Stunts of the Trained & Collared

(In which the author begs the query, "Am I lower than an animal?")

FAMILIAR TRIGGERS, LOYAL RESPONSES:
COMPONENTS OF EARLY CONDITIONING, BOTH FORGOTTEN AND UPHELD

The magnitude and impact of my mind's compulsive calls depends on their humor at the given hour.  As previously explained, these internal voices --those regularly lobbing their little assignments-- derive power from deep-seated fears.  My response --whether to obey the actions they suggest, the split-second resuscitation of mostly familiar ticks-- is ruled by levels of serotonin, an anxiety-reducing chemical sourced within not only the brain, but several systems of the body including the gastrointestinal tract.  While this well-known neurotransmitter can be boosted using pharmacologic intervention (100 mg clomipramine in my case), a more reliable and rather obvious solution is to vigorously fuel oneself with the food-based nutrients thought to reverse its deficiency.  After all, you are what you eat.  

When facing chemical imbalances, pills are sorry band-aids --slapdash and requiring regular turnover.  True healing, I believe with resolute confidence, can be achieved by correcting not only one's diet, but also one's perception of and relationship to wounds of the past.  This blog serves to provide a sturdy board upon which I might dissect and catalog these long-festering lesions, leaving records of said autopsy for students of similar injury.  As declared outright in the title heading framing these pages, I am taking measures to "mend", processing memories and present-day trials in public, with the literal and figurative screen of my computer.  Progress with moving forward has been reliably thwarted by the fact that my problems have been with me since my formative years.  Most new or unfamiliar behavioral cues emanating from my twin disorders can be shrugged-off and dismissed, but others are long-ingrained and receive no protestation.  Most exercise commitments were generated before I can even remember, devised as a means of thwarting weight gain by a desperate, callow, searching psyche fixated on a culture witnessing expanding waistbands and the early-'90s fad remedies espoused by its media.  My daily "obligations" have mutated over a lifetime; I can summon the memory of some rituals that have receded completely.  I remember having to complete a certain count of sit-ups, push-ups, kneeling lunges, stair ascensions, or other such physical repetitions before, say, navigating through our home merely to "proceed with the day".  These were the less inconvenient measures, performed with varying degrees of discretion.  Others, such as extended "power walks" or sessions on an elliptical machine, stationary bicycle, treadmill, etc. have existed as actual schedule commitments:  premeditated, time-consuming obligations, not always unpleasant but also not exactly welcomed.  Most moonlight as anorexic behaviors, but others on occasion have emerged without a clear or logical relationship to burning calories.  My mother was chiefly introduced to my disorder when I refused at age eight to leave for school until I had kissed every one of the stuffed plush toys hanging in a bedroom wall hammock.  In those days I would position a toothbrush or rat-tailed comb on a countertop so that its "head" (the area with teeth/bristles) would be on top with the thin handle below, to indicate a "big head" and "skinny body".  I also struggled with wearing yellow or pink underwear from the Hanes™ variety pack because those colors connoted lard and pigs, respectably.  (It does not take a sophisticated sleuth to detect their common denominator.)  Whether anyone ever realized such habits were being indulged is unlikely; I've only in the last few years shared those retained in memory.  These incidents I volunteer in conversation because any embarrassment they might arouse is eased by a sort of "statute of limitations".  Having been the concerns of my Child Self I can look at them with greater objectivity and also less ownership.  Current examples of OCD-related routines are less comfortably provided because their appraisal feels like an attack on who I am and where I find myself today.

GINGERLY MOVING THE BAR

One week ago, facing the standard laundry list of pre-meal obligations and ritual protocol, my will buckled from the mounting pressure to incorporate the minimum standard of roughly one hundred minutes speed-walking into the day.  (I wouldn't normally consider this terribly arduous, but when a grown woman is chasing eighty pounds, her legs eventually make an appeal for downtime, "no strings attached".  Furthermore, by noon my hunger cues generally breach, without the need to be stoked.)  Surely, engaging in basic acts of living should not include prerequisites -- why must I have to exhaust physical and emotional reserves only to "earn" the right to meager morsels?  Why should food, so readily in supply and accessible within Western culture, be an exotic privilege?  I am inexpressibly exasperated moving as a tired, trained creature, jumping and contorting myself through umpteen hoops, pausing for just enough fuel to pivot and perform the same antics again.  As an additional indignity, the scale of these painful efforts is ultimately recognized and appreciated by myself alone.  I am reminded of John Merrick's plea to his assailants in 1980's The Elephant Man:  "I am not an elephant!  I am not an animal!  I am a human being!  I am a man!"  Something is terribly amiss when, between my cat and I, she receives twice her master's meal allotments.  When might I, too, observe the elemental pleasures of a working body?  Am I not due what even the basest of lifeforms universally receive?  Am I not amongst the ranks of Man?  Or have I been tucked amidst Lucifer's enlisted?  Indeed, my spoon bears not an imprint from Tiffany or Waterford, but instead carries the markings of Satan's own.

