ARE YOU CHALLENGING ME?

Ok, so somehow, I got suckered into a 6-Week fitness aka “healthy living” challenge. I am not sure how or why, given that my whole entire life has been of that kind. Think, pre-pubescent 80s diets meets obsessive-compulsive lessons learned about food that played out in college in odd ways, like late-night grapefruit snacks post-keg parties while others ate burritos and pizza.

My whole life, as it seems, has been a food and exercise challenge. In some way or another. It has become something of a lifestyle for me. For better or worse. Healthy eating and exercise. Food and fitness. It has framed my existence in ways that hadn’t really come to light until I started thinking about this challenge. A life book-ended by food and fitness.

So this is a bit of a trigger for me. An important one it seems. In less than 24 hours, memories have surfaced of me food-journaling as a youth on Weight Watchers, or passing around fake pounds of fat in teen support groups to get a sense of the “weight” we were carrying.

The weight I have been carrying ever since hasn’t necessarily been on my body—though at times I see it as so. But it has been somewhat heavy in my heart. Today, at 34, I believe in healthy living, in good food and fitness. Yet, I harbor some sort of stigma around the idea of a challenge. Perhaps it’s the early 80s dieting experience? Or the fact that I am simply pre-disposed to ask questions, to analyze, to assess—I am the daughter of a scientist after all. A colleague once said to me: your propensity to ask a lot of questions sometimes appears as if you are challenging authority.

So I appear to challenge authority. In truth, I challenge myself more. And I expect others to do the same. When presented with this fitness challenge, the first image that came to my mind (perhaps on the heels of Halloween) was going through a haunted house as a kid. A clown or zombie jumped out and screamed at me and I screamed back with obscenities, thinking, “you aren’t going to scare me.” Much like that fear-driven, combative kid, I have already yelled back at this challenge, like, “You can’t challenge me.”

But I feel challenged. Already. I have cloaked this anxiety in the idea that I have to regulate the wine consumption. Or the corresponding cheese plates. Or I might have to exercise more. But the truth is—it’s more than that. It’s a psychological challenge. It’s about surrendering.

Last night I had a dream that all of my teeth fell out. Dream interpretation:

One theory is that dreams about your teeth reflect your anxieties about your appearance and how others perceive you. Another theory: Falling teeth points to all of our worries and anxieties that surround us in life and not being in control.

However apropos of an interpretation, it is even more apropos that I am experiencing this challenge with two of my oldest and dearest friends. Last night, as we gathered our materials for six weeks, we giggled about how our bodies have changed since we were kids. And how our personalities have stayed so strikingly similar: the complainer, the competitor, the skeptic (that’s me). I joked about how I had to have my “last cookies” before the challenge started and how dating without wine was just not going jive. The competitor boasted that she is already ahead of the game having detoxed for a few days, and the complainer talked of stomach pains in the same breath that she relished the idea of a new figure. The three of us, in all of our silliness, have actually committed to something much bigger than this 6 Week Challenge. I am not sure what. Or where it will take us. Or me. Or how I will feel along the way, but it’s on.