Zen Bender

by Stephanie Krikorian

  Nor was it always so great to talk about dieting with others. I initially thought support would help me, so I talked about my initiative. All it did was piss me off. I wasn’t the only one getting a PhD in diet books. Everybody was obsessing over them. And every time I discussed my efforts, not just during this diet run, but in all my years as a professional dieter, I realized every single person had an opinion to share, and it usually involved how misguided my efforts were, even though I knew myself and my struggle much better than anyone else. With every “Celery juice helped me” comment came a little more shame and judgment. Also, the question, “Well, how much do you want to lose?” stressed me out. That was invasive. And that meant revealing my failure—how much I had gained—in a way that was stress-inducing.

  And with every explanation of my legitimately herculean efforts to get the weight off came that visceral feeling that some people simply didn’t believe how hard I was trying. Comments like “Well, you need to get up and do twenty jumping jacks every hour to get it off” were perhaps well-intentioned; they were also slightly insulting. They suggested that working out six days a week and meeting a flawless eating schedule weren’t good enough. I also felt they suggested (and this could all be in my head) that I was lying, that perhaps I was eating donuts in the closet at two in the morning. And FYI, those comments often came from very skinny people who had not once had to lose a pound. Like the smug coupled-up people, the smug skinnies were the worst. They perhaps hadn’t read the New York Times article on the Biggest Loser phenomenon that suggested our bodies work hard to keep the weight on us; that, once you gain the weight, on a cellular level, you’re damaged, making it all the more difficult to turn the ship around.

  It had all, also, been so exhausting. I have since read a lot about genes and cells and fat and the challenges of losing weight. There are scientific and medical reasons why people struggle with weight. That helped me. I cut myself some slack, as I had always felt ashamed that I couldn’t control that situation.

  I was always able to admit my shortcomings with regard to inconsistencies in diet and exercise, but when I observed my consumption compared to that of thin people, there was a certain amount of unfairness about it. I finally started, not fully, to be kinder to myself, and work less on starving and more on accepting as best I could. That was new. Rationalizations for almost anything—well, when it came to other people’s problems—were easy. I could rationalize for them, when they were in the dumps, at art-form levels. But not for myself. I was not so kind to myself, but I was starting ever so slightly to see this through the prism of my battle with the bulge.

  The strength training eventually helped in this department. It became a confidence booster. Despite all the eating adjustments, the most profound impact on my health and body stemmed from hitting the weights hard. Fred, and his coauthor Steven Droullard, had been right. I would eventually discover, two years into strength training with Caroline, that my body had changed dramatically—tighter, smaller—but most importantly, I felt empowered. It also left my strength constantly underestimated, which at first I found insulting, as to me that was fat-profiling me (making a judgment that I must be unfit because my waist was thick), but eventually kind of amazing, for example when I lifted a mattress, stunning an observer who had insisted I could not.

  I concluded that many diets were close to the same. And they were similar to how I frequently ate anyway, when I wasn’t “on a diet.” Low starch, good proteins, good fats—they all had the same bones. Add to that limited sugar, healthy fats, and no preservatives. Just eating that way, like Keri Gans, author of The Small Change Diet, had told me often, was logical. “Just look at your plate,” she would say. “Fill it half with veggies, one quarter with high-fiber carbs (quinoa and sweet potato), and one quarter with protein.” She also said to add a little fat and mix up your food choices throughout the day. Boom. That would have been easier for me, if only I’d just stuck to that simple path all along.

  One final nugget was forming in my head post No Diet Left Behind: Perhaps the root cause of all of my junk—dating, home, work, and more—stemmed from my frustration with my waistline.

  While the scale didn’t actually move in any meaningful way during No Diet Left Behind, I ate clean, I remained calm, and maybe that combined with the meditation gave me a new view on the world. It was, after all, on the tail end of this regime that I eventually had an important epiphany.

  Chapter 10

  When A-Types Spa

  going for it

  Stunning late-life revelation: I’m built to spa.

  A destination spa is full-on Wellness Central, rife with an endless menu of fixes available. As in: all-you-do-all-day-is-spa kind of spa. Maximum Zen Bender. Days-long Zen Bendering. It’s really glorious and, as I learned surprisingly late, I excel at spa’ing. Considering my proclivity to all things self-improvement, I can’t believe I didn’t discover just how amazingly good it feels to spa until age forty-nine, when my friend Lucy invited me to join a group of super-successful and amazing women for their annual trip to Miraval Resort in Tucson, Arizona.

  Hesitant at first to spend the money, I heeded the wisdom of the numerologist to not be so tight-fisted and to live a little. Spending wildly generally gave me pause. It’s not in my DNA. Our house at Christmas is always decorated with these cute little Mr. and Mrs. Claus figures, crafted out of cotton and felt. My mother once told me she had to save up to buy them. They were five dollars each (back in the eighties), and she would go and drop off partial payment to the person who made them until she fully owned them. Stories like that do indeed tug at my frugal heart and mind and make me feel like an asshole for overspending. Still, I decided I needed actual days off (ask any freelancer, they don’t usually exist), and I had the money in the bank to go. It sounded like what I needed at the time.

