I am a change agent. I have hardly worked on anything else in my career. I could just take on the job title “Corporate Renovator” and hammer it onto a shingle outside my office. But today I was faced with an unthinkable demon. Are there areas that I really don’t want to change?

I have loved technology, the ability to reach out, connect and do things that used to take days or hours in nano-seconds, but for once I have resistance that is holding me back. I love books, adore books, from the time I was seven and an enlightened fourteen year old boy loaned me his entire collection of the Famous Five, my world opened, expanded and never shrunk again. When I go on holiday, clothes and shoes have been left behind while 10 books get shoved in a suitcase. Not just any books, but novels with words strung together so magnificently that you have to sigh and re-read their sentences; business books with concepts that brilliant people have pulled together and made simple and powerful; spiritual books that have stretched my soul, widened my perspectives and watered my internal garden. I generally need at least several in each category if I go away, so that I can entertain every part of my mind or moods. So, it would seem that acquiring an iPad would be a logical move for me. But I am so torn. It is like asking me to trade my relationships for a long-distance love affair.

The inability to hold the book, turn it over, read the back cover, muse at the intentions of the graphics on the cover, feel the sensation of turning the pages, just seems too much to give up. And what of the sharing? I love nothing better than standing in front of my floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and running my fingers along the spines of my books to find one that a friend MUST read. How do I do that when they are data bites on the inside of that magnificent, artistic device that is the iPad? Don’t get me wrong, I think the iPad is gorgeous and wonderous, but how, do I give up my love affair with the book? The practicality is a no brainer, the convenience beyond anything I could imagine, I could pack 3 extra pairs of shoes, but the loss, the loss…

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My genetic base is full of contradictions. The Italian and the Dutch fusing together to create a blonde-headed, green-eyed, emotive, food lover! I have often referred to myself as “Spaghetti and Cheese” to describe the combination of my Dutch and Italian heritage.

Growing up, when “exotic” food was not accepted in WASP-ish circles, I would denounce any association with pizza, spaghetti bolognaise or lasagne. In the small town I grew up in, it was just way too uncool in the ’70’s to be admitting to anything other than meat, three vege and a yorkshire pudding. In fact, I would beg my father not to cook anything Italian and certainly not to cook it if anyone outside the immediate family was to eat in our home. At that point in time I was a skinny little waif, who was just trying to fit in. Most of my friends had never seen a pizza. It was not until the ’80’s, when Pizza Hut emerged, that suddenly my father was “hip and happening”. Now the world has become obsessed with food, certainly Australia has, if MasterChef viewing is anything to go by. Food seems to have become the new way to fit in, the more diverse the better.

I must have been the only person in Melbourne, who had not watched a single episode of Master Chef. Television and I are not big buddies. But last night, I thought, I should see what the fuss was about (perhaps a tad late, it being the final episode). I have to say, I fell in love with Adam, the Japanese lawyer from Tokyo, who decided he would try his hand at being a “MasterChef”. What I loved about him in the short 60 minutes I saw him, was that he integrated his head, his heart and his skills into what he was doing, but he did it with utter humility. He is the perfect combination of when you bring your passion, skills and intellect to something you can’t go wrong. And when you leave your ego out of it, you have to emerge as he did, authentic and a winner.

It made me think about how we need to take that energy to everything we do, in order to be successful, whether it is our jobs, our relationships, our projects, our goals, whatever we are holding dear at the time. I was starting to feel a bit wobbly about my “No Diet” diet. But after watching Adam, I made healthy meals that had a twist of flavour, without a twist of fat and I managed to throw in some exercise with a manic labrador and a fantastic instructor at the gym (separately!). It was the glow of Adam’s win that inspired me to keep going on. I will continue to try, even when my Italian genes cheer me on with “Mange, Mange, Mange” and my Dutch genes look on disapprovingly, but get their cheeks pinched by the Italian ones and ignored! Adam, I am taking intellect and heart and skill and I will continue to try to make good meals that satisfy my hunger, but don’t indulge my emotions. One day at a time…

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I love it when my perceptions get challenged and I am forced to look at something from a different angle. Today my cycling Bud and I hit the spinning class at the vulgar hour of 9:30am on a Sunday morning. We pedalled our legs to jelly (mmmmh…food) and as we walked out she said “Do you feel like you will finish, the race?” I flippantly replied, “I don’t know and if on the day, I feel like I can’t, I won’t feel bad dropping out.” We know each other really well and she got confused, “But how can you train and not finish? You have finished massive things at work and on all sorts of other things, how could you NOT finish the race? We have to finish…” I was kind of stumped because I know that if on the day, I feel sick, exhausted or just bored, I could just give up. I could see a muffin stand and go “Aaaah, a muffin” and sit down and never get up again, well for the race anyway.

