Abandon all hope.

No, this isn't a dreary, depressed, despondent call to give up. I was reading Skinnybitch the other morning, and she had this to say about the end of the year 2007:

But in the calm after the storm [of the holidays], as we survey the damage - bulging waist lines and a wicked hangover, most likely - most of us will become reflective and, perhaps, a bit remorseful. Another year is about to die, and with it, all our failed good intentions of the previous year. What about that resolution to go to the gym every day? To eat less and exercise more? To be more patient, organized, forgiving, productive and self-disciplined?

Meanwhile, April submitted a post on New Years Resolutions.

They and most of us are tapping into an essential undercurrent that flows at this time of year, this urge for self-reflection and introspection. So many of us share this sense that we haven't done it well enough, that we could do it better, and that therefore we should do it better. Sometimes loudly proclaimed, and sometimes unspoken and whispering around in the subtext, is that we are just not good enough as we are. Nothing is ever good enough as it is.

I see this as derived, in a way, from the Protestant work ethic. We should always be busy. Always working. Working at our jobs, working on ourselves, basically work work work. You better work! Time to lean is time to clean. Cleanliness is next to godliness. Ad inifitum. Ad nauseum.

But careful: our culture does not reward this introspection and self-reflection unless it results in concrete action. You will not be an effective, virtuous person unless you channel those New Years resolutions into successful accomplishments. If you fail--and you will (even disciplined April jokes about which resolutions will be the first to go)--you will be revisiting a self-prescribed litany of failures at the end of 2008, wondering how you got off track, while hopefully planning your salvation in 2009. Lather, rinse, repeat in 2010. Ad infinitum. Ad nauseum.

I'm not immune. I've practiced CRON only in fleeting fits and starts, actually gaining weight while simultaneously stopping exercise and losing muscle tone. I'm stretching the seams of my fattest clothing. I've all but abandoned work on my novel. I hatched elaborate plans to train for and run a marathon, then bailed as soon as I found out the Chicago race had filled up and I couldn't get in.

If I wanted to sit down and revisit my shortcomings, either explicitly by listing the failures, or implicitly by mapping out the resolutions for "positive changes" next year, I could easily do it. I could do it in my sleep. With my hands tied behind my back. Hell, with my hands AND legs tied behind my back. Hogtied, I could list and wallow in the muck of my shortcomings, my dashed hopes, and my failed expectations for the work I could and should have been doing all year long.

For me, however, this year has been about survival. At some point in 2007, I finally abandoned hope. I started giving up on my perfectionism, and my expectations for perfectionism in others. I started learning to wallow in my slothy, lazy ways, to calmly recognize my impetuous ego-clinging, to look clearly and honestly and without judgement at my difficulty in resisting the apetites that defeat me.

Always wanting to be noticed and appreciated and adored by others, I learned somewhwere along the way this year to embrace the anonymity that comes from not being virtuous and beautiful and perfect. It became comforting to realize that people were looking through me instead of at me. That I could at times become invisible. To feel a sense of comfort and relief when no one was thinking about me. To not mind when no one expected anything from me, and to not feel that others owed me something.

Losing hope sounds scary and depressing and nihilistic, but that's not how I mean it at all. If hope is one side of a coin, what's on the other side? Fear, it seems. We hope for better, but fear the worst. Our fear drives us to hatch harebrained schemes which THIS TIME will free us from the truth about ourselves for sure! We have fears about our story, our character, our essential nature. We hope to change them all.

New Years resolutions are all about clinging to hope that we can be better. We find it so easy to accept that we were bad before, and yet so difficult to accept that we were good. Or good enough. We are afraid to not be good, to be better, to not be the best we can be. We're afraid that we were bad last year and if we don't do something we'll be worse than ever this year!

We want to run away from our fears, but we're stuck because we can't run into the future where everything has already been solved. Hope is our way of getting around that pesky fact of our time-space continuum: we only have access to right now--this instant. And since we can't solve our problems this instant, we turn to hope. Hope gives us a place to locate our longings.

2007 was a tough year for me. And for my family. And for the world, for that matter. I'm glad I made it out alive, in one piece, and not too much worse for the wear. But I can honestly say that for the first time ever, I am not filled with remorse for the things that didn't happen in 2007. There are plenty of things I'm glad did NOT happen in 2007. In fact, the list of things that didn't happen that could have been or surely would have been worse is infinite! So I'm thankful for that!

I'm sure I had high hopes for 2007, but with all that actually occurred, I cannot really recall what they were. I can't quite bring forth the specter of who I was at the end of 2006 and all his horrible shortcomings and failures. Nor can I materialize the ghost of who I thought I'd be at the end of 2007.

I'm learning to abandon hope. I think the more I'm able to do that, the better I'll be able to abandon fear. Maybe I won't be afraid to go to bed a little hungry some night, maybe after a day in which I've eaten enough, but not as much as usual. Maybe a 230 pound man going to bed a little hungry isn't that scary after all.

Maybe the discomfort of getting up at 5am so I can squeeze a reviving workout in at the gym, and the irritation of being a little tired, maybe that's not so scary.

Maybe being bored and lonely isn't frightening enough to make me flee to the warm comfort of an extra glass of wine.

Maybe being alone and quiet and still isn't so bad, and even if it feels so bad in the moment, well maybe feeling bad doesn't always require an escape or a remedy.

Maybe if I'm not so afraid to confront and engage with the pain (whatever type it is), I won't hope so hard for it to go away. Maybe I won't feel so strongly the urge to act based on my hopes and fears, instead of acting on what's actually happneing here, now, in this moment, where and when I actually have the ability to act.

I can't honestly say that I don't have hopes for 2008, and fears too. Those thoughts will surely cross my mind every day. My idea is to not be ruled by them. To let those thoughts cross my mind the way a bird crosses the sky...see them up there flying by, and let them continue on their way to wherever they are going, leaving me to sit here quietly.

So I'm abandoning hope.

The hand gesture depicted in the image at the top of this Gratuitous Musing is called the Abhaya Mudra. It means "no fear."

I'm abandoning fear.

(But I might still blog about it once in awhile...)

Grandma: "I think we'll all feel better after we see a few people getting slaughtered."

I'm in a dark place. Allow me to share.

Well, it's been awhile. I haven't submitted updates to CRONOLOGY for a very long time primarily because I haven't been practicing CRON. At times I entertained the thought of treating this blog as my own general journal/diary, and going ahead with postings about miscellaneous stuff unrelated to my stalled CRON practice. But in the end, I felt I wanted to keep things somewhat on topic.

The reasons for my lack of CRON are varied and numerous. Or maybe that's "excuses" rather than "reasons." So much has happened since my last entry that I'm not sure how it all fits together with my CRON practice. Maybe I'll just start back in July and see where this goes. [Author's note: Danger--it goes pretty far--and pretty far afield; turn back now.]

I was just getting back into CRON at the end of July. I think I wanted to drop some pounds before a Labor Day trip to New Orleans that I'd been excitedly anticipating. Well, that didn't happen. I'm not even sure why I didn't stick with it that time. It was summer, there were gobs of great fresh vegetables and fruits available at farmer's markets all over Chicago.

New Orleans was fun--I stayed for 8 days with three friends from DC. We ate nothing but horribly unhealthy (but so delicious) food the entire time. And of course, we drank massive quantities of alcohol. I mean, a LOT of alcohol. Like "frat boys on spring break" quantities of wine, beer, gin--you name it. If I was conscious, and it wasn't morning, I probably had a drink in my hand. We started at the hotel, and continued on the streets of the French Quarter until all hours of the night (or morning...).

This alcohol business is not an insignificant issue for me: I have long struggled to keep my alcohol intake to a low moderate level. On CRON, it's pretty easy, because alcohol eats up calories without providing nutrients, and I'm usually unwilling to feel that hungry in order to maintain a high level of alcohol consumption. Never mind that it's counterproductive for longevity. Or depression.

And I'm always mindful that I come from a long line of heavy drinkers. My grandmother on my father's side died of either lung cancer (from smoking) or cirrhosis (from drinking) or both--we can never remember. At any rate, she was often "in her cups" as it were. My grandmother on my mom's side went to rehab twice before kicking her long-time addiction at around the age of 55. She's been sober now for 25 years. I have spent my adulthood partying with my parents. Family occasions are always occasions for drinking. Alcohol-drinking behavior is encouraged and reinforced constantly in my family, and in our culture at large, and resisting it, just like resisting our obesigenic food environment, is difficult when you thoroughly enjoy the stuff.

