In Qoya, the intuitive movement classes that I teach, I say “movement is medicine.” In that context, I mean that movement helps us to connect to our bodies, and in so doing to connect to our emotions as well. We can find powerful emotional healing through movement.

But it’s also true that movement helps us to find physical healing as well.

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Which brings me back to our scheduled newsletter and the announcements that I promised (some of which is new even for paid subscribers!).

Weighty Matters

I’ve been consistently writing the weekly newsletter for about eight months, and for the last three or four months have been writing a second newsletter exclusively for paid subscribers. I started off the year with the intention of writing more broadly than I have before, over numerous topics that interest me. And then found that I rapidly brought my focus back into the same areas that I’d previously written about because this is where my thinking tends to circle.

In particular, I’ve been enjoying the Weight, Wellness, and What It All Means series that I’ve been exploring for the last couple months. Weight science is an area that fascinates me, because it’s so multi-dimensional: we have to take into consideration not just nutrition, but also culture, psychology, spirituality, metabolism, as well as an understanding of how science itself works and how it can get derailed.

Substack, which is the platform that hosts this newsletter, has a feature which allows “sections”—basically a sub-newsletter which can be subscribed/unsubscribed to without unsubscribing from the main newsletter. Since weight science isn’t for everyone, as I’ve pointed out in the forward to each of those emails, I’ll be making the Weight series into its own Section, called ‘Weighty Matters.’

The difference for you readers is only that you can choose whether you receive those emails or not—if you choose not, then on days when I’m sending out a Weighty Matters email you won’t get anything. But when I send out a newsletter about other topics, you’ll still get it. It’s a way for you to personalize how you receive my newsletters, while still allowing me to dive deeply into a topic that fascinates me.

Solving the Problem of Pain

At the same time, I’ve been plugging away at massage school. We’re gearing up for our midterm exam later this month, and at the same time, the intensity is increasing. Since it’s medical massage specifically, we’re studying methods of addressing musculoskeletal pain. Some of these are techniques for massage, but many are also self-help approaches that anyone can do.

As a thank-you for paid subscribers, I’ve been offering a Wednesday newsletter section that’s loosely connected to massage school, and bodywork in general. I’ve decided to define the focus of that section of the newsletter a little bit more clearly. In it, I’m going to be exploring how to address musculoskeletal pain, especially things that people can do themselves.

That section will be called ‘Solving the Problem of Pain.’ Instead of coming out every Wednesday, I’ll send it on Sundays, alternating with the main newsletter. I’m really excited about this part of my plan, because I’m really enjoying understanding this aspect of massage. I hope that you will enjoy it as well!

The Well Writer

My last announcement is actually for something that’s fairly invisible to people who’ve already subscribed to the newsletter, but should have a big impact to potential subscribers.

One of the things Substack does fairly well is help writers publicize their newsletters to other writers. As someone whose every instinct goes against marketing advice (you know, those edgy techniques like talking to people…) and who consequently has to put effort into my attempts to reach more people, I’m really excited about some of these tools.

As part of my anti-marketing instinct, I like to call things by obscure or poetic names. I think they’re clever, but nobody else knows what I mean. And I’ve been told (repeatedly!) that I’ll be able to help more people if I’m more clear about what I’m doing.

Therefore, I’m changing to the title of the overall newsletter to ‘The Well Writer,’ with the description—‘holistic health, eating well, and moving often for writers, readers, & others who sit for a living.’

The hippie-dippy poet side of me finds it appallingly direct.

But the side of me that sits in a chair for hours working on the computer or reading a book, and only gets up to look for snacks every few hours? She would sign up for that newsletter in a heartbeat.

Because really, that’s the fundamental question, isn’t it? How can we be healthy when modern life makes it impossible to be healthy?

It’s possible, but it requires deliberation.

And figuring that out is one of my passions in life, and the reason why I have a newsletter in the first place.

As always, thanks so much for reading! Next Sunday will be the first Solving the Problem of Pain newsletter. See you then!

I’ve been doing some behind-the-scenes work for the newsletter, and am really excited about it. But I’m not able to write an actual newsletter because Harvey, our tiny toy poodle, ruptured his anal gland yesterday (which is exactly as dreadful as it sounds and involves sedation, a good scrubbing, and lots of antibiotics and pain meds).

After we got back from the emergency vet, Harvey and I spent the day being quiet together on the sofa because he was VERY NOT HAPPY about the situation. And then he spent much of last night being VERY NOT HAPPY about the situation as well. So I’m going to be napping, with a dog draped over me, for a fair amount of today as well, and will send the newsletter out—with the exciting updates—next week.

