Tackling relationships with food

Today marks Day 1 of a project that I'm doing for the next 30 days called a Whole30. A Whole30 is basically a "nutrition reset," a commitment to eat whole, nutrient-rich, unprocessed foods for 30 days. All other foods and drinks are off limits. You can read more about the details of the program on the website.

I'm not calling this project a diet because I'm not doing it to lose weight. One of the main points of the Whole30 is to learn what processed foods, grains, dairy, and alcohol do to the body, as after 30 days, these kinds of food are reintroduced one day at a time to observe the effects on a recalibrated and healthy gut (meaning the small intestine specifically).

I don't talk about this very much, but I have a difficult time with food. I don't have a lot of self-control, particularly around foods that I like to eat, which tend to be carbohydrates and cheese. I'm fairly successful at keeping these foods out of my house, but avoiding the problem is not really addressing the problem. I also know that I use food as a distraction, eating because I feel stressed or bored or lonely or depressed. Because I exercise on a fairly regular basis and make generally decent food choices, I don't gain a lot of weight. However, that doesn't change the psychological impacts of my choices. The food and drink have more of a handle on me right now than I have a handle on them. In the last three months, I've been experiencing a heavy, bloated feeling, less energy, and less motivation to exercise. My workouts have lacked consistency as well, vacillating from good to frustrating, particularly my running. I also feel like my eating and drinking patterns have gotten a little more erratic. I read about the Whole30 and decided to give it a shot.

When I was 18, a senior in high school, I lost a lot of weight in a short period of time. I went from 165lbs to 135lbs in about three months. I did it with some exercise but mostly by drastically cutting back my food intake, basically in half. It was probably the right thing to do, as I was eating a lot of garbage, particularly at lunch, but I think I lost too much weight too quickly. By the time I went away to college, I wasn't looking so good. It didn't help that I wore all of my clothes entirely too big. It was something of a style in the late 80s, but it was more because I had a completely warped sense of what size I was and what clothes I should wear.

Fast forward to 44, and my overall lifestyle is much healthier, but there are still daily challenges. What I see in the mirror and how my body feels to me doesn't entirely match what's actually there, but I've accepted that as an ongoing part of being me and also being gay in a city that tends to validate men for having zero body fat, muscles for days, and incessantly flawless skin. (Happy Pride, I think???). As I read about the Whole30, the plan made some excellent points about how processed foods, grains, and dairy can have adverse physical and psychological effects, so I'm going to see if this 30 days of cleaner eating has any psychological benefits for me as well. 

My trainer has been talking with me for a few months now about the possibility of cutting out the grains, but I've always said I could never do it. Well, here I go. There are certainly adventurous elements to this undertaking, but I'm looking forward to it. I have limited expectations about changes in my physical appearance and more curiosity about how I might feel about myself, my body, and food when it's all done. Obviously, I'll keep you posted.

Artists I admire: Frank Langella, Kathryn Erbe, and Florian Zeller

About ten days ago, I had the chance to see Frank Langella play the title role in The Father by Florian Zeller in an English translation by Christopher Hampton. I'm not entirely sure why I wanted to see it, other than wanting to see Frank Langella perform live and that the production directed by Doug Hughes had received positive reviews. Kathryn Erbe is also in it, and I knew her work from Law and Order: Criminal Intent.

I knew that Langella played an older man suffering from memory loss, old age, and dementia. What I didn't know was how extraordinary he would be in the role and how heartfelt Erbe would be in hers. As I sat in the theatre, I found myself immediately connecting his performance to my grandmother's final years before she passed. She was often confused, not always sure who I was, sometimes clear and then five minutes later not so clear. And my mother was privy to that slow and steady decline, day by day, over a period of four years. As the final fifteen minutes of the play unfolded, I found it impossible not to cry, for my mother and my grandmother, as the experience of witnessing dementia in someone we love was captured so well by Kathryn Erbe and the act of having dementia itself was portrayed so painfully well by Langella.  He taught me what it must have been like for my grandmother, and it was terrifying. Zeller's play allows the audience to gain this understanding in a theatrical way that is unsettling and moving, and the playwright's skill is on display throughout the tight 90-minute piece. I left the theatre and continued to cry as I walked down the street, because I finally understood the depth of pain and sadness that my mother and grandmother must have felt in a way that I hadn't grasped before. It's one of those great productions that hurts because of its honesty but opens the heart at the same time. The Father now lives on my Top 10 theatre productions list. It has stayed with me since.

For giving extraordinary performances in a great play, for committing fully to terror of it all, and for giving me invaluable insights into my grandmother's final years and my mother's experience as a witness of it all, Frank Langella, Kathryn Erbe, and Florian Zeller are the artists I admire for this week.