My own drinking habits have been spotty over the years. I've gone long periods with moderately normal consumption, then gotten a little carried away for awhile, then turned to abstinence for long periods. When I go too far for too long, a switch seems to flip in my brain that orders me "stop drinking completely," at least for awhile, and I usually comply with that command. Inevitably I quietly start drinking again later, and the whole process repeats.

New Orleans at the end of August was rather a binge for me. I came back to Chicago feeling polluted and ill. I went "on the wagon" yet again, for a couple months. Then I started drinking again in November. So far, so good--for me at least. I'm managing moderation for now, and I'm enjoying the times I can have cocktails or wine with my friends over dinner. When I resume CRON, the drinking will necessarily be further diminished, and I'm fine with that.

But from the period of just before Thanksgiving until today, I have had an ugly glimpse of the possibilities that await me if I should fail to remain vigilant about my alcohol use.

My uncle (my mother's brother) has been a long-suffering alcoholic, just like his mother. He's fifty, and the last 10-15 years have seen his alcohol abuse go from an immoderate low-level to the level of "how the hell is he still alive?" While my mom and I knew about his problem, he'd been concealing it from his parents (my grandparents).

Then Grandpa died the Friday before Thanksgiving. Grandpa was 96 years old, had lived a long and happy life, pretty much did what he wanted to, and his death itself, while sad for the family, was not a tragedy. It was just his time. He failed pretty quickly, spending a week in the hospital before dying of heart failure.

But during that week when he was dying, my uncle was on a 24-hour a day binge for a week. He didn't go to work. He didn't go to Ft. Wayne to be with his dying father. He missed the death because he was drunk and felt guilty and then drank more.

When we finally all got to Ft. Wayne to deal with things, my uncle was a physical train wreck. He was so sick, we persuaded him to go to the ER. He was admitted to the hospital two days before Thanksgiving with kidney failure. Everything about his addiction finally came out in the open at the hospital. We had Thanksgiving dinner with him in the hospital cafeteria. It was dreadful. We were mourning grandpa's death, and at the same time worrying about my uncle.

After a few days of detoxing in the hospital, they got his kidneys working again. He was released on the Friday after Thanksgiving, pledging to enter rehab and deal with his addiction. He was contrite. He said all the right things. But he was not ready, it seems. Three weeks later, he was at it again.

Meanwhile, with grandpa gone, grandma decided she didn't want to do the usual Christmas, so we all went to a bed & breakfast in South Bend, Indiana, for a Christmas away. I should clarify: when I say "we all" I mean me, my mom and her husband, grandma, and my drunk uncle. My druncle. We are a small and dwindling family. Neither my uncle nor I show signs of producing offspring, and in both cases, I can't say that's a bad thing. Some families are just better off dying out, I think.

My druncle was already deep in his cups when he arrived late at the b&b. Everyone was pissed because he was 5 hours late and had made no effort to call and provide an update as to his whereabouts. The holiday went downhill from there.

Christmas was basically a captive, two-day long intervention filled with acrimonious exchanges, bitter recriminations, petulent stomping off, faux-contrite returns, promises of rehab followed by pouty retractions of promises of rehab, veiled suicide threats, excuses, excuses, and more excuses.

On Christmas eve, we needed escape from the pressure cooker we'd stepped into. It was decided we'd go see the new film version of "Sweeney Todd" with Johnny Depp. My sweet, little old grandma said without a trace of irony, "I think we'll all feel better after we see a few people getting slaughtered." It was one of the few times I laughed over the holiday. "Grandma, I have waited my entire life to hear you say something like that!" She was kidding, but on the other hand, her little joke quite illustrated the dark place we all felt we were trapped in together. When violent, vengeful, bloody murder seems an escape, you know you've got issues.

----SPOILER ALERT--STOP READING----

The trouble is, we didn't feel better. "Sweeney Todd" is NOT a feel-good movie. Vengeance doesn't deliver redemption here. Everyone dies horribly. Well, perhaps not everyone, but you get the strong sense that the few who live aren't looking forward to living. Squalid London is a depressing prison captured in an aggressively grayscale color pallet. You can smell the sewage in the streets, taste the rotten cat and rat meat in Mrs. Lovett's pies.

I enjoyed the movie--the performances were terrific, the music gorgeous, the cinematography breathtaking--but it was also thoroughly disgusting and depressing, and perhaps not the best choice for a break in our intervention. After the bloodshed, we headed back to the Inn for round three (or was it four?).

More acrimony, more bitter recriminations, more promises of rehab, and Christmas was over. Happy Birthday Jesus...hope you enjoyed our ill pageantry.

But lo! There is a new light on the horizon: my mom and grandma headed to Indianapolis Wednesday to escort my druncle into rehab. Seems they persuaded him to do it, and so while he was drunk as ever, he managed to work out arrangements with his employer, and was checked into an inpatient facility Thursday! That may sound depressing and traumatic, but honestly it's the only spot of good I've felt in, well, I can't really remember.

So, how to tie all this back to CRON, and thus, render it appropriate for CRONOLOGY?

The events of the past two months have really exposed a reality of human life that I identify as helplessness, or perhaps it's more accurate to say powerlessness. In so many things, we are powerless: powerless to save dying grandpas. Powerless over drugs or alcohol. Powerless to help the ones we love when they meet their match, be it alcohol, faulty relationships, or simply circumstances beyond their control.

I may be powerless, helpless to fix all these problems in others. But I can make some choices here and now about how I respond to them myself. Will I use the pain and darkness as a reason, or excuse to abandon my aspirations? Will I medicate myself with food and alcohol and escapist television and anything and everything else I can grasp at to avoid the discomfort of the present moment?

I've concluded that the vices that haunt me--my immoderate food consumption (I've ballooned to 230#, the fattest I've ever been my entire life), my occasional forays into problematic drinking, my seeming difficulty committing to CRON--these all stem from my very human (yet ironically mindless) impulse to avoid the occasion of discomfort, and to escape it when it appears.

I tend to give in to the itch, to scratch until I bleed, rather than wait it out with equanimity and an open heart and mind. Discomfort and pain are not abnormal things to be eradicated at any cost. They are facts of life. Learning to stay with that notion, to non-judgmentally label pain and discomfort and thoughts that distress me and then relax into them, to stay present, to sit with them awhile with a sense of curiosity instead of fear: that is my challenge.

If you've wondered, yes there are Buddhist principles at work here in my gratuitous musing. Buddhism is something I've been exploring lately. And reconciling certain Buddhist principles with a quest for health and longevity (with their inherent forward-looking hopefulness about the future and the desire to delay or even prevent death) is something I have pondered. But that's a topic for another day, one that deserves its own entry.

For now, for today, I'm just satisfied to have reopened this blog. If anyone is reading, thanks for hanging in there. And while I am considering my options for re-engaging in CRON, and I'm sure I will have some things to say about it in the coming days, for now, well, no promises. I've got a few more pressing things to get through first.

I wish the best to all for an acceptable conclusion to 2007, and a good opening to 2008.

An e-mail to a friend

I received an announcement today that a friend has decided to do the Paris-Brest-Paris Randonnée this August.

For the uninitiated, this is a 745 mile bike ride in 90 hours with NO support. It's an exercise in self-sufficiency and personal commitment.

I found myself so cheered by his news that I composed a reply that, after I sent it, I realized would be perfect for my blog. It follows at the end of this post.

In addition to getting back to CRON (which I've finally been doing lately), I'm beginning training this weekend for the October marathon here in Chicago. Lengthening my life through calorie-restriction, then shortening it again through ridiculous endurance-running. I've definitely got myself a confused little masochistic streak.

And gentle readers (if any remain, given my hiatus), go ahead and note my falling off the CRON wagon, but then recall what you read right here a couple of months ago:

Quit attempts should be thought of like practice sessions in learning a new skill—at some point one hopes to “get it right,” but one should not put undue hope on any single given quit attempt, and take solace in knowing the probability of success increases with each try.

Indeed. I'm living for that probability right this very second.

---

Okay, so on to my message to my inspirational cycling friend:

T.C.!

