Review of Shmirshky — think inside the box

When I was first approached about reviewing the book Shmirshky — think inside the box, I was hesitant. Written by ‘E’, the book was presented as follows: “Shmirshky is about menopause – it’s hilarious, witty and full of love.” Menopause. Hum….. at 37 years old, I like to think I’m still have time before I have to think about menopause, and I preferred to keep my head in the sand when it came to the matter. But then I had to admit, that although I am hopefully at least a decade off before I have to face the dreaded M-word, it couldn’t hurt to have an idea of what I face down the road. And it never hurts to have an idea of what other people I know might be going through — people like my mom.

When Shmirshky arrived, I was instantly intrigued. No — intrigued is not the right word. Amused. As you can see, the cover of the book has an outline of hips with a … uh … fuzzy spot in the middle. As soon as I opened the book, I was drawn in to the humor and reality of the book. As already mentioned, Shmirshky refers to vagina, but it also refers to anyone who has a vagina. In contrast, we learn, an erlick is a penis and/or anyone who has a penis. You will find many other words defined in the book, such as premenopause, perimenopause, postmenopausal, and, of course, the biggest one of them all — menopause. Sure, you could find all of these things in dictionary, on a health web site, and of course Wikipedia. But what you won’t get in any of those places is a very real account of what it is like to go through all of the phases of menopause, and certainly not in the way E describes it.

The book Shmirshky came about when E found herself desperate for information on what to expect when going through these massive hormonal changes and kept coming up short. There were the standard, sterile, medical accounts of what could or would happen to her body, but most of them were probably written by men, and none of them represented a personal account leading her to feel quite alone in the process. Friends wouldn’t talk about it, relatives brushed over it, and finally E decided to take matters into her own hands, ready to “bust open the shmirshky cover-up and sound the alarm for others.”

In addition to a first-hand understanding of M, as the author calls menopause, E has a deep understanding of the female psyche, and how we cope — or avoid coping with such a monumental event in every woman’s life. As E says in Chapter 5, the big shmirshky cover-up, “It’s not that we don’t want to be honest with those we love, but rather that we aren’t honest with ourselves. We’re afraid of being less than: less than perfect, less than 100 percent functioning, less than able to juggle it all.” But we find out as we go through the book that we must come to terms with the fact that even if we can’t (nor shouldn’t be) perfect, or perform at 100 percent, or juggle it all, it doesn’t mean that we are less than anything, because we are still who we are.

In addition to telling it like it is, Shmirshky is full of good advice on how to handle M through each step in the process, from finding the right doctor and understanding all the tests and numbers that are thrown your way to taking the concept of self care to a new level. She reminds us that we are “brought up to be the caregivers, but we must learn how to take care of ourselves”. And by learning to take care of ourselves, no matter whether we are years away from menopause, right smack in the middle of menopause, or have long since left it behind, now is the time to “love and respect the old you, just as you embrace the new.”

Menopause can be a scary thing. As E says, “we spend most of our time wondering where our period is, when it’s going to come, and when it will go away. It’s less like a period and more like a question mark.” But going into the experience with the knowledge and humor found in this book, the process can be a little less intimidating. Ultimately, in the author’s words, if you have a vagina, or you know someone who does, then this book is for you.

Review: America the Beautiful

One of the first questions Darryl Roberts asks in his documentary America the Beautiful is “Who benefits from women not feeling beautiful?” As the film spends the next 105 minutes trying to find the answers to that question, you witness the full impact of our obsession with beauty through tales of girls with eating disorders, plastic surgeries gone wrong, and the whirlwind modeling career of Gerren Taylor who did her first runway shows at the age of 12.

Roberts, who undertook this project after the search for the perfect women led him down an empty road filled with false promises of happiness, examines the different industries that benefit from America’s preoccupation with perfection. One 12-year-old boy interviewed in the film sums it up quite simply when he says “companies put people down to make money”. He realizes already that the more people feel bad about themselves, the more they will seek products and services to improve their self image.  This might explain that while America has 5% of the world’s population, we are exposed to 40% of the world’s advertising. Talking about creating a perfect image, world-renowned fashion photographer Marc Baptiste remarks “at the end of the day, we’re selling dreams”. But of course, they are dreams that can never be realized.

As Roberts follows Gerren’s pursuit of her own dream of becoming a super model, he interweaves her tale with a closer look at the cosmetics industry, the media and their role in creating unattainable expectations for both men and women and the toll that is taken, physically and mentally on our society.