Why would I train to not do something? I will always finish something I HAVE to finish. This falls into a category I may or may not WANT to finish. The goal for me is not the race. The goal is to get really fit and healthy and hopefully complete the race too. The goal for my Bud is to finish the race so that she will do more exercise next time. Does this make me a finisher or a quitter? I need to noodle on this and see what I come up with. Never had to think this before….

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I know who I am. At 43 if you haven’t figured it out, you need to take a crash course in you! But I need no such thing. I am a pudding. I am meant to be savoured after a long Sunday lunch with a dessert wine from the Margaret River region or maybe a Moscato d’Asti with a bit of frizzante from the Piedmont region. So what in all the gods, in all the religions names, am I doing in a Spin Class at 8:30am on a Saturday morning? Trying to climb uphill, while “you twist it up another notch” to the upbeat mania of Duran Duran’s “Hungry Life the Wolf? A pudding is supposed to be setting in its bowl at that time of the morning. But no, there she is with all the muscular main courses who are flexing their muscles and burning faster than a Sunday roast!

I made a commitment, to my friend that I would cycle in a 100 kilometer race in March 2011. So now, the pudding needs to place herself at the very least on a stationary bicycle. I knew at the time that I cycled like Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music, when she takes the repressed von Trapp children out on a hypermanic, laughing excursion. This, I too can do. Make me stand up and sing “High on the hill was a lonely goatherd” with an exaggerated English accent and a schoolmarm face and I will do it with aplomb. Some might laugh at me, some might laugh with me but in the end, I would achieve it! Make me cycle 100 kms in Lycra, what was I thinking? Why do seemingly sensible people think there is anything fun about grinding your coccyx with a pestle and mortar of a bicycle seat? If I was Jewish, I would just shake my head and sigh “Oi vey”.

Someone help me, how do I morph from pudding chick to cycling Barbie with the least possible pain? I have solved far greater problems, but this one has me stumped…

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Undoubtedly one of the most beautiful songs in the world is “Ne Me Quitte Pas” or “If you Go Away”. And since I am musing on the concept of “loss” this week. It came into my head. I wanted to Google the song and found a Cirque Du Soleil “Youtube” clip that really made me laugh. It balances the sorrow of the song and then brings in the light that a sense of humour brings to any situation. As much as we need to feel our losses, we do also need to smile at ourselves compassionately.

I thought you might like to see this artistic rendition of the wonderful song…and if my thighs shrink, from this diet that I am NOT on, I will not mourn them with this song…

Ne Me Quitte Pas Link

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Do days have personalities or am I stirring an all new Nature / Nurture Debate? This thought came into my head yesterday as I was trying to find something to wear and has lingered. I have never liked Thursdays. I would not go as far as saying it is my least favourite day of the week, but if pushed, it probably is. What is it about Thursday that offends my sensibilities? What has poor Thursday done to meet with my curled lip and a “Meh”? I think days of the week may have personalities or we have given them ones based on how we use them. I might have stumbled on a new “psychological” phenomenon that will take the researchers years to untangle and debate. Is this the new nature, nurture debate?

Why don’t I like Thursdays? Thursday, to me is kind of clingy. The week is not over, but she sits next to much more glam sister Friday and whines. I have never known what to wear on a Thursday, my clothes don’t seem to match because they have been used up by Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and now sit there in an odd assortment of possibly turning to me to Grunge Fashion or Nudism. Friday knows her stuff. She is confident and upbeat. She holds the promise of freedom, like the last day of term at school. She is hot, she knows it, but she is not arrogant. Thursday simpers next to her, instead of asserting herself to BE something. Saturday is any thing you want to make her. She can do anything from the relaxing yoga guru to the high powered marathon runner. Talented and forward thinking! Sunday, I like, but she is the grandmother of the week, proud of her grandchildren (the previous days of her week), slightly nostalgic and somethimes sitting calming saying “Oi vey, another week”. Sunday only sometimes, get miserable around 7pm, like a friend who is a bit maudlin. Monday, I don’t mind. I am an “up and at ’em” kind of girl. Monday to me is always a fresh start, a clean slate an opportunity to shine. Tuesday, is a bit like Thursday, if you haven’t shone on Monday, Tuesday punishes you with how much you still have to go through. To me, Tuesday is the personal trainer, tough love, with a glimmer of hope. Wednesday knows she is the pivot point, “hump day”, she is positive and energetic. Which takes me back to Thursday and you know how I feel about her, so I will say no more!