  I had met a couple of the women previously, but I was introduced to the ten or so others by email in an organizational mailer that was sent approximately eight weeks before we spa’ed. There were some clear directions in this launch email (I love directions, both giving them and receiving them): Sign up for activities early (I love activities and I love being early), even those that are listed as free, because they fill up fast. I knew from the email that these were my kind of people—real plan-ahead types (or at least Carrie the main organizer was, for sure). And so far, planning to spa (planning anything) was something I was good at. And loved. I give good schedule.

  So, plan ahead I did.

  I needed to cram as much activity as humanly possible into this four-day adventure so I could truly relax. How would I be able to decompress if I felt the stress of a wasted minute while on this getaway?

  Not one minute would be left to chance. Being idle, potentially missing a fix or a seminar or a coach, was not an option.

  Within minutes of receiving Carrie’s email, I logged into the Miraval activities calendar and started a chart (I love charts) on my computer. I made an A, B, and C list of things I wanted had to do, and then charted them out according to date and time—eliminating, adding, and shuffling—prioritizing my A-list items, highlighting in yellow the hard-to-fits and in pink the only-if-I-need-filler ones. If there were overlaps, I moved things around to exploit each available second of my time and get it all in. No self-improvement offering was left unexamined, not with Cardio Drumming, Morning Meditation, Outback Hikes, Zen Boot Camps, Energy Work, Scrubs and Rubs, and Two-Day Facials (why waste your time on a one-day one?) available for purchase.

  After four and a half hours of planning, even calling the spa to find out the walk time between activities (max fifteen minutes, FYI), I was set. Of course, I was also aware that I had spent the better part of a workday not making money, thereby pushing retirement one more day or maybe week out of reach (again). But, alas, I could not help myself. So far, spa’ing had spoken to me in so many ways, including my joy of being a joiner, but also of course my obsession with fixing myself
and learning, not to mention my naive notion and hope (sort of) that all this relaxing would help me put down the iPhone, even if just for a few days.

  #SpaGoals

  Lucy and I pre-gamed group spa’ing by arriving one day ahead of the rest of the crowd. It was breathtaking and shoulder-drop-inducing from the second we arrived. The grounds at Miraval were vast and captivating. The air was better there than anywhere else that I have ever experienced. The sky was sharp and blue. It was amazingly dry. (Stephanie + Humidity = Misery.) The cacti and plants looked like museum-quality sculptures.

  To set the scene (a different scene) a little, this trip was all taking place during the Kavanaugh hearings. This is an Important Fact Alert to save in your brain for later. I had watched the hearings live on my phone during my plane change on the way to the spa. I felt conflicted upon arrival as to how to manage my obsession with both the news and wellness—how to balance my desire to bask in the glorious Arizona sunshine, relaxing at one of the world’s most luxurious resorts, and my desire to stay in the room to watch Brian Williams and Stephanie Rhule. I won’t lie: This was a bona fide dilemma for me.

  Ultimately, the TV remained in the ON position even when neither Lucy nor I was in the room, so that, when either of us ducked in between relaxing sessions, we could catch up on current events and un-relax with great ease.

  On day one, Lucy and I decided to do morning meditation (which I was chasing with seventy-five minutes of yoga and a cardio drumming session). We strolled on over to the meditation building and, along with about fifteen fellow morning joiners, set ourselves up in a circle with bolsters, blankets, cushions, and a seatback, ready to meditate. Speaking as objectively as I can, meditation is something almost everybody I know should consider doing daily.

  My friends…well, let’s just say, in general, I have very few calm or even calm-ish friends; all are wound tightly in significantly different ways for a multitude of reasons. There are worriers, obsessed types, high-voltage debaters, spitfires, and some seemingly calm but still-waters-run-deep types. But not many regular breezy types. Maybe it’s a geographical issue having to do with New York City, or maybe I run with highly successful people, or perhaps it is due to the fact that I have a lot of deadline-driven media types in my orbit. That line of work is bound to torque anybody up, as is the city itself.

  But you get my point: Most of them are wound on the tighter side. Highly intellectual, and always up for fun and a good laugh, Lucy near tops the tightly wound list, and I mean that in a good way. After generosity, unapologetic drive would be her main characteristic. High functioning is another strong suit of hers. Constant pursuit of distinguishing right from wrong is also a solid, fully-felt-in-her-presence trait. I say all of this with nothing but love and admiration for her successes, one tightly wound, overachieving (albeit far less successful) woman to another. I suspect she knows herself well enough to know this, as we discussed before arrival the fact that taking a meditation class and learning to chill was her number-one #SpaGoal on that trip.

  Quick sidebar here: I would also guess, but can’t say with any factual basis or certainty, that many people who go to a spa like Miraval, if not all of them, share some of the traits of the people I know. Tightly wound. Driven. A-types. After all, it’s not an inexpensive endeavor. Spa’ing costs real money. The notion of New Age might evoke a certain vision of the flaky, somewhat earthy set but, while there are multiple activities one might consider New Age at Miraval, high functioning was still probably a thread running throughout the clientele there. Driven people who needed to unwind for professional or personal reasons.