First of all, I need to reduce the frequency--two newsletters a week is awesome, but entirely unsustainable for me right now. So instead of sending out newsletters on Wednesday (for paid subscribers) and Sunday (for all subs…

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First, a request: If you feel that this exploration would be unhealthy for you, please practice good boundaries and unsubscribe or stop reading. I know for many of us, and this certainly includes past-me, ANY conversation around weight can be triggering and upsetting. I don't want to cause problems for you, and would much prefer that you unsubscribe than find yourself in an unhealthy place because of something that I've written.

Here's what I've covered already if you want to catch up:

1. The Octopus wonders about weight… (introducing the series)

2. Body.Work: Deficiency and Congestion (thoughts on the flow of nutrients)

3. The Octopus sees nothing but knows all (calories aren’t real for your body)

4. The Octopus eats more than 400 calories (you’re allowed to eat until you’re full)

5. The Octopus can’t get no satisfaction (how to feel full and satisfied)

6. The Octopus eats a meal (what makes up a meal?)

7. The Octopus gets great mileage (individuality and the need to experiment)

Now, onward to tracking data with compassion.

As a nutritionist, I have some odd hobbies, one of which is data collection. I'm endlessly entertained by keeping track of what I eat and how it makes me feel. (Hey, I'm sure you have your own peculiar hobbies...) There's a trick to that, though. Because if I start losing compassion for myself, then it's no longer fun and interesting. Then it's just self-flagellation and a way of being cruel to myself.

So I have to keep my mind relaxed and non-judgemental. I have to look at my own food diary the same way that I'd look at that of my clients. "Oh, interesting what happened here. I wonder why that was?" is much more effective than "You stupid idiot, you should have had better willpower."

The thing is, it's taken me years to get here. Years. Years of deliberate practice, and years where I realize that I'm being mean to myself again and need to recommit to being compassionate.

But, as long as I maintain that deep compassion and kindness, exploring the connections between how I eat and how I feel is fascinating, and helps me to make adjustments that make me feel better and better.

I've learned that protein-containing dairy products give me terrible headaches, that wheat makes me bloated and exhausted, that (non-dairy!) protein is awesome, that using a sun-lamp in the winter is essential to my mental health.

FOR ME. These are things that are true FOR ME.

As I've written before, your mileage may vary. People have an enormous capability of adapting to different situations, and are all highly individual, so what makes one person feel fabulous will--I guarantee it--make another person feel terrible. This is why there's such a proliferation of popular diets and ways of eating. There's a decent chance that any sort of diet will work great for someone (at least for a while, until they get out of balance). The problem comes when that person tries to make it into the One True Diet for Everyone and for All Time.

The only way to know how you respond to how you eat is to pay attention, with compassion, and then to start looking for patterns. Plus, your body changes over time, sometimes in the blink of an eye, and so it's important to keep an open mind about whatever you've found out. You might have been able to digest beans fine in the past, but now they disagree with you. Or you might not have needed to consume many carbs ten years ago, but now you need to eat more.

I use an app, Lose It, to keep track of things, but only because I don't get triggered by having weight and calories displayed. At least, I don't right now--if that changes, you can be certain that I'll be making changes as well, ASAP, to protect my mental health.

“This is a skull. There’s the temporalis muscle, at the temple. And the masseter at the jaw. You can feel these with your fingers. Especially if you clench your jaw.”

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First, a request: If you feel that this exploration would be unhealthy for you, please practice good boundaries and unsubscribe or stop reading. I know for many of us, and this certainly includes past-me, ANY conversation around weight can be triggering and upsetting. I don't want to cause problems for you, and would much prefer that you unsubscribe than find yourself in an unhealthy place because of something that I've written.

Here's what I've covered already in the series if you want to catch up:

1. The Octopus wonders about weight… (introducing the series)

2. Body.Work: Deficiency and Congestion (thoughts on the flow of nutrients)

3. The Octopus sees nothing but knows all (calories aren’t real for your body)

4. The Octopus eats more than 400 calories (you’re allowed to eat until you’re full)

5. The Octopus can’t get no satisfaction (how to feel full and satisfied)

6. The Octopus eats a meal (what makes up a meal?)

This is a quick newsletter today, since my massage class has shifted to studying the muscles of the jaw and chewing. I’m attempting to get myself up to speed on the sphenoid bone, a small bone shaped like a moth with outspread wings and located inside the face behind the nose. Right now, it’s completely new and unfamiliar, but I’m working hard to get accustomed to it. Preferably before our test this week…

Having spent the last month and a half looking at different aspects of weight and how we eat, let’s step back a little bit.

On car ads, whenever they give specific numbers for fuel efficiency, there’s also a disclaimer: your mileage may vary. Meaning, it’s possible to get this many miles to the gallon, but there are a lot of variables that go into it, and it might be that you’re not able to reach this particular number.

