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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Tanya No Dieting

I grew up in a tiny town in South Africa, where I hunted with lions…mmmmh….no, that’s not quite true.  I grew up in a tiny town in South Africa, where I ran with wolves. Actually, there are no wolves in South Africa.  I grew up in a tiny town in South Africa, where nothing really happened.  It gave me an appreciation for the minutae of life.  I have lived on three continents and now call Australia home.  I have been privileged to set foot on all six continents and work in roles that I loved and blossomed in.  I have an ordinary life, with an ordinary husband, an ordinary daughter, an ordinary dog, cat and three goldfish.  I have learned that nothing is ordinary and every day is actually extraordinary and the poetry of my ordinary life is pretty exceptional.  Well, to me, anyway!

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