Robin's Rules for Healthy Living

Yesterday my coworker announced happily that she had eaten chips for breakfast, and oddly enough was not hungry for lunch. I had bitten my tongue one too many times--I couldn't hold back this time, and I started mouthing off unsolicited advice about health. I decided I needed to channel my soapbox into the world's universal soapbox receptacle, the blog.

Thus, here are my rules for healthy living and healthy weight. I'm no scientist or nutritionist or personal trainer, so do I really know what I'm talking about? No! My only credentials are that I have stayed at the same weight, more or less, since I was 14. Also, I am obsessively interested in the subject and read about it voraciously. Also, I have developed very strong opinions.


Rule #1: Don't worry about it too much.

Without fail, every time I start to worry about my weight, I get stressed out and make myself miserable. And usually I gain a couple pounds. It's tragic how obsessed most women are with weight and body image. It's hard to escape! All that worry and guilt and fear and anxiety does IMMENSE damage to a person's quality of life. My philosophy is: trust your body to tell you what it needs. Some days you might need more food, some days less. Focus on health, not thinness. The more I do that, the easier it is to be in touch with my body's messages. Bodies are amazing! Relax and enjoy yours! Eat and love it! It's all about pleasure! Which leads me to rule #2...

Rule #2: Eat. All the time. When you're hungry, and even when you're not.

I am convinced that going hungry for any length of time (read: 15 mins) causes my adrenal glands to kick in my stress response, making my hormone levels react as if I were being chased by a leopard. I also think going hungry teaches your body to conserve calories and slow your metabolism. For that reason, I eat constantly. Really. Like every 2-3 hours. From the moment I wake up, and before I go to bed. People talk about 6 small meals instead of 3 large ones...I don't think about it that much or measure the calories. I eat the right amount to satsify me now and make me hungry again in 3 hours.

Rule #2: Keep your blood sugar steady all day.

This one makes my blood boil with passion! I feel very strongly about this. Every time my coworker says, "I ate too many donuts, I can't have dinner!" it pains me deep in my heart. If you're going to eat cheesecake, eat it and eat your dinner too!! You'll consume more calories in the short run, yes. But you'll be satisfied, which will make you less likely to binge later. Plus, you'll get the nutrition you need which HELLO is always most important! If you eat junk on its own, your blood sugar spikes and falls and insulin kicks in to lock down the fat. Blood sugar oscillations cause all sorts of problems: moodiness, low energy, weight gain--and I'm convinced it plays a role in depression, anxiety and many other problems.

Rule #3: Eating healthy food is really worth it.

The more I do it, the better I feel. There's no way around it. And the more I do it, the more I notice how bad junk food makes me feel. It's gotten easier to avoid fast food. I do follow the usual rules. I eat mainly whole grains, various fruits and vegetables (organic is usually worth it too), lots of legumes (they keep you full!), dark chocolate (my midmorning snack), some dairy, probably too much soy, and occasional meat (I try to get grass fed...). I pay attention to fiber and protein. But...

Rule #4: Overeating is okay sometimes!

Honestly, I eat a lot. Sometimes I overeat. I have convinced myself that doing that occasionally, in addition to making me happy, keeps my metabolism higher. (Caveat: I overeat on good or only moderately-bad things, like Indian buffets.) Though during the week I usually pay attention to portion size.

Rule #5: Yes, okay, exercise.

No way around this one either. Exercise is a damn miracle. Miracle! I wish I could bottle up how much pleasure it gives me and sell it to others. I've been reading that exercise is more important than sleep when it comes to mental and physical health. I highly encourage mixing it up: I do cardio, weights, yoga, swimming, occasional running, occasional classes...whatever mood I'm in. I think the biggest effect on weight comes from weight lifting and yoga. Try doing bow pose with a full stomach and you'll never want to do it again! But it's the endorphines from cardio that keep me hooked.

