Make Me Slim for my Dance Competition!

NO! This is NOT me!  And this WAS never me!

Trying to stay slim and fit becomes harder by the decade.  My ballroom dancing is incentive enough for trying very hard to stay fit and trim, but its no easy task. This is even more difficult if you alternate between high-end cruising and ballroom dance competitions. On a cruise, there is food everywhere. I mean everywhere. And even when guests are not shoveling in food mimicking a john deere backhoe, there are so many meals and so many food events that make it virtually impossible to avoid food in your visual pathway most anywhere on the ship.

My eating habits have improved over the decades, although I admit to intermittently lapsing into a food zombie, eyes glazed and pupils fixed, burgers and fries stuffing their way down mouth to esophagus, stomach, filling you up leaving your tummy looking three months pregnant.

Except for cruising where I love my egg white omelets, I just eat fruit in the morning, berries, grapes, apples, bananas, melons, peaches and pears. That gets me to lunch, when I really enjoy a full sandwich or salad.  My favorites are avocado and cheese, tuna, salmon, turkey, ham, all with lots of spicy mustard. Lately, I have been lapsing, eating larger and larger yummy lunches. This is OK if I spend my afternoons in dance lessons or practicing my dancing, or weight lifting or in stretch class. Indeed, I can afford to eat a decent lunch when I spend at least two hours in vigorous exercise activity a day.  Dinner is a sacred time; I can’t bother worrying about dieting at the end of the day. It is my time to let go, eat, drink some wine, relax my body and loosen my tongue.  

But after a cruise, when the scale shifts by about five pounds in the up direction, I can’t lose weight on the above regimen. As an ectomorph, my tummy and love handles show the preponderance of those five pounds, the fat oozing out of my Latin dance shirt like jello. My God, I can’t fake having no talent in ballroom dancing, so I have to take every opportunity to make the best of my talentless body by staying fit and in shape.

So about 10 days before the Heritage Classic, I started cutting down on my eating.  Fruits were OK, but nothing else until dinner.  Well that didn’t go over very well, as I got weaker and weaker and I found that by 3pm each day, I was a walking zombie. Indeed, I had to stuff a tortilla and one piece of cheese at that time to keep from collapsing from hypoglycemia. And I was failing in my dance lessons cause my brain had run out of fuel!

But I managed to stick by my guns and ended up losing 4-6 pounds by the competition.  Hooray.  My Latin dance shirt fit me nicely as I lost the pooch belly that I owned only a week before.

I found that there was one more advantage to my week of starvation. Before this test of determination, the feeling of postprandial fatigue, as blood is diverted to your abdomen to process the food that is consumed, deserting the brain to process the desserts in the intestine made me very tired and sleepy. After lunch, naps had become a frequent event, not that there is anything wrong with this European tradition of taking a siesta after lunch and closing down your shop in the mid afternoon.

But, I lost this need for an afternoon nap as I starved myself until dinner. Not only did the blood continue to circulate my brain, but the intense hunger that I felt, this gnawing feeling of constant discomfort, did wonders for my attention span. I was never contented enough to consider napping.  All I could think of was the time when I allowed myself to eat and drink my day's ration.

The good news is after three or four days, my stomach contracted enough that the hunger pangs diminished considerably and it got easier and easier to starve myself during the day. As we all know, the more we eat, the hungrier we get, and the more food we consume over time. The opposite is also true. As in most of nature, this ironic twist of human physiology, as counterintuitive as it may seem, makes physiological sense and truly works to the benefit of those brave enough to change their eating habits over the long-term in order to moderate their food consumption and lighten their body habitus.

I have learned many lessons over the years regarding diet and weight maintenance. I have not learned these from books, or from those charlatans who conjure up some diet formula that never makes sense and may in fact do you harm. I have not learned from those who have taken their case to the surgeon for some instant remedy. I have learned the hard way from trial and error, slowly over time.  Changing habits is not easy, but it will only work if you consider a plan that is long-term in nature than something that you think will occur over night.

All I can say is that writing this blog has made me very hungry, so I'm going to attack the refrigerator for a carrot and one stalk of celery....yeah, right!