Winter weather blahs and blechs

I have to admit, it gets much harder to stick to my daily yoga plan during the winter. I tend to get a touch of SAD, which makes getting out of bed more difficult than I care for it to be (this morning, which is gray and rainy, was nearly impossible), but I'm somehow managing to persevere. The last few days my practice has been limited or non-existent, but I'm going to take some time to do it now before I get into the full swing of the workday.

In other news, I was finally able to get a new (and quite lovely) yoga outfit for myself, as a reward for being so good on vacation. I'm starting to notice now that I don't have as many bulges as I used to have; while I'm certainly not skinny, there's a much leaner overall appearance to my body that I'm quite enjoying.

Shifting Things Around

So I've been a bit moody of late, partly due to the weather (the late sunrises and early sunsets make me a bit cranky), and partly because of the insanity of holiday schedules. One of the things I realized was making me cranky was actually my bedroom - although it was mostly fine, I had these very dark brown curtains hanging on the windows which made it incredibly dark in the room at all times. Even with the curtains open, there was almost no light coming in. Add that to a dark red comforter on the bed and just a lot of red and black in the room in general, and my room was really, really dark and kind of depressing, which was affecting my mood when I woke up, which was affecting my mood for the rest of the day. You see the pattern.

So, today I decided to do something about it. I have now replaced the brown curtains (they're going to my mother for her candle shop) with some sunny orange curtains that let in plenty of light. I still have the red comforter, but it's covered by a light green super-fuzzy blanket, and all of the furniture has been moved around to a much better configuration. I have my bed positioned so I'll be able to look out the windows as I wake up, and my meditation alter positioned so I'll be able to look out the windows as I meditate (before, it was against the wall looking out into the hallway), and overall, I feel much happier about the current configuration.

The next step is tackling the office. This one's going to be a bit more of a challenge; I have a lot of stuff in a relatively small space, and it has been really hard to convince myself that I don't need half of the stuff in there. Wish me luck!

Day One: Back to Size 16

My name is Dani Nordin, and I turned 30 last July. I was born and raised in Providence, RI, and now live in Somerville, MA, where I moved almost two years ago. In my life, I've been an actress, a performance poet, a karaoke diva, an administrative assistant with a special gift for Access databases, a social and environmental activist, and a graphic designer. At the moment, I am the principal of a small but growing design studio called the zen kitchen, where I help businesses, individuals and non-profits expand their reach through eco-friendly graphic design and standards-based web design (two of my passions). I do yoga almost every day, have just started learning Tai Chi, and am an expert at making healthy vegetarian food taste so good you forget that it's good for you.

By many people's standards, I have a pretty good life. By my own standards, most of the time, I have a pretty good life. But one thing has bothered me since I was eight years old, and it's about time I came out about it: my weight.

Food, aside from being one of my passions, has always been the way I deal with stress. It's one of my few truly self-destructive tendencies; I get stressed out, all of a sudden I'm grabbing a bag of Cheetos at the grocery store and eating half of it on my way home, or stopping at some fast-food joint or another and deciding it's "okay this one time" if I have an entire order of Nachos Bell Grande (no meat, thank you very much). While normally I eat pretty healthy (other than a few particularly indulgent dishes I throw into the mix once a month or so), an extended period of stress is guaranteed to throw any health-conscious tendencies out the window.

I started using food as an outlet when I was about eight. My parents, never a particularly happy couple, were just starting to near the point of divorce, and for the life of me I didn't know how to deal with it. To make matters worse, I was—shall we say—unpopular as a child, branded "the smart kid" by the time I was in kindergarten, and torn between my desire to constantly be learning and my desire for people to stop making fun of me. I pretended I was okay. I withdrew to the library. I invented new snacks.

By the time I was fifteen, I was a size 18, and somewhere around 215 pounds. That year, about 2 years after my parents finally got divorced and 1 year after I had decided to stay with my father, something in me snapped. I moved in with my mother, gave up meat, and spent the next six months exercising every day and living on beans and rice, omelettes and pasta with tomato sauce (it was what we could afford, and it was what I liked to eat). By the time I returned to school, I had lost 65 pounds and decided to switch high schools so I could pursue my dream of acting. By the time I reached college, I was a size 10, and stayed vegetarian for the next three years.

Since that time, I've had two separate instances where, due to the circumstances of my life, I've found myself back around 215, made major life changes, and gotten back down to somewhere around 170. Right now, after 3+ years of dealing with one seemingly insane life-crisis situation after another, I've found myself back at a size 16, as a recent trip to Target has shown. And now, at 30, I feel like it's time to get this thing under control. It's time to change my relationship with food; to stop seeing it as comfort, or punishment for not doing/being what I should. It's time to get myself healthy again.

Over the next few months, I'll be using this blog to share my journey, not only as someone trying to lose weight, but as someone trying to find wellness in all areas of life—finances, stress, time management, relationship. You might ask why I'd share such incredibly personal information with an Internet full of complete strangers, especially as a business owner; the answer is simple. I know I'm not the only person out there who's ever experienced depression, and I certainly know I'm not the only woman who's ever suffered from a negative self-image as a result of her weight. And if my story can help even one person out there who's dealing with these issues, then I have fulfilled the purpose of this blog.