Fat Days for Boys

My last two short-term sources of relative sexual gratification expressed a surprising amount of angst and insecurity over the ostensible body fat they perceived around their bellies. It turns out that this is a pretty excellent way to land yourself onto my no-go list, as is saying I kiss like an iguana, and as are baboon jokes.


The way I see it, I am the only one who gets to have body angst in a relationship. I win the Fat Day Monopoly.

You may have heard that on October 29, 2015, I turned 30 years old and cancelled all Fat Days from that day forward.

 

This was a nice thought.

 

In fact, I really try to keep my fat days to myself.  Because even on the days when I fail to get myself into the tiny Asian-sized tie-dye pants, the notion that I am at all overweight, is both ridiculous, and obnoxious and just shut up.

I only caused one hole
in these tie-dyed pants
and it's not
in the crotch.

Just shut up is what I feel inclined to say to my dude friends when they exhibit low-grade symptoms of Manorexia.

 

But just as my angst, self-loathing and food belly feel totally real, I’m sure theirs do too.

 

What the fuck should we do about fat days?

 

Last February I showed up in Mysore, India, ready to eat grilled cheese sandwiches. Triggered by a thali in Varanasi (the holy city of auspicious funeral pyres), 1.5 months of persistent liquid shits and an ensuing eating head trip had made a big chunk of me disappear. And there I was, Erica’s version of Emaciated for the 273rd time in my life. 

 

Here I am in Kerala
looking half dead
on a motorcycle.

“Achieving” my champion adolescent weight always comes with a bag of conflicting and tumultuous feelings.

 

Shame is there: Oh here we are again, 22 years since the first time I tried to burn calories by eating a single boiled egg for breakfast and counting six thousand and one steps as I walked the dog. 31 years old. Not menstruating, and an emotional fuck-job.

Overcome by backpacks
and
radiating diarrhea.
(Bangalore)
Photo by the Stunning and Exceptional Photographer, Maansi Jain

And then the quiet and embarrassing pride: Can you see me? I’m so thin. I both crave and abhor the attention I get at my thinnest: “Oh wow! You’re so skinny. What happened?” This one from a former yoga teacher: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this thin. This must really be your thinnest. Oh, but you look good!” How helpful, and thank you! Though I had kind of been hoping to evoke a cross between a Holocaust victim and cancer patient. Maybe throw in some AIDS. Damn these biceps, this baby face. Even sinewy and gaunt, they can’t pull off Concentration Camp.


In our culture, weight loss is so coveted that sometimes it feels as though nothing could be more riveting than the conversation about how someone got skinnier.

 

“She looks like she’s starving.

How

fucking

fascinating.”

 

Our world often associates being an emaciated bone rack with glamour and sexy. I can only speak for myself, but countless unplanned studies have shown that for Erica J. Schmidt, dropping more than six or seven pounds under a certain comfortable window totally fucks up my already fragile set of precarious coping skills. And this is why I am somewhat of a strong advocate against anorexia or manorexia or any version of fucking up your eating. I can empathize with your manorexic belly angst, but let me tell you, it really gets in the way of the thorough and life-changing fuck we all need.

Also:

 

Leg humping with

a side of squishy belly

is

some of my favourite.

 

Mysore is an interesting choice of refuge for getting your eating back on track. In 2014, I spent three months in this birthplace and mecca of Ashtanga Yoga. For over seven years, I had devoted the mornings of my life to this highly structured, sweaty, dynamic and time-consuming practice. Ashtanga Yoga brought me deep joy, some serenity, a sense of accomplishment, community and belonging, and eventually some rather persistent and hideous sensations and noises in several of my joints. While my three months practicing with the Guru’s grandson, were beautiful and delightful, not long after the end of my trip, I felt compelled to quit just about every stable facet of my life:

 

The Boatman, my favourite ex-boyfriend,

and the former leading man of this blog,

(Who by the way does not have manorexia);

Halifax; and,

Ashtanga Yoga.

