We hear a lot about bad hair days, but in real life I don’t know anyone for whom the blow dryer holds such sway. This could be because I work at a university where (in general) women don’t trade on their looks. But even if they don’t have bad hair days, many women I know have bad food days (by which I mean a day in which they don’t stick to whatever diet they’re on). An errantly consumed donut at a 10 AM coffee break can derail an entire afternoon. Talk about lost productivity!

For the record, I’m not talking about eating disordered women or even noticeably over-weight women. I’m talking about tenured professors, dizzyingly intelligent graduate students, women whose battle more often than not is with an unwanted 10 or 15 pounds. How does a donut wield such power over such high-powered women? (Which leads me to believe that the obsession with food, with weight, goes beyond a mere concern with appearance.)

I suffered from an eating disorder for a good eight years (with a brief relapse a couple years into recovery), yet I eat today with more pleasure (and less guilt) than most of the “normal” women in my realm of acquaintances. I know about the guilt because I’m often at the end of conversations that assume that because I’m thin that I’m somehow immune to the vicious cycle of donut-eating, remorse, and recrimination. People marvel that I eat so … unapologetically.

They obviously don’t know my history, and I’m rarely inclined to share it. While it’s true that I don’t eat donuts (because they really and truly don’t appeal to me – if they did, I’d be all over them), I am no stranger to the self-hatred that feeds the cycle of eating and self-recrimination in which so many women today find themselves caught. There are healthy and unhealthy reasons to avoid donuts, and for many years, I abstained for the wrong reasons – not out of any concern for my health, or the environment, but out of a contempt for food and for my body’s needs. Interestingly enough, my recovery involved my coming to eat the occasional donut before I started to avoid them again for the right reasons (out of caring concern for my body, not contempt).

Most days I consider myself fully recovered from what was a prolonged bout with (sub-clinical) anorexia. Other days, especially when I compare myself to so-called normal women whose daily productivity is determined by what they eat or don’t eat for lunch, I wonder if my recovery isn’t all strategy. I say that because (full confession here) I still don’t process food mistakes very well. I have a million strategies in place, however, that have helped me 1. to relegate food to a place where it no longer consumes more than its rightful share of my physical and mental energy, 2. to avoid food mistakes, and 3. to deal with food mistakes when they happen.

For me, a transformed relationship with food was crucial to my being able to relegate it to its proper place. I no longer view food as something “bad” to be avoided (even if there are wholesale categories of things masquerading as “food,” donuts among them, that are probably very “bad”), but as pure life force energy. For me, putting food in its place involved elevating my view of it, to a point where I now regard food, and the act of eating, as sacred. I shop more consciously, prepare food more mindfully, and eat with greater awareness of food as spiritual sustenance.

Avoiding food mistakes is harder, but the key strategy I’ve developed is mindfulness. I practice what’s known as intuitive eating. Meaning, I don’t follow a food plan, and I have no real rules about what I can eat and what I can’t eat, so there’s never room for recrimination. Yes, there are wholesale categories of “food” that I avoid (most animal products, processed food, bananas without a fair trade label, etc.) but whether I avoid certain things for health or environmental or even aesthetic reasons, I want to be clear that there is no self-denial involved in my food choices. I eat what I want, whenever I want, in whatever quantities I want. In my experience, restriction always backfires. Personally, I have found that educating myself about food and environmental issues has allowed me to bring my food choices into alignment with my values. Not that I don’t (more than occasionally) compromise, but I do feel like I have solid enough parameters in place that I can toss the rule books when it comes to deciding what to eat each day. Knowing where my food comes from allows me to experience a deeper feeling of connection than I ever experienced while eating food of unknown origin. I agree with cookbook author Deborah Madison that our hunger for connection is our deepest hunger, one that conventional food doesn’t satisfy, which is the main reason the 10 AM donuts, consumed mindlessly, leave us feeling so … bereft. Bereft as in deprived, or lacking something. It’s a feeling not unlike grief and we experience it whenever we consume food that does not deliver on its promise to nourish.

