Daniel Fast, Day 4: Just Saying Hello :-)!

Hi, y'all, I know I said I had a wonderful account that I planned to share with you today of something that happened in the recent past, and I still mean to share it.  Just not today.  I'm really not concentrating very well lately, and the closer it gets to the end of the day, the more effort concentration takes.  Yet, in order to put down my full menu for the day, I need to wait until it's late; otherwise I may miss noting something that day, and I may not remember to make note of it the next day.  So I'm going to keep you in suspense for a little while longer.

I will tell you, though:  I believe that my Lord God has healed my back.  I'm clinging to this in the Spirit, and I'm living toward the complete manifestation of this wonderful reality.  The Daniel Fast that I'm currently doing is a part of that manifestation of healing.  The epicenter of it all came during a powerful Prophetic Conference that recently took place at Miracle Life Ministries International, a relatively new ministry which moved into the neighborhood at the beginning of 2011, not too long after I did.  I'm blessed, in fact, that I actually live very close by!  That whole time was a powerful time for me, in fact.  As I think on it, I was healed, and my life was touched, in more ways than one, particularly during that last session on the Saturday almost two weeks ago now.  Definitely it is a story that deserves its own entry.  I'm just saying:  Glory be to God for His unspeakable gifts to me on that day!

As for this day, I almost hesitate to tell you the menu, lest you think I copy-pasted it from yesterday.  I assure you, I did not :-).  I started off with a handful of raw almonds and a banana.  I actually got in my planned day's walk looking for the place where I bought it.  I bought two of them and two apples.  After I got home, I had a handful of almonds to hold me until I could drain, rinse, and sauté some cut string beans from a can.  I sautéed them in olive oil, with Kosher salt and pepper to season them.  Right before taking them out of the sauce pan, I dashed two capfuls of concentrated lemon juice over them to balance out the oil.  They were good paired with more roasted almonds that I prepared today after getting home.  I still have a few left, and I'm debating eating them with an apple before bed.  These taste better than the ones from last night, because I roasted these at 250ºF.  Healthy or not, it's the high temperature that makes roasting such a flavorful way to cook anything, and there's something to be said for roasting nuts at a high enough temperature to make a difference.  To my back, my almonds, my life—Vive la difference!  And Hallelujah!

Daniel Fast, Day 3: The Almond Edition

I have almonds roasting in the oven.  It's the very first time I've ever tried to roast almonds, or, I think, any nuts.  (I think maybe I tried once to roast some peanuts; I seem to remember them coming out a little overdone.) I put a little too much extra virgin olive oil, Kosher salt, and ground black pepper into the bottom of a 1 C measure, put in a good couple handfuls of raw almonds, stirred them with the tip of a sturdy plastic knife, and put them in a single layer into an aluminum pie tin.  They're in a 200ºF oven (I'm guessing at that; the lowest temperature on the knob reads 250ºF, and I turned it far enough leftward to where the correct temp would be if it were marked on the knob), and I'm stirring them every five minutes or so until I think they're done.

That may seem a little low, but even at 200ºF they're cooking a little high, according to the good folks on the site The World's Healthiest Foods, who recommend a temperature of no higher than 170ºF.  They say that research has shown that beyond this temperature, the fats in almonds break down, and they form free radicals in the blood.  Since most of the other sites I checked for instructions gave cooking temps ranging 325-400ºF, it's a safe bet that the roasted nuts you buy in the store are also cooked high, possibly making them less healthy for you than if they were roasted the WHFoods way, and that's before they use cottonseed and other unhealthy oils in unhealthy amounts to roast them, ruining them further.

I think God likes almonds.  I think, in fact, that while Jesus walked the earth, He probably snacked on a lot of them :-).  My reasons for thinking this are three.  In the first case, for the crafting of the decorations and implements for the Tabernacle of Meeting which the Hebrews used during their 40-year wilderness sojourn, God commanded Moses to have the craftsmen use an almond blossom motif (See verses in Exodus 25 and 37).  In the second case, to settle a series of confrontations between the Hebrews and Moses over his leadership of them after God judged them in the matter of their cowardice and disobedience at the border of the Promised Land (Numbers 13, 14, and 16), God commanded Moses to collect staffs from each of the chiefs of the twelve tribes of Israel, with the tribe of Levi being represented by Aaron.  After each chief had written his name on his staff, the staffs were placed inside the tabernacle and left overnight to see which one God would cause to sprout as an indication of whom He had chosen to stand before Him for the people.  In the morning, when Moses went to collect the staffs, it was the staff of Aaron, in representation of the tribe of Levi, which had sprouted, putting out buds and producing almond blossoms that bore ripe almonds.  So when Moses brought it out with the rest of the staffs, and every staff's owner had collected it, God commanded Moses to place Aaron's staff before the tabernacle as a reminder to the rest of the people, so that they would know that God had chosen their leaders (Numbers 17).

