Some Say It Took Long Enough...

Those of you who know me know I've always been terribly thin.  Most of my friends worry about me because of it.  A lot of my friends have commented that I look unhealthy because I'm so tiny.  For years I used to chalk that up to jealousy, but the truth is, I didn't know why I was so incredibly thin.  It's been a mystery to me.

Well, as my weight started to drop to the same dangerously low level it was at when I found out I was pregnant with my oldest, I started to think something was wrong.  It's not healthy for my weight to drop this low.  If I lose another five pounds I'm putting myself at risk for heart attacks and other health problems.  It's time to figure out what I'm doing wrong.

I set myself up with a diet tracker app on my phone.  I was kind of curious what I could find out by tracking my diet, fitness level, and all of that, so I chose My Fitness Pal.  Normally these programs are geared towards weight loss, but I think there's nothing wrong with using them for weight gain.  Pretty much anyone can sign up for a free account, search thousands of kinds of food, and track their diet.  For me, it also tells me how much extra calories I've earned every day by working out, but I would think it would work a little differently for someone trying to lose weight.  At the beginning of the process they ask you what your goals are, and you can choose fitness goals, weight gain/loss goals, etc.  Obviously I chose a weight gain goal.

Later I was kicking around on the website and noticed they have these nifty little calculators.  They tell you your BMI (which I know mine is considered unhealthy), as well as your BMR, which is your body's metabolic rate when at rest.  In other words, how many calories does your body burn just to exist each day if it did nothing but stay at rest.  As I found out, I need 1,200 calories every day for my height, weight, and age.  How much do I normally eat?  Well, let's just say less than 1,000.  It's not that I'm trying to starve myself or anything.  I honestly think I'm eating a lot more than I do.  I'm just not hungry for more than that!  Now add to that all the calories burned when I did yoga, dancing, and running around after the kids.  Obviously I'm requiring more calories than I'm consuming by a good deal.  No wonder I can't keep a steady, healthy weight!

So what has this magic program told me?  I need to be eating over 2,100 calories a day if I want to start working towards my weight gain goals.  I should probably include some yoga and strength training if I don't want all that extra weight I gain to be fat.  Even so, I've got to work on building up a healthy body weight, and I'm starting to think I just can't do it!  I can't eat that much!  It's hard not to come to 500 or more calories short!  Yesterday I was almost 900 calories short!  It feels like I've got to force feed myself a lot more than I'm used to eating.

I know some people would be jealous of me.  They wish they could be as small and tiny as I am.  They think it's easier to battle being underweight than it is to battle being overweight.  Is it?  Honestly, I don't know.  All I do know is that I'm having a terribly hard time of it.  I've got to figure out how to train my body to eat and want more food every day.  I need to do things that will encourage muscle growth so I can be putting on healthy weight, but for now, I'd just take any weight gain at all!  I need to completely overhaul my lifestyle because clearly I'm just not getting enough of what I need.

That's one thing I will say about little programs like these.  When you have to write down every little thing you eat, it gives you a realistic perspective of what you're doing to your body.  For example, I always thought I ate a lot of food, but in reality, I eat three meals each day and a couple of snacks, sure, but the portions I eat are so small that I'm not eating as much as I think I am.  I know for others I've talked to, it's been the opposite kind of eye opening experience.  They see exactly how many calories they do take in every day, and exactly how much they eat, and it helps them limit their own choices.

For me, this isn't so much about society's standards on what's considered too fat or too thin.  This is about being healthy.  So much of my life I've had people assuming I'm so incredibly healthy because I'm thin and when they see me eat, more often than not I can put away a good meal!  Of course, what they're not seeing is I'll put away one good meal each day, and then skip out on breakfast or lunch because I'm just not hungry.  A lot of people assume thin means healthy, but thin can also mean nutrient deficient.  If I really wanted to be careful about my health, I'd be taking a vitamin supplement every day to make sure I get the nutrients I need.  At this rate, from the looks of it, I would always be snacking on some kind of healthy snack too, though it may just have to be pretty constant because healthy snacks are typically low calorie snacks.  I might just become that image in the cartoon of the little animal that's always hungry and eating everything in sight...

Being healthy isn't easy.  Between choosing good foods to eat, living a healthy lifestyle, getting enough exercise, and everything else, it's a lot to manage.  It's not as simple as living your life and hoping for the best.  It makes me wonder what kind of image I'm going to be showing my kids, especially if they see that their mother's got to eat all day to maintain a healthy weight.  What if that's not healthy for them?  What if that has the effect of making them gain too much weight, and as a result, be unhealthy?  There's so much to consider and so much to think about.  For me?  I'm going to see what I can scrounge up to toss another few calories into the mix for this morning.  I want to see if I can actually stomach eating as much as I have to in order to gain the weight I need!