That’s also true when we talk about health and wellness, and weight, and healthy eating, and mindset, and biology. Your mileage may vary. In fact, your mileage WILL vary. Because your body is completely different from everyone else’s. It’s one of the reasons that no one can proclaim that any particular way of eating is right for everyone. There might be some common features—like eating plenty of fruits and vegetables—but no universals. Fruits and vegetables are great, unless you have a difficulty digesting fructose, or can’t tolerate much fiber, or any one of the other numerous reasons that “eat plenty of fruits and vegetables” might not be the right advice for everyone.

The way that we deal with this variability is by experimenting. A few weeks ago, I suggested eating more protein as a way to feel satisfied by your meals. I even suggested a specific amount. How do you know if eating more protein works for you? How do you know how much is the right amount? By experimenting. Try it out and see what happens. Keep track of your results. Pay attention to how you feel.

This is one of the reasons that journaling and keeping a food diary can be extremely helpful. Knowing what you actually ate, and how you actually felt, are incredibly powerful aids to wellness. It helps us remain grounded in reality, instead of endlessly circling around what “everybody says” and what we’re “supposed” to be doing.

So, as we get deeper and deeper into our explorations of “weight, wellness, and what it all means,” remember that what I say, what works for me, and what other people are doing… none of these things really matter. What matters is what’s true for you. And you can only discover that for yourself through experimenting and paying attention to what happens.

(Normally, this would be the place where I point out that the process of experimentation can be helped along by working with me on a one-on-one basis. Which is true, but because of my somewhat insane venture into massage school, I’m not taking on any new clients right now. My process of working with clients involves a very deep dive into all aspects of their lives to figure out how we can work together to help them feel better—something that I can’t devote the time to right now. However, I WILL be taking on new clients in the winter, somewhere around the end of January or beginning of February. If you’ve been considering working with me, just hold on—as impossible as it is for me to believe right now, winter will be here before we know it!)

When I was researching massage schools, Pam, at IHSI, told me that the career life expectancy for a massage therapist was 3-5 years, largely because of injury and repetitive strain. At their school, they focused on teaching proper biomechanics for doing massage: using a low stance with bended knees instead of

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First, a request: If you feel that this exploration would be unhealthy for you, please practice good boundaries and unsubscribe or stop reading. I know for many of us, and this certainly includes past-me, ANY conversation around weight can be triggering and upsetting. I don't want to cause problems for you, and would much prefer that you unsubscribe than find yourself in an unhealthy place because of something that I've written.

Here's what I've covered already if you want to catch up:

1. The Octopus wonders about weight… (introducing the series)

2. Body.Work: Deficiency and Congestion (thoughts on the flow of nutrients)

3. The Octopus sees nothing but knows all (calories aren’t real for your body)

4. The Octopus eats more than 400 calories (you’re allowed to eat until you’re full)

5. The Octopus can’t get no satisfaction (how to feel full and satisfied)

Now, onward to what makes a meal.

My kids have always been independent, since they were wee little things. Figuring out their own breakfast and lunches were high priorities for both of them. As a result, we’ve had many conversations (which often became highly technical and legalistic explorations about the meaning of words, because Juno, the youngest, was all about the arguments) about what constitutes a meal.

No, a bowl of cereal isn’t a meal. Yes, if you drink all the milk and have a piece of fruit you can consider it a meal. No, I’m not buying Sugar Frosted Cocoa Bombs. You can have Fiber Yums.

No, an apple isn’t a meal. Yes, it’s a meal if you have peanut butter with it. No, it’s not a meal if you have Nutella instead of peanut butter.

And so on, and so forth.

Basically, I wanted them to be feeling full and satisfied, which meant that I was steering them towards option that contained both fiber and protein. Fat helps with satisfaction as well. And people with higher energy needs, like growing children (and physically active adults, and those in the menstruating years), need carbohydrates. Fruits and veggies are helpful sources of vitamins and minerals.

Since we homeschooled plus had dinner together most nights, I could give them a fair amount of leeway on breakfast, knowing that we could always have an early lunch if things started to go haywire. Dinner was (usually) a pretty balanced meal to round off the day.

If they’d gone to school, getting protein and fat and fiber into them first thing in the morning would have been critical to help them work all morning long. I would have been most concerned about having breakfast be as perfectly balanced as possible, and focused on finding satisfying lunch components that they would actually eat. Dinner, then, could have been a bit more flexible.

I have no idea how many calories kids need, although I imagine it’s quite a bit. They always had a good sense of when they’d had enough to eat, something that a lot of us adults work at relearning. Making sure that the meals were balanced between food groups kept the kids going with fewer hunger crashes. And, I’ve found, it works for me as well.

