It's a Love/Hate Thing.

I hate Oprah. No wait, I love Oprah. No. No. No. I hate her. But I love her. I hate her. Definitely hate. Or love. You know.

I have a subscription to Oprah magazine. I hate it. And I love it. Some of the reasons why I love it:

• I found out in a small little blurb in the middle of an article that President Obama had extended unemployment benefits last year through December. It was April and The Candyman's unemployment benefits were about to run out. We were planning and saving for a wedding and it was about to get ugly. Thankfully, The Candyman was employed by the end of the next month and those benefits could assist others elsewhere, but damn. We had no idea they had been extended. You'd THINK that the unemployment office might alert those receiving benefits of this, but no. Really effin' lame, Tennessee. Thank you, Oprah.
• I found out that the little bumps on the back of my right arm that show up just in time for summer are not acne. It's called Keratosis Pilaris and it's hereditary. And exfoliating the fuck out of my right arm does NOT help. Now I know what does. Thanks, Oprah and Dr. Oz.

These are just two little nuggets that I have taken away with me. And that's why I love the magazine, because of the nuggets. The reason I hate the magazine are longer and more detailed. For instance:

Two months ago they featured a woman who was depressed and overweight and really not loving herself. She decided to take the 60-day Bikram Yoga challenge. Now, I love Bikram Yoga. Love it. Never heard of it? It's insane, it really is. It's a 90 minute class of 26 postures in a room heated to about 105 degrees. It's the same 26 postures every day, every class. The great thing about it is that you can go and totally suck and it's OK. Lots of people around you will suck too. The great thing is that it's one amazing exercise regimen where you can actually see and feel progression, regardless of your age or physical state. The 60-day challenge is nothing to sneeze at folks. It's hard. Not only because the class is challenging, but because it's a total time sucker. You have to get there at least 10-15 minutes before class starts. Class lasts 90 minutes. Then you need a few minutes at the end of class to regroup, change out of your sweat soaked clothing and then finally get home, shower and do your thing. Taking a Bikram class is like 2-3 hours of your time a day. If I take a 6:30pm class, I don't get home until almost 9pm. That's big commitment. ANYWAY, this chick started the challenge and the article was about her bitching and moaning about her life - typical Oprah fare. 

Fast forward to the next months' issue where they follow up with the same chick. She's happier, thinner, working through her issues...presto-change-o! She's a new person (OK, it wasn't THAT bad, but it had that flavor, after she appropriately dissed herself)! Part of the article talks about how she went food shopping with the director of the yoga studio (a nutrition "freak" - as described in the magazine) to learn about what she should and shouldn't eat. The Bikram instructor steered her away from all things white: "white pasta, white bread, potatoes = pudge."

I have a HUGE probelm with this. This is one of the reasons I hate Oprah. White bread, white pasta and potatoes are not BAD for you. They aren't the best thing you can eat, but they aren't BAD. You know what's bad? McDonald's. Fast food. Ever see Super Size Me? You should. Fast-food will kill you. However, if you have a Filet-o-Fish once in a blue moon (that means less than 5 times a year, not once a week), you will not die. You will not gain 100 pounds. You will feel oogy, for sure (my family called it "The McDonallies"). It's these kinds of sweeping statements by one yoga freak that can hinder rather than help. This article is supposed to be encouraging and uplifting, yet I came away with irritation and bitterness. WHY do potatoes equal pudge? They do NOT! Potatoes are good for you.

A medium-sized 150 g (5.3 oz) potato with the skin provides 27 mg of vitamin C (45% of the Daily Value (DV)), 620 mg of potassium (18% of DV), 0.2 mg vitamin B6 (10% of DV) and trace amounts of thiamin, riboflavin, folate, niacin, magnesium, phosphorus, iron, and zinc. The fiber content of a potato with skin (2 g) is equivalent to that of many whole grain breads, pastas, and cereals

Nutritionally, the potato is best known for its carbohydrate content (approximately 26 grams in a medium potato). The predominant form of this carbohydrate is starch. A small but significant portion of this starch is resistant to digestion by enzymes in the stomach and small intestine, and so reaches the large intestine essentially intact. This resistant starch is considered to have similar physiological effects and health benefits as fiber: it provides bulk, offers protection against colon cancer, improves glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity, lowers plasma cholesterol and triglyceride concentrations, increases satiety, and possibly even reduces fat storage.^[49][50][51] The amount of resistant starch in potatoes depends much on preparation methods. Cooking and then cooling potatoes significantly increased resistant starch. For example, cooked potato starch contains about 7% resistant starch, which increases to about 13% upon cooling.^[52]

Potatoes are bad for you when you eat too many that are deep fried, au gratin'd, twice baked, mashed or slathered in butter, cheese, bacon and sour cream. It's what we do to them that makes them bad.

So, as of last month, I was pissed at Oprah. Again.

So I'm reading this month's magazine and now I love Oprah. Dammit. It ties in with my recent posts about body image. There's an article about how Oprah has beaten her addiction with food or some sort of nonsense that I haven't read in totality. I call bullshit on that one because she still writes, talks and  clearly frets about it. I don't think she's done with it quite yet. It's not about the battle with food, it's about a release from within. There is an excerpt this month from a book by Geneen Roth called Women Food and God that I think is brilliant. Please read it:

When I was in high school, I used to dream about having Melissa Morris's legs, Toni Oliver's eyes, and Amy Breyer's hair. I liked my skin, my breasts, and my lips, but everything else had to go. Then, in my 20s, I dreamed about slicing off pieces of my thighs and arms the way you carve a turkey, certain that if I could cut away what was wrong, only the good parts—the pretty parts, the thin parts—would be left. I believed there was an end goal, a place at which I would arrive and forever more be at peace. And since I also believed that the way to get there was by judging and shaming and hating myself, I also believed in diets.