 

I was such a junkie,

This was really quite surprising,

But I honestly
don’t miss it
all that much.   

 

I am happy with the varied, flexible and creative movement practice and meditation I have been able to come up with; my spine feels almost wonderful, almost all the time; I enjoy more reasonable amount of sleep; and I now feel free of the OCD that tended to arise when I had the obligation of performing close to the exact same ritual close to every fucking day.

 

Having said that, in all their neuroses, Ashtangis remain some of my favourite people. Ernest, sincere, hardworking, self-deprecating, although they may be disproportionately committed to their cause, they are often quite fun, funny and lovely. I returned to Mysore for the friends, familiarity and trust that most of the restaurants would not cause cholera. Lucky for me, a beautiful long-term Canadian practitioner and excellent Eating Ally was in town.

 

One time over lunch at the Sixth Main, my friend was talking about the struggle to be a healthy role model for newer younger practitioners and the trend to take up radical non-eating regimes in the quest for lightness, purity and the breezy lithe body that seemingly bends and folds and balances with no effort.

 

Slurping up my bowl of noodles I blurted out, “I just don’t find weight-loss inspiring.”

 

“Thanks,” said my friend. “I’ll gonna make sure I remember that.”

 

Me too, I’m gonna make sure I remember that.

Upon returning to Canada, yet again, my cells bounced back to something stronger. This body, it never deserts me, and I am so grateful. Although I would not necessarily reward myself with a trophy for the Poster Girl of Liberated Eating Habits, life has brought me other lovely prizes, and I do feel entirely committed to cutting through the bullshit and arriving at a deeper love, for your cells and for mine.

 

Friends, your Fat Days, they are not inspiring.

Come on people, what else ya got?

The End.

In honour of this blog post,
I took a picture
of myself
with no pants on.


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The Benefits of an Ashtanga Yoga Practice, Part Two
Are You Strong and Are You Skinny?
Finally, and undoubtedly, I feel grateful for my life

Are you strong, or are you skinny?

“Does this mirror make me look wider?” I asked my friend, the Queen Of Butt Club. On Sunday I moved to my fourth location of this trip to Mysore. I felt like I appeared less wide in my old apartment. The Queen of Butt Club examined the situation.

“Not sure,” she said. “I feel like I have been consistently widening since Preethi moved in.” Preethi is QOBC’s roommate from Bangalore. She is quite talented at cooking chapatis, parathas, pakoras and most importantly dosas. All through November, Preethi passed on her gifts to my friend via unbroken lineage or Parampara. My friend was delighted to learn the correct method in such a traditional way. As fate would have it, she loves dosas so much that she named her dog Dosa.

I should mention that my friend did not earn her title “Queen of Butt Club,” due to the size of her butt. Rather, in another lifetime, she became quite skilled at pilates and fitness. During this era, she accumulated knowledge of many compelling and effective butt exercises. Nobody ever authorized or certified her in this area, but that was a big mistake. All the members of our Glutes Group agree that our asses had never been in better hands than with the Queen of Butt Club. My Cool Friend from Belgium was adamant that her exercises were way better than Eddie Stern’s. Eddie Stern’s butt exercises do not generate adequate burning.

A couple of weeks into it, Butt Club died out when the Queen embarked upon Seventh Series and adopted five little kittens. It was a good lesson for the Glutes Group slash Butt Club to learn that some things are more important than your pelvis. And we learned about the importance of self-practice.

Anyways, back to the Fun House mirror at my fun new apartment.  The Queen and I examined the fronts of our torsos for about three and a half seconds.

“Hard to say,” I said. “Especially when all we wear is spiritual pants.” Spiritual pants are these great items you can buy in Mysore. The waist consists of three to four inches of ruffled elastic and the seam of the crotch falls nearly a foot below your secular vagina and/or spiritual beard.  Everything is exciting and mysterious when you wear spiritual pants.