I keep it simple when I’m meal planning, and focus on getting something from each group: 1) fruits and veggies, 2) grains and starches, and 3) “meat” (beef, pork, poultry, fish, beans, nuts, and dairy—it’s my general catch-all category for protein + fat). Meals, then, work out to being meat, plus a vegetable and something starchy. I’m not super rigorous with the categories, and tend to be flexible in how I do things, but following the general principle keeps things simple and straightforward.

So, some examples:

Roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and green beans.

Ground beef, rice, and sauteed spinach.

Grilled chicken, corn, and a green salad. (Here, I treat corn as a starch—other times I’ll consider it a vegetable.)

Rotisserie chicken, bag o’ salad, and rolls.

Basically, it’s the four food groups that I grew up with, but simplified even further (particularly since I can’t have dairy). Keeping things simple makes it easier for me to get a balanced meal on the table without feeling overwhelmed with managing a whole bunch of moving parts.

We've finished the eighteen muscles of the shoulder and are moving on to the neck this week. A classmate had a nasty headache yesterday, so our teacher demonstrated treating the neck. After about a half hour treatment (plus a bottle of water and a much-needed granola bar), the headache was gone.

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First, a request: If you feel that this exploration would be unhealthy for you, please practice good boundaries and unsubscribe or stop reading. I know for many of us, and this certainly includes past-me, ANY conversation around weight can be triggering and upsetting. I don't want to cause problems for you, and would much prefer that you unsubscribe than find yourself in an unhealthy place because of something that I've written.

Here's what I've covered already if you want to catch up:

The Octopus

The Octopus wonders about weight...

Since my schedule is crazy right now, I'm trying to focus on giving myself as much support as possible. I feel better when I eat "better" (for me that means eating plenty of meat and plenty of veggies, with other stuff filling in the edges), and fit more movement into my day. I'm using an app to keep track of what eating, in large part because it helps …

Read more

3 years ago · Adrienne Marie Wood

The Octopus

Body.Work: Deficiency and Congestion

Preliminaries: the same caveat from Sunday’s newsletter applies here—if you find discussions of weight to be unhealthy and triggering, please don’t read. However, since this is the (small-circulation) paid newsletter, please LET ME KNOW if you’d prefer that I focus on a different direction. There’s plenty of other things I could be writing about, it’s just that this is where my brain is right now…

Read more

3 years ago · Adrienne Marie Wood

The Octopus

The Octopus sees nothing but knows all (Weight Part 2)

The body has two goals, stay alive until tomorrow and, if possible, have a baby. In order to do either one of those efficiently, the body has to know something about the environment. Is there food available, will there be food tomorrow, are there lots of predators, is it really cold out…

Read more

3 years ago · Adrienne Marie Wood

The Octopus

The Octopus eats more than 400 calories

I'm continuing my exploration of weight, wellness, and what it all means by taking a first look at the concept of the 400-calorie meal (the short version: it’s BS). First, a request: If you feel that this exploration would be unhealthy for you, please practice good boundaries and unsubscribe or stop reading. I know for many of us, and this certainly incl…

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3 years ago · Adrienne Marie Wood

I wrote earlier about how our bodies don’t really track calories. People track calories largely because calories were the first measurement of nutritional content in food and it’s (relatively) easy to do so, especially in the internet-connected modern world. Just because it’s an easy metric doesn’t mean that it’s a valuable metric, regardless of the fact that most weight-loss advice is based on it.

Our bodies are far more concerned about two different nutrients: protein and, to a lesser extent, fiber. Protein is important because it’s both the bricks from which our bodies are constructed as well as the paper on which all the internal messages are written. More than just our muscles, our immune system and our hormones, among other things, are entirely dependent on protein.

The fiber we eat, interestingly, isn’t for us so much as it is for our gut bacteria. Fiber is both home and food to the critically important, beneficial bacteria that live in our digestive tract. Lack of fiber will tip the balance from mostly good bacteria to more bad bacteria, which in turn affects our health in ways we don’t totally understand yet. But, in natural, whole foods, fiber bring micronutrients along with it, like vitamin C, and so eating fiber means getting plenty of micronutrients as well.

How do we know that we’ve eaten enough protein and fiber? We get two different signals from our bodies—the first, fastest signal is from the stretch receptors in the walls of the stomach. After eating enough food to expand the stomach, we have a physical sensation of fullness.

Historically, before highly processed foods like Oreos and Pringles entered our diets, a large volume of plant food meant that we’d eaten a significant amount of fiber. All flour was whole grain flour, with plenty of fiber attached, and fruits were eaten as fruit and not jam or “fruit snacks”. There just weren’t any opportunities to eat starch or sugar without the attached fiber. (Except honey, although that particular food product is somewhat self-limiting, given what happens to people who go up against the bees…)

But, of course, simply having a full stomach isn’t enough.