I'm extremely delighted by this pleasant news. Allow me to make it all about me for a moment.

In 1999, as I was hatching my plans to move from DC to Chicago (and my plans were only that: to move here; I had no plans beyond my arrival), I decided to run the Marine Corps Marathon.

I was 29 years old, I'd never been a runner (or an athlete of ANY kind), and I was then--as I am again--about 40 lbs overweight. I also have some mild foot problems that require special running shoes, but thankfully that was an easily solved challenge.

They call my running cohort "Clydesdale." I wasn't terribly amused by that, but then again, Clydesdales are very sturdy, handsome horses, and they haul beer around, so what's not to like?

The point is that as I was contemplating major life changes, and I needed a powerful shot of confidence, proof that I could muster a bit of some weird thing called "discipline," and actually finish a long-term, hard project before I packed up the truck and headed west. I conjured up the idea that in running the marathon at the end of my time in DC, I wasn't running away from my old life, but running towards my new one.

I trained for six months, and then I ran (and sometimes hobbled) that race, crossing the finish line barely before they closed the event. Then I came to Chicago and staggered around on unsteady legs for several weeks. I was wrecked physically, but high as a kite emotionally.

It was easily in my top three majorly awesome life-changing experiences (even above my first CCM) [Author's Note: CCM is "Chicago Critical Mass"]. That sounds corny, but I'm a sentimental guy, and I was as self-satisfied as I could be. I also didn't feel too badly about raising nearly $2000 for AIDS (it was a fund-raising program), though that wasn't honestly why I did it. I did it for me.

Here I am at 36, fat again, getting ready to finish school and start my interim-career (yep, working for you-know-who), and finally making some serious and steady progress on the novel I've been belaboring for years (that's my REAL career). I'm at another crossroads, another moment when my whole life is gonna change around again. Everything's good--no everything's GREAT, but...I need a serious kick-start to push me out of the gate. Not to mix metaphors.

So, coincidentally I've decided to train for and run another marathon, and my training begins soon. Of course, what you are doing requires a much greater level of commitment and self-sufficiency than doing a marathon, but I bet the results will be similar in some ways.

While I don't really know what your reasons are (or mine for that matter), I bet there's at least a bit of some of the following: Maybe we are having pre-midlife-crises? Maybe we want our youthful bodies back, and all the fun and health and even MORE fun that promises. Maybe we're hoping to impress others (at least a little). Maybe we're bored, or curious. Maybe we're in pain (physical, psychological, spiritual), and more pain seems like it might be curative, like some bizarre metaphysical homeopathy. Personally, I sometimes wonder if I'm looking for ways to dig the knife in a little deeper and give it a twist--after all, it can't feel worse than what I've been doing to myself over the last six years, with all my addictions and self-destructive impulses. It's like a bleeding, a cleansing ritual. Maybe you just wanna see France by bike, and I wanna see the backsides of 44,999 other runners.

Whatever the reasons, I promise you will enjoy what happens to your body along the way (provided you're careful to avoid injuries--and injuries are NOT inevitable but preventable, so do take care).

But the big surprise to me was realizing that these things train our minds as much as, no--more than--our bodies. Endurance sports require, to my mind, a great deal of mental discipline that is much more difficult than meeting the physical demands we place on ourselves. Our bodies are just the vehicles, and they are very adaptive and malleable ones, at that. Our minds are where resistance is located. That's where the real workout is. Enjoy this trip--it's mind-blowing. You'll be a whole new T.C. when this is over. (Not that there's anything wrong with the old one.)

I'm really excited for you, and I'll read your blog faithfully. (Actually, I read anything you write. I dig your "voice.") So make sure you actually post to it.

And thanks for the shot of inspiration on this depressingly gray, damp, April (the cruellest month) day. My conviction was wavering today, but now I'm fired up again!

yours,

--Chris

Existential Crisis!

I have some great news: I am not suicidal!

I'd always suspected that I was not suicidal, but how could I have ever known for sure? I mean, it's really easy to sit there and say, "I want to be alive! Living is great!" But where do you find your proof? How do you know your desire to be alive springs from a passionate lust for life, or some sense of purpose, and isn't just instinctive and reflexive, the product of the basic survival impulse?

However bad things get, however defeated I ever might feel in an individual moment, it seems that I generally return to an optimistic attitude. I know that I can probably have a good life and make a difference, and all that stuff. But sometimes I wonder, "what's the point of it all," and "why bother?"

I realize that I am not breaking any new ground here, and people far more well-read and well-spoken and intelligent and possessed of more philosophical curiosity than I have waxed eloquently about these questions for, like, a really long time. If I have nothing new to say about these things, then, what am I going on about here? Well, a week or two ago, this question popped into my head, unbidden:

"Why would I want to live even LONGER...when this is all meaningless, and I could die today and I wouldn't even care because I'd be dead, so I wouldn't know any better, right?" What would I want with all that extra time? Why not just "live it up" now and who cares when I croak, if it's at 50 or 80 or 120?

It occurred to me that this was a really, really important question to discover an answer to if I seriously want to do CRON (or any other healthful thing) for the purpose of longevity. It seems to me that if you are asking for more time, you should have some sort of idea what you plan to do with it. I realized I wasn't sure.

This sophomoric existential crisis was looming large a week or so ago when, in an intensely strange moment while I was preparing my (decidedly non-CRON) dinner, I vividly imagined having a massive heart attack and dropping right there in my kitchen. Making the moment more surreal was the fact that opera music was streaming from the living room (something from Prairie Home Companion). I felt like I was in some kind of artsy movie. The diva was wailing, and I imagined myself on my knees, clutching my chest, begging, "No! Not now! Wait...it's too soon! I have so much to do!" before slipping into the darkness.

I stood there, paralyzed, waiting to see if it was really happening. You know the funny way time seems to stretch out and everything goes slow-mo when something horrible and traumatic is happening, when seconds seem like minutes, and minutes seem like hours? I found myself stricken with the idea that I was in the midst of a sudden, surprising death, and time was stretching out forever, so I could experience every moment of it. Not that I was experiencing any bodily sensations or anything--this was all in my head.

When I'd recovered my senses (just in time to drain the gaky pasta I was cooking), I couldn't help but chuckle with relief, that kind of insane chuckle that really isn't because something was funny, but rather, served as a pressure-release valve we sometimes need after averting disaster. I mean, obviously I was relieved that I wasn't really having a heart attack. But more than that, I felt an intense relief to suddenly know for sure that I actually wanted rather seriously to be alive, as opposed to descending into the aforementioned sophomoric existential crisis.

I know that all sounds so silly, but I realized that I've never really been endangered in a way that made me seriously fear for my life. My mortality has never posed much threat. It's been more theoretical than actual.

I suppose that sureal moment (revelation? ephiphany?) was at least in part the result of all my new knowledge about health and nutrition, and the tension inherent between all that knowledge and my continued bad behavior.

I'm sure I was fantasizing what I actually do fear will be the likely consequence of my continuing the path I've been on. That path has been strewn with fitful, sporadic CRON practice, peppered with frightening bouts of ad lib abandon. I was in the midst of preparing macaroni and cheese, a meal so off my CRON list it shouldn't even be recognized as food so much as poison!

I realized something else: I've been thinking of my bad feelings about food as "guilt" and "shame," but those are imprecise characterizations of something that I think is much more primal. I think, at least for me, my bad food feelings spring from fear. I was suddenly imagining what was going to happen to me thanks to the very food I was preparing that moment.

Guilt came next, in the moment I realized I wasn't having a heart attack and everything was fine. As I shoveled greasy forkfulls of macaroni and cheese into my mouth, I felt like, "Ha! I've gotten away with it again!" But getting away with something always makes me feel guilty. This is why I cannot bear to play practical jokes on my friends--if I get away with it, if I fool them, I feel guilty!

So, what does all this mean? I guess the answer is, "I don't really know." It's a relief to be made aware in no uncertain terms that I don't want to die, that in fact I'd prefer most strenuously to remain alive. I never did think I was suicidal, but isn't it nice to know for sure? But I also know that if I want to stick with CRON, I need a plan. I need a goal. I need a rationale for prolonging the time that I plan to spend here, a justification for the greater amount of resources I will then have to consume in order to do that, for the greater footprint I will leave on the environment.

