A few weeks ago, my friend LV commented that I’ve made a significant number of changes in the past few years. She wonders if she ever truly understood me in our almost 30 years of friendship. Mostly because my current likes/dislikes, habits, actions, and personality is nearly completely antithetical to who I was when we first became friends in 1996.
During our phone chat, I told LV that I think I changed because I was forced to. It sounded good at the time, especially when said in Chinese, “我是被逼得” and repeated several times in succession. It was only afterward when asking myself “What’s the percentage of me being certain on this matter,” (a habit I’m currently trying to develop as part of my 2023 goals) that I realized I was actually unsure of the authenticity of my words to LV.
In trying to find examples to quantify my words of I was being forced to change, I came up empty. There was no person, circumstance, or ultimatum that commanded me to change. It was then that I realized my initial thoughts about why I changed was incorrect.
I then pulled up the 3 most recent big changes I made to try to see if there were any shared commonalities between them.
Jan 2023 Change: I went from having about a 60% success rate in going to sleep before 11 PM every night for the past 5 years to nearly 100% in the first 3 months of 2023.
I attribute that major change to the terrible and terrifying lack of sleep that occurred during week 1 of 2023. I don’t remember ever feeling so sick and helpless. I didn’t think it was even possible to be unable to sleep for more than 2 hours a day when I craved sleep so desperately that I would have tried almost anything to fall and stay asleep.
To prevent a situation like that from ever occurring again, I read Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker and followed all his recommendations despite hating all of them. I feared all the terrible outcomes that Matthew Walker described awaited me if I don’t give myself an “8-hour sleep opportunity” every night.
My late father slept poorly his whole life (less than 4 hours each night) and it likely resulted in him getting one of the neurodegenerative diseases that Matthew Walker mentioned that also played a huge part in my taking immediate action.
I’m incredibly grateful to Matthew Walker for writing Why We Sleep and thankful that Mark changed his nightly routine to accommodate my new sleeping routine.
Feb 2023 Change: I went from eating for taste and maintaining my weight to be between 105-110 lbs to eating for health.
For over two months now I’ve been following the dietary guideline I made for myself in my blog post stating that I’ll be eating for health and not for maximum flavor. The first 3 weeks were the hardest because most of the food felt incredibly bland to my taste buds. I was lamenting about it to pretty much everyone I talked to in those weeks. Sorry friends and most especially Mark!
I continued despite my almost daily saying to Mark, “This is so hard,” because my 25 years of gastrointestinal problems were steadily improving. I knew I had to force myself to continue because I always regret not making the logical choice.
Then, sometime in mid-March, my cravings mostly stopped!!! I was so grateful I cried. During the weeks of eating healthy, my weight (which I’ve monitored excessively to stay between 105 to 110 lbs for 6+ years) went up steadily even as I exercised more strenuously and longer than I have in my entire life.
As my weight increased, a part of me wanted to give up. It was through asking myself if I could only choose one, would I choose my health or my being thin that I continued eating for health. An unexpected upside of gaining weight by eating nutritious food is that my skin looks more supple, and my hair loss is reversed!
My fear of poor health and the discomfort that comes with it overpowered my taste buds and eating disorder. Until I asked myself, “Is health more important or being thin,” I didn’t know that health is far more important to me. And that I’m sick and tired of feeling the overwhelming pressure to remain thin without realizing I was paying for it with my health.
Because it took an immense amount of mental energy for me to keep my weight in the 105-110 lbs for the past 6 years. Of eating around 1340 calories daily even though I want to eat at least 2000 calories in order to maintain that weight range for my 5’0 frame.
If I was aware I feared poor health this much, I wouldn’t have suffered 25+ years of disordered eating to look thin. Then again I only fear poor health now because I’m currently around many people who are suffering from it.
I’m incredibly grateful to Dr. Layne Norton: The Science of Eating for Health, Fat Loss & Lean Muscle, Metabolical (main concept: eat foods that protect the liver, feed the gut, and support the brain), Harvard’s Healthy Eating Plate, The Government of Canada’s Food Guide, The World Health Organization’s Healthy Diet recommendations. Additionally, I’m lucky that Catan has been eating nutritious food since 2015 or even earlier to model for me what a healthy meal looks like.
Mar 2023: I went from begrudgingly doing the minimum of exercising to targeted stretching, lifting weights, and doing cardio with the goal of lengthening my health span.
In 2022, I skipped several periods, but I tell myself I’m too young at age 41 to worry about perimenopause. Except it was lurking in the back of my mind. To convince myself I was not entering perimenopause, I decided to read The Menopause Manifesto by Dr. Jen Gunter to discover that I was actually in perimenopause.
My doctor told me I entered it in late 2022 but I couldn’t accept it then because I thought I was too young for it at age 41. According to The National Institutes of Health: The menopausal transition most often begins between ages 45 and 55. It usually lasts about seven years but can be as long as 14 years. The duration can depend on lifestyle factors such as smoking, age it begins, and race and ethnicity.
After reading The Menopause Manifesto by Dr. Jen Gunter, I decided to take action to prevent or alleviate many of the menopause-related health concerns that were waiting for me in the next 7 to 14 years if I didn’t try to do 300 minutes of moderate exercise or 150 minutes of vigorous exercise a week. A huge thank you to Dr. Jen Gunter to state the facts and offer actionable solutions!
So you see dear readers, what caused me to change is actually fear. Specifically, when my fear of the consequences of not doing something is greater than the effort required to change, I will then immediately modify my behavior.
LV always said that I’m the most scared person she knows, meaning I fear many things that most people would not. For example, I don’t drive or go out after 7pm by myself because I’m afraid of the dark. I think she is likely correct. For now because maybe one day that too may change as I wasn’t always scared of the dark.
Some of my fondest childhood memories were during the sweltering summer nights in Shanghai when many people in the housing project I lived in would spend the entire night outdoors. There was a vacant lot that would be filled with mahjong tables and card tables along with homemade bamboo chairs pushed together as a makeshift temporary beds of all sorts. The women would be be playing mahjong as they cracked sunflower seeds. The men would slapping down cards as they drank baijiu and smoked. My cousins and I would be curled up in those temporary beds set next to each other. With the comforting scent of citronella incense to repel mosquitos (and to counter the heavy cigarette smoke), the soft breeze gently blowing away my sweat, we fell asleep under a canopy of stars.
My fear of the dark came from my late father, he was terrified of the dark and kept one lamp on overnight. After constantly being lectured by him for years about the dangers of the dark, I too became scared of it.
