Is this the fast I asked for?

On Yom Kippur we read the passage from Isaiah 58 in which God asks, is this the fast I have asked for? One where you humble yourselves with sackcloth and ashes? No! I desire a fast where you throw off the yoke of oppression, and share your bread with the hungry.

Yom Kippur was this past Wednesday – one day short of 3 weeks after my double mastectomy. I usually do the 26 hour fast, making an exception for a moderate amount of water. This year I wasn’t sure whether it made sense to fast or not. Until the day before I’d still been alternating Tylenol and ibuprofen every few hours, and you can’t take ibuprofen on an empty stomach. But I felt I might be ready to cut back or cut out the ibuprofen. So I skipped breakfast, took my Tylenol with water, and headed to synagogue with a snack bar and ibuprofen in my purse.

I actually felt fine, and even was able to hold my prayer book comfortably most of the service (at Rosh Hashanah 10 days previously this had been painful), though after a while of holding it with one hand and gently “beating” my chest with the other during the confessional prayer, Don took the book from me because he could tell it was starting to get uncomfortable for me, and I let him. I felt like I could keep fasting til after sundown as usual, but I didn’t want to push it, so we went home after Yizkor (the special service to remember the dead), took a nap, and then skipped the closing service and broke the fast a little early with Anita and Lenny.

I’m glad I fasted part of the day, especially because the next day was my meeting with the nutritionist about the low-fat diet. I am now 2 ½ days in to tracking my diet to try to reduce my fat intake to under 15% of calories. Having just fasted most of the day before, I didn’t mind feeling a little hungry the last couple of days as I modified my intake. (It is really a disincentive to snack if you know you’re going to have to not only write down what you ate, but also try to figure out how much of it you ate and what it’s nutritional values are!)

I am learning a lot about what foods are highest in fat, and am realizing that one of the biggest challenges (in addition to the fact that I LIKE high fat foods) will be to consume enough protein (especially if I want to build muscle) without consuming too much fat. It looks like my recently acquired taste for snacking on lean organic beef jerky will be my friend; it has 11 grams of protein and only 1 gram of fat per ounce! I am also going to need to increase my intake of beans and vegetables, and drastically reduce my intake of nuts and nut butters. I have a deli-drawer full of cheese that I may be giving away, though I haven’t investigated its nutritional values thoroughly yet. I may also be giving up salad dressing, at least the traditional kind. (If you had to choose between salad dressing with your dinner and a small scoop of ice cream for dessert, which would you pick?)

Yesterday I was a bit down. I think the “residual cancer burden” was getting to me --- not just that there’s a lot more to figure out and possibly more chemo ahead, but also that this diet may be for the rest of my life. (One friend pointed out that the scientific understanding could change, so it might NOT be for the rest of my life!) It’s one thing to alter your life for a few months or a year; it’s another thing to try to change a life-long habit permanently.

My relationship with food has always been somewhat mindful, but somewhat challenging. I was raised keeping kosher. Though I sometimes felt this was oppressive, I realized at the age of 14 that it gave me a kind of awareness about what I was eating that my non-kosher / gentile friends did not have. When I went away to college, I began eating as a vegetarian, at first because it was a lot easier to do in my college dorm cafeteria than keeping kosher. Then I read Diet for a Small Planet and it gave me a political, saving-the-world reason to be a vegetarian.

My freshman year of college was also when my adult metabolism kicked in, and with the desserts offered at every meal, I began to gain weight, and for the first time in my awareness, couldn’t lose it just by cutting back on desserts. I began exercising regularly – swimming laps – for the first time that year also. Later in college I read Laurel’s Kitchen and under my friend Dawn’s influence began getting really into baking my own bread, cooking beans from scratch, and other more natural lifestyle things (e.g. using cloth menstrual pads!) My friend Jenni, who’d been on a swim team, taught me to do flip turns and the lap swimming became a life-long habit.

After college I went to live on a communal organic farm, Sandhill Farm in northeast Missouri. I picked this group because in my research and visits to many intentional communities, they were one of the only groups that grew most of their own food. Their estimate was 70% of their food was grown on site; they also produced some food to sell commercially. During the 2 ½ years I lived there, I began eating meat again, because the animals were raised there and many of the Diet for a Small Planet arguments didn’t apply. Also, I realized from seeing the suffering caused to the animals by milking cows (the mother and baby cry for each other for days after they are separated), that if I was serious about animal rights I would have to be a vegan, and I wasn’t willing to do that.