In the third case, some centuries later, God called a young man probably in his teens named Jeremiah to prophesy destruction to a people grown steeped and adamant in spiritual rebellion and all kinds of wickedness.  In a vision, He inaugurated and sanctified Jeremiah, then asked, "What do you see?"  "I see an almond branch," Jeremiah answered.  Then the LORD said, "You have seen well, for I am watching over My word to perform it (Jeremiah 1:1-12)."  I think it's a safe conclusion to draw that the almond symbolizes God's steadfastness and His faithfulness to His word.  Side note:  In the Book of Ecclesiastes the almond also symbolizes age (Ecclesiastes 12)

On today's menu:  Breakfast was salted mixed nuts and a banana.  Lunch was raw almonds and an apple.  Supper was a large salad made with mixed greens, slices of cucumber and green bell pepper, large diced tomatoes, and roasted and shelled sunflower nuts drizzled—or more accurately drenched—in olive oil and liberally salted and peppered, with another apple.  I've been snacking on more raw almonds while the ones I tried to roast have been in, and now out of, the oven.  I'm going to eat some, or all, of them, and then I'm going to bed.

Daniel Fast, Day 2: A Little Random Health

So let me start with today's menu:  Breakfast was raw almonds and a banana.  Lunch was pinto beans cooked from dry and grits mixed together, which was quite tasty, and an apple.  Supper was more pintos and grits, no apple.  

I based the concept of mixing grits into my beans on beans and rice.  Beans and rice are also tasty together, but on the Daniel Fast, the rice needs to be brown, and I don't have any brown rice.   Plus, when you eat legumes and whole grains in the same meal, you get a complete protein.  That's a handy little piece of wisdom for anyone who already is vegetarian/vegan or who is considering it.

One thing to watch out for is the consumption of cottonseed oil on nuts if you're buying them roasted from the grocery store, or, as almost became the case today, the pharmacy.  I enjoy almonds raw, which is how they're best; but I enjoy them roasted even more.  After eating so many raw almonds, I'm getting the taste for roasted ones.  However, those oils that are not considered high quality—probably based on their healthful qualities or lack thereof—are not recommended for this fast.  It is actually spelled out somewhere in Kristin Feola's blog; go back to my post for day 1 to find the link, that cottonseed and tropical nut oils other than coconut are actually not very healthful because they're high in saturated fat.  In addition, cottonseed oil may actually present a potential hazard because cotton is often sprayed with pesticides.  And many food manufacturers and processors who roast nuts in their factories roast them in cottonseed oil.  This was the case for the store brand of the pharmacy from which I almost bought roasted almonds today.  For a dollar more, however, I found Blue Diamond roasted almonds that were roasted in healthier oils other than cottonseed.  The only reason I eventually abstained from buying them is because I know I can probably get them for less in the grocery store.

One of the prayers I will be making on this fast is for my health, having dedicated this year to being better to my self, as I think I indicated yesterday.  In regard to that, I spent a Saturday evening a few weekends back researching foods that negatively and positively affect the liver.  Guess what:  A comparison of those lists with the Daniel Fast lists of foods to avoid and to eat turns up some interesting similarities.  Except for meats and meat products, all the foods recommended for good liver health are on the Daniel Fast list.  Oh, but you already guessed I was gonna say that, right?  So I'm already helping my liver as we speak.  

Why is that important?  (1)  I take pain meds that, over time, can have a negative impact on my liver, and I've been on them for over two years now.  Because of this, I recently began to sense that I needed to start specifically focusing on doing what I could to protect it.  Thus, the evening of research.  (2)  I just spoke with my doctor this afternoon about the results of lab work for which he had his nurse draw blood during my visit with him a few days earlier.  He told me that although most of the tests he ordered came back fine or tolerable at least, my liver test result came back "a little off".  This fast comes at a good time, no?

There's more, on a different note.  Today, I took a different bus home than the one I normally take.  The ride is shorter, and I get home sooner, but I get off two blocks away, two blocks I've never wanted to walk before due to the problems I'd had with my back.  You can go back through my archives to read that whole sorry tale.  I think this makes a good set-up for the post I'd like to submit Wednesday evening—I won't have time for a long one tomorrow—but over the last two weeks my back has felt better and better, so that today I decided to take the walk.  I took it slowly, but I made it without any major problems and with only a few very brief stops along the way.  I have now decided that I will do this on a regular basis for the exercise value as well as for the time savings:  Today, I was home almost a half hour earlier than I would have been had I gone my usual route.