What do you think? Is it just me? Is it the nature of the days or did we nuture them this way with our expectations? I am off now to play with Friday, my buddy who is uncomplicated…

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Let”s talk about what I call “Generalised Crankiness Disorder”. It is not classified in the DSM IV yet, but I am hoping I am ahead of the pack and a thought leader on this. GCD occurs for me when things I love doing get thrown out of kilter and then I feel it descending on me like a fog.

Take this morning for instance, I am really into Joanne Fedler’s book “Eat when Hungry.” I like to read on the train on the way to work. It is MY time and I get precious little of that. So the thirty minutes that I am gently rocked into the city, sometimes on schedule, sometimes not, could be an enormous waste of time. Instead, I have turned it into something precious and fiercely guarded. I coccoon myself with my favourite “tone setting” music on my ipod, I check Facebook and I swallow books whole, burping out content at the end of my journey and rubbing my stomach in satisfied glee (Yes, the food analogy is not lost on me!).

Except today when I left my book at home! And as I got to the station I felt the irritating descent of GCD. I like my routine. Is that sad? I like that I have turned the mundane into a spectacular opportunity that no one can mess with and I hate it when I muck that up. So there I sat on the train with a decision, do I go with the GDC? Or do I “feel it file it” and move on? I know what the answer should be but I feel like wallowing in my lost opportunity. Again with the iritation of loss! Pehaps I have to look at how I embrace loss and not feel like a petulant child in its presence? We are not taught to sit with uncomfortable emotions. We are rescued from them by well meaning carers, who rush in to “make things better”. I know, I have spent 18 years trying to make sure my daughter NEVER feels a negative emotion. Probably my well-intentioned clumsiness in this regard has actually inadvertantly caused a few! Would I have done better just holding her and saying it is okay, it is generalised crankiness condition, this too shall pass, rather than saying cheer up? Feelings are just feelings and if we sit with them long enough they too shall pass. But once acknowledged, the next time they come around they don’t sting an open wound.

Just as the comfortableness of the uncomfortableness was starting to feel okay, my bubbly, hyper-manic, gorgeous friend rings me. As I answer quietly, whispering “I am on the train”, she kicks it up a notch as she LOVES catching me on my commute and saying outrageous things while I reply with a muted “mmmh hhhhe” to the crowded carriage. And with that the crankiness cracked into a mischievous grin and my day started in a much better way. Thanks, Bud! Generalised Crankiness Disorder is lifted by acknowledgement, light and laughter. SO much better than reaching for a muffin and chewing on it…

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There are two things that I think I have clung to since I was a child, the avoidance of loss and the feeling of fullness. I liked them both. Perhaps genetically, I come from a long line of shepherds, but I like to know that my people and things that I love are accounted for when I go to bed at night. If one “lamb” was missing, I would be an anxious, little mess as a child. I have learnt to mask this anxiety as an adult, but fundamentally the feeling still bubbles under the surface, sometimes unacknowledged and unconscious.

I don’t do loss very well, certainly not of anything I truly love. Friends, I have collected from when I was as young as six, are still in my life; people I love, fill a space in my heart and if they leave, the shape of the space they created deflates and I don’t like the feeling of emptiness. I need the fullness of my peeps. I also like the feeling of fullness after a meal, surrounded by the people I love. Maybe that is the Italian in me, but that is the ultimate bliss. So musing on this I turned my thoughts to my own emigration (I am reading Joanne Fedler’s book and it is certainly similar). In emigrating, I lost the ability to “count my sheep” as I got into bed at night. I had no idea where they were, in fact they were prancing around in daylight, wide-awake while I was dreaming on the other side of the world. One loses a lot when one abandons your home, your culture, your music, your life and starts over. I gained a lot too and have been enormously blessed, but it made me really hate loss even more!