And a few miscellaneous tips:

• Sugar is not the end of the world. If you eat something bad, drink lots of water. And eat some protein. My favorite is low-fat cottage cheese.
• Buy low-fat instead of non-fat, for many items. Low-fat still tends to have normal ingredients. Non-fat often adds sugar and exhorbitant unpronounceable ingredients. One study I read said eating whole dairy instead of non-fat (or even low-fat) correlates with higher fertility. Who knew.
• DEFINITELY avoid high-fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated oils NO REALLY THEY'RE AWFUL BUT THEY'RE IN EVERYTHING IT'S REALLY FRUSTRATING!
• Good fat!! Trust me!! Olive oil, avocadoes, walnuts and almonds, salmon, flaxseed--so fabulous! You won't gain weight like you will from white bread! Try to eat more good fat than bad. It will fill you up, and I swear it infuses you with vitality.

If you made it all the way through this, thank you for entertaining my kinda-weirdly-strong opinions. :)

In Search of Comfort

"Many traditional cultures regard the self in different terms — as inseparable from your role in your kinship group, intertwined with the story of your ancestry and permeable to the spirit world."

In my head, I know the cultural differences between my clients and me are a big deal, but most of the time I go around blissfully believing I can still be of help. But then I read the recent New York Times article: "The Americanization of Mental Illness."

Offering the latest Western mental-health theories, treatments and categories in an attempt to ameliorate the psychological stress sparked by modernization and globalization is not a solution; it may be part of the problem. When we undermine local conceptions of the self and modes of healing, we may be speeding along the disorienting changes that are at the very heart of much of the world’s mental distress.

Whew. I had just spent an hour with a the client my supervisor and I affectionally call "Eeyore," because of his persistent gloominess. He was telling me another infuriating story about his boss, and his inability to stand up for himself. I was encouraging him to respond to the ever-so-ethusiastic lessons about assertiveness we've been repeating for the last year. Both of us were frustrated, so I tried to dig deeper.

"I get the sense you feel too helpless to be assertive," I said. "You think you have no control over what happens to you, or what people demand from you. But you have more power than you think you do! You have the right to ask for things and to say no to things. Give it a try!"

Spoken like a true child of the Enlightenment. I stood squarely in my Anglo-American view of the self, dripping with the assumption that we are captains of our own destinies.

Of course he felt helpless! He's from Guatemala--a place where you damn sure choose your battles wisely, to say the least.

As often as I can, I try to own my contingent perspective. I'll say things like, "I know leaving home and building independence is more of an American ideal. Tell me what you think and what it means for you." Or, "I hear you saying that it's normal for you to hit your kids. But here, it's illegal. And to my ears, it's a big deal." And for God's sake, don't even get me started on the sticky conversations about feminism. Even the language is flagranty sexist. The word for "handcuffs" is "esposas," or "wives." The word for "helpless" is "impotente."

My clients are reticent, if not suspicious, of their providers' beliefs about mental health. Most fear medications might cause more harm than good. Many think it's just as likely that their problems are caused by spiritual forces, witchery, psychic ability or a thousand other things, and that the cure might be food, sex, herbs, rituals, ice-cold water baths, or none at all. I spend many a well-meaning session explaining mental illness as a medical condition. "It's like diabetes or hypertension," I often say. I am one of many who hope this "disease explanation" will reduce stigma.

This article says the opposite. In many non-Western countries, people with mental illnesses fare much better. The author mentions a few studies where people who accepted the disease explanation actually treated sufferers worse. "Our most remarkable scientific leaps in understanding the brain haven’t yet created the sorts of cultural stories from which humans take comfort and meaning."

Science is our dominant ideology. Our very country is born from the rational secularism that asserted itself in opposition to the Church throughout the 18th century. According to Judith Herman in Trauma and Recovery, scientific interest in "hysteria" began with Jean Martin Charcot, Freud's teacher, as part of the French republican political agenda.

To me the purist disease explanation is, well, depressing. It strips emotional experiences of their complexity and meaning. It infuses profound feelings with a sort of nihilistic emptiness. Many studies read like a slow, meticulous "boiling down" of people's inner worlds.

As the article says, viewing mental illness through others' eyes, we start to look pretty sad and fearful. "We are investing our great wealth in researching and treating mental illness — medicalizing ever larger swaths of human experience — because we have rather suddenly lost older belief systems that once gave meaning and context to mental suffering."

I'm reminded of just how wholeheartedly I need to live in the dissonance between me and my clients. It's a challenge to know when to maintain their narratives, or to consider altering mine. What's common between us is a fervent search to find what's helpful, and preserve all the meaning we can.