Now I need to go to bed :-)!

Daniel Fast, Day 1: Off To A Good Start!

Daniel 1:12  “Please test your servants for ten days, 

and let them give us vegetables to eat and water to drink.”

Daniel 10:3 KJV  “I ate no pleasant food, 

no meat or wine came into my mouth, 

nor did I anoint myself at all, 

till three whole weeks were fulfilled.”

Okay, so the last time I posted, I was setting out on a challenge for the sake of my health, spurred on by the love of a friend.  Wow, what a difference a year can make!  The close relationship I once enjoyed with said friend is gone, and I wish I could say the same for most of said challenges, but, alas! I still struggle.  The good news is that God is still good, and He's a much more faithful Friend than any of us deserve.  

So today I began that fast phenomenon that has swept the Church and is still going fairly strong, from all I can tell.  It's called the Daniel Fast.  From the combined resources made available by Susan Gregory, Kristin Feola, and Pastor Jentezen Franklin, the curious seeker will find that the concepts behind the Daniel Fast are based on passages taken from the first and tenth chapters of the Book of the Bible that bears that prophet's name.  

In Sum, the Daniel Fast is a spiritual fast, so it involves prayer, studying the Word of God as found in the Bible, dietary abstinence, and some specific spiritual purpose for observing the fast.  The abstinence part is what makes it so interesting, and doubtless so popular.  On this fast, one may eat and drink.  It is what one eats and drinks, however, that makes the fast distinctive and is the reason behind its name.  In the spirit of the aforementioned passages, one may eat fruits, vegetables, nuts and nut butters, seeds, legumes, whole grains, tofu and other soy products, salt, seasonings, herbs, and spices.  The only beverage is water: Spring water, distilled water, or other pure water.  To be avoided are all meats and animal products, fish and seafood, dairy, sweeteners of every kind, yeast and yeast-baked products, solid fats, refined and processed foods and food additives especially including artificial chemicals and colors and flavors and other such additives, white flour, white rice, fried foods, and all beverages other than water.  

When to eat and how much are not specified; but remember: It is a spiritual fast, and the pleasure derived from food is not the intended object! So the recommendation is to keep meals small and eat only what is specified, rather than trying to see what specifics can be worked around, or what palatable desires worked into the menu.  If you are trying, for instance, to justify drinking herbal tea by the fact that it is made with water and herbs are natural, then clearly that is the first item you need to eliminate. On the one hand, unmixed water is its own naked substance, whereas the addition of herbs, however natural they are, makes it a different beverage, and there is no Biblical record that Daniel or his companions had tea.  On the other hand, especially in the second instance cited in chapter 10, this was not about his pleasure but about his need to connect with God more than with his own physical needs or desires.  So if you are trying to work in your favorite beverage or food where it is specifically not allowed, then you have clearly missed the whole idea behind fasting and may as well say, "I'm adopting a diet based on the Daniel Fast," rather than "I'm observing the Daniel Fast."

So why am I doing it?  I did say that a year makes a lot of difference, didn't I :-)?  Well, in that year, I've grown spiritually, but that growth has not been without its challenges.  Perhaps the biggest has been to my determination to remain in right relationship with God in the face of my friend's equal determination to have me question the faith on which that Godly relationship stands.  The battles between us were frequent and frequently heated.  Ultimately my friend chose to "redraw the boundaries" of our relationship for that and other reasons.   At least, that's the human explanation of events.  My Lord God, as I was brought to understand, has His own mind about the matter.  

At any rate, the pages were turning in the Spirit as much as they were in the natural, and I find myself on the brink of a new season in my life.  Add to that the determination I made to dedicate this year to being better to myself and to pay more attention to my body.  And I began feeling the leading of the Lord some weeks back to begin this fast, and to do it at this particular time, when so many things are coming together to launch me into this new season, which is largely a season of Spiritual happenings for me.  So that's what I'm doing.

And I thought it would be instructive for me, and maybe interesting for you, to document this journey, so come along with me and we'll see what happens next.   And if you're so minded, I'd be ever so thankful for your prayers and encouragement.