America the Beautiful features insightful interviews of people from all sides of the issue. There is the guy who starts out saying “my idea of a perfect women is, first of all, she’s gotta be hot,” raising the question “is this the person for whom we are trying so hard to reach perfection?” There are interviews with representatives from the media industry some of whom admit to some amount of culpability, while others laugh at the mere suggestion that media has any role on the behaviors of those to whom it is targeted. (Of course, isn’t that why advertising exists in the first place?) We also meet plastic surgeons, toxicologists, and various girls and women who can only see their shortcomings.

My favorite interview though is with Eve Ensler who wrote and performed in the play The Vagina Monologues. As someone who has achieved great success and has been such a strong voice for empowering women worldwide, she would seem above suffering from a poor body image. And yet her description of a conversation with a woman in Africa about not knowing how to love her own body makes the viewer realize that even the strongest of women are vulnerable to the idea that there is such a thing as the perfect body.

Ultimately though she realizes that we all have a vision problem. “Every woman is beautiful in her particular way; if we developed eyes and we develop spirit, we would see that every woman is beautiful.” This statement alone really sums up the whole point of the film, but equally profound is her comment on plastic surgery: “Stop fixing yourself. You were never broken.”

Roberts spends considerable time delving into the darker side of plastic surgery — a side to which every woman considering any procedure should become acquainted. We learn that, thanks to a FTC ruling in 1977, anyone with an M.D. can hang a sign up on their door saying they are a plastic surgeon and start doing business. And there is no end to the procedures that can be done to “enhance” one’s features, including creating “designer vaginas”. But as Eve Ensler says, “to think you’re not tight enough, well, get a bigger dick.”

The film also highlights some startling statistics like the fact that in 2004 Americans spent $12.4 billion on cosmetic surgery, while the estimated cost for basic nutrition and health care in developing countries is $13 billion. In addition, we spend over $45 billion per year on cosmetic and beauty products. And yet, we put little thought into exactly what it is we are applying to our skin. According to Roberts’ research, there are 884 toxic ingredients found in cosmetics. While the EU has banned 450 ingredients commonly used in cosmetics, including the phthalates which have been shown to be toxic to the reproductive system, the FDA has banned only 6 ingredients and continues to allow phthalates which of course the cosmetic industry still argues are perfectly safe.

At one point in the movie, after we question if a woman who has just undergone plastic surgery will awake from anesthesia — which ultimately is what carries the most risk in plastic surgery procedures — Darryl Roberts says he called every man he knew and told them to tell every woman they know that they are beautiful exactly the way they are.

Going back to the beginning of the movie, Roberts draws a correlation between women gaining the right to vote, and the introduction of the Miss America Pageant, suggesting that to keep women from gaining too much power, women were becoming more suppressed by the burden of beauty, requiring a whole new level of preoccupation. I have now seen this movie three times, and each time I am left wondering how much we could change the world if we took all the time, effort, and money that we devote to beauty, and put it towards something important, like world hunger, basic human rights and the protection of our environment. Perhaps one day self-improvement will be equated with improving the lives of those around us, and Robert’s film will remind you that your own beauty has less to do with looking like the photo-shopped pages of a magazine, and more to do with what you radiate from within.

For your chance to win a copy of the Limited Edition America the Beautiful DVD, enter a comment below by 12:00 pm EST December 11, 2009 saying that you would like to win a copy of America the Beautiful. For more chances to win, be sure to become a VenusVision fan on Facebook and follow VenusVision on Twitter (@VenusVision).

Review of Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat

It wasn’t that long ago that I decided I was ready to get off the diet roller coaster. But if you’ve spent a lifetime going on and off diets, obsessing about your weight, and swinging back and forth between counting every calorie and having an all-out food free-for-all like I have, then making the decision to end the cycle is only the beginning of the process. Sure you can decide you’ve had enough of counting calories, always feeling deprived, and so you just eat what you want, whenever you want, without considering the consequences. But chances are you, if you’ve been playing the diet game long enough, you probably have long lost the ability to listen to your body, and when you end up gaining weight as you no longer restrict every bite, you’re likely to feel bad about yourself, leading you to go on yet another diet.

Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat: How to Break Your Eat-Repent-Repeat Cycle by Michelle May, M.D., is a guide book for quitting dieting and (re)learning how to eat. Like other books on intuitive eating, Eat What You Love places a big emphasis on listening to your body. But simply deciding to listen to ones body after ignoring it for so long isn’t as easy as making the decision to do so. With each Chapter, author Michelle May outlines actionable steps you can take to stop controlling what you eat and start taking charge of what you eat. She also includes moments from her own journey towards becoming an intuitive eater, bringing a personal element to the book.