Young Love...(post-Ph.D.)

A friend of mine is in love. He says he's never felt like this before. They have been e-mailing for a few weeks, then began talking on the phone last week. The first day he spoke to her (and saw her picture, he emphasized) he knew he was in love with her.

He moved from China a few years ago, in part to study and work, but also to mentally escape a previous relationship that ended badly. He's told me that people in China usually begin dating later than Americans--because of the emphasis on education, dating in high school is highly discouraged. I also get the sense that growing up, he was not as bombarded by love-as-entertainment as most of us were. I gleaned this astute conclusion from his utter enthrallment in that classic high-school love story, "The Hot Chick," as we watched it this morning. :) He tells me he's just now experiencing the innocent thrill of young love, five-hour phone conversations, and rushes of excitement that defy his carefully cultivated Ph.D.-in-biology logic.

They had their first argument during their fourth phone conversation. I tried to encourage him by insisting that conflict can be a good thing, when it begins to shape the edges of your fantasies with the truth of the other person. He thought for a second. "I like living in my dreams!" He responded.

Amen. Maybe he's someone who will live blissfully in his infatuation for a lifetime--I've certainly met people who seem to. From what I've read of research on couple success (which, like many things, the more you read the less you know), maintaining a rosy idealism of the other person is likely a fabulous idea.

Still, I become uncomfortable listening to him. I fear a long fall. At the same time, I smile wistfully at his unexamined earnestness, the enormity of his hope without the guardedness that many of us develop as we grow up (ha! Spoken like a wise 27-year-old!). I know many couples who married their first love. I wonder if that unguardedness is what made their bond so powerful and so resilient.

Well, let's ask him a few weeks. :)

My first case

You wear mostly neutral colors: whites, grays, browns and blacks. Your face is pale and tired. It is hard to get a sense of you at first: you speak mostly of strange dreams, and of your efforts to get pregnant. Your social worker fears you may be depressed. You tell me you're afraid your boyfriend will leave you if you can't have children. You have been to doctors, healers, herbalists. You may have been pregnant once, as a girl, but your boyfriend's parents forced you to get an abortion--though no one ever did a pregnancy test. "I'm from Mexico," is your explanation. You later married that boyfriend.

I record your affect as "down" rather than "sad"--in fact you look as if everything about you were falling downward. You voice is flat, you do not cry, and you speak little of how you feel. The first couple of months your attendance is sporadic. I decide to tell you I think our work would be more successful if you came to see me more often. I worry my pressure may push you away.

But you come to your next session, and you keep coming. I say, "We haven't talked much about your history, your childhood..." and all at once, you divulge to me your absent parents, your caretaking role for five brothers, the multiple people who sexually abused you. Your husband couldn't make love to you after you married. You list your many efforts to save your marriage. Your sadness materializes not when you discuss your husband's multiple affairs, but when you describe how grieved he was at his own predicament.

My supervisor points out that my insistence, perhaps, was what you needed. I let you know you were important.

My instinct with you is to step back, to allow you space. For a while, it is as if I'm speaking to a self who's not yet there with us. She betrays herself in little peeks. Once, you say, you punched one of your husband's mistresses. I smile in surprise, and you smile too, before telling me you later apologized.

You start to recall things you had forgotten, like the "healer" who also abused you--and I'm relieved to see you scowl in anger.

"What is wrong with people who do that? Are they sick?" You ask me.

Good question, I say. Certainly something is wrong with them.

Patriarchy stares at me straight-faced. Alive and well.

"Am I getting better?" You ask.

Good question, I say. What is 'better'?

As time passes, you seem slowly to come to life. You show up wearing exercise outfits. Your posture straightens, your face brightens. You make more eye contact. You take a new stance with your boyfriend, weighing his strengths and his faults, considering whether you want to be with him. You see him as immature. I offer that he may rely on the caretaking you provide. You say Yes, he never had a mother...and a swell of power rises in you. Quickly, you get way ahead of me in your insights. I try to reflect back the woman I see emerging.

Soon you don't really need me to say much anymore--you even interrupt me when I speak.

That's when I think you're getting better.