Dreads at (almost) Nine Months

I've been thinking a lot about my dreads lately.  They look kind of, well, shaggy and rough.  I've got whispy bits sticking out everywhere.  There are all kinds of crazy loops and bumps.  I kind of like the loops and bumbs, but I wanted my hair to be neater, and those bumps were a lot of the reason my hair was able to pull loose.  I keep hoping that sooner rather than later I'm going to have the beautiful dreads everyone says I'll some day have.  Supposedly dreads start looking pretty beautiful after they've hit the one year mark.  I'm hoping mine will do the same, but with only one month to go, I'm not so confident.  I think it's going to take longer than that, but it may have to do with my dreads being so incredibly short when I started them out.  I barely had enough hair to dread!  Thankfully, though it's been a struggle, they're finally getting there.

Having gotten sick of looking at my dreads doing crazy things, I wasn't terribly thrilled with the overall effect.  I just want my hair to start looking good.  I love my dreads and all, but I'm tired of waking up every morning to having little wisps everywhere.  It doesn't look very neat and it's only making it easier for the dreads to eat each other.  I decided it was time to break my previous pattern and do some serious maintenance.  As much as I wanted to let my dreads do their own things, something had to be done.  I've been doing some palm rolling with each shower, but it hasn't been getting me anywhere, so it was time to take it up another level.

The other day, after getting out of the bath, palm rolling, and taking a "before" picture, I decided it was time for some serious work.  I tried crocheting the dreads in front, but it didn't do anything.  I've crocheted other people's dreads before just fine, but my own?  Apparently that just can't happen.  Instead I thought I would just bind up the roots so that I could go in and crochet them later.  I started working in the front, working my way to the back where I knew it was going to be a nightmarish trouble spot.  I would have to rip apart all those dreads and I wasn't looking forward to it.

I found out early on that my hair wasn't even going to co-operate with that.  I had to bind my hair pretty much all the way down or it was just going to attempt to dread together the whole length.  I'm impressed!  My hair really wants to dread, it just doesn't want to do it the way I think it should!  Even now, with just the ends loose, my hair still tries to dread together, but it's a little more well behaved.  I bound them up pretty well through my hair.  The back was a nightmare.  It was all tangled in to each other, so it took twice as long as the rest of my hair.  I was thrilled to see the results though.  It looked fantastic!  I just hope it helps all those scrappy bits clean up so my dreads will start looking pretty good.  In a couple of months my dreads will be a year old.  I really hope that they can start looking pretty fantastic before then!

In other news, I've found the perfect way to tie my hair back to keep it out of my face, yay!  I have a fantastic bandana/scarf kind of thing that I bought at the local shop (Gaia's Garden) a year and a half ago.  It's called a MayaWear Bandana, and it's wonderful!  It can be worn as a headband or pulled back like a more traditional scarf.  It's very hippie and I love it.  Mine is a beautiful aqua color, but they've got a variety of colors from African style woven patterns to solid colors.  I wish I could buy a few more!  They're so practical for every-day wear, especially with dreads!  They're quick, easy, and convenient.  Unfortunately, they do make it a good deal easier to pop the elastics in my hair, but I suppose that's just something I'll have to live with.  I'd rather have my hair back and neat than worry about popping the elastics!

Real Friends Versus "Facebook Friends"

Just about everyone these days has a Facebook account.  Everyone knows about Facebook, the social networking site and all it's fabulousness.  It's the replacement for MySpace, which seems to have been largely forgotten over the past couple of years.  In some respects, it's the greatest thing to have happened to social networking.  It's a great way to keep in touch with friends and family, stay updated on events, and all of that.  Unfortunately, it can also become a huge time waster, and it can mean your life is public to a lot more than just the people you want it to be.

I've got to admit, I've kind of become sucked in to the Facebook generation.  My friend count has skyrocketed more times than I can count, no matter how many times I've tried to cut it back.  I honestly don't think I've ever had less than a hundred friends on Facebook since my account was new.  It's a little disturbing to think about, really.  Do I really have that many friends?

All of this started when I considered adding some moms from the co-op yesterday.  I had to think about what kind of view they'd get of my life if I added them to my Facebook.  I really wanted to.  They've become a truly influential part of my life and it would be nice to keep updated with whatever's going on with them.  It may seem like something easy, but it wasn't so much that decision that was challenging.  It got me thinking about everything connecting to my Facebook.  I put a lot out there, and there's a lot of people on friends' list that I might not want knowing that kind of information.

It was about a year and a half ago that I realized perhaps I was putting a bit much out there with my Facebook profile.  I would include updates on the divorce and things like that.  It always seemed that no matter how careful I was, friends of his would read what I wrote and inform him.  It felt like having spies on my Facebook. I wasn't free to express myself and what I was really going through.  I felt so exposed, like my privacy was no longer being respected.  I'd deleted my husband, anyone I suspected might be a "spy", and locked down my profile so only friends could access my updates.  I thought that would probably fix everything.  I would feel like I had my privacy again.