While my key strategy in avoiding food mistakes is mindfulness, I have an arsenal of other tactics in place. Some of my favorites are 1. sticking to feel good fruits, juices, veggie salads and the occasional raw treat during the day, 2. avoiding restaurant salad dressings (I never take a chance on them unless I’m in a raw restaurant or a really, really good restaurant as nothing can ruin a meal more quickly), 3. carrying an avocado in a Ziploc bag if I’m headed out to lunch, 4. keeping a well-stocked office fridge, 5. never, ever, no matter how hungry I am, buying fruit from a convenience store (I’m better off with the potato chips, really), 6. herbal tea with stevia, and 7. keeping one or two Lara Bars in my back pack (keeps me away from the potato chips when there’s no fresh fruit to be had). Lara Bars aren’t really raw, but they are minimally processed, and I love the simple ingredient profile. I do with they hadn’t gone corporate though.

I don’t know if this is a result of my eating disorder or what, but I do know there are a whole bunch of foods (i.e. processed carbs) where an appropriate satiety response never kicks in for me. For years before I went gluten free, I used to eat a brand of pasta called De Cecco. According to the nutritional information, each box contained eight servings, yet I’d inevitably cook up half a box and still not be really satisfied. I’d eat four servings (800 calories) of processed white flour and I would still be hungry. Some combination of vanity and willpower (to say nothing of laziness) kept me from ever cooking up the second half of the box, but these days, I find it easier to indulge my occasional carb cravings out of the house. No shame in buying single servings if that’s what it takes to avoid eating too much. That’s what I do with deserts, even raw deserts, all the time.

Finally, as someone with sensitive digestion, I’ve found food combining to be immensely helpful in avoiding post-meal discomfort. Whether there’s any truth to the science of food combining or not, I don’t know. But avoiding the most egregious (mis)combinations does seem to work for me.

I might not eat the free donuts at work, but that doesn’t mean my day can’t be thrown off kilter by an off-tasting smoothie, too many bites of a melon that’s started to ferment before I realize it, etc. Because I don’t process food mistakes very well, I put a lot of effort into avoiding them. But I am not perfect, food mistakes happen, and so I’ve developed a whole other set of strategies for dealing with them.

There’s not a food mistake I haven’t made, whether we’re talking about the wrong food, the right food at the wrong time, too much of a good (or bad) thing, etc. In my early days of recovery, every meal felt like a mistake. I couldn’t stand the feeling of food in my stomach, so anything more than my usual meals of half a cantaloupe or an 8 oz. yogurt left me feeling full, and uncomfortable. I’m no stranger to the self-loathing that comes from eating a little too much, a little something unplanned, etc. My first strategy is to avoid knee jerk reactions … I feel really yucky so I might as well finish off the chocolate bar, the cherries, whatever. I’ve learned that the best thing to do once my awareness kicks in (if I’ve been eating less than mindfully) is to stop and breathe. Make some tea (I’m a fan of the old standbys – chamomile, ginger, and peppermint). Go for a walk. Get away from the food. (I had a routine for a while where I’d eat dinner at my house in Watertown and walk a mile and a half to Harvard Square, grab a cup of tea, and hang out at a bookstore until the discomfort passed, which it inevitably did.)

My second strategy is a takeaway from my yoga practice through which I’ve learned that every breath is a new beginning. We don’t have to wait until tomorrow to start over. I’ve observed that many women will let food mistakes dictate the way they eat for the rest of the day so that a mishap at breakfast leads to pizza for lunch and something even worse for dinner. I know from my own experience how hard it is to snap out of the “the day is already ruined, so what” mentality, but I think it’s really crucial to get in the habit of putting mistakes behind us as quickly as possible. There’s nothing worse than piling bad food on top of bad food because this leads to what Gil Jacobs calls a “traffic jam” in the digestive system. If you find yourself unable to resist a donut at 10 AM, first of all, enjoy it! Then give yourself a good three or four hours to let it exit the stomach, have a big green salad, some herbal tea, and later on enjoy a simple well-combined dinner. You’ll wake up feeling a whole lot better the next day than if you’d allowed your meals to go from bad to worse, making it easier to get back on the healthy eating track. Bad days don’t equal weight gain, not significant weight gain anyway, unless you let them add up. Trust me on this one.