In Part 1 of Eat What You Love, May helps you recognize what type of eater you are. While you might think your poor relationship by food can be summed up by simple explanations like “I just enjoy food too much” what you might find while reading this book is that there are more underlying issues that lead you to ignore your body’s cues. Understanding your habits and learning the reasons behind your eating will enable you to use the tools provided in the book to help you “eat mindfully, live vibrantly.”

Once you’ve discovered the underlying issues behind your eating habits, Eat What You Love provides new strategies to deal with old feelings and situations that may trigger overeating. In fact, there is a whole chapter on self-care. Additionally, learning how to eat with purpose may awaken or heighten the sensations you get from the food you love, and give you whole new level of enjoyment of food. And you may even realize some of the foods you think you love actually don’t taste all that great when you pay close attention to what your body is telling you as you eat it. Your taste buds are the most sensitive when you are truly hungry, and as your hunger diminishes, so does your taste sensations. That first bite of chocolate cake may taste like a little slice of heaven but if you eat slowly, taking time to taste every bite, you might find that as you fill up, the flavor seems to fade.

After going through the process of learning to eat with intention, becoming more mindful of how your emotions come into play when making decisions about food and learning how to cope through means other than food, Eat What You Love moves onto the subject of exercise. As with food, May encourages you to focus more on how exercise makes you feel instead of seeing it as a chore or as redemption for your food sins, and in the vain of the title of the book suggests “do what you love, love what you do”. If you dread the monotony of walking on the treadmill, don’t do it. Instead find other ways to move that make you feel good, like dancing around the house, taking the dog for a walk outside, or even active play with the kids. Of course, you might also find that when you are focused on the way exercise makes your body and mind feel, it might renew love for activities you thought you no longer enjoyed. And for those who are interested, May spends some time talking about the physiology of exercise but breaks it down in layman’s terms to make the information accessible and meaningful.

May points out that “Every time you drastically decrease your caloric intake, you lose muscle, not just fat, if you aren’t exercising regularly. Once you abandon the diet and resume eating the way you previously did, you’ll quickly regain fat but not the muscle you lost. As a result, your metabolism will be even slower.” In addition to suggestions on ways to add enjoyable movement to your life, Eat What You Love offers specific weight-bearing exercises as well as stretches to increase flexibility — another important component of a healthy lifestyle.

The last section of the book is filled with menu ideas and recipes for foods that will feed and nourish your body while allowing you to love what you eat. Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat is a comprehensive resource to get you on track towards a healthy relationship with food and your body. It is not a quick fix diet solution. It does not present an easy way to lose weight under the guise of a healthy eating plan. Instead, if you are ready to do some emotional work, Eat What You Love will bring you to a place you thought you might never be able to find — a place where you don’t have to think about food all the time, but instead enjoy it thoroughly while staying in charge, and living your life in a healthy way.

Book Review: Intuitive Eating, A Revolutionary Program That Works

You eat when you’re bored. You eat when you’re stressed. You eat when you’re out having fun. You may eat for any number of reasons, none of which include hunger. In fact, maybe you don’t even know what hunger feels like.

This is what happens when we have ridden the roller coaster of diet mania. Dependent on the latest news of what we should and shouldn’t eat in the name of losing weight, so many of us no longer know how to listen to our bodies. Going back and forth between restricting and binging, it’s like our body’s signals have gone hay wire, and we need nothing short of a “re-booting” to set things straight again. The problem is, how do we re-boot? In other words, how do we regain that ability — one that most of us probably had at some point in our lives, maybe as long ago as when we were kids — to listen to our bodies and eat intuitively? It probably won’t surprise you when I say the answer is in a book.

Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works was written by two Registered Dietitians, Evelyn Tribole, and Elyse Resch, and is a highly accessible, well-written book outlining the process for getting in touch with your body and learning what we knew as children — how to eat intuitively. Most of us once had the ability to listen to our body’s signals, eating when we’re hungry, and stopping when we’ve had enough. We seem to lose that ability, whether its through the introduction of food as a coping mechanism, comforting us when we’re hurt, sad, bored, lonely, stressed, angry, etc., or through the the black and white view of food that we come to have through the pressures of society to be thin, or, most likely, both.