Spiritual Pants

“Well,” said the Queen. “I guess if we start busting out of the Spiritual Pants, maybe then we can ask Malcom about his diet.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Only then.”

Malcom, whose real name luckily isn't Malcom, is an earnest young ashtangi who we always see eating plates of raw vegetables and smoothies. He dips his veggies in tiny containers of tahini butter. Otherwise, that seems to be it. How sad for him.

“I’m a control freak,” he explained, crunching on a raw beet. “Eating is one thing I can control.” How interesting. Sounds like the clichéd description of an eating disorder. “My life felt out of control and so I controlled my eating.” And then what happened?

Seven Augusts ago, when I walked into Darby’s Mysore room, I met The Vegan Life Coach, a great and temporary source of sexual gratification. Although our relationship was short-lived, his influence was enormous. The Vegan Coach encouraged me to keep practicing in the most traditional way possible. He also warned me of the perils of consuming dairy and eggs. And he said that drinking a bunch of coffee while on Prozaac (which I happened to be on) was probably a horrible idea. He never told me outright that I should become vegan, but it seemed like an obvious step towards my moral evolution, and thus I did. And I figured that if it was between coffee and Prozaac, I’d pick coffee. I quit Prozaac cold turkey, after being on it off and on for six years.

So there I was, a mighty and devoted Ashtanga practitioner. Egg-free, dairy-free, prozaac free.

This was before the gluten-free days. Otherwise, I’m sure I would have taken that up too.

As fate would have it, daily Ashtanga and going vegan coincided with the end of Rumination Syndrome, a rare and unpleasant bulimia-related symptom that took forever to get rid of following my somewhat significant bout with an eating disorder. Rumination involves regurgitating food in your mouth and then reswallowing it over and over again. This would go on for up to an hour every time I ate. This went on for years. It’s quite disgusting, but oh well. I forgive myself.

You can imagine how relieved I was when the puke just disappeared. I attributed the newfound lack of puke with my Ashtanga practice, and being vegan.

I had eight ecstatic months of ostensible freedom.

Then May came, and suddenly I was really hungry and anxious. My practice was getting longer and longer. I was biking all over Montreal to get to school and my very physical job working with people with disabilities.  And I was eating less and less, since many of the other yogis in my teacher training program seemed to do fine subsisting on salads and green drinks in mason jars. The puke came back, first once or twice a week, and then all the time. I wouldn’t let myself consider the fact that maybe if I ate more and practiced less or at least less aggressively, my anxiety might decrease along with some of the eating chaos. No, without giving everything to practice, I was convinced I’d be even more of a disaster. I kept going full throttle with little to no increase in sandwiches or cheese.

In August, Daniel Vitalis came to talk to our teacher training group about nutrition. Daniel is a vibrant and seemingly magical person with the claim to fame of only drinking and using water that he gathers from springs. He also doesn’t eat much that he hasn’t scavenged from the wilderness. At our teacher training, Daniel told us a story about finding a blue robin’s egg in the forest. He took a bite and what a surprise, inside was a budding bird fetus. Figuring that he shouldn’t let it go to waste, he ate the whole thing, webbed feet and all.

“That’s bad karma,” said Joanne, Darby’s wife. 

The Wild and Magical Daniel Vitalis

For whatever reason, I decided to consult Daniel about my battle with toenail fungus which had persisted even longer than the puke in my mouth.  He said that likely the microorganisms that caused my fungus had also invaded my intestines and joints and were contributing to my depression and mental health problems.

“Do you crave sugar a lot?” he asked. In my experience, the more I deprive myself, the more I crave sugar. So yes, I was craving sugar all the time. Alcohol, chocolate and grapes.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Yah, that’s the fungus. It’ll keep coming back as long as you eat sugar.”
“Even fruit?”
“Yah, fruit’s the worst.”