Our main income crops at Sandhill were sorghum syrup and honey, and I ate copious delicious home-made desserts sweetened with them. We also traded for East Wind nut butters, and I learned to put peanut or almond butter on practically everything including in my oatmeal. At some point while I was there I decided sweets were an addiction and that even these natural sweeteners caused my immune system to be weak. I decided to cut out sweets completely, even fruit, and did so successfully for a couple of years. It was remarkable what things tasted sweet to me in the absence of sweeteners – garlic, for instance!

My success at this hard-core no-sugar diet was fueled by self-righteousness and superiority; my mother had a “terrible” sweet tooth, and was forever trying to lose 10 pounds by cutting out starches to allow herself to eat sweets. I scorned this (though now I can relate!) and wanted to be better than her. Eventually, sometime after I left Sandhill, I decided that giving up the self-righteousness was more important to my well-being than going without sugar, and went back to eating sweets. I continue to try to eat natural and organically grown foods as much as possible to this day, although I haven’t cooked beans from scratch in years! And, I still have had a serious nut butter habit!

I have almost always eaten too fast, at least since Junior high school, when we had 25 minutes to get from 3rd hour class to 4th hour class, including eating lunch, which if you didn’t bring your lunch from home and had to stand in line, gave you about 4 minutes for the actual eating. Sometimes, under the influence of eating meditation learned through Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and Thich Nhat Hanh retreats, I am able to actually eat slowly and pay attention to the food’s smell, appearance, texture, and taste as I eat it. I also try to remember to think about all of the interconnections inherent in eating – where the food came from, who grew it, how it was transported, how my nourishment depends on all of that plus the sun and rain and soil. (Though I learned a lot about that from Buddhism, I actually invented it for myself as a young teen – when flying on an airplane, where it is not possible to read while eating, I began contemplating where the food came from, who did the preparation and packaging of it, and even who made the seat-cover of the seat in front of me, and how it was assembled!)

Still, my normal mode is to eat quickly and without paying much attention to the food (indeed, often reading the paper). Both my father and my maternal grandmother became diabetic from overweight in later years, and I have always been a little worried the same will happen to me. My weight was gradually creeping up a couple of pounds every year, so I was getting more worried. I recognize that it is problematic to “weigh one’s self esteem,” and that our culture tends to be overly prejudiced against large people; and I fully support all of us loving our bodies no matter their shape and size. And, in our current sedentary culture where fatty and sugary foods are abundant, I do think we collectively could use a hand here.

Perhaps I’m just a product of my culture, or still want the illusion of control, but I’d like to feel like this is something I can choose to change. I did once, years ago, attend an Overeaters’ Anonymous meeting with a friend, and I think if I decide someday I have a really serious problem, I might choose to do so regularly. I think there is something important about acknowledging that we are in denial if we think we can just do this kind of thing alone.

A couple years ago, I asked my Aunt Ellen for advice, because she had been overweight for a number of years and at some point had figured out how to lose weight and keep it off. She said her secret is to never eat unless she’s actually quite hungry, and never eat until she’s totally full. She suggested I think of hunger on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is so hungry you’d steal food from your child, and 10 is so full you never want to eat again. On that scale, instead of beginning to eat whenever you hit a 5 or 4, and eating until you’re an 8 or 9, don’t begin eating until you hit a 3, and only eat until you’re at a 6 or 7. I did this for a while, and it works well. Between that and the extra working out, I’d lost a few pounds and was not so worried about ending up seriously overweight.

I’d begun slipping from this “eat hungrier” method the last year or two though. When I began chemo treatments earlier this year, a part of me was glad to be losing weight from it, and I had a small hope that the experience would make me permanently more mindful about my eating. I gave that up somewhere along the way, realizing that I mostly needed to eat whatever I could stand the taste of and could digest. I have gradually been regaining some of the 10 pounds I lost during the first month or so of chemo, and was thinking, darn, I’m going back to the way I was!

So, now, here I am again, with a “be careful what you ask for” experience. A very strong incentive to go on a very low-fat diet. While the point of the biblical passage from Isaiah is that we should care more about social justice and being good people than about our own individual redemption, my new declaration (from the somatics methodology I study and practice) is “I am a commitment to being a healing channel.” This means, healing myself, as well as being a healing channel for others and for the world. Tune in again soon and I’ll let you know how it goes!