Getting healthy in Michigan: Confessions of a (very) curvy girl: Part eight

On roughly December 29th, I started making a real conscious effort to eat significantly better, and to follow a certain set of guidelines for myself in regards to how I eat and what I eat. Here are some of the things that I have been doing in no particular order:

• First, I’ve begun to make myself eat breakfast. This is something that is usually pretty difficult for me since it is supposed to occur much earlier in the day than 11:00 a.m., and though I may be awake by 7:00 a.m., nobody seems to have told my appetite or my digestive system that.

• Second, I have significantly cut down on the sweets. I have not cut them out completely (I haven’t gone completely mad), but my sweet treat intake has been drastically slashed.

• Third, I have made myself pack a mid-morning snack for work every day, and I am slowly but surely getting to the point where I am prepared enough at home to bring my lunch every day as well. However, bringing it twice this week has been better than not at all.

• Fourth, I have been scouring all of our cookbooks (oh, and we both got some great new ones for Christmas!) and the great inter-wide web to find recipes that incorporate the foods that I am attempting to incorporate more in my diet. These include, but are not limited to, different varieties of beans, more varied vegetables, lentils, vinegars, rice, mustards, and grains.

• Fifth, and it’s really hard for me to do this, but I am stopping my eating before bed habit. In what is amounting to a Herculean effort, I am trying to not eat anything at least two hours before I go to bed. It sucks. Because if I’m awake, chances are I’m thinking about what would taste really good and what I can do to make that happen.

• Sixth, and this is a biggie, I am getting back to being conscious about portion control. And let me tell you something: I like to eat. A lot. Both in quantity as well as times per day, but I have been retraining my body lately to only eat when I am actually hungry and to choose healthier things to quell my ravenous nature. This requires that I sit and think about it sometimes. Stop for a minute before ordering or cooking that next meal. More often than not, I find that I am not as hungry as often as I am habitually looking for something to chew, taste and enjoy because I find that act in and of itself pleasurable and satisfying. When I do eat, I also realize that I am eating less to get full, and the result is that by taking more time to really enjoy what I’m eating and to think about each meal, I am tending to eat less in quantity but doing so at more times during the day.

• Seventh, every so often, I stop into Sparrow’s or Border’s and buy the three-for-a dollar-or-so chocolates conveniently located next to the register to stop myself from going completely bat-crap insane.

Other parts of my over-arching plan are starting to come into place as well. My boyfriend and I are taking on the house together and doing some major reorganization and rejuvenation of the space. This is a huge deal for me because not only will this assist us in having a more pleasurable place to live, but there is something very significant to be said for not being bombarded with disorganization and clutter everywhere in a tangible way.

My brain and schedule are always filling up with crazy plans and work keeping me busy in every which way and it is nice to be able to enter your dwelling ensconced in the comforts of an inviting home that you have created for yourself. In fact, it makes all the difference in the world, so I am very happy about that.

Also, bellydance is starting up again, which I will be featuring in this series more and more as time goes by. I am excited about getting back into the swing (or shimmy) of things with dance, and I am also working my way into a normal work-out routine again. My tentative plans are to have bellydance class at least twice a week and to augment that by practicing at home, do yoga at home most days and go to classes one to two times a week, and then to drag myself out of bed every morning to walk to work. I think that if I start maintaining that level of activity or something close to it, it would be a major step toward the achievement of my goals.

And I have, for the first time in my life, been writing for an audience. And that, you dear, dear 5 people who read this series, is one of the greatest feelings I’ve had as a writer. Sharing my (very) curvy journey with you is something I look forward to every week.

It has also prompted me to have more confidence in my writing, and I’m telling you, this is the year I am writing my first book. I truly think that a gigantic portion of the whole body and mind harmony/wellness pie is being persistent in pursuing your dreams. For me, there is no other dream so sweet as being a real, self-sustaining author… living in Europe with Andrew and our cat and having our friends and family nearby and happy… perhaps even getting my work on the New York Times’ Best Seller List…traveling the world and tasting all kinds of regional cuisine…but I digress. The first step is to write the book; I can’t really thank everyone who has said such kind things about my writing enough, but thank you just the same. You are all fabulous.

Part Eight.Five: How was the Hafla?

I have had a few requests to talk about how the hafla went, so where better to recount your most recent adventure in public embarrassment than in an out with the old, in with the new post? For those of you who are new to this series, by hafla I am referring to a bellydance performance that I participated in on December 18th - my first public bellydance performance in front of people that I still wanted to know after the show.

So here’s how the hafla went: fine. It went fine if you consider that I was so insanely nervous that night that I was rude to everyone I care about who came to see the show. And if you count that I was so petrified and embarrassed that when I had a tiny drink to calm my nerves before the performance, my racing heartbeat made it go through my system so fast that toward the end I nearly fell over. And if you count me catching a look at one of my instructors during the performance and it making me so much more nervous that my timing in a very obvious part of the dance was well off from the rest of my class as fine, then it all went fine.

In all sincerity though, I was a wreck. The evening was great, and it was a good thing for me to do considering that continuing to perform is probably the only successful way for me to manage my stage nerves, but I was a nervous, rude, sarcastic wreck to all those around me. I was not graceful and I was fresh out of pleasantries, but all in all it went well, and I can concede that I didn’t mess up too badly. Though, in careful review of the video by my best friend and myself, we were both mortified by several various aspects of our all-told just-over-2-minutes-long performance, but, such is life.

We could have been much worse. And as my best friend said, one of our other instructors offered to have us dance under her tutelage at the next hafla after seeing us perform, so that must mean that we aren’t so bad that she wouldn’t want to be seen having us represent her teaching in the future…we hope.

We wore black and each of us had beautiful, colorful hip scarves on, accenting each punctuation of hip up, hip down, hip curving all the way around. Eight sassy ladies rocking it out to Beats Antique in a bowling alley in Saline. Ahh…memories.

More confessions of a (very) curvy girl will come out every Wednesday.

Elizabeth Palmer is the Customer Advocate at AnnArbor.com as well as a contributor. She writes about food and food traditions, sustainable development and her experiences as a curvy girl. She has a bachelor’s degree in photography and is finishing her masters in historic preservation. Starting in January, Elizabeth will be teaching a course on sustainable development at Eastern Michigan University.

You can contact Elizabeth by e-mailing her at elizabethpalmer@annarbor.com.