So what did I eat today?  Breakfast and lunch were the same and quite simple:  A generous handful of raw almonds and a peeled and sliced yellow mango.  The water was bottled spring water, according to the label.  Another small handful of the same almonds preceded supper, which was white grits generously seasoned with Kosher salt, black pepper, onion powder, and wa-a-a-ay too much garlic powder (that was a complete accident, albeit brought on by carelessness:  I didn't look at what I picked up before I started dumping it unceremoniously into the pot), and with the grits I had microwave-steamed whole string beans from the can.  The only ingredients were the string beans, salt, and water.  I rinsed them, put them into a covered microwaveable container with a made-up blend of Kosher salt, black pepper, and powders of onion and garlic. I drizzled on extra virgin olive oil and lemon juice, tossed everything together in the container, and let the microwave do its thing on a "Sensor Reheat" setting.  Even with the overabundance of garlic powder in the grits, supper was quite tasty, I thought.

I'm just getting started, but I already have been a little irritable from lack of sugar.  It's okay, though; I don't have any resident heads to bite off, so no feelings were hurt in the living of this day.  I think, overall, that I'm off to a good start.

The Wounds Of A Friend

“Wounds from a sincere friend

are better than many kisses from an enemy.

The heartfelt counsel of a friend

is as sweet as perfume and incense (Proverbs 27:6, 9 New Living Translation).”

We’ll call him T. T has dreamed of this moment for almost as long as he’s been away. It’s what he’s talked about in our exchanges, thought about, planned in his head. He has so been looking forward to this: The day he would come home and we would work out together!

And I was so excited to have him home again! Our friendship had just begun to take off when he went away, and I was devastated. We nurtured it, and each other, through our correspondence, and I prayed for him frequently that God would bring him through whatever he had to face until he could come back. Now he’s home.

The working out together thing, though—yes, I made assenting sounds whenever he brought it up, listened to his dreams about it, said it might be nice, but that was his dream. His dream, my nightmare.

The first lower back sciatic pain struck in October 1997. I was at the fair with my friend A. We’d gone together at my invitation and walked around quite a bit, having a good time. Suddenly, while stopping at a food concession, a sharp pain grabbed my spine. I held still, hoping it would let go. It did. Then, when I tried to move, it grabbed me again! The good news was that A was now ready to leave the fair. So was I. I had no idea of the slow descent into hell that waited.

It was in August of 1998 that, seemingly out of nowhere, the sciatic pain struck again and held fast. The pain was so bad I thought I was going to end up in a wheelchair. I underwent a round of therapy that only marginally helped, then I bought a cane which I used with increasing frequency for the next 10 years while the pain grew steadily worse, the walking grew steadily more difficult, and the weight went up and down, up and down. During the last half of that decade, I joined and frequented two different health clubs, acquired and frequently rode two trikes, and tried a nationally known weight loss plan. Eventually, my chiropractor, whom I first met in 2008, persuaded me to stop using the cane, because I’d lost strength in my left hip and leg due to the way I leaned when I walked. He did everything he could for my spine, but while his efforts helped some, they did nothing about arresting the worsening of my back. By the beginning of 2009 the pain was bad enough that it was beginning to affect my triking and my ability to work out. By the fall of that year, the pain had taken a sudden, marked turn for the much worse. My beloved chiro sent me to a colleague, an orthopedist whom I still visit to this day. Instead of a cane to hold me up, I now lean upon the strong medicine on which my ortho has put me after several rounds of trying other drugs to find which ones would best work for me without working me over.

Now as exercises go, I didn’t mind walking; it was as much transportation for me as it was exercise, and I was able to do enough of it to get me where I needed to go so I could do what needed to be done. Prior to August ’98 I was in fact quite pleased with myself because, for a “big girl”, I could move my mass very well, I felt. I was reasonably flexible, and my legs were strong. I could walk a lot and cover a lot of ground, and so I did regularly, frequently walking for a couple of hours at a time, just because I could.

Generally, however, I’ve never liked exercise. The forms of exercise I find least offensive nowadays are those forms that utilize the breath and are non-impact, such as yoga, pilates, and t’ai chi, or some combination of those. When I’ve exercised, it has never been as much about doing it for my benefit as about self-justification and self-defense against those people, known and not, who took it upon themselves to criticize to me the gynormous flaw that is my size, my fat, my obesity. When told I needed to do something about it, I could point at the road outside and say that somewhere down it was the health club du jour to which I belonged, courtesy of my own money, and which I visited regularly, pedaling, lifting, toning, and whatever else they offered that I might do to slim down. Or if I wasn’t in a club, I was out walking, or, after the walking became impossible, triking. Some of it was tolerable, and the trike rides, I must admit, were even fun in large part, because at least I saw parts of the city on my own that I might not have otherwise seen if I’d been walking. And even on a clunky three-speed trike, it’s amazing how much ground a nosy fat girl on a mission to see what comes next can cover in two hours!

