Author and Inspired Writer

The Spirit of Boston

you tried to make us afraid
but we turned and raced TOWARDS the blast

you tried to humiliate and bring us low
but you are the one who will kneel

you shed our blood
and took our legs
and thought that you had crippled us

but we are the Spirit of Boston

see how we rise
see how we stand
see how we RUN!

(copyright Penny-Anne Beaudoin, April 17, 2013)

…to lose some weight.

Oh now, that was a nasty shock to give my gentle readers, wasn’t it?  Sorry.  Just couldn’t resist.  I’ll be good now.

But yes, the Mister and I are on a diet.

What! I hear you say.  But haven’t you’ve always condemned diets as a waste of time and potentially harmful to boot?

Yup.  And I have never been on a diet in my life.  If I found I was gaining a few pounds, I just ate less or ramped up my exercise.  Then two years or so ago, the pounds started adding up and refused to leave.  I also had some digestive problems at the same time, so I went gluten-free and voila, goodbye pounds, goodbye digestive problems.

But last year, with the flare-up of chronic fatigue, the pounds started creeping back.  I thought once I was able to workout again they’d melt away, but no.  Even when I was back to doing an intensive cardio workout, and weights, six days a week, not only did I not lose anything, but the weight kept climbing at the astonishing rate of a pound per month!  I had never weighed so much in my life and felt completely discouraged and mystified.  The doctor checked my thyroid and other stuff, but everything was fine.  I just couldn’t stop gaining.

A couple of months ago, three different sources came out with the same message – sometimes the body can interpret intense exercise as stress and will hold onto or put on more weight as a stress reaction.  Well, I’ve always followed the adage “If three people say you’re sick, lie down.”  So I cut my exercise back to three cardio days per week and on alternate days I do Tai Chi.  Four pounds disappeared in about as many weeks.  Great rejoicing, until I plateaued and stayed stuck there, still looking at jiggley rolls that seemed to be laughing at me now.

Then the Mister watched a program on PBS about Dr. Michael Mosley’s fasting diet.  Dr. Mosley was overweight and at high risk for diabetes and prostate cancer when he discovered the life-lengthening and health-enhancing properties of fasting.  The evidence was so compelling, the Mister and I decided to try it out immediately.

The diet works like this.  You eat normally five days a week, but on two non-consecutive days you cut your calories down dramatically to 500 – 600 per day.  We bought his book and are following his guidelines fairly strictly.  Mind you, we’ve only been on it one week (two fasting days), but I was hoping the extra room I was finding in my jeans was attributable to weight loss and not the fact that I’d stretched them out to the seam-ripping point.  I didn’t want to blog about it until we had our weigh-in day, today.  Both of us are down two pounds, and our fancy-schmancy scale says one of those pounds was pure fat.  Great rejoicing again.

The Mister is doing quite well on the fasting days.  Me, not so much.  We decided to have our two small meals at lunch and supper, with just a steamed carrot and kiwi for breakfast.  Tuesday, my energy so low I wasn’t up to my Tai Chi, although I did go through a rather stressful meeting with our financial consultant.  (These meetings require intense concentration on my part, something I was finding difficult to do on an empty stomach.)  When we got home, the Mister made us a lovely low-cal chicken stirfry which I tore into greedily.  I was quite comfortable that night and the next day and thought maybe this fasting-thing might be OK after all.  On Friday I woke up with enough energy to do my cardio workout before our carrot/kiwi breakfast.  When lunch (which seemed very slow in coming) finally rolled around we relished our boiled egg on greens and veg.  After lunch, my energy barely registered, but I thought a bowl of vegetarian chili would perk me up like the chicken stirfry did on Tuesday.  Only we didn’t follow the recipe in the book but our own, the one we’ve always used.  The Mister calculated the calories, and alas! we discovered half a bowl used up our remaining calories for the day.  I went to bed hungry…and cranky.  And this morning my energy was way low and I was headachy.

But that’s only the first week and we’re tweeking the diet as we go along.  For instance, we’ve learned that beans (a staple at our house and a delight for me), while high in protein, are also very high in carbs and therefore calories, and so our last meal of the fast day should include lean meat protein and tons of veg and greens which contain very few calories.    I’ve also become aware of where calories have been sneaking into my diet.  An example – dried cranberries – very good for you nutritionally, but sky-high in carbs.  I’ve cut my consumption in half.  Bread (especially gluten-free bead) is also high calorically (because of the starches) and is another bug-a-boo I need to watch, not just on fast days but generally.

The book provides a calorie counter, but there’s still arithmetic to do (ick!) and we find his calorie count for eggs a bit off.  So we need to confirm some stuff on line.  All in all, this diet  ain’t no walk in the park, but Dr. Mosely assures us that with time our bodies will adapt and we will barely notice our fast days.  I willing to give it a chance.  And the lovely things the scale told me today is great motivation.