Diets are based on the unspoken fear that you are a madwoman, a food terrorist, a lunatic. The promise of a diet is not only that you will have a different body; it is that in having a different body, you will have a different life. If you hate yourself enough, you will love yourself. If you torture yourself enough, you will become a peaceful, relaxed human being.

Although the very notion that hatred leads to love and that torture leads to relaxation is absolutely insane, we hypnotize ourselves into believing that the end justifies the means. We treat ourselves and the rest of the world as if deprivation, punishment, and shame lead to change. We treat our bodies as if they are the enemy and the only acceptable outcome is annihilation. Our deeply ingrained belief is that hatred and torture work. And although I've never met anyone—not one person—for whom warring with their bodies led to long-lasting change, we continue to believe that with a little more self-disgust, we'll prevail.

But the truth is that kindness, not hatred, is the answer. The shape of your body obeys the shape of your beliefs about love, value, and possibility. To change your body, you must first understand that which is shaping it. Not fight it. Not force it. Not deprive it. Not shame it. Not do anything but accept and—yes, Virginia—understand it. Because if you force and deprive and shame yourself into being thin, you end up a deprived, shamed, fearful person who will also be thin for ten minutes. When you abuse yourself (by taunting or threatening yourself), you become a bruised human being no matter how much you weigh. When you demonize yourself, when you pit one part of you against another—your ironclad will against your bottomless hunger—you end up feeling split and crazed and afraid that the part you locked away will, when you are least prepared, take over and ruin your life. Losing weight on any program in which you tell yourself that left to your real impulses you would devour the universe is like building a skyscraper on sand: Without a foundation, the new structure collapses.

Change, if it is to be long-lasting, must occur on the unseen levels first. With understanding, inquiry, openness. With the realization that you eat the way you do for lifesaving reasons. I tell my retreat students that there are always exquisitely good reasons why they turn to food.

Can you imagine how your life would have been different if each time you were feeling sad or angry as a kid, an adult said to you, "Come here, sweetheart, tell me all about it"? If when you were overcome with grief at your best friend's rejection, someone said to you, "Oh, darling, tell me more. Tell me where you feel those feelings. Tell me how your belly feels, your chest. I want to know every little thing. I'm here to listen to you, hold you, be with you."

All any feeling wants is to be welcomed with tenderness. It wants room to unfold. It wants to relax and tell its story. It wants to dissolve like a thousand writhing snakes that with a flick of kindness become harmless strands of rope.

The path from obsession to feelings to presence is not about healing our "wounded children" or feeling every bit of rage or grief we never felt so that we can be successful, thin, and happy. We are not trying to put ourselves together. We are taking who we think we are apart. We feel the feelings not so that we can blame our parents for not saying, "Oh, darling," not so that we can express our anger to everyone we've never confronted, but because unmet feelings obscure our ability to know ourselves. As long as we take ourselves to be the child who was hurt by an unconscious parent, we will never grow up. We will never know who we actually are. We will keep looking for the parent who never showed up and forget to see that the one who is looking is no longer a child.

I tell my retreat students that they need to remember two things: to eat what they want when they're hungry and to feel what they feel when they're not. Inquiry—the feel-what-you-feel part—allows you to relate to your feelings instead of retreat from them.

The part in bold is really what I wanted to share in my first post about body image. If I had a better brain and an ability to truly write, I think this is what I would have said. It's the point I wanted to make. You cannot be who you truly are by demoralizing yourself, by treating your habits like a child ("You're not allowed to eat that. Shame on you, you ate a cup cake. You're lazy for not going to the gym."). How is that helpful? It's not. It is not. So while I was hating Oprah and the Yoga Freak last month. I'm loving her and Geneen Roth this month. While I feel like I'm kinda done with my own self-repair, I still have to tend to the temple and make sure I'm in a good place by checking on the inside parts on a regular basis. I might just get this book to see what else she has to say.

I was reading some more blogs about more women prepping for their wedding by working out to actually fit into their dresses. This really stressed me out for them. This kind of manic behaviour is not good. It's not. That weight is just going to balloon right back on after the wedding (plus some, statistically) when one approaches it in a Herculean effort that is so based in emotion and an end result by a certain date. I say be mindful, ladies. Be kind to yourselves. No one will think less of you if you walk down the aisle looking as you did three months ago, or six months ago, or a year ago. Most certainly, not your fiance since he proposed when you looked a particular way. Remember the love.

Please forgive me for waxing poetic above about my attitude towards weight-loss brides.  

Do you have a love-hate relationship with Oprah like I do?

Comments

[bride]

what does dr. oz say about your KP? There is a fabulous scrub/lotion they sell at Sephora called KP duty and it works wonders (and is not cheap) and i'm always interested to hear what others do to soothe away these stupid bumps!

[Mom]

I'm STILL trying to learn these things myself! It is difficult, but not impossible. I hope the young brides learn the lesson NOW. They will be happier wives and better mothers if they do.

[kc]

Louise, I'm reading a book now called Intuitive Eating that you might find interesting. I get so upset when people comment on certain foods (as in REAL food, not fake food) being BAD or GOOD. It's food folks. No food is bad. It just seems to me that labeling a food as bad or good is a cop out. It takes the responsibility off ourselves and lays it on the food. So the problem isn't that I sat down and ate a box of chocolates (which is inevitable when you deny yourself something) but that chocolate is BAD. I mean, if I sat down and ate a bag of apples, it wouldn't be much better, right?

Abby, I think you're brave for doing what you felt was right for your body and not being ashamed of it. I'm a strong believer that if we all stopped commenting on each other and took care of ourselves we'd all be much happier.

[Ms. Wife of the Year]

I hate Oprah's guts. I can't even stand the sound of her voice. That's all.