By the summer of 2009, however, pedaling on the club bikes was getting painful because of the nerve pain in my back and down my legs. I made it through the breath-centered exercise classes on sheer hardheadedness and staggered out of every one of them as if I were drunk rather than relaxed. The walk across the parking lot from the bus stop to the club, and back again when I was done, could only be accomplished in stages, and it easily took a good five or six minutes when it shouldn’t have taken more than maybe two or three. Even the elders in the Silver Sneakers classes could stand up longer and walk better and farther than I could! I know this, because toward the end, I was in their classes.

I thank God for my ortho. The medicines I’m taking—very strong medicines—keep me functional enough to go where I need to go and do what I need to do most of the time. And in the last year, for reasons I’m attributing to a combination of different and unrelated things even as I confess that I think it’s simply a miracle of God, I’ve managed to slowly but surely drop some weight without really trying. I think one of the medicines may have contributed to that a little bit. The pain, however, while under some semblance of control, never goes away. And I do quite literally mean never.

It’s this pain that makes for me a nightmare out of T’s dream.

Today, T and I went out for the reward T said we’d earned after six straight days—I think it’s been 10 for him; we started a week and a half ago, but I missed a couple of days due to sickness—of working out at the club: After a lunch of London broil, garlic mashed potatoes, salad, and grapes, we went to Baskin-Robbins for ice cream! Ooooohhhhh, it was soooo good!!! Mine was Pralines and Cream packed on top of Chocolate Escape in a crunchy waffle cone! I didn’t care that I dribbled it onto my shirt and probably looked like I thought I was a child eating it, it was GOOD!

Then came the hard part: T determined that we must set parameters and goals. I’ll tell you mine in a moment.

T has been, I’m sure, quite disappointed in me. I’m obviously not as excited about this as he hoped I’d be; far from it, I’ve been dragging my heels, kicking and screaming attitudinally, and giving him fits. He seems to be one of those people who, once they get into the routine of exercising, are lifted up and buoyed by it, who miss it when they’re away from it, and who can’t wait to get back to it. That has never been me, even when I do it regularly enough to make an impact on myself. As I said earlier, for me it’s all about being able to say I did it, and that’s all. For him, it’s a joy because he will be fit and strong. For me it is a punishment because I’m fat and unhealthy. He wants to be big and muscular. I want to be small enough that if I must leave this earth by way of the grave, they don’t have to put me there in a piano case.

He gets irked at me when I say that. T has his own burdens to bear, I very well know this. Chronic pain isn’t one of them. So I think he doesn’t get just how big a deal it has become for me. He doesn’t know how loudly I want to yell at him when he seems not to take it into consideration in this working out like a maniac and making of goals to become even more maniacal about it.

He made me answer questions I wasn’t happy to have him ask: The impact of my weight on my health, my activities, my relationships, my wishes.

So far my glucose levels are good, and except for a slight thickening in the ventricles, my heart is fine. The thickening will correct itself if I can maintain a normal blood pressure. I am being treated for hypertension, and my doctor has mentioned high cholesterol a few times. I admit that my weight contributes to the pain I feel; however, due to the fact that I have suffered attacks of paresthesia since I was a child, I know that the nerve aspect of it is a lifelong issue, and I will probably have that even if I achieve a normal weight.

I cannot run, so heaven help me if I ever need to escape trouble quickly. I climb stairs like a child, two-footing every one. I don’t walk very well. I miss walking! I wouldn’t care about the rest of it if I could just do that.

I’ve never dated except for a very brief period of four months. That relationship ended badly for me. It has only been recently that I have been truly able to forgive the person involved. People who are very small and/or very slender are very concerning to me; I feel that I must be very careful around them lest I accidentally hurt them. I feel like a bear around them. In all my adult life, I’ve been the sex object of two different men, but neither of them loved me. No man has. Others have unsuccessfully tried by assault or other means. Many have inquired and pursued. I’ve given my heart away to some who were good men, I felt, but no man has wanted it or me. This has led to bitterness, and this I have also recently had to forgive.

I do not now expect that I shall ever be the wife and mother I longed to be for most of my adult life. Right now, the only other thing I wish that could possibly come true is that I might someday be able to buy clothes I like at any time I want from a regular store, rather than holding on to clothes that are over a decade old or accepting clothes given to me, not because I like them but because they fit.

Yesterday we were in church listening to the second part of a sermon series. The pastor described three kinds of people who, when confronted with the question of doing what is wise, had different responses: The naïf (naïve person) lacks experience, but out of hubris refuses to listen to information. The fool has experience to know that his way is wrong and information to know which way is right, but even in the teeth of the evidence that his way is wrong, he still chooses to go his own way. The mocker is angered by correction and attacks those who try to correct him for his good, belittling their experience and rejecting their information. I felt challenged on a personal and spiritual level to give an account. I recognized and acknowledged that I have often been a fool about many things. So I paid attention to the sermon yesterday.