The answer, it seems to me, is that I must do something good. I need to prolong my life, and most especially, the period of my life during which I am most robust, because there are some good things I am meant to do, and they take more time than I'll have if I continue the way I have been. What are these good things I have to do? I have no idea. But I'd prefer to have the luxury of time in which to figure out the answer to that question. And so, I must do CRON.

Existential crisis averted, for now....

Bad Mantra, or "This is the blog where I say 'fuck' a lot."

As often happens, I was inspired this morning to write after reading a blog entry of a fellow CRON practitioner, Emily (http://cron-emily.blogspot.com/), who was expressing frustration over her recent lapse into making some food choices that she felt regretful about.

First, I recognize this frustration, but just for a little reality check, let's consider the foods in which she indulged during her moments of weakness:

• cereal
• chocolate
• almonds
• tortilla with peanut butter and jam

These are hardly the food equivalents of a shot of heroin, so let's not completely freak out here. You wanna know what my recent binges included?

• pizza (delivery)
• donuts
• Chinese food (delivery)
• wine (lots of it)
• more pizza
• monte cristo sandwich (ham, turkey, cheese, on FRENCH TOAST!) and fries--FRIES!!!
• even more pizza
• did I mention pizza?

Aw, fuck it.

That's what the old me would have said. I have a long history of attempting some life-change, "failing," and saying "Aw, fuck it" and simply abandoning the cause entirely. I'd done it so many times that "Aw, fuck it" had become something of a mantra for me. Not the kind of mantra that helps organize and quiet the mind. No, this is a bad mantra. A self-defeating mantra. A self-indulgent mantra that serves the purpose of giving me all the excuse I need to head to Dunkin' Donuts for an old fashioned buttermilk donut, chocolate frosted cake donut, and glazed chocolate cake donut. I sure like me some cake donuts.

Not to sound all pop-psychology-self-helpish, but we shouldn't underestimate the power of our self-talk. Saying "aw fuck it" is just another tool for making sense of the choices we are confronted with. It's a poor tool for the job, but it is a tool nonetheless. I know, Emily didn't say "aw, fuck it," but she did say "I felt positive and great and totally in the CRON-groove, and now... I just don't know." That's close enough. It may say "I just don't know," but it whispers "aw fuck it." It's just a few slides down that slippery slope from "I just don't know" to "aw, fuck it."

We need to become more skilled at opening up our tool boxes, surveying what's in there, and then--with the job in mind--choosing the best one to get it done. When we stray from our plan, we can say "aw fuck it," and go completely off the rails--that's what I used to do all the time. Or we can say, "oh well, it's not like I can't try again. And again. And again. However many times it takes until it sticks." The tool of negative self-talk makes us feel badly, and still it doesn't get the job done. Like beating on our thumb with a hammer, when we're supposed to be using wrench to tighten down a bolt.

The other issue here, besides the unhelpful ways we talk to ourselves about what we are doing, is our notion of what constitutes success. I argue that an attempt itself is a success, and every attempt, regardless of its outcome, should be applauded. We should be all self-congratulatory AND self-satisfied whenever we make an attempt to do whatever the good thing is that we want to do. Not fully succeeding in any attempt just means we get the chance to try again. Each new try offers the possibility of success, even if that's just an incremental success.

Consider this gem from an article on smoking cessation from PubMed Central:

"The most important aspect to smoking cessation is maintaining the motivation to make multiple attempts. Thus, quit attempts should be thought of like practice sessions in learning a new skill—at some point one hopes to “get it right,” but one should not put undue hope on any single given quit attempt, and take solace in knowing the probability of success increases with each try. (read the article)

Hey--you need to read that sentence again:

"Quit attempts should be thought of like practice sessions in learning a new skill—at some point one hopes to “get it right,” but one should not put undue hope on any single given quit attempt, and take solace in knowing the probability of success increases with each try."

You know, that sentence is so smart, we all need to read it one more time:

"Quit attempts should be thought of like practice sessions in learning a new skill—at some point one hopes to “get it right,” but one should not put undue hope on any single given quit attempt, and take solace in knowing the probability of success increases with each try."

I'm not an addiction specialist or anything, but I've certainly wrestled with addictions throughout my adult life (a topic I'm bound to blog about eventually) and I find it all too easy to analogize the Standard American Diet with cigarette smoking. It's addictive, destructive, deadly. And I have my own theory about why repeated attempts to quit lead to success.

I think we learn a lot from our unsuccessful attempts to quit things (like the Standard American Diet). We learn about the pangs of withdrawal--what they feel like, what eases them, how long they take to pass; we learn about that ephemeral "pink cloud," that wonderful, carefree high we feel in the first days or weeks of abstinence that inevitably dissipates, leaving us to face the long journey ahead with clear eyes not blinded by the comforting fog of euphoria; we learn about the physical and mental pain of relapse. Knowing all that makes the next attempt easier. Knowing the course ahead makes it easier to bear the pains, and not be unsustainably seduced by the joys.

Future attempts are easier too because we already have a chest full of useful tools to put into service: we already know how to distinguish between good food and gak, we already know how to use the software (don't tell me you aren't using software yet--that's like going to the job site without a tape measure), we already know what our own patterns are, our triggers, we've learned tips and tricks, we have our blogs and our online friends--these are all tools we have immediately available to us as soon as we're ready for our next attempt. These are all tools we didn't have in the beginning, so we are already that much closer to success.

I invite those of us new to CRON to look at it this way: quitting lifelong addictions is hard, it requires many attempts, and since we are all in this for the long haul, whatever is happening today, or whatever happened yesterday, is just a tiny piece of a great big picture. All our many (perhaps frustrated) attempts to "get it right" are a necessary part of our future success, so what we are doing now is good, and helpful, and productive. We'll get there in our own time, some faster than others, if we keep on working at it. And I can assure you, we will most certainly not get there if we say "Aw, fuck it," and quit trying.

If, like me, you are starting CRON all over again today (or tomorrow, or the next day), then remember, the probability of success increases with each try. So keep trying. And don't even let me hear any of you say "Aw, fuck it." I promise not to say it too.

"Perfection is attained by slow degrees; it requires the hand of time."

That quotation from François Voltaire seems a good way to start out today's belated Gratuitous Musing.

But first, a note about my recent silence: I started back to school the week before last, and am taking a lot of classes, plus working part-time. As time evaporates, I'm finding it difficult to spend as much time on the blog during the week. The blog is an important tool for my CR practice, and I really relish working on it, but have to keep my priorities clear so I can graduate in May. So, please pardon any longish delays between posts. I really appreciate that folks are reading and drawing some usefulness from my prattle, and I'll keep posting, just a bit less frequently. Now on to today's Gratuitous Musing.

If you haven't read "On Setting a Good Example," over at Apri's blog (1/24/07), do so at once, then come back and read this entry, which was inspired by it.

April writes:

"I'd have to admit, I've been a bit concerned as of late that some of you have the idea that I'm some sort of ice queen of food perfection. I mean, you sounded so shocked when I ate some hummus! If you want food discipline perfection, you've got to look to MR. Cause I do pretty well, much better than ever before, but I'm by no means invincible. That's one reason why I build a little margin into my daily calories, so that I don't end up messing up my long term CR program. Life happens! It's okay!"

The unfortunately conjoined-twin subjects of CR'ers behaving in non-CR-like ways, and the emotional and psychological gymnastics we perform in order to cope with our slip-ups, have been a recurrent theme in the CR newbie blogosphere since I entered the discussion a few weeks back. I've commented on it before myself in my "Shut the Hell Up on Pain of Bitch Slap" post.

I am one of the few males I know who wrestles openly with my self-demands for perfection, and the inevitable failures for which I then scold and criticize myself. I say "openly" because many--perhaps most--men experience self-doubt, lack of confidence, fear of failure, dissatisfaction with achievement, fear of being judged weak, and on and on, but almost as many seem to be conditioned to avoid expressing it. I don't know how those tough dudes work it out, but I get through it by boring a few very select, dear, close friends (plus the whole CR newbie blogosphere) to death with my mutterings. They then set me straight (er...so to speak).