Sharpening my axe

So I've taken a short hiatus from generating a lot of new material for this blog. I wrote myself into a corner with the play that was going up on Mondays, so I stopped. And last week I just ran out of steam. The end of the academic year is a tough time, and given the work that I did over the January break, it was a particularly long and tiring spring.

I'm trying to find the balance between sticking to my writing practice and sharpening my axe. I find it very hard to take a rest from work. I think if I stop I'm going to miss out on an opportunity. I struggle with this feeling that I'm wasting time if I'm not actively working on something. My trainer once pointed out to me that a wood cutter can't cut wood if the axe isn't sharp. So taking time out to sharpen the axe is imperative. That metaphor really landed for me, and I'm trying to embrace it right now. Not get too anxious about productivity and just allow some time and space for rest and reflection.

My play "Bromancing the OK" is featured as the Play of the Week on TreePress this week, and you can read a copy of it for free! I also did an interview for them, which was a lot of fun. I talked about the axe sharpening in the interview, which made me think about including it for today's musing.  I hope you enjoy the play and the interview!

Artists I admire: Liane Tomasetti

On Thursday morning I attended Hunter College Elementary School's sixth grade production of Once on this Island, directed by Liane Tomasetti. I've known Liane for eight years now, and we've worked together on a number of projects over that time. She's been working at Hunter for this academic year, and this production marked something of a culmination of her work.

From the start, Liane thought carefully about the subject matter of the musical, the casting choices, and the overall experience for her students. Her deep and intentional reflection about this project over the last nine months showed in the production. Students were having a great time on stage, they understood the story they were telling, and they knew where they were supposed to be and when they were supposed to be there. Costume changes, singing, dancing, acting, playing instruments, all executed with precision and joy. It was really exciting watching these kids work, particularly given that most of the audience members were kids from other schools. The performers did not hesitate in front of their peers, and that was so gratifying to witness. I was moved repeatedly by their commitment to the stakes of the story and the plights of their characters.

For creating an aesthetically sound production that kept my attention from start to finish, for holding herself and her young collaborators to high artistic standards, and for establishing and maintaining a working space where her young collaborators felt the freedom to create and perform with joy, Liane Tomasetti is the artist I admire for this week.

Looking for understanding rather than intolerance

Earlier this week, The New York Times published an opinion piece by Nicholas Kristof called "A Confession of Liberal Intolerance." In the piece, Kristof writes about the notion that academia is big on diversity but only when it fits a liberal mindset. He cites examples of conservative-leaning and/or evangelical Christian faculty members who feel uncomfortable expressing their viewpoints within an academic institution. And then there are some quantitative statistics that support these stories, which just add fuel to the fire.

While I found the article disturbing, I wasn't surprised. Working in a university, I witness this all the time. I overhear comments made by faculty members. I see students react when another student speaks about Christianity in a personal way. I experience my own reactions when I hear something that contradicts what I believe to be "the truth." We talk a lot in higher education about microaggressions, small insults that we typically associate with historically oppressed peoples, however, I hear plenty of microaggressions flying at Christians and conservatives as well.

One could argue that Christians and conservatives are part of the dominant culture and that microaggressions towards them are just "righting a biased, oppressive system," but I'm not sure that it's the most effective or forward-thinking way of calibrating a system. When I was an undergraduate and just starting to embark on the long, never-ending journey of confronting my own privilege and becoming more mindful about social justice, a facilitator in a training session said that a person's perception is their reality. My perception of what's happening to me and around me is my reality. Regardless of what someone tells me is happening, if I can't perceive it, it's tough to embrace it as my reality. I may adamantly disagree with how someone is perceiving the exact same situation, but I can't tell them to experience it differently. They are having their own experience that is informed by their own context. Unfortunately, I think a lot of people across the political continuum don't understand this. And as a result, we see it play out on college campuses the way that Kristof highlights in his article and in countless other situations that dominate the news right now.

We have become a culture of backlashers. We have a very hard time agreeing to disagree because we experience that as a loss of power rather than as an opportunity to deepen our understanding of another's position. There's value in considering someone else's viewpoint. Knowing the "enemy" is better than not knowing the enemy. And I've learned quite a bit from thinking through the other side of an argument. It sharpens my own position.

None of this is meant to dilute the action that I want taken against the policies and positions that I disagree with, but I do think that we need to be careful about having a double standard when it comes to thinking through personal viewpoints, particularly on college campuses where we supposedly guarantee academic freedom of thought. Viewpoints are viewpoints. It's when viewpoints become legislation that we have problems.