My third strategy is a variation on a lesson I learned in business school, which basically says don’t throw good money after bad. It’s always tempting when you’ve invested time or money in something to try to recoup the investment. (I make this mistake with relationships all the time.) But sometimes you have to cut your losses. I’ve learned that if it tastes bad (no matter how expensive the ingredients), it will make me feel bad to eat it. So I never let a frugal mindset keep me from throwing bad-tasting food away, whether it’s a rotting melon or a yucky-tasting smoothie. As you embark on a raw food lifestyle, you have to give yourself room for some expensive mistakes (I can tell you right now not to try juicing arugula!). I tend to stick to tried and true recipes, but this isn’t good either, as variety really is a key to maintenance with this lifestyle.

My fourth strategy is to enjoy every single thing I eat. I follow Natalia Rose’s Raw Food Detox Diet (at about a level two) a good percentage of the time, but if I choose to eat white potatoes or hummus or another less than ideal food, I do so without guilt. I once spent five days in Vienna eating nothing but cake. I am not kidding. I had cake with espresso for lunch and cake with wine for dinner. I enjoyed every morsel, ate all the icing, and actually returned to Boston a few pounds lighter! The thought of travelling to Vienna (or Paris!) with a suitcase filled with raw food (or heaven forbid, my juicer) has no appeal to me. For me travelling is all about the local food. (I never ever eat on airplanes though – no matter how long the trip.)

I’ve observed that I will often overeat a food I haven’t encountered before (or in a long time) … my first pint of Coconut Bliss was gone within an evening and my first jar of raw cashew butter was gone within a few days (along with several pints of blueberries!). I’ll almost always eat too many cherries when I first catch them in season. I wonder if we’re not hardwired as a species to do this, or if it’s just me? My point is that if it happens (that I really eat too much), I don’t freak out. I know the next batch of cherries will last two days. The body can handle an occasional overload to the digestive system a lot better than the mind can handle the barrage of self-hatred that too often accompanies these incidents.

There was a time (after I’d reached a healthy weight and I was in maintenance mode, so to speak) when I’d fast after a food mistake. I no longer believe this practice is a healthy one, psychologically, and I don’t let myself do it. I will wait to eat until my hunger has returned, and sometimes it’s several hours, but I won’t deliberately refrain from eating as punishment or as a way of offsetting the extra calories. I don’t believe restriction is healthy, physically or psychologically, and the practice of fasting after a food mistake seems eating-disordered to me. I feel the same way about colonics and enemas, etc., when misused. I will do a colonic every three or four months – I think they’re a great way to hit “re-set” – but I am not as big a fan as many of my raw food friends are. My wariness is partly because of my history, but partly because of what I believe is an unhealthy focus on cleansing among many proponents of these modalities. I think that unchecked, the concern with internal cleanliness can become an obsession and can lead to an unhealthy disdain for food. There are folks who posit that in an ideal world we’d all be Breatharians, and I find no support for that theory scientifically or theologically.

There are people who think I don’t eat, but that’s only because I’ll never eat just because everyone else is eating if I’m not really hungry, and I often don’t get hungry until well after noon. I NEVER ignore my body’s hunger signals! Maybe that’s mistake numero uno right there, to tune out the body.

I consider myself pretty safely recovered (I have been at a healthy and stable weight for almost 15 years), but I still don’t believe fasting is a safe practice for me. Don’t get me wrong – I live and breathe detox. But I also actively protect my recovery and that means a whole bunch of things from avoiding yoga studios with mirrors to shunning the advice of some popular raw gurus. I don’t believe in systematic undereating, caloric restriction, regular fasting, or more than the occasional colonic. In real life and online, I surround myself with women who love to eat.

It seems to me that Democrats learned the wrong lesson from Jimmy Carter’s 1980 defeat, namely, that moral courage is a bad thing in a President. Clinton’s success probably reinforced that lesson. They’d better unlearn it quickly.

This is the time for Obama to TACK LEFT if he wants to catch what’s left of the wind that swept him into office. If he continues on his centrist course, or worse, tacks right, the Democrats are doomed, in November, and in 2012.