Speaking of straight, I dunno, maybe the fact that I'm gay has something to do with all this. I was certainly exposed to some specific sorts of unfair pressures growing up. I lacked the physical desire to do the sorts of things that the other boys were doing, things that would have established me as a more "normal" member of the tribe. I was a deviant in the purely sociological sense: I was different. It's no surprise I developed my closest, longest-lasting relationships with females, people who make up just over half the population of the United States and still somehow are still treated as if they are "other" or "different" from normal (which is of course white, male, and heterosexual). Perhaps I absorbed more than just companionship from my close platonic friendships with girls who were carrying around--or struggling against--society's ludicrous and oppressive gender baggage.

Now as a young(ish) gay male adult, it's easy for me to see some similarities in the pressures I face to those of many women in our society, including the pressure to look a certain way. Tyra Banks was recently mocked for being 30lbs heavier now than at the height of her modelling career. Noel Gallagher of Oasis described Jack White (from the White Stripes) as "Zorro on donuts." Okay. So these wildly successful, career-oriented, accomplished folks gained a little weigh. That somehow means they should be publicly ridiculed? Society demands perfection and so breathlessly and gladly sneers at anything less.

I commit the unspeakable sin of being too fat for a gay man. Try being a youngish urban gay male AND too fat, and then try to get noticed by gymbot physical-perfection-obsessed urban gay male society. My basic identity has long included being constantly aware that I'm not perfect. My fear of being too fat inevitably becomes an element of my CR goals and practice. How could it not? Enter my obsession with perfection, as expressed by that Embittered Nasty Little Troll: "Oh no! You ate a chicken burrito with sour cream and cheese at Chipotle Mexican Grill for an astonishing 1200 (delicious) calories! You failed! If you can't do it perfectly, you can't do it at all. Might as well say 'fuck it' and hop right off the wagon." You guys see why I don't like to listen to this guy, right? He's such a dick.

I had a friend in my hometown of Ft. Wayne, Indiana, who like me wanted nothing more than to leave town and live somewhere else, somewhere cool like Chicago. In 1993, at the age of 22, I packed whatever I could fit in a big suitcase and headed east to Washington, DC, where I lived for six years before moving here to Chicago. I did my messy and exciting and and tragi-comic growing up in DC (The drugs! The booze! The sex! The really bad food!), then came to Chicago to enjoy my maturity. Soon after moving to Chicago, I visited my friend in Ft. Wayne who still wanted to move to Chicago himself, so badly. But he was going to wait until he could "do it right." I wasn't sure what "right" meant, but whatever it was, it kept him in Ft. Wayne, where he remains today. Granted, much more is at stake with relocating than eating a burrito, but still my friend had a sense of perfection that, if he couldn't achieve it, immobilized him--quite literally. He didn't even try.

Meanwhile, people who appear to actually be perfect in some way get stuck in a different kind of trap: if perfection is the achieved norm, then losing that perfection becomes a constant concern and source for fear. The risks in fear-driven behavior are many, and include the propensity to be very annoying and humorless.

And let's not forget there are some unpleasant forms of perfection. There are people who seem to have perfected being assholes. Some politicians have demonstrated that they are perfect idiots. Some manage to commit the "perfect crimes," and the perfect aspect in grammar has caused more than a few headaches for students of languages.

So, I think it's more than totally cool that someone who is a visible and charismatic proponent of CR publicly acknowledges her imperfection and the struggles that make CR challenging for her, even after years of practice. Especially for us newbies, this candor about struggle is also absolutely necessary in order to build an authentic, solidly supportive community that we hope will grow into larger grass-roots movement.

Adjusting to this lifestyle is HARD, even on the very easy, low-hunger days, and I don't trust anyone who tells me "it was nothing." It's such a radical departure from what we are used to. Food is so emblematic, so tied to tradition and ritual, that we sometimes feel we are cutting ourselves loose from our moorings, set adrift in a strange and by turns inviting and intimidating sea. There's no way that sort of heavy transformation isn't gonna hurt. We are going to stumble around in the dark, stubbing our toes on the furniture, and then when we finally find the light switch and flip it on, we'll see that the room is a mess, and it's going to take awhile to clean it up. And we have to find a place for all the clutter before we can even think about vacuuming the floor, or dusting, or repainting.

It's so great to be able to stumble around and yet keep going, and that's easier when we can be reminded that the experienced CR folks still stumble too. The trap of perfectionism is not going to turn out to be a useful tool for making this transformation. Put on some old ripped jeans and a stained t-shirt and prepare to get messy. Prepare to come up with a brilliant plan today for your "perfect" quotidian diet, and then find yourself at Chipotle Mexican Grill tomorrow. Prepare to make four trips to Chiptole Mexican Grill this month, but only three next month. And only two the month after that. And then sometime two years from now, to look back and say, "I haven't been to Chipotle Mexican Grill for six months...maybe I should....naw, I don't really want it that much anymore."

Prepare to think about this lifestyle in terms of months and years, not days and weeks, and readjust your notion of what perfection is. Perfection is not "all or nothing," and this isn't a "zero-sum game." Perfection is a process, not a goal. Perfection is deciding what you want to do, then taking frequent and steady--albeit small--steps towards that goal, steps that include stumbles, stubbed toes, maybe even an all-out face plant or two. Just remeber that even stumbling, you are moving forward. Even taking two steps forward and one step back still makes progress.

I'm not just musing gratuitously here. I'm engaging in a therapeutic reframing of my own successes and failures, because lately, since going back to school, I feel like I've been doing CR more in theory than in practice. Not yet fully comfortable with my new tools, in moments of weakness I've been choosing some old, comforting ones. For every three good days, I have one bad.

I haven't been successful at keeping my calories as low as my target, and my weight loss--one of the easiest but also most psychologically loaded metrics--has leveled off at just five pounds since January 1st. Maybe I'll hit that magic eight pounds by January 31, but I doubt it. So I probably won't meet my first monthly target.

But not so fast: I lost five pounds and stayed that way! My jeans fit noticeably looser! That means despite my stumbles, I really did ratchet down my calorie consumption enough to lose weight, and that is undeniable progress, just a bit slower than I anticipated. But who cares about two or three pounds when I want to do this for the rest of my (long) life? For the month of February, I'll set a more modest goal: instead of having three good days followed by one bad, maybe I'll try for four good days in a row, followed by one not-so-bad?

So down with perfection, and up with progress! I just want to be happy with moving steadily forward with the rest of you on our long, slow journey!

Pooping in the blogoshpere

I hope you all are doing well, and thanks for all the support yesterday with my Skull and Crossbones dilemma. I am so much looking forward to going to the brunch now that I've resolved (with your help) my ambivalent feelings about what's "okay" for me to do, and confronted and (I think) disarmed my guilt reflex in advance. It takes time to make peace with food and all the emotional baggage attached to it. But I've never had it as easy as I do now. I hope it's not too sappy to say--especially for a man (but then I am a very sensitive type of man, after all)--but it feels like an emotional and physical healing is taking place, and you are all part of this effective treatment, so thanks for being there!

By the way, I find it interesting to note that it seems most of the blogs, and most of the comments on my blog, are created by women. Where are the men? There is something culturally interesting going on here, that both women and men are doing CR, but the support network seems heavily weighted towards women...this seems a good topic for a future blog. Your thoughts, ladies?

The picture to the right is beautiful psyllium, which in its herbal state, is really quite lovely and delicate in appearance--I think I would welcome it in my herb garden (if I had one)--especially when you consider the rather indelicate function it often serves. Yes, I'm going to talk about poop, here in public. But before you jump to the conclusion that my blog has descended into the e-toilet, let's talk about MegaMuffins, because as you'll see, in the same way MegaMuffins inevitably lead to good poop, MegaMuffin discussions can lead to good poop discussions.

I am flush with the fervor of the recently converted. I'm ready to go tell it on the mountain, to knock on doors, to rouse people from their slumber to let them know about the miracle of the Mighty MegaMuffin.

It's really quite impossible to overstate the allure of the MegaMuffin. It is the ultimate convenience food--so easy, and so satisfying that every time I eat one, I feel like I'm "cheating" (if there is such a thing). MegaMuffins have single-handedly saved my CR program during this hectic first week back to school, just as I was counting on them too. Isn't it great when you open your toolbox and find just the tool you needed for the job, waiting for you? MegaMuffins are like a super-fancy nutrition bar, only I made it myself and I know exactly what's in it and none of the ingredients frighten me (well, okay maybe one or two are sort of creepy). I trust the mighty MegaMuffin. Mighty MegaMuffin--I [heart] you!