On God

"What is it you hope to gain from these pursuits?"


I was asked while strolling in a field, talking about religion, as I am wont to do.


I was stumped. The question, honestly, had never occurred to me. I've been asking about God since I could talk. Why not?


Several times in the last week, I have found myself in long, winding, oddly social conversations about religion.

Usually, I can't articulate a coherent belief system, so I clam up and go back to my reading and thinking and secret moments of quivering revelation.

First there were my roommates, from Israel and China. We spent all of a Tuesday evening talking about Judaism and Christianity and the Chinese exclusion of religion. A couple Bud Lights with Lime (so delicious!), and I found myself arguing for the scholarly evidence to scripture, the leaps of faith we all (even scientists) make, the importance of keeping the baby without the bathwater.

This stuff has sat with me since I was little. No matter where I go, when I hear it again I think, "You're right!"

Then Tamar talks about the exquisite complexity of Judaism, Xianmin the Chinese commitment to country and self-sacrifice ("We don't matter," he says), and I think, "You're right!"


I just finished reading The Bhagavad Gita:

“There is neither this world nor the world beyond nor happiness for the one who doubts.”

"Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is."

"Still your mind in me, still yourself in me, and without a doubt you shall be united with me, Lord of Love, dwelling in your heart."

"I desire neither victory nor pleasure nor kingdom, O Krishna. What is the use of the kingdom, or enjoyment, or even life?"

"For those who wish to climb the mountain of spiritual awareness, the path is selfless work. For those who have attained the summit of union with the Lord, the path is stillness and peace."

My heart lets loose, "You're right!"

Then at a rooftop party, beers in our hands (a theme here...?), I ran into a guy who grew up in a Church of Christ, the same type of church I went to. He talked about how Christianity often takes the joy out of faith, creates too much exclusion, focuses on meaningless details. I find myself arguing vehemently that we must focus on the central message of religions, not dismiss them for their problems. I think, "We're both right!"

Eventually, I was able to articulate the glorious cognitive dissonance in my own brain. And the strange joy of living in it.

Revived!

Did the reunion eat me? You may ask. Where have I been? I do not know. One thing I do know: I haven't given up on Robo in Rockville.



Lesson of the day: we have more of an impact than we know. Recently, my coworker and I conducted groups in a local middle school. They were for families who had been separated and reunified--in most of them, parents came to the U.S. first, then brought the kids 2, 5, even 11 years later.

At the end of the groups, we did a field trip to Great Falls National Park. We hiked, grilled, ate enormous Costco cupcakes, made t-shirts, raffled off Subway gift cards. We laughed at me mistakenly calling a "waterfall" a "puddle" (FYI: a waterfall in the Dominican Republic is a puddle in El Salvador: charco. "Look at the giant puddle!" they guffawed), and other glorious moments of cultural integration.

Jason and his big, warm, culturally competent heart joined us. Even without the group leaders around, the families told him how much the groups meant to them. And what struck me most were the T-shirts the kids made at the end:

It says "El Salvador" and "I love my family." The kids each made T-shirts, on their own, displaying pride in their heritage and in their families.

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it toward some overwhelming question,

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—

If one, settling a pillow by her head,

Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.

That is not it, at all.”

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be...

(T.S. Eliot, The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock)

I used to live there. That mass of columns, palm trees and sunlight is my alma mater, Pomona College. In a few weeks, I'm going to attend my five-year college reunion. Dun dun DUN!

It was a very formative place to be. Challenge. Friendship. Ideas. Food (oh, the food!). But what does that mean? A room of talented, ambitious people debating male homosocial desire in medieval literature. Anti- and pseudo- and post- and more post-. Discovering coffee. Anglo-American vs. Continential philosophy. Beer. Pink Floyd. Fake snow. Flip-flops. A thesis on Nietzche and Dostoevsky. Have the courage to be offended. T-shirts that said Harvard: the Pomona College of the East.

My thesis advisor once told me, "Sometimes elitism is good. You have to be elitist to be a leader."

Now most of the alumni I know have gone on to higher education or to service fields. And now something in me wants to run the other way from academic ego and ambition. I love having my ideas checked minute-by-minute by the person in front of me, ready to say, "Nope. You've missed it. That is not it, at all."