Intuitive Eating outlines a process for regaining the ability to listen to our bodies and comfortably trust ourselves with food, as well as learning move for the sake of feeling good — not burning off last night’s desert. Though you may have been riding the diet roller coaster for so long that you believe it is actually impossible for you to ever learn to intuitively eat, I would suggest that the principles proposed by Tribole and Resch go to the core of the dieter’s mentality, and bit by bit break down the reasons why diets inevitably don’t and won’t work.

After going through why your diets continue to fail you, the book describes different types of eaters and helps you determine which group you fall into. By understanding what kind of eater you are, you can begin to chip away at the barriers you have to listening to your body by following the ten principles of intuitive eating:

Princple 1: Reject the Diet Mentality
Princple 2: Honor Your Hunger
Princple 3: Make Peace with Food
Princple 4: Challenge the Food Police
Princple 5: Feel Your Fullness
Princple 6: Discover the Satisfaction Factor
Princple 7: Cope with Your Emotions Without Using Food
Princple 8: Respect Your Body
Princple 9: Exercise — Feel the Difference
Princple 10: Honor Your Health — Gentle Nutrition

By highlighting the principles here, I am in no way offering a substitute for the book. Each process is supported by examples and methods for internalizing the concept. Intuitive Eating is not a quick-fix, solve-all-your-food problems, self-help book. It offers a common sense approach to changing your relationship with food and your body, allowing you to live a life not dominated by thoughts of food and your body size, but instead filled with the pleasures food and your body can provide you.

If you are looking for yet another way to lose 10, 20, or 50 pounds before your next event, perhaps you are not ready for this book. But if you are ready to start living your life free from self deprivation and self loathing, then this book is for you.

MBT Shoe Review: Are They Worth It?

MBT shoes (a.k.a. “the anti-shoe”) … they’re expensive. They are hardly fashionable (though they sometimes reach acceptable). In fact, they are downright weird looking. When I first saw them as I walked past The Walking Store at the mall one day, I thought, “Who in their right mind would wear those?” They reminded me of orthotic shoes, but without insurance covering the high cost of them, I thought surely no one would shell out the big bucks for these shoes. And what the heck does MBT stand for anyway? The manufacturers of the shoe, Swiss Masai named the shoe Masai Barefoot Technology (which of course is a mouthful, and thus MBT) because it supposedly emulates the nomadic walking habits of the Masai tribes of Africa. The company touts all sorts of benefits that come from wearing the shoe:

• Activates neglected muscles
• Tone and shape the body
• Improves posture and gait
• Can help with back, hip, leg and foot problesm
• Can help with joint, muscle, ligament and tendon injuries
• Reduces tress on knee and hip joints
• MBT activates the whole body

Ok, seriously… so are they trying to say that wearing these shoes will give me a workout? I certainly wasn’t going to be fooled.

Fast forward a few months later, when I met a woman who was wearing a pair of MBT shoes. I immediately noticed them, not because I thought she looked ridiculous in them, but because I was surprised at how cute they were. I asked her about them, and she was more than happy to tell me all about them. She actually admitted to buying them (along with a second pair after she decided she loved them) because she believed the claims about toning and shaping. And she felt like she was seeing results. I was a little skeptical, but she insisted that they were not only comfortable, but effective in their claims. Of course, since she likely spent over $500 on her two pairs, it would be hard to admit they were just another pair of shoes. I have to admit, my conversation with this women piqued my curiousity, and I soon found myself in The Walking Store trying a pair on.

My first observation about the MBT shoes (besides the hefty price tag) was that they are quite heavy. No wonder they give your legs a work out. You’re walking around with 5 pound weights on your feet! I walked around a bit in the store and actually could sense the muscles that were being engaged in my upper legs. I started to believe that wearing these could give add a little something extra to your exercise routine. But that is not why I was ultimately considering the shoes. For about a year and a half now, I have suffered from problems with my lower back and hamstring. After unsuccessful physical therapy and chiropractic treatments, I was beginning to get desperate for anything that might help alleviate my pain. Though I did not end up buying the shoes from The Walking Store, I immediately checked out Zappos.com to see if they carried them at a lower price. Luckily, I found a pair for MBT Walk shoes on sale for $189.95 — a $60 difference from the price of the same shoe at the walking store. The only downside at that point (besides the fact that it was still more than I have ever paid for any other pair of shoes) was that above a size 10, the pair that I wanted did not come in half sizes, and since I had already discovered in the store that a size 10 (which is what I usually wear) was too small, so I had to order a size 11. (They seem to offer most shoes in 10.5 now.)

