What can ya say when you’ve been off the grid for a good four months! I just couldn’t let my birthday go by without a peep here. Yeah, after all that turning-40 hullabaloo last year, I nearly let 41 go by unmentioned. But really the silence speaks volumes. It’s been a significant year for me all around. I lost patience with the “not quite getting around” to the life I wanted. From August to January, I focused in on losing 30 lbs. I can’t tell you what a blessing it is to be able to walk for an hour without pain. I knew that I was stuck career-wise and until just recently was absolutely miserable despite significant efforts to find the right direction. Months ago, I placed the following poem on my online calendar as inspiration and it is finally sinking in:

I will not die an unlived life,
I will not live in fear
Of falling or catching fire,
I choose to inhabit my days
To allow my living to open me
To make me less afraid,
More accessible,
To loosen my heart
Until it becomes a wing,
A torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance: To live.
So that which comes to me as seed,
Goes to the next as blossom,
And that which comes to me as blossom,
Goes on as fruit.
~ Dawna Markova

So I’m continuing to lose weight, but I’ve noticed that I can’t see it. At first I did and I was really enjoying it. But now it’s like I’m starting to see myself with those same old critical eyes that were never satisfied no matter how bone thin I was. This is exactly what I wanted to avoid so I must dive back into The Woman’s Belly Book that I started to read over the summer. (I got distracted by other books for a while, as I often do.) I know that I’ll never be happy until I can love my body right now, as is. So it’s time to learn to love my belly and all my curvy parts. Not just those occasional days when the stars mystically align so I can see myself as attractive. But everyday, enjoying this body. Perfectly imperfect. If not at 40, then when?

Tonight I celebrated my long awaited triumphant return to my beloved bellydance class! It was delayed two weeks by my shoulder injury. So far I seem to be no worse for having danced my heart out.

Nuff said about the simple pleasure of moving your body to music. The fact that I was 20 lbs lighter just added to the experience.

Walking home from my Pilates session today, I was thinking about my success with losing weight. Fifteen pounds may be the most I’ve ever lost. I can remember losing 10 lbs a few times with great effort and sacrifice and then feeling stalled, discouraged and having a hard time keeping up what I was doing (then of course I gained them back plus more). This time I’m putting in some effort but it feels more relaxed and rather than keeping up extreme diet habits, I’m building ones that I plan to keep on an ongoing basis. For instance, I have yogurt with my breakfast now and for an afternoon snack, I have an apple and a low-fat cheese stick. I have always enjoyed eating apples and yogurt, but instead of eating them randomly I now have a sense of where they best fit in during my day. I’ve also focused a great deal on exercising before with frustratingly little impact – sometimes I did two Spinning classes a day!

Now I’m doing lots of small things – diet, relaxation, exercise – and together they are having a big impact. It reminded me of the quote I have had on my email signature lately:

“Perhaps what we are called to do may not seem like much, but the butterfly is a small creature to affect galaxies thousands of light years away.” ~ Madeleine L’Engle

Within the complex system of my own body, the small efforts I’m making are like the butterflies whose movements can create big waves of change.

Today’s headlines include: “Scientists discover ‘skinny’ gene” with the story of a study that finds a gene which, depending on how good of a copy you have in your DNA, controls whether you are one of those “skinny” no matter what they eat people. If you feel like you have been battling your biology, you probably have. Of course there are other factors too, so this doesn’t mean forget about diet and exercise. It just means that some people have to work much harder than others and may never get as good results. I’m wary of the idea of creating a pill to treat it (except for those whose biological tendency toward obesity leads to serious health problems). However, I could see it being helpful for someone to know from childhood so they can make sure to focus on a good diet and lots of exercise from the start. Something we should all be doing, of course, but all the more important if the odds are going to be against you.

Now, if you read more than the first few paragraphs you learn that this is not such a recent discovery. A woman published her discovery 50 years ago! Her findings were ignored, but luckily a man took interest so we are now reading it in the headlines.