About six months ago I realized that a lot of my friends were a part of the dance community.  Being a belly dancer, this shouldn't be surprising.  I wanted to stay connected, but I felt like I couldn't have my privacy again.  I don't want to talk about my divorce with the dance community.  I don't want to bog them down with pictures of my kids.  I don't want them knowing private details of my life, not that I'm posting much that's private on my Facebook, but they're just not that kind of friends, you know?  I created a dance profile specifically for that and moved most of my dance contacts over to that instead.  Only a handful remained on my profile.  I felt much more comfortable with my own privacy knowing I could keep some details of my life out of "public view" only to choose who I wanted to share with instead, my own personal social circle.

Still, my friend list was massive, and grew.  As of this morning I had a total of 175 friends on my list.  How many of them can I possibly know?  How many of them are really my friends?  How many care to read my updates, view my pictures, or anything else.  How many of them do I skim over when I'm reading my news feed because it's just the eight millionth game announcement or request or they simply don't say anything I'm interested in?  How many of them say things that challenge my views, get under my skin, and make me want to start a debate when perhaps it's better to keep my mouth shut?  And are all these people really the kinds of people I want seeing pictures of my kids, hearing about my life, and in general being up to date on my goings on?  Is this really something I should be comfortable with?  And of those friends, how many of them would really be there if I needed a shoulder to cry on, friendly advice, or someone to listen as I vent my frustration?  How many of them would I be there for?

Cutting back the first 75 friends wasn't too terribly hard.  There were a lot of people on there I was involved with through dance or other things that really aren't involved in my life.  There were a number of people from my high school that I just don't care to stay in touch with.  There were a handful of people from the local Pagan group that I never talk to anymore.  Those were easy to cut out.  In general if there's been no contact between the two of us for over a year or I really don't know you that well, then it's pretty easy for you to be gone.  There were plenty of people I figured I can always add later, or I'll see them around.

Then things started getting harder.  There's something about holding on to the past that seems like it's such a great idea.  It's not easy to let go of the crowd from the old game group.  I don't want to distance myself from the fire spinners and some of my favorite dancers.  It's not always easy to let go of ex-boyfriends I still want to be friends with.  It's challenging to admit that I'll never see these people again, and in truth, I really don't want to.  They were what they were in my life at the time, but I've moved on and it's time to accept that.  It doesn't help me to hold on to those old pieces of my past, not unless they have some purpose in my future.  It's time to move on and live in the now.

After all that I managed to cut back by another 30 friends.  Honestly, I thought I'd feel bad about it, but already I feel so much better!  It's a huge relief to know I'm not going to be staring at all those faces and updates every time I log on, knowing those people really aren't a part of my life.  It's a huge relief to let go and know that those are people I'll see if I'm meant to, but I won't if I'm not.  I can stop holding out for hope that we can once again be friends some day.

Feeling pretty confident at how easy all of that turned out to be (and how wonderful it felt) I decided to go for a third and final purge.  Anything more for one day might just bee too much.  For starters, it's a HUGE time drain.  It takes a lot of time to click and delete every one.  There's no bulk delete action.  I didn't know how many more people I could delete without feeling a little bad about it.  There are a handful of people I still want to keep on the list because, well, I still really care about them and I want to stay in touch, but the whole thing was pretty darn brutal!

When that was done I'd shaved about another nearly 20 Facebook friends!  Can you believe it?  That means I've stopped being "friends" with over 125 people!  It feels so incredibly freeing!

Looking at all of that, I've come to realize the shocking difference between Facebook friends and real friends.  I've had a lot of Facebook friends.  They come and go over time.  Some of them are people that really were influential in my life at one point or another.  Most of them have fallen away.  We've grown apart and distant.  We've taken different directions in our lives.  It's perfectly normal, and in times before Facebook, that's just how it was.  There's something about Facebook that gets people thinking they have to hang on to these old friendships that have fallen by the wayside.  They have to keep on their computer to check for updates from friends they rarely hear about, and often times truly don't care what those people are doing.  Instead of letting go of the past and growing up, it's too easy to leave that as a landmark for change in our lives.  We need to hold ourselves up to those old friends and see where we stand.

Well, I've decided I don't need that anymore.  I'm grown up now.  I'm a big girl.  I don't need a bunch of people that aren't really a part of my life checking in with me and giving me their two cents.  I don't need anyone's permission to live my life the way I choose.  I just need to be myself.  In truth, I feel much happier knowing that the people that remain are people I truly love and enjoy in my life.  So for those of you out there who are reading this and are more than just my Facebook friends, thanks for being there for me.  You have no idea how much I appreciate you!