“I’m always hungry an hour after eating Chinese food.”

“I’m full; what’s for dessert?”

“I can eat that whole package and still want more.”

Most of us have experienced feeling full, or even stuffed, and yet still finding ourselves in the kitchen, poking around for that extra something that will end the meal and make us feel satisfied.

What we’re looking for is the chemical signal of satisfaction, or, in science-speak, satiety, which is the feedback from having eaten enough protein.

When people say that it takes around 20 minutes to feel “full” after eating a meal, this is what they actually mean, because it takes a while for the protein in our food to chemically register in the brain. Once that sensation hits, though, we generally have a feeling of closure to the meal—we’re calm, satisfied, and can walk away from the table without looking back. For many of us, it’s something we don’t feel very often.

I would argue that this feeling of satisfaction is critical for our sense of well-being. Satisfaction, further, is the key to eating both well and healthfully. When we don’t experience satisfaction, we’re biologically driven to eat more. While we may have eaten “enough calories,” we haven’t eaten enough protein to satisfy the body.

What the body considers “enough” protein will vary from person to person. The type of protein might vary as well—in order to use proteins that come from plants, our bodies have to convert them into a usable form, while proteins from animals need less of a conversion process. Some people, for various reasons, have a more difficult time than others converting plant proteins, and so feel better when they focus on eating protein from animals. Other people have no problem with that same process, and feel great on primarily plant protein.

It’s important to understand that mental health, in particular, is dependent on eating enough protein. The brain chemicals that make us feel calm and happy are, like so many other key components, made from protein. Depression and anxiety can be signs that we aren’t getting enough good quality protein. Personally, I know that my mental health is much better when I eat animal protein—trying to follow a vegetarian lifestyle consistently throws me into depression.

The takeaway, then, is to pay attention to whether you’re feeling full and satisfied after you eat. If you’re finding yourself searching for a little something more, even if you’re full, experiment with eating more protein, especially animal protein. How do you feel if you consistently eat about 4oz of meat (or 2-3 eggs) at breakfast, lunch, and dinner? How does it affect your sense of well-being? Your mood? Your energy? Your cravings?

As with everything, the only way we know what works for us is by experimenting and paying attention to the results. Learning how to feel full and satisfied empowers us to freely eat in a way that is truly nourishing.

She suggests rephrasing and reframing a lot of how we think about cleaning and self-care, to encourage self-compassion and remove the moral judgements that creep into those internal conversations. As a result, I've been thinking of "returning a room to functionality," or "resetting the room" instead of "cleaning."

Simply living in a space means we're disrupting it. A dish gets brought in, books are taken off the shelves, a dog leaves fur on the sofa, a wrapper put in the trash can, dust settles on the floor.

Resetting a room, making it functional again and ready for use, means undoing the things we've done to it--putting away what's been gotten out, removing what's been brought in, cleaning the dirt that's accumulated, emptying the trash can that's gotten filled.

Without this "undoing," things perpetually grow more disordered and messy. There's no escaping the need to regularly reset a room to take care of the detritus of life and living.

But restoration isn't just limited to housekeeping. Bodies need it too.

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First, a request: If you feel that this exploration would be unhealthy for you, please practice good boundaries and unsubscribe or stop reading. I know for many of us, and this certainly includes past-me, ANY conversation around weight can be triggering and upsetting. I don't want to cause problems for you, and would much prefer that you unsubscribe than find yourself in an unhealthy place because of something that I've written.

Here's what I've covered already if you want to catch up:

The Octopus

The Octopus wonders about weight...

Since my schedule is crazy right now, I'm trying to focus on giving myself as much support as possible. I feel better when I eat "better" (for me that means eating plenty of meat and plenty of veggies, with other stuff filling in the edges), and fit more movement into my day. I'm using an app to keep track of what eating, in large part because it helps …

Read more

3 years ago · Adrienne Marie Wood

The Octopus

Body.Work: Deficiency and Congestion

Preliminaries: the same caveat from Sunday’s newsletter applies here—if you find discussions of weight to be unhealthy and triggering, please don’t read. However, since this is the (small-circulation) paid newsletter, please LET ME KNOW if you’d prefer that I focus on a different direction. There’s plenty of other things I could be writing about, it’s just that this is where my brain is right now…

Read more

3 years ago · Adrienne Marie Wood

The Octopus

The Octopus sees nothing but knows all (Weight Part 2)

The body has two goals, stay alive until tomorrow and, if possible, have a baby. In order to do either one of those efficiently, the body has to know something about the environment. Is there food available, will there be food tomorrow, are there lots of predators, is it really cold out…

Read more

3 years ago · Adrienne Marie Wood

And now, the real meat of the matter:

The 400-calorie meal. I see this sometimes--there's a few cookbooks bouncing around with "400-calorie" in their titles. It gives the impression that 400 calories is the right size for a meal. We should probably be aiming for that, maybe, or at least try not to exceed it by too much. Certainly, this all implies, eating a whole lot more than 400 calories--1000 calories in a single meal--would be unhealthy and gluttonous.

