View this morning: my neighbors' great tree full of sun.
Not much on today besides the usual, though I am doing a live radio interview, with my Substack colleague, for South Dakota Public Broadcasting this afternoon. We'll be talking about the poetry Substack and, I imagine, about poetry as a living cultural element.
Today's projected high temperature is 87F, practically summer. And friends, I am not complaining.
Wearing today for these summery temperatures:
*Secondhand Flax navy linen tunic, bought April 2024
*Secondhand Y2K NY&Company red linen (or linen-blend) skirt, bought January 2023
*Secondhand Birkenstock Mayaris, bought April 2024
Once again, in the spirit of wearing my whole closet, I went looking for a combination I hadn't tried before. Having just bought this linen tunic, I do want to wear it --- and I love my long, swishy red skirt, which often doesn't get enough applied love (meaning: I love it but it tends to go unworn).
I like these pieces together quite a lot. I can tuck the tunic in to wear it with other skirts, but I really like it untucked over a longer skirt, for a fluid, layered shape that skims my body. I think this silhouette works in terms of the Rule of Thirds: in this outfit, I have a top-2/3 proportion happening, with a substantial bottom third. The outfit works because it's not cutting me in half, but there's enough shape in the tunic not to make me look like a rectangular block of fabric. It's kind of a soft triangle over a soft triangle, with the base of the top triangle falling below my hips, to hit (as luck would have it) the place where my thighs curve in, not out. That seems like an intrinsically flattering line. The colors and contrast aren't super bright, but nice and deep and saturated, the way I like them.
For this radio interview, since we're doing it over Zoom and will be visible to one another, I can just put on my longline navy linen-blend cardigan for a light but professional-looking top layer.
My husband has been recording his daily weigh-in on the bathroom mirror again, in grease pencil:
So that'll probably be a feature in these photos for a while to come. I weigh in daily as well (though I don't bother when I'm traveling) --- not because I want to be too obsessed with the scale, but because it's useful to me to see how much weight fluctuates from day to day. I read recently that when you eat a lot of carbs in a day, you'll probably weigh more the next day --- not because carbs make you fat, but because carbs tend to make you retain water more than other macro groups do. Some carb-high foods can also be really caloric --- beer, for example, and pasta --- and you probably want to be mindful of how much you're consuming, especially in proportion to protein. Note that I'm not saying don't ever eat pasta or drink beer. I am saying: If you do, on a regular basis, eat a lot of pasta and/or drink a lot of beer, especially if you're not very physically active, you're going to see excess food energy stored in your body, and it won't just be water. If you have pasta occasionally, or go out for beer once or twice a week, you might see water retention the next day, but that's not something to be really concerned about in itself.
At least, I want to be mindful about these things, since my goals here are to lose fat and build muscle (goals which are different from simply the goal of weight loss). Weighing in daily helps me track my own habits. One day's jump in numbers isn't a big deal --- probably means that for whatever reason I am retaining more water from the previous day, and that maybe I want to watch what I eat today, not eating less, but eating more protein and fiber in proportion to carbs. A sustained jump in numbers means that I need to pay attention to portion sizes, snacking, and alcohol consumption --- in other words, that I need to revisit my habits.
The big difference here is learning not to punish myself for scale numbers or for indulgences: I ate more, or more "bad foods," yesterday, so I won't eat anything today. The idea that there are "bad foods," especially coupled with a punitive relationship with food and the body, is the stuff of eating disorders (which includes orthorexia, or the idea that you can't eat unless the food is "orthodox" in some way -- "clean," or zero-carb, or without any trace of some undesired substance such as animal products, or whatever). For me, intermittent fasting skates too close to that territory to be really safe --- besides which, when I do do intermittent fasting, on purpose or not, my hair falls out. The real revelation is the need to eat more, most of the time, especially if I want to build muscle.