And in spite of wanting, yet again, to scream at him that he doesn’t understand, I paid attention to T today. If T has been anything with me, he has been craze-makingly, teeth-grindingly, jaw-droppingly, head-shakingly, heart-stoppingly, unfailingly honest as far as what he believes to be true. He believes, among other things, that the only thing holding men back from me is my weight. He insists he needs me to motivate him as much as I obviously need him to drive me. More to the point, he believes I’m going to somehow succeed this time where I’ve failed so many other times before. All I’ve got to do is just do it. I don’t want to act the fool about this. I don’t want to kill a dream. I also don’t want to waste my time hurting myself to no purpose. I live enough nightmares. One of us is right. I’ll pursue this until I’m satisfied we both know which one.

So here is what T and I have agreed that I will do:

I will follow the same method of eating my chiro mentioned to me some time ago and with which I had such good success the brief time I stuck to it. If you check the archives on this blog, you will recognize it instantly: Lean protein, plenty of vegetables and fruits, no more than one serving daily of starch of any kind, nothing fried, and only agave nectar and honey as sweeteners. The one serving of starch is a departure from the last time I tried this, because T insists that I need some complex carbs (I grew up thinking that fruits and vegetables were complex carbs) to give me energy for workouts. My intention is to fuel myself with a little starch before my workouts, so I will eat it no later than lunchtime, since I will probably do most of my workouts in the afternoon. I define starch as all starchy plant matter such as grains, potatoes and corn, breads and cereals, crackers, baked and fried snack foods made from grains or potatoes, and baked sweets such as cakes, cookies, pies, etc. For the one starch serving I allow myself, I will choose from healthier starches such as granola or other cereal, corn, whole-grain breads, and potatoes. I will only eat enough of these to satisfy my body’s physical requirements for working out.

In addition to this low-starch menu, I will drink a gallon of water per day. This seems excessive, but (1), I have been chronically dehydrated for at least a year and maybe longer, so I need some water! (2) In addition, I have heard from a number of sources that, especially for larger people, the proper amount of water to drink is one ounce per two pounds of body weight. According to this formula, I should rightly be drinking a bit more than a gallon, but we’re setting a gallon as the goal, and I think I will be doing swimmingly, no pun intended, if I consistently put down that much in one day, let alone every day!

We will definitely work out six days a week, and probably walk, weather and time permitting, on Sunday. Every workout for me will be 25 minutes on the stationary bike, with five additional minutes added every month. I will also do weight training, with upper and lower body workouts on alternate days. As I gain strength, I will increase my weights. Each workout will end with stretching. T ultimately would like to see me on the bike or other aerobic exercise for an hour. I just want to get it done.

In addition to adding time to my bike ride and weight to my strength training, I will track my weight loss by weighing myself every other week. I refused to do it more frequently than that. I have zero intention of living and dying by numbers on a scale; I don’t need that frustration!

We will reward ourselves weekly; what those rewards will be is up to T.

I just thought of something: It does occur to me that I can check the speed and quality of my hair growth as a result of these changes, since some women swear by all these things as an impetus for hair to grow, and as brittle as mine is, I need it to grow fast enough to make up for the breakage I’m constantly fighting to minimize. It’s a good enough focus to keep me from strangling T during the tough times :-).

HairStory, From Then To Now, Part 1 - The Early Years

Okay, you caught me in a gabby mood. Quick, grab that beverage and that munchie, resume your seat, and let me tell you the long-awaited story of my hair, as I promised last time we spoke.

For me, there isn't much to tell before the day I took a pair of scissors to the front of my hair when I was about six. Mama washed my hair when she thought it needed it, greased and straightened it with a straightening comb to silk it out before curling it with hot curlers so I would look pretty according to her expectations for church, and plaited and/or ponied it up to keep it neat for the rest of the week. All I had to do was sit there and let it happen.

I think I must have been influenced by other little girls at the boarding school I began attending at age five to do what I did, because I distinctly seem to remember being six when I picked up the scissors that day. Mama saw the handiwork, and after ascertaining from a shaky, oh-no-I'm-about-to-get-it me that "I just wanted to cut myself a bang," she got spanktacular. Any desire or interest I had in using scissors on my hair died a screaming, painful, permanent death that day.