Actually, there aren't just a few cookbooks. A quick Amazon search turns up page after page, all of which imply (or even promise) effortless weight loss and weight maintenance. Never eat more than 400 calories and you can be skinny forever.

Ugh.

Which isn't a particularly articulate or sufficient response, so instead of just smashing my head into a wall repeatedly, I'll unpack it a bit. (But really, "ugh" sums it up.)

"It's easy"

First of all, I just want to say that whenever anyone, in regards to health and wellness, says, "it's easy, all you have to do is..." I'm immediately suspicious. Generally, that means that they've oversimplified something, are out to sell you the key to this "easy" solution, or don't understand the science. Or all three. So this concept of 400-calorie meals (or, as I've seen in other places, 300 or 200 or even 100) immediately raises that red flag.

Famine in the brain

Second, as I said in an earlier newsletter, our bodies don't know what our brains know--that there's plenty of food available at the store, we're just choosing to eat less because we've decided to do so. Our bodies understand the truth of what we experience. The truth of hunger, the truth of fullness. Based on this information--have we eaten enough today--our bodies act to make sure that we'll survive. Without getting enough to eat, our bodies know that we're in a famine and that in order to live through it, our bodies will have to take drastic measures.

Meals?

Third, not all meals are equal. The idea of the 400-calorie meal makes a few assumptions--that no meal should exceed 400 calories, that it's sufficient for the main meal (or meals) of the day to be limited, and that we're eating three 400-calorie meals a day (maybe four, if the authors are being generous).

Wrong, wrong, and wrong. Which means that next week I need to write about meals and how we can structure them to better serve us, before I can really pull together the reasoning on why the 400-calorie concept irritates me so much.

Plus, I need to write about satisfaction and fullness. So many things I want to cover.

For now, I want to give you a very solid take-away from this:

You are allowed to eat until you're full and satisfied.

You don't have to stop after one serving, or after a certain number of calories, or whatever other metric. Your body is very smart, smarter than your brain. If you eat until you're full and you feel satisfied, you'll be doing great. It's not a flaw in your programming, that you're still hungry after eating "rabbit food," or that you're still wanting to eat even after you've finished a meal that the calorie counter says is sufficient.

You're allowed to eat until you're full and satisfied.

For those of you who've taken a nutrition/eating workshop with me, you've heard me talking about this before. For everyone else, pay attention to the foods that help you feel full and satisfied. What meals makes you feel content and happy? What meals leave you standing in front of the fridge, maybe with a full stomach, still wanting something more to finish it off?

Know that paying very close attention to these two different sensations, fullness and satisfaction, is the key to knowing how much to eat, and what to eat.

And no matter what you see in your Instagram feed, remember:

You're allowed to eat until you're both full and satisfied.

Thanks for reading this series on weight, wellness, and what it means. It's a topic that I feel very passionately about, and that I think most people get very wrong. There are a lot of components that going into understanding it, and I'm grateful that you're sticking around for the ride. Not a subscriber? Sign up. Already a subscriber? Consider supporting my work by sharing it with a friend.

I was so wired after class yesterday afternoon that I couldn't get to sleep last night. It was as if I'd had a cup of coffee. We're finishing up the muscles of the shoulder, which includes the upper arm bone, the shoulder blade, and the collarbone. Our focus yesterday was on learning a stretch for a tiny muscle that lives right between the collarbone and the first rib, the subclavius. Our instructor demonstrated the subclavian stretch on me, and then we all practiced on each other. It was, I think, the effect of the treatment that kept me awake

.

In contrast to most of my education, which involved a lot of reading and only a small amount of hands-on anything, massage school is, as you can imagine, tightly focused on learning skills. We have about thirteen hours at school each week: all but four of them are either learning hands-on techniques or participating in actual massages. The book-learning is important for us to understand what we're doing, but the actual hands-on learning is essential.

The subclavian stretch was, to be honest, a bit gruesome to learn, since it involves gripping the collarbone and holding it against the movement of the upper arm. It looked uncomfortable as I watched it done to someone else, and felt painful when it was applied to me. I didn't like it while it was happening. But once my subclavius was thoroughly stretched, which my classmates could see from how the collarbones floated above the ribs instead of being stuck onto them, I immediately felt the benefits.