I’m glad Joe Biden has the President’s ear, because we the people sure don’t. I hope Obama takes away the right lesson from the special senate election in Massachusetts; he’s in great danger of losing the progressive vote (I for one stayed home) and our financial support too.

I can’t afford campaign donations, but I gave, happily, $100 to the Obama campaign. By now I’ve given twice, $100 to the campaign, and $100 in increased interest to the banks he bailed out.

All I know is the Obama we got is not the Obama we elected. I think I speak for other progressives, hence the first person plural. We’re like the Whos down in Whoville. No one in Washington, least of all the President, knows we’re here.

Martha Coakley lost the special senate election in Massachusetts yesterday for a couple of reasons: one, because she was an uninspiring candidate completely unprepared to actually have to work for the seat, and two, because progressives, myself included, stayed home. So yes, the election was a referendum on Obama, but it’s being interpreted incorrectly. It’s not that independents are disappointed in Obama’s “partisan and one-sided agenda,” but rather that progressives are disappointed (and angry) at the extent to which corporations still run the show in Washington. While Obama has pandered to big money and big pharma, while he’s appointed former Monsanto execs to high positions, he has been losing the progressive vote. I for one voted for real change in November 2008, not rhetorical change. And I haven’t seen it. I stayed home yesterday knowing Scott Brown would win. And sad as I was to see Ted Kennedy’s seat pass to a Republican, nothing inspired me to get out and vote. Obama didn’t lift a finger for a public option … probably because he thought the progressive vote was in the bag. Well, it’s not, and I am tired of my vote being taken for granted by centrist Democrats intent on propping up the status quo, protecting the financial interests of a small percentage of the American people. I hope Obama takes away the right message from yesterday’s election before November when the results will be more consequential. Or perhaps I’ll stay home again, versus exercising my “right” to choose the lesser of two evils.

I am realizing extent to which I have no choice but to support the corporate takeover of society, if I want to save for retirement that is. Even so-called “green funds” include a lot of big companies, and in my view, big is a part of the problem.

My father did not own shares, not as far as I’m aware.

I am realizing how very lucky my mother is that my father died (in 1981) before the world changed, before his pension was decimated.

Sometimes I think my father was lucky too. Sure, he missed our college graduations, the births of his grandchildren, the Internet (he would have loved it, he was always one to reach for an encyclopedia), the gentrification of Hoboken. But he did not live to feel shame for the country he served, proudly.

Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children’s faces looking up,
Holding wonder like a cup.

Life has loveliness to sell,
Music like the curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And for your spirit’s still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.

Spend all you have for loveliness,
Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstasy
Give all you have been, or could be.

No surprise that Teasdale’s work has fallen into obscurity – the rhyme, the cadence, lend her poems a deceptive simplicity. I have come to prefer more difficult poets myself. But there was a time when I lived, longed, “for one white singing hour of peace.”

The difficulty arises AFTER the ecstasy. It’s hard not to fall into bitterness.

I just read a great article by the wife of Gary Hirshberg, CE-Yo of Stonyfield Farm Yogurt. She describes life on their New Hampshire farm when they were starting out, sharing the farmhouse with the founder, his wife, and six kids; the hard work, and mostly, the uncertainty of it all. There were many failures and the business teetered on edge of bankruptcy for a while. Yet there’s not a trace of bitterness in her re-telling. You can tell she didn’t like it, the precariousness of life back then, but she was in love so walking away was never an option.

I think there’s something to hardship; if you can overcome it, it lends your success a certain sweetness. As long as we can put some distance between past and present, as long as there’s no fear of going back, we can remember, even fondly, where we’ve come from.

I don’t think we should barter our future, however.

We have no way of knowing how things will play out. There is no such thing as a sure thing, as Teasdale’s own life evidences. She married a business man, not her true love, the poet Vachel Lindsay. She later (coming to her senses?) divorced.

Both Lindsay and Teasdale died by suicide.

We reject happiness at our peril.

I think …

Eventually I want to start another general blog, less a journal and more a place to talk about work. I think revealing bits and pieces of one’s life is nice, I think blog readers appreciate it, and I can’t imagine writing without this personal angle. But no one wants to read anyone’s journal, not unless they’ve connected to that person on another level. I don’t mind the occasional journal entry, the outpouring of the heart, so to speak, but I only have interest in reading the journals of people who are engaged in similar pursuits, or struggles, or of people whose work or writing I admire/respect. Anais Nin excepted.