The list of food I wasn’t allowed to eat was lengthening steadily. By September, I hired a naturopath who prescribed an extremely restrictive 90-day raw food cleanse. I immediately stopped menstruating. At the time, Darby was having me practice full primary all the way to Karandavasana. Although I’d become disturbingly lighter, Karandavasana remained a lost cause. That said, as my muscles started breaking down, backbends became significantly easier.

“Don’t expect to be able to do that when you start eating again,” Darby said as he easily yanked my hands to my heels in Kapotasana. Several unempowered head trips ensued. Luckily, by mid-October, even Darby advocated that I cut the cleanse short. I felt and looked horrific. At the end of October, I bailed, surrendering to a lifetime of hideous and infested toenails. My weight stabilized within a several months; however, now a whole bunch of old eating hang-ups and patterns had returned including puke in my mouth and in the toilet. It took another two and half years for the puke to disappear completely, and I hope it never returns.

My Cool Friend From Belgium claims I’m the best eater in Gokulam. (While we’re at it, I am also probably the best at pooping and menstruating). The Queen of Butt Club, one of the most wonderful vegans I know is also quite good, though alas, our competition is rather pathetic. I would be so rich if I got money for every time I heard someone complain about how full they were from lunch, at 6 P.M, or maybe even the day after. Or how repulsively heavy Indian food is. I find the food here is spectacular and delicious. And my digestion is better than ever. Back home, I eat way more salad and as a result I am way more gassy. In Mysore, the food is so well cooked that I barely ever fart. Congratulations to me.

Maybe it is okay for people to experiment with food during a certain stage of their practice. Some people’s diets could be more healthy and nourishing. That said, a great number of people come to yoga with tendencies towards perfectly sensible and reasonable food choices. Despite this, many practitioners seem to suffer from a widespread lack of faith in themselves and their bodies. As though if they were left to their own devices, they’d expand into massive hedonistic Buddhas.

Having essentially completed a PhD in eating disorders, I have come to the conclusion that although everyone is different, upon depriving themselves, most people become neurotic, irritable and anxious. I have consolidated a few sentences containing my Excellent Advice About Food. Whether or not you want it, here it is:

Stop having food rules. Even if your arms are too short to bind in various yoga postures or you think your life would be way better if you were thinner. I am terrible at reading spiritual texts but I am quite certain that nowhere in the Bhagavad Gita or the Yoga Sutras does it say you must starve yourself until you can catch your wrists in Pasasana or lift up in Karandavasana. So unless you are missing internal organs, trust your deep internal wisdom and give yourself permission to eat whatever you want, whenever you want. I promise that you will not turn into a mammoth. Being neurotic about food is really bad for digestion, and also really bad for having fun with your friends. Eat in a way that doesn’t leave you hungry and thinking about food all the time. Ideally what you eat will allow you to sleep and shit and have a nice time with the people around you. If you’re having trouble shitting, let me know. I have lots of tricks. The End.

The only thing I would add is, watch out for rocks. Yesterday, the Queen of Butt Club was biting into a chick pea, and it turned out to be a rock. She broke a chunk out of her back molar. Besides the molar, there were no other casualties.

The Very End.

I have more advice in my self-help book, “I Let Go.” I increased the price to $2.99, since the price of coriander in Mysore has gone up 200%, even though I never buy coriander.

Also, The Queen of Butt Club is leaving this week. Besides fellow Butt Club members, she leaves behind Sambar the kitten, who defeated great odds and survived. Look how fluffy and cute he is. Sambar will be living with a generous foster mom until January at which point he will need a new home. Who loves kittens?!? Preference will be given to people living in India or Mysore, but if you live somewhere else and it is love at first sight, Sambaar will probably be strong enough to fly by the end of the month. Please get in touch if you’re interested!  

The Fiesty and Fluffy Sambar
Update: Sambar found a home in Mexico and he is fluffier than ever!

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor

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Food Belly 
The Day Yoga Almost Gave Me a Stroke 
Butt Club et. al. 
21st Century Yoga and an End to Self-Care