Thinking back, I'm sure it was the trauma of having the hands of a stranger in my hair for the first time that made me pay attention to the bangs on little White girls at my school. Until I went away to the boarding school, Mama was the main hairdresser for me, with my grandma and the occasional aunt pitching in here and there. Mama didn't live with me at the school, however, and there were other little Colored girls who also needed haircare, so they had a Miss Luvinia to come in and take care of our hair.

I'd probably been at school a few days or so the first time I met her. I'll never forget it: Mama had styled my hair in twisted ponytails on each side with a bang in front for that final day, a Sunday, when she and Daddy packed me away to school, the awful day when she turned her little girl over to the hopefully tender mercies of strangers. Now, on this fateful morning some few days later, here was this tall, thin Colored woman with a voice that fell harshly on my ears, who was NOT my Mama, and who proceeded to undo my hair and ruthlessly comb out and eliminate the bang my Mama had made me, that I felt made me pretty, that was the one last thing I had of home to comfort me, because Mama wasn't there. It wasn't that her technique hurt, it was the psychological ripping of my Mama, of the last piece of the known, of the last comforting, familiar bit of home, from my hair. It felt awful, as though this monster who dared to put her hands in my hair had done something unimaginably, horribly wrong to me. I cried. Thinking on it now, that psychological violation felt to the then-five-year-old me as awful as the actual physical violation of the almost-19-year-old me years later, though for obviously different reasons.

I never wanted that to happen to me again. Mama sent me to school with a bang, and I wanted it back. Seeing the little White girls, with their bangs cut into their hair, I somehow understood that if my bang were cut into my hair, then it would be harder to comb it away. Even if the hair was combed back, it would be easy to make the bang again because it would be shorter than the rest of my hair. I doubt my thinking was this sophisticated, but I definitely had the correct idea, or so I thought. Thus, at the first opportunity on a visit home, I picked up those scissors. And, well, the rest I just told you.

From that first ill-fated encounter with Miss Luvinia until fourth grade, when I was nine, the most I'd done to my hair, besides the one ill-fated bang-cut, was undo my own plaits and ponies. I'd never washed it or styled it myself. That was Miss Luvinia's job. Every morning she was there to comb and style my hair as needed, and every two weeks she washed, dried, and straightened my hair. By its regularity and familiarity with what Mama always did, it became as familiar and comforting as home and did much to heal that initial psychic damage. I actually came, rather quickly, to look forward to my day to have my hair washed. Miss Luvinia would talk to me and sing while she worked. I specifically remember hearing, from her point of view, what that first encounter was like, her having to listen to my pitiful wails while she styled my hair to make it neat for school. I think I actually laughed as she described a day when, for some unrelated reason, I returned to the "cottage", as we called the dorms, "Wailing like a siren!" She said she could hear me all the way from the school building! Getting to know her, I found her to actually be quite sweet, and I came to love her. Thanks to her total management of my hair, however, I was totally unprepared to take on the task when I entered fourth grade.

My school was actually split between two campuses in those days. Grades K-3 and 9-12 lived on the Ashe Avenue campus. For fourth grade I was taken to the Garner Road campus. There was a Mrs. MacDougald who was a housekeeper mostly, who also did the Black girls' hair in cornrows, flat braids they're mostly called now. However, the daily washing and other maintenance was ours to do, and for me, the learning curve was a bit steep in places. My hair suffered greatly for it. That, however was the beginning of my hands-on, do-it-myself attitude in the management of my hair. I'd long since accepted the loss of life with Mama except in the 10 or so weeks of summer vacation, and, perhaps more than I, she suffered the loss of my beautiful, redgold-blond hair that, until I went away, she'd loved so much and nurtured so well according to the haircare custom of the time. First strangers had taken over that task, and now my own hapless hands had done worlds of damage. So I guess she saw it as salvation of sorts when the Jheri Curl came out when I was in my early teens. At her earliest opportunity, she had one applied to my hair. The chemical styling had begun.

As I indicated earlier, I had a brief interest in cutting my hair, and only then to cut myself a bang, that had died a swift and painful death. So I found it disconcerting, and ultimately undesirable, that every time I went to have my hair re-Curled, the stylist was cutting my hair. Especially since I also noticed, for the first time since I was a little girl, that my hair was retaining length! It seemed that between visits my hair grew quite fast but would then be cut. Since seeing the extent to which my hair grew between curl applications made me want to have my hair long, I eventually became very resistant to having it cut. By this point, it was Mama, using the box kits that had now become popular and available in stores, who had learned to apply the Curl to her husband and all her children, male and female, who was again my main stylist for this look, although the daily maintenance was mine. One day, the struggle erupted in words, with her fussing at me because "You won't let nobody cut your hair in a style!" and me responding with equal heat that "I don't want my hair locked into the same style! I want to be able to do different things with my hair, and the only way I can do that is if I keep it long!" I was sixteen. The Hair War had begun.