I made my inaugural batch last weekend, and I wasn't able to obtain a couple of the ingredients, so it's hard to know if what I produced is like the MegaMuffins others make. But I guess that doesn't really matter--I like them, and on more than a couple occasions they've been the sole barrier between a good CR day and an ad lib disaster.

I see room for improvement though. I think I want to pump up the flavor with more spices. I'm the type who, when making a pumpkin pie, automatically doubles the spices called for in the recipe because I like it spicy and most people are spiceaphobic. And where's the vanilla? Vanilla is a must! I can't believe I didn't think to add some in the first place. And though there is already an entire orange (peel and all) in the recipe, I can't help feeling the flavor could be brightened considerably with the addition of a judicious amount of grated lemon zest! Fresh ginger instead of powdered, and a bit of clove, and I think I'll have a recipe tailored just for me.

And then there are the endless variations: why not some almond extract in one batch, and coconut extract in another? How about some rose water (or maybe even some rose hips--lots of vitamin C in those!) and cardamom, for a little Indian flair? It seems the basic ingredients of the muffin are so mild that almost any flavor profile could work. I'll be turning out another batch this weekend, so I'll post details about any delightful new ideas I come up with.

And now for a little graphic exploration of something very private, so tune out NOW if you are squeamish about discussing our elimination habits. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. But I feel compelled to share this in case anyone else has experienced the same problem as me:

During the first couple weeks of my CR practice, I was finding that I needed to have a bowel movement (sometimes quite urgently) after almost every meal, up to three times a day, and the results were not pleasant: loose and watery. I was consuming vastly greater amounts of dietary fiber than in my prior ad lib diet, but I think perhaps I was missing certain types of fiber for bulking up my stools, with the inevitable watery result, since it seemed there was nothing to bind it all together.

Enter MegaMuffin. I've been eating at least one of them daily, and sometimes two, and I have to tell you, thanks to all the bran and fruit fibers and the psyllium husks, that watery problem is gone without a trace. I've begun having large, firm (but not hard) stools that I'm able to eliminate without any effort and little mess. I'm convinced I was missing important types of bulking fiber, perhaps of the soluble sort. I haven't had bowel movements this healthy and comfortable and clean and effortless in years. So, that's yet another great thing about MegaMuffins: nice poop.

We'll be talking about poop more in the future, I feel confident. I mean, how long can we go on discussing what goes in without at least some mention of what comes out? But for our first poop discussion, was that really so bad?

Guess what mustard greens taste like....

First, a few odds and ends, perhaps enough to make ends meet:

I recently decided to "Zone" up my targets, so I'm shooting for 40% protein, 30% fat, and 30% carbohydrate. This has made getting adequate protein a bit more challenging. Also, I've decided to increase my daily calorie target again, because even despite my two very unCR days last week, my scale informs me that I've lost six pounds--in just two weeks. That's two pounds too fast, and while I at one time thought, "I want to lose as fast as I can," I'm also enjoying the chance to eat some extra food and still lose weight.

[As a cheery aside: it doesn't take much weight loss for you to start feeling it in your clothes, and I'm happy--oh SO happy--to report that my favorite pair of jeans, which were fitting exactly properly two weeks ago, are now somewhat loose--comfortably so. God that feels GOOD.]

Back to my targets: reviewing my CRON data reveals the truth, that I've been eating more than my 1500/day calorie target anyhow, sometimes up to1900 calories. So I'm going to raise my target to 1700, and see where that takes me in the next week. Recall, I began with a 1300/day target, raised it to 1500/day, and now 1700/day.

The downside of raising my target is that I will have to find new ways to consume more protein. This is a bit of a tedious process, but thankfully it's fun and rewarding too.

Now, on to the titular subject matter: Mustard Greens

The only way I've ever eaten mustard greens in the past is stewed to oblivion the way collards and turnip greens and kale are often cooked, with a nice ham hock, plenty of salt, a dash of vinegar, a little sugar, some red pepper, served with hot sauce. I used to make good old fashioned, old-school collards that could take their place in any soul food restaurant without anyone noticing the white boy made them.

That was then, when said collards would naturally be accompanied by sweet potatoes (and I mean SWEET with sugar), corn bread, macaroni and cheese, and perhaps chicken wings, or ham, or a smothered pork chop. Don't forget the cobbler for dessert (even though the sweet potatoes had just as much sugar...).

Obviously I don't do that anymore, but I've always loved greens, and given their powerful nutrient punch for low calories, finding new and exciting ways to eat them seems like a high priority for effective CR practice.

Given the fact that "cooked-to-death" was the only way I'd experienced them previously, imagine my surprise yesterday when I got home with a pile of fresh, curly, beautiful mustard greens, and tried a little piece raw.

Mustard greens taste like mustard.

And I love with a capital L-O-V-E the flavor and ephemeral vapory heat of mustard (and horseradish and especially wasabe, too!)

But here's the funny and almost tragic part (if I'd gone through with it): I was on a shopping trip looking for recipe ingredients for my inaugural batch of Megamuffins, which includes curly endive. Well, Whole Foods was out of endive, but had a mountain of mustard greens that looked sort of similar--same color you know. I thought, "well, maybe mustard greens will work," and I bought a bunch.

Fortunately I discovered endive in stock at another store and bought it too. Why? Because mustard greens taste like mustard, and that just might not be the best accompaniment to strawberries and cherries, the fruit I was using in my batch of Megamuffins.

I'd had NO idea mustard greens were so mustardy. I'd never had them when they still had a flavor of their own. What a revelation!

Which brings me to my next point: the different styles of eating I engage in each day.

I prepared some lightly steamed mustard greens, dressed with a quick "vinaigrette" of balsamic vinegar, dijon mustard, brewer's yeast, pepper, garlic, and flax oil. The flavor was deliciously sharp and pungent--at first.

But after three or four bites, with a HUGE bowl still to go, it quickly became overwhelming. Too much pungency, too vinegary, too sharp. Just too flavorful, so flavorful I was practically crying out for a thin and tasteless broth to ease things up.

But I'd already mixed all those nutritious ingredients into the dressing, and I needed to eat ALL of it to get my budgeted nutrients for the day! So, I gritted my teeth, and chomped my way through a rather aggressive meal that, when I'd finished it, well, let's just say I was more than ready to be done with it. I turned to a big soothing mug of green tea to cleanse my poor overwrought palate.

This type of eating, this "ignore what's going on in your mouth and just bite, chew, swallow, bite, chew swallow," I'd charitably call "utilitarian," or "refueling" eating. I was not really enjoying the food (though I certainly wasn't hating it), and I was definitely eager to be finished. But I was also self-satisfied with the knowledge that every bite was packed with nutrition and while maybe my tongue wasn't exactly amused, my guts were all about it. (I can feel them in there now--my guts--descending on those greens like a pack of hungry wolves on a young buck.)

Well, mercifully, I got the "utilitarian" meal out of the way early. All the rest of the food I have planned for today seems indulgent by comparison, what I'd call "luxurious" eating:

• salmon
• sweet potatoes
• kippered herring
• yogurt
• blueberries
• chocolate (72% cacao)
• a brand new Megamuffin (!)
• ....and more!

Isn't it wonderful when you begin to notice your tastes changing such that a baked sweet potato (mashed with a teaspoon of flax oil, cinnamon, vanilla, chopped nuts, and maybe a dash of Splenda if you are really in the mood for SWEET) seems like a rich dessert? When blueberries seem like little nibbles of ambrosia? When just 10 grams of some of the finest chocolate you can get virtually explodes in the mouth with flavor?

Sensible eating, as CR is, turns taste buds into sensory super-athletes. Without the oppressive unctuousness of all that unnecessary fat (not to be confused with necessary fat) and salt and sugar--which overwhelm everything else in the food--taste buds are free to tune themselves to detect essences that hover on the edges, tastes that suggest the presence of important nutrients our bodies crave, subtleties we missed before that give food its fullest expression of flavor.