I’ve made it through the 15 questions, but I am not much closer to discovering my personal mission than when I began. I’m quite sure it lies in the area of personal development, but all I’ve been able to come up with so far is “to inspire people in difficult circumstances to create lives of beauty and meaning (outside the corporate matrix), to reject the Walmartization of their lives, to keep their kids out of government schools, to turn off their televisions and to eat real food.” I know there’s a writing component to my mission, but I’m struggling with writing now, and until I work through whatever it is that is stopping me mid-sentence, I am going to work on other aspects of my identity – yogini, friend and mother, event planner and fundraiser, etc. That covers spirituality and health, relationships, and work. If I get the writing, eventually, it will be icing, as they say.

Question 15: Given your talents, passions and values, how could you use these resources to serve, to help, to contribute? ( to people, beings, causes, organization, environment, planet, etc.)

Another difficult question. Truth is I panic, often, that I don’t have a marketable skill (I’m not a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, etc.) that will guarantee employment. I have academic credentials (an MDiv, an MBA), but degrees don’t count for much on the job market, not compared to experience. I have experience as an academic administrator, but while there are administrative jobs a plenty, they don’t really pay the rent and God knows they don’t allow me to put anything aside.

That said, I’d like to serve, contribute, so to speak. Service is not my career anchor (my desire to serve is not as strong as my desire for freedom, autonomy, or my desire for work-life balance) but the desire to change the world (or to see the world changed) is there. Inequality (the pervasive sort we’re starting to see) angers me. But I have an understanding of its structural causes and really there’s nothing I can do about them apart from getting angry. When I find myself completely powerless, I get depressed. So I’m just not motivated by a desire to change the world so much as by a will to survive, thrive even, under social political conditions about which I can’t do anything.

I’m playing now with the idea of helping others, on an individual basis, to negotiate the system we have, to find ways to flourish, in conditions not always conducive to human flourishing. Lives of beauty, meaning, can be had, on low budgets, in less than ideal conditions, but creating them is a not easy task. It’s one I’ve managed, however, and I think it’s something I can help others to do.

Question 14: If you could get a message across to a large group of people, who would those people be? What would your message be?

This is a tough question. Probably I’d say something to the poor people, the economically disenfranchised. I’d say fight back, vote with your dollars, stay the hell out of Walmart.

I make a supposedly not bad salary and I find life impossible, financially. I live humbly, I pay nothing to speak of for rent (this cozy situation will end soon and I’m dreading it), I buy no clothes, no material goods. I spend my whole check on books and food and services. Do I need all the services I pay for? Probably not, but I can’t imagine my life (or my son’s life) without them. Do I raise a kid who doesn’t go to summer camp? I could save money, I just don’t want to.

So I’d say to people wake up. Life may be better here than in Brazil, but it doesn’t begin to compare to Europe, especially if you’re poor.

I don’t know what I think about Coelho. The intellectual in me wants to dismiss him, as my Brazilian friends are wont to do. But I don’t care if he’s not original, if he’s recycling myth, legend, whatever. I agree as a writer he’s not exceptional, or even very good, but I enjoyed The Alchemist so much (at least the first time through) that I keep going back for more. The Alchemist is a well-told story, a gem, really, but Coelho’s other books (the ones I’ve read) lack something. Even while they inspire, they disappoint, but I can’t put my finger on why. It’s not the material, and it’s not the language, it’s something else.

Is it that a part of me doesn’t believe wisdom should be so accessible?

The Witch of Portobello explores the feminine nature of divinity, the nature of revelation, etc. I did not like the narrative structure – the story of Athena is told from multiple view points – but I appreciated the lesson in re-patterning: “Changes only happen when we go totally against everything we’re used to doing.” And also the whole idea that love just is. We can’t, and need not, explain it.

Maybe the story tries to do too much? I’d have told it differently, but I think Coelho’s point is that the world is not ready for *revelation* if what is revealed contradicts what is known. And this has always been the case, not only with regard to religious revelation, but also scientific truth.