My posture was better, I could stand up a little straighter with my shoulders less rounded. I felt more open, like I could breathe better. It felt great. More than great, really.

Of everything we've learned in class so far, and that I've had practiced on me, this had the most dramatic effect. Hours later, at home, I could still feel that openness, with a buzzy sense of excitement and joy. Even after I'd turned out my light and was trying to go to sleep, it was still there. Eventually I slept--and when I woke I realized that some of my morning aches and pains weren't there, especially in my shoulders.

This experience comes on the heels of discovering that a client I’ve been treating at our clinic has had an improvement in the condition that we’ve been working on. She’d previously been told that she’d just have to “live with it.”

It’s exciting to have these experiences seeing the impact that bodywork can have—on myself, and on clients. As someone who tends to do a lot of work on the computer and inside my head, making a difference in the physical body is incredibly exciting.

This wasn’t the newsletter I was planning on writing. But when I sat down this morning, still aware of my newly stretched subclavius muscles and my open collarbones, still excited from the feedback my client, this is what came out. Thanks for coming along for the ride.

This is my ninth week of clinical massage school, out of thirty-seven. We're working on learning the muscles of the shoulder and the back right now, and how to treat them. In class yesterday, Dan, our teacher, gave us a handout on assessing and treating the shoulder. It listed seven different qualities to look for while feeling the muscles:

1. tissue density, comparing one side to the other

2. temperature--does it feel hot or cold?

3. does the tissue move, or is it rigid?

4. localized soreness or tenderness?

5. feel for nodules, knots, ropes, which could be signs of muscle spasm or fibrosis

6. check for crepitus (grating sound or vibration when the tissue is moved)

7. stiffness or a loss or range of motion

The list ends with a statement that we're generally feeling for the environment of the tissue.

As I was reading it, it seemed a little familiar. By the time I got to that last statement about the environment of the tissue, I realized what it was.

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But how does the body know anything about the environment? The intellectual knowledge that comes from vision--seeing aisles and aisles filled with food at the grocery store--doesn't get communicated to the body. The body want to know that it's not starving, and not likely to starve tomorrow either.

The body takes its cues from what we eat, and how we eat. Frequently hungry and not eating until you're full? Better start taking emergency action because we're in the middle of a famine. Eating an abundance of sweet and starchy things? Excellent, it's clearly summer time so we can bulk up for the future scarcity of winter.

(Interestingly, another way the body learns about the environment is through our movement or lack thereof. Always sitting at a computer? The body will make adaptations--shortening the hip flexors, lengthening the muscles in the upper back--to make it easier to hold that position for hours on end. And we wonder why we're in pain...)

From our perspective, dieting just makes sense. Eat less and move more so that we burn more calories than we take in and therefore lose weight. As they say, it's just simple math.

But from the body's perspective, there's something different happening.

We go on a diet. We're hungry and never seem to get enough to eat. As far as the body is concerned, this is the start of a famine. The body doesn't understand voluntarily eating less when there's food available. If this is a famine, the body needs to protect it's resources as well as give us a kick in the pants to find food.

After some time on the diet--which might just be a single insufficient meal, or maybe a day or a week--we become obsessed with food. We use willpower to stick to the diet, but it's just not enough. Eventually we can't do it any more. We fall face-first into a box of doughnuts, or bag of potato chips, or package or cookies. We binge--because our body is so relieved that it finally is getting some food and isn't starving to death any longer.

Now that the body has experienced starvation, it automatically starts a savings account for rainy days--that is, it devotes resources to building up the fat supply in order to be ready for the next famine. It would be foolish not to, of course, because starvation can kill you, and certainly makes it impossible to have a baby. Since the body will do anything to survive, it stores up fat just in case. And to be prudent, it also leans a little harder on the appetite, making you a little more likely to eat and more likely to eat those efficient, calorically dense foods with sugar and fat and starch. As far as the body is concerned, doughnuts are money in the bank.

Then we go back to the diet. The body recognizes a famine and boots up the same emergency procedures as before. Hold tight to resources (by making us tired so we'll stop burning up energy), and focus all our attention of getting food. The need for survival will overcome the limits of willpower, and we'll find ourselves eating desperately once again.

Rescued from the famine, the body sets about recovering and preparing for the next one.

Our logical brain is ashamed of our constant failure to lose weight and keep it off.

Our body is damned proud of the reserves that it's built up against the next famine, but confused about the mixed signals it's been receiving for years. Or decades. It's kept us alive, despite the constant threat of starvation. Maybe it's even managed to make some babies. It doesn't mind that it's paid for that success with increasingly poor health. As long as we get enough to eat for today, and save up some fat so we can get through the famine that it knows is coming tomorrow, the body has done its job.