And good flavor is what keeps us eating, so to me, this process seems key to survival. I'm inducing my body to deploy some dusty and disused tools from my toolchest of evolutionary survival. There's something primal and honest about this, something that makes me feel in touch with the way things work, the way things are supposed to work, a connection to nature that had been lost, paved over with refined carbs and saturated fat and bizarre chemicals, like a garden turned into a parking lot where nothing can grow with any real enthusiasm. My body feels like it's been depaved, the soured earth beneath tilled and restocked with nutrients and moisture and springing to life once again.

CR makes it easy to love food again, instead of always thinking of it as a source of guilt and denial. It's a benefit I wasn't expecting so soon in my experience, but I'm so grateful it's here!

I don't care if I die tomorrow.

I don't care if I live to be 70, 80, 90, 145, or die tomorrow. Not exactly, anyhow. No, I don't want to die--I love life as much as anyone (and maybe more than some). But the notion of practicing CR for the purpose of achieving longevity is a concept that I'm still trying to wrap my head around.

Here's the thing: if I died suddenly, and didn't know it was coming, how could I possibly care? I wouldn't be around to notice it happened.

What I absolutely DO care about, without a doubt, is that I don't want to get sick and linger in some awful in-between state, not quite alive, not yet dead. I'm thinking of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, any illness that would directly or indirectly interfere with my ability to enjoy (not just endure) my life. I want to be vital, strong, healthy and energetic for as long as I can, and then I want to be suddenly, and without warning...dead.

Right now, if I were to suddenly die, and if my consciousness could somehow linger long enough to appreciate my own death, I could be satisfied that I hadn't descended into serious quality-of-life-ruining ill health, pain, fear and sadness, and that I'd been living my life according to my values and principles. But I'm only 36, and despite a few health conditions, I enjoy fairly healthy, happy existence--for now.

But statistics are NOT on my side, here. Give me another 30 years proceeding as I was before starting CR, and I could reasonably expect my death to be merely the logical and tragic end to a lot of suffering.

I don't want to do it that way.

So, as far as I can tell, this CR thing is my ticket to avoiding that tragic fate, to enjoying life as a strong and healthy person for as long as possible--however long that turns out to be. I don't need 140 years to feel successful here. I'd be happy to make it to 70, but have these next 34 years be vibrant and wonderful, instead of sickly and sad.

I guess, if I'm really honest with myself, I'm early into this process and I've been reluctant to share this blog with, for example, friends or co-workers, etc. because I'm sensitive to the idea that someone reading this blog who doesn't know anything about this process will be dismissive of CR before fully understanding that it's not only about some magical unknown future longevity, but about the quality of my life RIGHT NOW!

When I first trained for a marathon, our training coach said at the beginning, "Don't think about 26.2 miles, when today you only need to run 5. Can you run 26.2 miles? Of course not--not today. So why spend time stressing about how daunting that distance seems. Focus on what you have to work with right now."

I don't have 140 years to work with right now. I have high blood pressure and high cholesterol and I'm 40 lbs overweight--that's what I have to work with right now. That's the five miles I have to run today. Longevity? That's the 26.2 miles I'm slowly, gradually working my way up to. I'm choosing to be mindful of what's happening to me now.

So if you are reading this blog, and you are critical of CR, or you are interested in persuading me that CR isn't the absolute best way for me to work with my health concerns right now, you better first do the following:

1. Demonstrate to me that you know what CR is, and that you are conversant in its premises and principles. (And be aware that it's taken me almost three months of study to just begin to understand it, and I have a long way to go, so don't imagine you can simply do a quick google search and convince me that you know what you're talking about. Be prepared to work for my respect.)

2. Prove to me that you have a better solution that can survive scientific scrutiny (good luck)

3. Show me how your solution is working out for you personally. (In other words, if you aren't personally a shining beautiful example of good health, I really don't want to hear advice from you.)

There's an expression, "stick with the winners." And it seems self-evident to me that if you want what someone else has, you should probably try to do what they did. So I'm taking my inspiration and advice from people who are doing this now, and achieving the kind of results that I want. Longevity? Who knows. Low blood pressure and cholesterol and weight loss and feeling good and healthy now? I'll take it.

Shut the hell up on pain of bitch slap!

I find the premise that we can control, or at least influence our psychological and emotional responses (what I usually refer to as my "internal life") by managing the substances we put into our bodies to be intuitive, even self-evident. But that was not always the case for me, and I'm regularly reminded that others do not always see this connection as clearly as I now do.

My experience training for marathons and other athletic endeavors taught me the value in keeping a training log in which I recorded not only how much exercise I performed, but other things, like observations about energy levels, mood, the weather, diet--anything that could have an impact on performance was fair game to be journaled. The purpose was in being able to look back over a period of time and draw some connections and conclusions about what worked on the good days and what contributed to the bad days. This approach diminishes the role of randomness, focusing instead on rational, predictable responses to various inputs and stimuli--the predictable results of behaviors, as opposed to simply being a victim of bad luck. So rather than saying after a bad day, "Oh you know, it was just one of those days..." one could just as easily conclude "I ate a bunch of crap the day before, didn't get enough sleep, then ran 30% further than my last run instead of just 10%. No wonder I feel like shit today and my per/mile average sucked and I'm stiff and sore and am missing today's workout because of it."

I'm starting to view keeping track of my CR experience as not unlike keeping a training log. It seems important to be mindful (mindfulness--such a powerful concept) not only of how I'm eating, but how I'm feeling, how my external behaviors influence my internal life, and how my internal life in turn influences my external behaviors (the image of an ouroboros comes to mind). Over time, it seems likely I can learn much about the predictable and mechanical functioning of my mind and body by reviewing this information. And I predict that when my mind and body live in easy balance with one another, I will perceive that experience as what I'll call the CR Happy Meal, a well-balanced emotional feast consisting of a judicious serving of relaxed contentment, generously spiced with optimism (and just a pinch of pessimism for contrasting flavor), served with a side of mixed energies and enthusiasms, with healing and restorative sleep for dessert.

My certainty of these premises has only grown as I've embarked on this new CR lifestyle. Its objective tools, like nutritional software, allow me to compare and perhaps correlate my moods and emotions with the foods I've eaten that day or in the days previous, while the more subjective tools like the blogs of other newbies struggling their way through the initial baby steps, and the blogs and mailing lists with the musings of long-time practitioners invite me to compare my experience with those of other people. I'm aware that what works for me may not work for others, and vice versa, but I'll add that these truths that I have concluded to be intuitive and self-evident were things I learned from other people, then tested in my own life and found to be true, so I'll be happy if anyone reading these words I write can identify with my experience in some way.

With all of that as a rather indulgent prologue, I'll now move on to the real meat of this morning's Gratuitous Musings.

I've had a couple bad--really bad--CR days. I haven't recorded my food in CRON-O-Meter since January 10. Why? Because I sacrificed mindfullness and allowed my emotions to dominate and overmaster my behavior in ways that I couldn't bear to record for posterity. I used to call what I'm feeling this morning "shame." But the real shame I should be feeling is for how I often sit in judgment of myself in a disdainful and destructive way that I would never subject anyone else to.

Imagine:

"Chris, I really fucked up yesterday. I ate 10 pizzas, drank a keg of beer, and finished up with three dozen donuts which I washed down with a gallon of heavy cream!"

"How do you feel today?"

"Terrible. I'm sluggish and tired, depressed, my gut is in open revolt, I gained 25 pounds overnight, my blood pressure skyrocketed, and I'm about to have a heart attack because my arteries have narrowed to a trickle!"

"Wow, you are a total fuck up! You should probably just kill yourself and get it over with. Here, have a pound of butter for a snack."

Ouch! No, No, NO, not in a million years, not ever, never never never would I even THINK such a thing about--let alone say it to--someone who was suffering from the results of a few bad choices.

And I'm not going to put up with that nasty voice whispering in MY ear either. Oh, he tried it. He got all up in my face, that embittered, nasty little troll, and I had to warn him to shut the hell up on pain of bitch slap.

So imagine instead:

"Chris, I really fucked up yesterday. I ate 10 pizzas, drank a keg of beer, and finished up with three dozen donuts which I washed down with a gallon of heavy cream!"

"How do you feel today?"

"Terrible. I'm sluggish and tired, depressed, my gut is in open revolt, I gained 25 pounds overnight, my blood pressure skyrocketed, and I'm about to have a heart attack because my arteries have narrowed to a trickle!"

"What were you doing before this happened?"