For me, that simply means eating three meals a day, making sure each meal is substantial in terms of protein intake, so that I stay full until the next meal. This morning for breakfast, for example, I had probably a cup of whole-milk Greek yogurt. I could have added frozen blueberries or mango to it, and that would have been even better, but I kind of wasn't feeling frozen fruit at that hour, which is okay as long as I do eat substantial portions of fruits and vegetables in the course of the day. But it was enough to keep me full for a good while, and it was enough protein for the same. Breakfast is the hardest meal for me, because traditionally I haven't been hungry in the morning, and as a child, especially, eating early in the morning before I went somewhere (ie, school) meant that I was probably going to be sick to my stomach. But although I still don't eat in the morning when I'm traveling for that last reason, I have kind of trained myself to be hungry when I wake up. This is a good thing --- and I did have to habituate myself to it.
So I might eat plain Greek yogurt, with or without fruit, for breakfast. If I do start to get hungry, I'll just have an early and very substantial lunch --- that's often when I like to have 2-3 eggs, on a sprouted-bread sandwich with some greens, or in an omelette, or scrambled. OR I'll make myself a big smoothie with kefir, frozen fruit, and either collagen powder or whey protein powder or both (or sometimes I'll have 2 eggs in some form, PLUS a small smoothie to get my fruit in). Then dinner is some combination of meat and vegetables --- hand-sized portion of meat, LOTS of vegetables. I don't buy snack food as such, because if it's here I'll eat it, but I might have a small smoothie as a snack in the afternoon, or some sprouted bread and fig preserves, or something, if I'm hungry. Meanwhile, I try to be purposeful about drinking water --- I don't really enjoy water, but the difference that drinking roughly 64 oz. a day makes is remarkable. I sleep better (weirdly, because I do sometimes have to get up in the night after drinking all that water). I feel better overall. I'm less likely to be hungry.
The other side to this coin is physical activity. It is true what they say: You can't out-exercise your diet. You can't consume two or three times the caloric/energy content that your body needs to sustain itself in a given day, and expect to work it off by frantic, self-punitive exercise. The ideal, it seems to me, is a) to consume the amount of energy your body requires (but not more than that), and preferably to make that amount as nutritionally rich as possible, since nutrients are far better absorbed and utilized in the body via your food than via supplements; and b) to move your body, because that too contributes to your overall health.
You want to build muscle, because that helps your metabolism, but also because physical strength makes you less prone to injuries and general aches and pains. You want to build flexibility, because same --- and because you want to be able to do basic things like get up from a chair without a struggle. You want to build endurance, so that you can walk where you need to go. These thoughts brought to you largely via my having spent time with someone who is 88 and struggles with these things . . . which, I mean, might just be an inevitable function of being 88, but then again, might not be. There's a lot you can't control in life, especially with regard to aging (and I don't think that any old person's struggles are that person's fault or shortcoming) --- but I'm not ready to believe, just yet, that anything short of eventual death is inevitable. And while I'm really not on board with the longevity gurus who think that if you don't do anything fun you'll have the epigenetic health of a 30-year-old when you're 60 --- I prefer the idea of living well to the idea of living long --- at the same time, I figure that my body is a gift, and that if I take some basic care of it, it might serve me pretty well for a pretty long time, God willing.
More power to the body, say I (and yeah, I feel like I've built a good bit of muscle over the last few months, but I'm obviously not going in for bodybuilding competition just yet . . .).
Anyway, I think I'll jump on my trampoline now, since Dora is still asleep in her crate. She seems to find my jumping threatening and barks at me when I do it in her presence. Jogging on the trampoline seems okay, but not straight up-and-down jumping. So I shall simply do it behind her back.
And then I'll settle down to some work, because I do have three essays to write for next week, and it's already Thursday of this week.
AFTERNOON UPDATE:
Nice 5-minute spot on South Dakota Public Broadcasting, about the poetry Substack.
I've also done one essay and begun drafting a poem in rime royale, because as far as I can remember, I've never written a poem in rime royale. With ottava rima, that makes two new-to-me forms this week: not too bad, I don't think.
It's marvelously warm out there, like a spa bath. Dora and I might decamp to the porch to soak it up.