You know, as with all my utterances, this is taking more words than I planned for. So I'm gonna take a break. Stay tuned, because this tale ain't by any means done. Maybe I'll come back tonight or in a few days to finish it. But finish it I definitely will.

Challenge Updates

When you don't know what to write, that first word is always the hardest. Once you get past that first one, sometimes you sit there waiting for something to happen. Sometimes it does, and the floodgates just open up.

Sometimes it's not that there is nothing to say, but that there is so much to say that you don't know where to start. Ever been there? Every writer goes there at least once.

That's partly why I haven't written in this blog nearly as much as I thought I might when I first started it. Partly that, and partly having whole stretches where I didn't feel like talking about any of it, whatever it has been. I promise, though, to do better.

So I was reading back through my previous posts last night, and I saw that I haven't really kept up my end of the bargain giving you guys regular updates on how I'm doing on the two challenges I've got going. So here's an update on both of them.

Regarding the starch/sugar challenge, I meet it when I can. Let me explain: Because of the financial challenges I've faced since late last summer, I've obtained a lot of my food from the kindness of friends and, most recently, food pantries. From this, I've made the disheartening discovery that starch is abundant! It's everywhere! Thus, it frequently ends up in my kitchen and on my plate. I try to limit my intake of this as much as possible, but sometimes there just is not anything much else to eat. So I try to make sure that I always have some protein with it. This does nothing, I find, to lessen the impact of the starch on my system, but every bit of protein or non-starch plant matter that replaces an equal amount of starch is, in my opinion, a very good thing.

So what else can I do about the starch, besides stoically eating it? (1) I've frozen some of it in the past, and it has actually been there to supplement meager stores in emergencies. That's not a bad thing, so long as I don't continue to eat it in large amounts once the emergency is over. Thing is, though, I was a bread-head when I started this blog, and I still love it, even when I go whole stretches of days without it.
(2) There are just some forms of starch—pasta, white rice, and shredded wheat chief among them, and after this past Tuesday, I'm adding oatmeal to this list—that I should just never eat, or should only eat in very small amounts with comparatively large amounts of protein and non-starchy plant matter. These go off like bombs in my system, causing bloat, gas, and all manner of other discomforts. In the case of oatmeal, this makes me a little sad, because I like oatmeal raisin cookies, and I like toasting the oats with shredded coconut from time to time and eating them with peanut butter and sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon—but the side effects from too much of any of these starches makes me miserable, so I just need to forgo them. These typically come packaged in such a manner as to allow re-gifting, and I don't mind re-sharing the love.
(3) In the case of the food pantry I visited this week, I was instructed that if there were any dietary considerations I wanted to have addressed, I should make this known the next time I request a voucher to go. I will certainly act on this and ask that I not be given any of the more highly-processed starches, especially the ones mentioned above. Bread I can tolerate in small amounts, but there's no point in receiving stuff I truly cannot tolerate when they can go to someone else who not only needs them but will probably fare better with them than I do. If they are willing to give me more fruits and veggies, meat, or dairy in their place, that will work just fine with me.

Now, what about the sleep challenge?

Hahahahahaha :-)!!!

I have been consistent in only one thing: Remaining inconsistent. It's the time thing. Time-wise, I really need to get my nightly routine into a rut and leave it there. Instead of being prepped for bed by 11 p.m., I'm usually still sitting at my computer or in front of the TV, and still in my clothes, at midnight. Then I take my sweet time about getting prepped for bed, so lately it's been closer to 2 a.m. before my head hits a pillow. And because I'm still wound up, I then play Klondike solitaire on my phone until I finally get sleepy enough to take mini-naps between moves. No, that's not good. It's the same routine most nights, but the timing stinks. So I've gotta get on the stick about fixing that.

In the meantime, I'm also taking up some new and interesting challenges in addition to these. I promised to tell you about one of them eventually, and I'll mention it now: Last weekend was the one year anniversary of cutting off the last bits of my chemically altered hair. I've now worn my hair free of texture altering chemicals for a whole year. And I'm real happy 'bout that :-)!

In my next post, I promise to tell the story of my hair, and what's going on with it. Meanwhile, you can check out my blogroll on the left, if you're reading this from my blog site, or at Canticle of the Cygnet if you're reading this from my Facebook page. With a few notable exceptions, it is comprised almost entirely of blogs devoted to curly/coily/kinky hair. Right now, I'm hungry!