"Well, I was eating generous portions of delicious and nutritious vegetables and fruit, succulently fatty fish, nuts, tea, even delicious 72% cacao chocolate!"

"Wow, that sounds terrific. How'd you feel?"

"Oh, man, I felt GREAT!"

"Well, if that was working for you, maybe you should try that again."

"But yesterday...it was all so awful...I..."

"Don't even think about yesterday--or tomorrow, for that matter. How about we just focus on what we actually have to work with, which is now, today. Could you try that, just one day? I'll do it with you, and we can compare notes tomorrow. What do you say?"

Well, whose counsel do you prefer?

I know what some of you are thinking: "So much DRAMA about food. Relax!" Oh, I wish I could! But, that food is tied to psychological drama shouldn't be surprising to anyone. Food is the first thing we do in life after breathing. Love and dependence and ecstasy and survival become inextricably hardwired the first time we latch on to mother's tit, and there's no divorcing them again. There is so much emotional baggage attached to food that we should applaud ourselves for making even the most trivial of good choices.

Embracing CR or any healthy way of eating is an act of self-love and self-respect, and inherent in that choice is an optimistic view that we can and should be better, that we can be healthier and happier and that those are desirable goals because we want to be alive and life is meant to be enjoyed, not just endured.

But love and hate are not opposites, and this isn't a zero-sum game. A day or two, or a week, a month, even years of bad choices don't have to be seen as acts of defeating self hatred. We don't need to keep sabotaging ourselves with feelings of inadequacy and disappointment and self-shaming, because those things in the end do not contribute much to our lives or the lives of others.

I like to remind myself of something I learned when I did some research on Wicca for a class once, something called the Wiccan Rede:

"An it harm none, do as thou wilt."

It's a powerful statement, and not only because it advises us to be mindful of how our choices impact others. The unspoken message inherent in the Wiccan Rede is that we not harm ourselves. Human beings are fairly clever--too clever perhaps--we find a million ways to harm ourselves first, and then find we are unable to help but harm others.

Obsessing about one's health and well being, about CR--about any of these things--can at times seem self-indulgent and self-absorbed. But we also need to recognize that if we want to be of any use to the world at all, if we want to love and respect others, and be loved and respected by others, we first must take care of and love and respect ourselves. And that means enjoying our successes and our good choices and our good days, and learning from our bad ones without descending into self-sabotaging shame and regret.

As Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron said, "We work on ourselves in order to help others, but also we help others in order to work on ourselves."

As I sit here in front of CRON-O-Meter, peering at those two empty days where fear and loathing stood in my way and prevented honesty and acceptance, I can hear his receding voice now, that embittered little troll who visits me on days like yesterday, or the day before. He sounds so desperate and hateful, so unhappy. I'm tempted to give him an extra bitch slap for the road. But maybe like me, all he needs is a hug and blueberry/yogurt/flax oil/egg white smoothie.

Talking about CRON at work

People at work have noticed that I'm doing things differently with my diet (bringing all my own food to work, not partaking of snacks and other goodies put out by the other office people, not going out to eat for lunch, etc.).

My work life is perhaps a little different than some. I work in the field of bicycling advocacy, as an intern at the Chicago Department of Transportation. Like me, most of my coworkers are reasonably healthy, active people who bicycle every day to work, school, grocery shopping, etc. They are naturally sympathetic to issues of healthy diet, a healthy food environment, environmental and social concerns, sustainability, etc., and many of these people are already fully politicized when it comes to the power of personal choice. So they are naturally sympathetic, I think, to the ethical reasons why I think CR is a good idea, even if they don't care about longevity. (The ethics of CR are something I take every bit as seriously as the personal benefits, but that's a discussion for another post.)

I'm unsure how best to respond to their questions. I worry that if I go into too much detail about CR, I will seem nutty--especially given that I am still significantly overweight. Who am I to represent the virtues of CR? So far, I've given a half-truth answer:

"I'm trying to address some of my serious health concerns with modifications to my diet."

I deemphasize the weight-loss goal, and longevity never enters into the conversation. I'm not ready to be a longevity advocate in public because if I fail to stick with this, it might persuade others that CR is unworkable. I also am the kind of person who would rather explain to people what I do that works for me, rather than offer advice about what they should do. And I'm not really the poster child for "what works," not yet. In July, maybe, after I've shed some weight and you can see the effects of CR just by looking at me!

So, I have a cunning plan. Okay, it's not that cunning, but it just might work. I'll give vague half-answers to their questions until I reach my goal weight. When I am the very image of virtuous CR practice, and can reasonably provide an appealing and authentic representation of what CR can do (in the short term, since the longevity issue remains an open question)--when they are looking at my thin, healthy body and asking "how'd you do it?"--THEN I'll open my big mouth and do some CR advocacy with my coworkers. And then they'll think I'm nutty anyhow. But I'll be able to say something arch and pithy, like "the results speak for themselves..."

I think it's important for me to fully internalize and prove my commitment to myself first, before I advocate to others.

I'll admit it: I have a lusty infatuation with my skinny, post-CR body.

I'll admit it: I have a lusty infatuation with my skinny, post-CR body. It goes around, hiding its sexy self inside an unflattering cloak of flab--I know it's in there, and I've repeatedly attempted to coax it to disrobe, but it's been holding out, teasing me from time to time with a glimpse of glutes, or a peak of pec, only to cover back up and walk away. So I decided to try a little CR, a carefully constructed campaign to win my body over.

Starting CR is an act of seduction. I have all kinds of things I want my body to do for me, but it gives the cold shoulder, and prances off coquettishly, tossing a come hither glance over its shoulder that says, "nice try, but I don't think so..."

I romanced my body with ardor for six long days, only to be rewarded with one tiny pound of weight loss--just a stitch in a sturdily constructed garment.

I thought, "if it took six days to lose one pound, there's no way I'm going to meet my target of two pounds per week. There's no way I'm going to get this body naked in six months." I'd been allowed a little heavy petting, then it pulled back--it wasn't ready. CR frustration threatened to cloud my judgment. My body was mocking me, dangling that one solitary pound in front of me. What a tease!

Well apparently some bodies like it in the morning. On day eight, I was greeted by more than the sunrise when I awoke. My body must have REALLY been in the mood this morning, because the scale revealed a 4lb weight loss--a three pound difference from yesterday! Whew! I finally got some!

I can hear you now:

"SLOW DOWN!" you caution. "You have some power in this relationship too--but you're moving too fast."

But things seem suddenly to be going great, I enthuse! And they do! I got four pounds this morning, and it was HOT!

"Don't let it go to your head," you reply. "It's all part of the tease, how your body gets its hooks into you. Now that you know what you were missing all this time, how good it was, your body can withhold all it wants. You'll do what it wants to get more. You are owned now."

I sigh. This isn't exactly what I wanted to hear. I thought my problems were over, and that me and my body were finally locked in a steamy, passionate CR affair.

"Yeah, you're desperate--we all are. So what? You don't have to let your body know that. That's not a turn on. You need to send the message, loud and clear: 'Weight loss? Meh. I could take it or leave it...' Now that's a turn on. Yes, your body has something you want, and it's teased you and excited you. But you have power too--you have things your body wants. You can use the power of tease, as well."

Like what? How can I turn this fling into a torrid, passionate affair that will last?

"If you want to enjoy this relationship for a long, long time, take a tip from the experts: you need to engage in a little foreplay if you want to get things moving on a regular basis."

Foreplay? You mean, like cooing into its ear, maybe running it a hot bath with rose petals and shampooing its hair lovi....

"Shhhh! Less willful talking, more willing listening." you chide. "Here are some tips: try seduction with almonds, and egg whites. Never underestimate the subtle power in the judicious use of kale, and tenderly--but firmly--apply a little zinc. A soft powdering with brewers yeast might be the cool touch that really heats things up...but watch the saturated fat--instant turnoff! Look at us--don't the results speak for themselves?" you ask boastfully. I bow to you. I am your pupil.

"And don't expect to get 4lbs every week," you scold. "That's just greedy, and no one likes a selfish CRer. Now get going!" you command with a light swat on my behind as you show me the door.

Duly chastened, I scoot sheepishly out into the big happy sunny world outside. 'Is the sky just a little bit bluer today?' I wonder, as I set off on my quest to gather the tools of seduction.