  And there was zero shame in that. It was an amazing place to get one’s Zen on.

  Back in the meditation room, flanked by giant glass windows filled with views of magnificent chiseled red clay hills in the distance, we all assembled. Our meditation guide sat down and asked us each to introduce ourselves, to dedicate our practice, and to set our intention. I dedicated my practice to my mother (because I like to send her all the good vibes I can in a day), and I told the group my intention was to reset for the fall after a busy and stressful summer. Lucy was next up after me, as we were sitting side by side. Leave it to Lucy to punch back at the wrongs of the world during meditation. She aphoristically dedicated her practice to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who had just testified in front of Congress regarding an alleged assault. It was testimony heard ‘round the world. Risky, of course, for Lucy to come out swinging like that outside the safe liberal confines of Manhattan, but that’s Lucy. She speaks truth and isn’t one bit worried about what other people think.

  But that’s not the most interesting part of Lucy’s introduction.

  Let me back up slightly here to give you more information about Lucy. When I think of people who know basically everything about every topic, I often think of Lucy. I ask her all the time: What do you think of this or that, or what’s that mean? She always knows. She’s incredibly bright and accomplished, not to mention kind, and one of the most generous humans on the planet. So, when it came time for her to set an intention in meditation class, I was a little thrown by her initial response.

  She said, “I’m not quite sure what that means exactly, but I guess, judging by what other people said, mine would be to stop hating everybody.”

  Indeed, that was an actual intention, and a pretty darn good one. So, if she didn’t actually know what an intention was, she quickly figured it out on her own and then proceeded to set what was certainly an honest one. A perfect intention, really.

  But Lucy hadn’t known exactly what setting an intention meant. And that truly surprised me.

  Who—in this world of fixes and gurus and avalanches of wellness influencers and self-help books—doesn’t already know what setting an intention means? Lucy. Because, while I and the rest of us wellness overindulgers and addicts were busy setting intentions at yoga retreats and monthly meditation seminars, and after journaling and visiting the Rainbow Healer and the Dove and pulling cards from a deck of pictures while setting intention after intention after intention, Lucy had been fucking working—climbing the corporate ladder all the way to the C-Suite! At an executive-level, major, real job. And being a mother to two cuties. And being a wife. And being on committees and councils and contributing to the betterment of society in general.

  All that, while I was spending my money and time setting fucking intentions. Every. Stupid. Day.

  First-Degree Intent

  But my exceptional ability to waste time on all sorts of things aside, I couldn’t shake the fact that the intention concept was so foreign to her. Despite having set probably 18,000 intentions, I can’t actually name too many of them—most of them I don’t even remember, don’t know if I achieved, or don’t know what I intended to do, but I’m pretty sure, in most cases, I never executed. In fact, I can’t think of a single intention I set, let alone one that I accomplished and that changed my life. (Unless they are stealthy, and the payoff from setting them happens without one even noticing.) I suppose sometimes my intention was to stay calm. But, alas, I’m not calm. Sometimes it was to stop using the iPhone. I can tell by that utterly offensive weekly reminder that pops up on my screen of how much time I spend staring at my phone that that intention didn’t stick.

  But hearing Lucy made me wonder: Who else set intentions?

  I assumed everybody, except apparently Lucy. That prompted me to start calling around and asking people in my circle if they knew what it meant to set an intention. I didn’t call my yoga friends, obviously. They set intentions at the top of each practice. Zero calls went out to anybody from California because I suspect the concept of setting an intention is on the driver’s license test at the DMV there. Instead, I called everyone else, including professional men and women.

  My findings were downright startling.

  Many, many people had never set intentions. Many had never even heard the term. And furthermore, the answ
ers to my question about what constituted an intention were quite fascinating:

  Is that some new Millennial thing?

  So, let me understand this, are you calling the people you think might be the dumbest person you know, or something? (The opposite, in fact, I explained—successful people who were too busy working and succeeding to set intentions.)

  Next, I decided to check in with the wellness professionals in my life to see if I correctly understood the meaning of an intention. My acupuncturist, Alexis, said, “Setting an intention is knowing the desired destination before embarking on the journey. From the perspective of acupuncture, energy follows thought; intention is the guide that brings us to the place we wish to go.”

  Hmm. Was I pre-determining my destination? Should I be tweaking the way I worded my intentions? Like a life with less screen time versus breaking up with this stupid phone? Was I confusing my energy, so it wasn’t following? Or did I just forget and move on to something else, like Law & Order: SVU?

  Jessica, author of The Loving Diet, said, “Setting an intention is making a conscious choice about something.” She told me we do it for a few reasons: A) to attempt to handle something that is uncomfortable/avert suffering; B) to bring ourselves more into alignment with something; C) to attempt to produce a different outcome than we are getting currently.

  Note to self: The outcome I got was rarely different. But why?

  From my brief, yet in-depth, reporting, I came up with a few theories about intentions. Maybe I had been too frivolous with mine. I had been tossing the word around so much it got watered down. Also, I set a lot of them, likely too many, and, when I set one, I quickly moved on to another one, not giving the previous one enough time to materialize.