The name of the book is The Fast Diet by Dr. Michael Mosley and Mimi Spencer, and we picked it up at Shopper’s Drug Mart of all places.  And if you’re interested in the documentary, see if you can catch it on PBS.  I think it might go by the same title.

Stay tuned for more updates.

Work on The Magdalene Poems is progressing well.  I’ve begun donating three, sometimes four afternoons a week to writing and that seems a good balance enabling me to work in my exercise, appointments, reading, and yes, prepare to gasp, housework! Having blocks of concentrated time to write makes it easier to shift into another state of consciousness where my mind opens up to ideas, implications, and hitherto unseen connections.

And that’s why I’m so angry right now.

The significance of the Magdalene, her contribution to the Christ story is enormous.  But almost from the start, it was diminished and in places, even obliterated.  And it’s seeming more and more likely that this was not accidental.

I know what you’re thinking – oy! this girl is SO paranoid!  Be that as it may, I figure even conspiracy theorists must get it right once in a while.  And maybe this is one of those “once’s”.  Is it so impossible a thought that those in power at the time the gospels were written down, were so horrified at the thought of a female apostle, who was pre-eminent among the apostles, and who (to make matters worse) was the beloved of Christ, that they edited the story to tone down the astounding truth and avoid the implications thereof?  This is what I seem to be finding at almost every turn.

For instance, some gospels have Mary at the foot of the Cross.  Others have her “standing far off.”  In three of the gospels, Christ appears to Mary after the resurrection – in John’s gospel he appears to her alone, and commissions her to take his message to his “brothers”.  But in Luke’s gospel, Christ appears first to Peter.  Peter?! When did that happen?  Two gospels describe Mary as demon-possessed.  (One of them is Luke, by the way.)  And in the anointing scene in Mark (the first gospel written down) the significance of the unnamed woman (who I believe is, in fact, the Magdalene) has already been “depoliticized,” to use Jane Schaberg’s phrase, rendering her act a preparation of Christ’s body for burial, instead of the anointing of the long-awaited Messiah.

Now hold on there, missy!  Didn’t Jesus say she anointed him ahead of time for burial?  Yup.  That’s what it says in the gospel all right.  And isn’t the Bible the inspired, inerrant Word of God?

Inspired, yes.  But inerrant?  Sister Sandra Schneiders has a wonderful way of describing the Bible as the Word of God, not the words of God.  Meaning, the Scriptures were inspired by the Holy Spirit, but the Spirit working through human agents who were themselves inevitably influenced by their culture, their traditions, their upbringing and their own personal interpretations of the Christ event.  In other words, they had agendas, and it might well be that these agendas caused them to portray the Christ story in a certain light, which left Mary in the shadows.

It may not have been deliberate.  As a writer I know it is impossible to write anything from a purely objective point of view.  We each give meaning to what we see and experience in our own unique way.  That’s why witness accounts of the same incident can vary so widely.  That’s why the gospels don’t match – they are each telling a different story.

But even so, deliberate or not, a grave injustice has been perpetrated and I’m beginning to think that if there’s to be any hope for the healing of Christianity today, the Magdalene must be restored to her rightful place, at the side of Christ, his prophet, his apostle, his beloved.

The Mister and I are nearing our twenty-fourth year of wedded bliss.  (He likes to announce this to people and then add, “The first ten years were great!”  How droll.  How very droll.)  And while the word “bliss” might be a tad too, shall we say, rosy?, our connubial cohabitation has managed to file down many of our collective rough edges.

Many.  But not all.  There is still one edge I could sharpen my nails on.

Whenever I decide to take a shower, you can be sure, if the Mister is anywhere in the vicinity, he WILL turn on the water in the kitchen sink, basement sink, or outside hose.  Some showers make a particular noise when another faucet has been turned on, alerting the showerer to the situation and allowing a few seconds to move out of the direct line of fire.  Our shower does not have this feature unfortunately, and the resulting drop in water temperature causes me to emit a note so high, so piercing, our windows are in danger of shattering.

I ALWAYS inform the Mister before I perform my abultions, so he can’t use that as an excuse.  But it doesn’t seem to matter.  I can count the number of showers I’ve completed safely on the fingers of one hand.  I started leaving a scrunchie around the kitchen faucet to indicate the shower is in use, and that worked for a while.  Then he got so used to seeing it, he stopped seeing it and…

Yesterday he did this to me TWICE and when he popped his head in to apologize, as he always does God bless him, I told him he owed me fifty cents.

“How’s that?”

“Every time you freeze me out from now on, you owe me a quarter.  It’s like when someone’s trying to stop using bad language, every time they slip, they have to put a quarter in the Swearing Jar.  Same idea, only I’m going to call my version the Can Can.  Brilliant idea, don’t you think?”

To my astonishment, he went straight away and got two quarters!  Plink!  Plink!

He looked at my face and asked, “What’s the smile for?”

I replied, “I’m going to be so rich!”