darn cold

Hi, y'all:

Santa Cruz has been hit with its version of a cold wave, with temps below freezing in some places. I know this is nothing compared to what other parts of the country are going through, but it sure feels like winter here.

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. Mr. Strega and I produced a proper feast, with turkey and all the trimmings, and also a prime rib. I did Tarot card readings for people (I always seem to do this, no matter what the occasion), and my friend Mary read palms. Too bad we never seem to figure out the right lottery numbers!

And thus, on the heels of Thanksgiving, I want to announce that I have joined Weight Watchers. This is because I'm not particularly worried about my weight, even though I could stand to drop about fifteen to twenty pounds. I was becoming seriously addicted to sugary things, and, since I write a lot in coffeehouses, I was eating far more than my share of scones, muffins, bread, cookies, etc. There were some emotional reasons for this eating, too, which I won't go into here, and these I've decided to work on in counseling. Food is a wonderful comfort, but I was also using it a bit like a drug, to push away feelings.

I was also beginning to be concerned about the health issues of carrying extra weight, as my mother developed diabetes as a direct result of her own weight and eating habits. I lost nearly fifteen pounds in the first year I started bellydancing, but have lost very little since then. Prior to losing those fifteen pounds, I was definitely developing problems related to my weight, including acid reflux, which has since gone away. The clincher for me was an online test to determine my risk for Type II diabetes and, despite my level of activity, this test said I was at high risk. I feel there is a lot of tyranny in the media about how people ought to look, that we should look ageless and be thin as rails, but at the same time, I don't want to develop health problems beyond the ones I already have.

I have a long history with Weight Watchers in my immediate family. My Auntie Jo was on Weight Watchers in the 1970s and lost some weight on it, but complained the whole time about it. Another female relative of mine has been on and off Weight Watchers for years, and gained and lost the same fifteen pounds each time. Weight Watchers assigns a certain points amount to different types of food; she used to complain endlessly about this, and berated herself in a way I thought was unnecessarily merciless when she went over her points limit.

I decided three weeks ago to just give the online program a try (I don't really want to go to meetings just yet). I learned in the first few days that if I decided to eat a lot of scones, muffins, cookies etc., in a day, I would blow all my points really quickly, and that if I ate healthily, I would end up not hungry, not deprived, and stay in my points limits. There are also a surprisingly large number of points for each day--I thought it would be like some horrible gulag thing, but it's not. I did feel weird for the first three days as my body started to adjust to not having so much sugar, but that was transient. I can still have desserts and things like that, but within reason.

By the way, I'm not touting WW as the only program there is to lose weight or something--it just seems to be working for me. I have lost four pounds in the last three weeks, even with Thanksgiving, and this rate is fine for me. It is a little tedious to sign on and record what I've eaten in a day, but I decided to use the points system as a tool and treat it like a game, not use it as an instrument to beat myself up. I feel a lot more energetic, especially in my dance classes, and I feel better about my relationship with food.

So, that is what I am doing lately, as well as finally shopping my poetry manuscript around. Harvey's poem was the very last one I will put into this particular manuscript, which has taken me--ahem--well over twenty years to put together. But there you have it--I am a very slow, painstaking writer and that is who I am.

Speaking of Harvey, I had a dream about him last night. He was standing just outside my peripheral vision, so I could not see him, but I heard his voice; he was explaining to me that "really, death is an illusion." The strangest thing was, I woke up for a minute and could still hear him talking to me, a moment when my dream-life and waking-life touched.