The body has no way of knowing that it was never in any real danger of starving, and that it's emergency procedures has caused us both heartache and heart disease.

I don’t want to just flat out end here, because it’s depressing: weight-loss through dieting and willpower is doomed to failure because the body WILL survive this famine, and the next one too.

The thing is, though, that we’re thinking about things wrong. We’re trying to strong-arm our way to health, instead of just… being healthy. I’ll be looking more at what that means, and how we can communicate more effectively with our bodies so that we can work together as a team for both long term and short term health. Stay tuned.

A couple weeks ago in class, our teacher pointed out that a central explanation for disease and imbalance, both historically and in complementary medicine, is deficiency and congestion. It seems relevant to the meditations on weight that I'm working on for the Sunday newsletters, so I'll play with it a little bit here first to work through the implications.

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But using the app means that I've been thinking about weight, and how it works. It's a topic that I come back to frequently because it's so complicated and interesting, and there's so much that we tend to get wrong about it.

I'll be spending the next few newsletters exploring weight, largely from the perspective of how the biology works rather than a cultural examination (probably, although there will certainly be a little of that brought in too). It's a bigger topic than can easily fit into a single newsletter (or, at least, a single newsletter than can be read in a single sitting...), so I'll be taking my time to really dig into it. And because my primary focus is on learning medical massage, "digging in" means taking small bites and working my way through these ideas slowly and sometimes in a disjointed way.

A request: if you feel that this exploration would be unhealthy for you, please practice good boundaries and unsubscribe or stop reading. I know for many of us, and this certainly includes past-me, ANY conversation around weight can be triggering and upsetting. I don't want to cause problems for you, and would much prefer that you unsubscribe than find yourself in an unhealthy place because of something that I've written.

With that caveat, let's begin.

We're told that our weight is not just in our control, but is our responsibility. It's no different to our clothes--put it on, take it off. Just choose what you want it to be and then get there. Failure to achieve your goal is simply laziness. End of discussion.

If that were true, then commercials for weight loss programs wouldn't have the disclaimer: results not typical.

In fact, our current obsession with weight and weight loss has found an easy and almost foolproof way to automatically cause weight gain, with 95% efficacy. Just deliberately eat less and move more. It won't take effect right away, of course. There'll actually be some loss before the gain starts. But in as little as a few days, the magic will start to happen and then you'll effortlessly start to gain weight. And when things start to slow down, just kickstart the process with another few days of deliberately eating less and moving more. After a few years of this, you'll hardly recognize yourself.

That's not the story that we're told, of course. But the numbers are there. For 95% of people, deliberately eating less and moving more results in a higher weight. That was certainly true for me, and it's been true for many other people that I've spoken to. We diet ourselves into ever higher weight, and we feel miserable and guilty the whole time.

The truth is, our weight is complicated. It's also not in our control. Kind of like fuel-efficiency in a car. High fuel-efficiency means that we go farther on less gas, but we don't achieve that through trying to literally drive farther with less gas in the tank. Fuel-efficiency is about more thans miles and gallons.

We can affect it, like we can affect whether we're healthy or not. But ultimately our weight, like our health and like the fuel-efficiency of our cars, is a result of the accumulation of many, many different factors. It's not just about the number of calories (or carbs) that we eat and the minutes of exercise we get in. It’s complicated, which is, truly, the interesting part.

to be continued…

We're getting into the more intense memorization now, focusing on the actions and attachment points for the muscles. By January, we'll have memorized information for almost every muscle of the body. In some ways, I'm frustrated that I don't know everything RIGHT NOW, but at the same time, I'm grateful that things are spaced out the way they are. Because boy, is it a lot to memorize.

This week we're focusing on the superficial muscles of the back. This is the second set of muscles that we've worked with, and much more complicated than the rotator cuff muscles that we studied a couple weeks ago. With this set, there are nine separate actions that the muscles are responsible for, everything from tipping the head back to raising the shoulder or raising the ribcage when you deliberately take a breath. Similarly, there are fifteen total attachment points. Some are straightforward (the spinous processes of cervical vertebrae 1 and 2) but some are very complicated (medial border of the scapula between the superior angle and the superior portion of the spine of the scapula).

In medical massage, knowing everything about a muscle is important because it gives us the tools to treat disfunction. If a client says that their upper back hurts, this in-depth knowledge of anatomy helps me to understand that, in this case, the underlying problem is actually with the muscles of the chest. And I can treat those muscles specifically through knowing exactly where they attach to the bones. Even in the few weeks that I've been working in the clinic at our school, I've been able to see how effective our approach is.

But the memorizing! My poor brain!

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