The most damaging thing about chasing the baby tail is that it lifts the veil on what is ambitious, and what is meaningful. I think of my work as very meaningful, but of late, I have been looking at all my professional and social activities through this lens whereby they are all rendered particularly meaningless by the abject feeling that at the end of the day, I'm missing something that I really Want. And that what you want is somewhere else. I don't know how to lift myself out of this funk or that anyone can really help you with this feeling.
Accordingly, sometime earlier this year, I made a new promise to help myself. No goal, I told myself, no extra hours in the cubicle, chasing that better performance, or reading architectural digest or worrying over baby announcements is worth it if you don't act on what is meaningful, what is spiritual and uplifting in who you're becoming.
Perhaps this reckoning has been overdue and it is not unusual that anyone in this position would be anxious to make changes, or for anything to change. Over the last years, I have been putting on 1kg a year. Over time and age, this was compounded by frequent, rich eating and a general lack of regular exercise because my schedule had become an endless cycle of finishing work, coming home, meeting friends and the odd cooking or cleaning. Finding the time and motivation to exercise became inversely correlated to how sedentary and heavy I felt.
I had started thinking more about this when a year and a half ago now, I experienced a curious episode of cutaneous edema, a sudden swelling of the face, inflammation of the nasal and throat passages (think Will Smith in Hitched) and shortness of breath that is frequently associated with allergy. I also have more peers with life-threatening illnesses despite our age, although attributing this to food and the way our food is processed is prosaic and simplistic, it may well be true.
As we come into our 30s, in all honesty, I've often been shocked by how much weight my peers have piled on. Similarly, I sometimes register a shock to see how large my chin or arms are in photos, how our excess weight and skin folded and flattened when we sat, or smiled. I could see the bulge of tummies or thighs under our dresses and none of us were really as trim as we'd been in the past.
My goal was not to maintain, but to reverse the damage of weight, age and ill-health. I wanted to feel happier in my skin and make a dent in new hobbies that had stayed, resolutely, on my resolutions list, year after year. Yes, I still can't play the guitar or quilt or speak Korean, but at least I wanted to improve the basics, to be leaner, have stronger hair, teeth and better skin, take proper multivitamins.
Trying to conceive has had these dual effects on me — I was acutely aware of my physicality and what I was putting into my body. And yet I was also living my life in two-week periods; and ricocheting between hope (no sushi, no coffee, no alcohol, inactivity) and disappointment-comfort eating that wasn't very healthy!
There were several months where I was so hopeful because don't people always tell you that it happens on vacation, or when you least expect it? I remember being in Korea and feeling nauseas and bloated; I imagined blissfully and cut myself slack, only to later discover that, adding insult to injury — I was simply constipated and fat. And that I had forgone delicious sushi and makoli for nothing at all!
I began drinking fresh vegetable fruit juice in place of meals, juices with a particularly high vegetable content at 9–10am, so I would not be hungry for the next meal. I had also started to cut back on meat. But when the hunger got to me, one day I wolfed down a giant chocolate eclair at 5pm. Another day, I ate an oily, yummy bazhang (rice and meat dumpling).
I aimed to eat one vegetarian meal a day, at my choice, either lunch or dinner, and I find that this system of a flexible and unthinking 'partial vegetarianism' has been surprisingly easy to achieve. Lifestyle diets work, partly, if only because they make you more conscious about how and why you eat. Just as I'm more conscious now that we eat more meat and more carbohydrates, than vegetables. We eat more processed and refined foods, than natural foods. We eat more food cooked with oil, than raw. I'm more aware of the amounts of sugar in drinks, food and dessert as well as how complacent I had become to it. I realize how little I'm outdoors, and how on many days it clears my mind and my preoccupied thoughts.
Even though I work with so many colleagues who have kids, it's incredible how guilty I feel about the few times I leave early! One other feature of trying to conceive — even when I caught a stomach flu and threw up for three days, I couldn't take medication until I knew for sure that I wasn't pregnant that month, and yes, suffering through it was awful! Even though I have had a relatively stable weight, I also find it hard to dramatically lose weight.