Frontispiece of Nero The Circus Lion:  His Many Adventures (1919) 
Copy by Richard Barnun.  Illustrations:  Walter S. Rogers

Riled by this pother of entreaties, with the rollover of months again staging their turn, I made yet another attempt at normalizing my seriously-defective daily cycle.  With willpower shyly reinforced, for the last eight days I have talked-down my disorders, negotiating.  I subsequently committed to only enough exercise that light rounds might be taken within the town, with a rare half-hour, in bad weather or at night, on the stationary bicycle.  I have come to conclude that I am incapable of swearing-off such stirrings outright -- I need to relieve the "itch" to actively employ my legs.  Having done so, I house much less irritability, self-loathing, disquietude.  In general, my fitness routines have been reduced (for now) by about 40-50%, leaving me with more space to pursue art and earlier sittings for lunch and dinner.  What's more, I have made a firmer commitment to administering an organic multivitamin with medication mid-morning.  After these vital changes came another big "win" for my digestive health:  the elimination ("soyonara!") of soy milk.  As far back as I can recall, this stuff has left me tremendously bloated, in concert with nausea and agitated bowels.  These conditions were only worsened by the nature of how I was preparing it:  1/2 cup chocolate Soy Slender® to 1/4 cup unsweetened Almond Breeze®, heated, with salt to taste.  Certainly, adding sodium (to bring-out the cocoa flavor) was contributing to the gastrointestinal trauma that was persisting four or more hours post-consumption of the mixture.  Because I was also using it to "cut" the blandness of chocolate Orgain®, this past week I haven't been drinking that product either.  Instead, I have reacquainted myself to the gift of yoghurt, as well as indulging a craving for Rice Crispies® (as paired with my old friend banana).  Admittedly, what I have allowed is at least three to four hundred calories less than the amount I should be prescribing, but it would seem my metabolism is so royally f**ed at this point that I gain weight at the mere smell of food.  (I have restored the last pound-and-a-half that had fallen victim to holiday stress and restriction; with some sound self-coaching I have accepted that this now-familiar number is to be embraced as an inevitable stepping stone, with additional adjustments inevitably in store.)  Now the mystery remains, why did my weight spike when I removed the one-two punch of soy milk and Orgain®?*  Could I have been really burning-off so much of my reserves in my activities, or was it that my body wasn't really absorbing much nutrition from what I had become accustomed to for my late-afternoon repast?  Scores of studies argue that soy, like corn, is an insubstantial, if not genetically-modifed crop, nutritionally vacant unless fermented whole.  Said "milk" is the liquid residue of the bean, and if it is not made fresh from that source it is likely derived from soy protein or soy isolate-- in other words, highly processed  (Even Dr. Oz warns against these versions.)  All I know is I was more prone to diarrhea with it in my system, and that, simply put, is an anorexic's crutch --her means, with exercise, of purging.  Given its appetite-suppressing qualities, salted soy milk certainly is a tool for thwarting weight gain -- whether that is an advantage hinges on what side of the battlefield you're approaching from.

*ADDENDUM (on the tail of a four day interim):  After seeing its readings take an unusual climb, it was determined that the base of my scale was not solidly positioned on the floor and was thus issuing its digital pronouncements on a foundation that was literally uncertain ground.  After moving the machine so that its feet were flush on the same floorboard, the number immediately returned to its previous flatline.  This is not to say my current standing is low, or at least lower, than what it had been before ditching soy milk.  It is the same, which makes sense when considering that said action cut calories from my meal plan but was balanced-out by a simultaneous decision to reduce exercise.  Measures where followed to trade soy milk for Almond Breeze® and/or a 6 oz. yoghurt cup along with continuing my regimen of one serving Orgain®.  All considered, there shouldn't be a gaping whole on the food front --or at least more than there had been before this switch-over-- and sessions spent walking or on the anchored pedal bike have not been so dramatically scaled-back as to cause disruption of my steady equilibrium.  What needs to be seen herein:  commitment to the Orgain® supplement and the restoration of an accompanying 200-250 calories with lunch, without falling back into formal work-outs.  To increase odds of lasting weight improvement this is a minimum need, as my body's hunger is less easily ignored without the discomfort of "soy-bloat".  I must be firm with myself, I must maintain the designated bearings:  at my sister's recommendation, I will be more aggressively applying methods of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy under the supervision of weekly council --provided, per usual, by Jennifer M. Batterman, clinical psychologist.  Stay tuned -- this unmoored vessel is leaning into bucking, irascible seas.