So how does this translate to weight loss. It just feels like another loss I have to endure, another emptiness, another deflation of a space that something I loved used to occupy. Yes, there is a gain. Just like my wonderful new home, that gave me an amazing career, more freedom than I ever dreamed of, the ability to build wealth in a stable currency, an infrastructure that is first world and even tiny things like the ability for me to walk unharmed, at 10pm on a foggy, winter’s night, alone, with ipods in my ears is amazing. But the loss if horrible. Going forward I am banishing loss, to the extent that I can. My no diet philosophy has a new angle, it is the gaining of health. Out with loss! And if you are reading this and you are one of my peeps, far away, I still hold you with fullness 🙂

Onwards to a successful week for all of my buddies all around the world…

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I ran like the wind last night, well, like a gentle breeze – not a hurricane! Just twenty minutes on the treadmill, that normally doubles as a clothes-horse. In fact, I think the treadmill is so used to being a clothes-horse that it would be quite calm if I just draped myself over one of its handles and hung out there for a while…

But I digress, this is not about the treadmill. It is amazing how when you connect with your energy and push yourself, you do feel amazingly alive and how that translates to benefits hours later. I had to get up at 5:30am this morning to attend a breakfast launch in the city. I know that if I had not run last night, I would not have managed to get up half as cheerily as I did. As I was sitting on the train coming home tonight, I was musing about how when you put a different lens on a problem, you do see things differently and the solution does become quite different. It is about finding the right lens and then trusting your instincts, to try the solution that looks different to what previously made you successful. Let me explain, whenever I diet, I do lose weight, but there is an anxiety around any event that has food in it or actually just anxiety about whether I will get through the day sticking to the diet plan. And which event does not have food in it and what day does not have temptations? In diet-mode, I am always passing judgement about whether a day was “good” or “bad” based on what I did or did not eat! I don’t end up saying it was a good day if something fantastic happened at work, this would be paled into insignificance by the muffin I might have eaten in a meeting, rather than the major breakthrough that occurred in that meeting! Not a good way to live your life! So the new lens needs to focus differently…

So what was different today? Normally, prior to an event, my internal Gourmand and my food Nazi would have an enormous argument about what I will or will not eat. Today was different, subtle, but different. I went to breakfast with the view that I would eat only that which was healthy and I would be aware of my hunger and stop when I was satisfied. This subtle shift away from feeling deprived, was awesome. Suddenly I was free to eat and free to not eat. And the removal of the anxiety about sticking to “the plan” meant I did actually defuse the obsession with what I might eat and I actually ate sensibly, focussed on the event and not feeling like a failure because what has passed my lips did not perfectly fit into “the plan”.

Verdict for Tuesday – Food suddenly doesn’t feel as emotionally charged and the relief is palpable! I am actually not as hungry as I normally would be if I was on a diet as I am not focussing on food and therefore am eating less…go figure!

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Embarking on a change for me is always terribly exciting. In my head, that is! The planning is ecstasy. The vision of the post change scenario – sublime. The outcome – ravishing. And then in between that and the new reality is “the process”. Sigh, this is often where I often get lost!

I have just finished reading Geneen Roth’s “Women, Food and God” and this blog is meant to be a journey of change and making sure I am no longer masking the things that creep into my head, that I need to deal with, with a food issue. The book speaks of us keeping ourselves obsessed with food and weight, to avoid other issues we should be processing (Mmmh…there’s THAT word again). My girlfriends and I over the last twenty years, have analysed and “tut-tutted” our way through our food issues. We have dieted, squeezed ourselves into clothes that allow us breathe at the very top of your lungs, in tiny gulps and not participated in life because we did not want to have to wear something as simple as a bathing suit. Attacking the problem with the same solution (a diet) now seems like a definition of insanity. So we are off to try something NEW!

So how did day one start for me…I woke up at 5:50am and was VERY tempted to set the alarm for 6:50am and roll over saying “I woke, I saw, I was conquered” – but I had made a commitment to myself that this was the only time today that exercise was going to manage to fit into my schedule. With the sky as black and as thick as my Labrador’s coat, we ventured out into the suburban darkness. The dog was much more enthusiastic than her lead controller! Thirty minutes at-5 degrees-with-a-puffy-jacket-purchased-in-a-New York-city-blizzard later, I returned home remarkably refreshed and fairly proud of my neighbourhood cat-burglar slinking. The fresh air must have stimulated my brain, because, while I was making breakfast (a boiled egg on toast) and preparing dinner (a roast chicken that my daughter would later pop in the oven), I solved an age old question: “What came first, the chicken or the egg?”. It is simple guys, breakfast comes first and preparing a chicken at 7:30am, makes you queasy enough to realise it must be the egg, because there is no way you can face the chicken so early!

My day was a success in terms of only eating that which fuels my loveliness, I am filled with fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, salads and salmon and a very yummy, roast chicken. I don’t feel hungry. I don’t feel deprived and I don’t feel like I need to obsess about that which I chose not to eat. Let’s see what tomorrow brings…

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