When they arrived a day or two later (Zappos generally has very fast and free shipping), I immediately tried them on. They were a bit big, but not so much that I couldn’t wear them comfortably, even if I do look like I have clown feet. I wore them for long walks, but I wasn’t wearing them all the time, mostly because it was summer and I refused to wear them with shorts. I just couldn’t go that far in sacrificing fashion for comfort. Instead I wore sandals and flip flops all summer, exacerbating my leg and lower back problems. They ended up in my closet nearly forgotten.

I was almost ready to sell them on eBay when my pain, now diagnosed officially as sciattica became worse than ever, and more concentrated in my lower back. I decided to give my shoes one last chance before getting rid of them. Much to my shock, my pain was alleviated almost immediately when wearing the shoes. I even had a recent episode where the pain was so bad, I couldn’t walk without a limp (I can blame myself for wearing flats all day the day before). But then I put my MBT shoes on, and spent the day at a museum in the city, walking around virtually pain free.

So, are the shoes worth it? Well, as it turns out, for me, they were. I am even at this point contemplating buying another pair, since they offer a few more styles which better match my own. (I’d like to try that 10.5 to see if they fit better.) They even have boots now which I would definitely wear if it were not for their $390 price tag.

If you are desperate to try a pair and you don’t have it in your budget to spend $150+, there is a cheaper alternative out there. Avon.com carries a pair of shoes put out by the fitness chain Curves, called the Toning Sneaker. For comparison’s sake, I bought them, and quite frankly, you get what you pay for. They don’t have the solid feel of the MBT shoes, instead giving the wearer the feeling of cheaply made shoes. They don’t offer any cushioning, but they do seem to have similar mechanics to the MBT shoes, and therefore may offer some of the same benefits. I won’t be wearing mine again, but for someone with fewer requirements in a shoe, these might be worth a try if you are curious about their potential benefits.

Ultimately, I don’t know if the MBT shoes live up to all the claims Swiss Masai makes about them, but I honestly believe they have made a difference for me and am looking forward to purchasing my next pair.

“Life Without Ed” — A Book Review

You might think that Life Without Ed is a book about a woman separating herself from a boyfriend/husband/lover named Ed. But when you read the sub-header “How One Woman Declared Independence from her Eating Disorder and How You Can Too” it is apparent that Ed is not a person. As it turns out, for Jenni Schaefer, as well as for many other women, Ed (a convenient acronym for Eating Disorder) can be just as powerful a force as the most abusive of men, and like abusive partners, Ed can and does kill.

The review of this book is timely as National Eating Disorders Awareness Week begins February 22. Through Shaefer’s book, other victims of Ed can find the hope they need to begin the long process of declaring their own independence from an eating disorder.

Life Without Ed begins with Jenni stating that although she has never been married, she is happily divorced. Through the guidance of her therapist Thom Rutledge — with whom Jenni cowrote her book — Jenni began to identify her eating disorder as an entity separate from her own person, an entity she identified as Ed. Personifying her disorder gave clarity to the thoughts in her head as she began to identify which thoughts belonged to her, and which thoughts belonged to Ed. Making that distinction enabled her first to disagree with Ed, and eventually to disobey him.

From the beginning, Ed was as controlling, domineering, and selfish as the worst partners committing domestic violence. But he was also as manipulative, leading Jenni to believe that she was deserving of his negative treatment. Without Ed, she believed she was nothing, because that is what Ed told her at every opportunity he had. He also gave her the proverbial carrot, leading her on with promises of beauty (through being thin), success (through being thin), and happiness (through being thin). Without him, he convinced her she would never achieve any of those things. Finally, Jenni realized though that the life she was living with Ed was not one worth living at all, and instead of giving into his demands indefinitely — which ultimately would have led to her death — she got the help she needed to begin the long process of separating herself from Ed.

Throughout Shaefer’s account — which is witty at times, and tragic at others — we are reminded of the hold Ed has taken of her. But we are also reminded of the strong sense of survival that eventually leads to Jenni’s “divorce” from Ed. As with the separation of many couples, Jenni’s recovery was full of moments of self doubt and the desire to go back to Ed who was always full of promises of a better life. Although he was a great source of misery for her, he also knew how to relieve moments of stress and unhappiness through binging, purging and restricting — all of which can provide a false but powerful sense of control when all else feels out of control.  Ultimately, with the help of a strong support system comprised of therapists, internists, dieticians and peers, Jenni found the strength to leave Ed once and for all. Though he still periodically tries to reunite with Jenni — perhaps for a casual fling or even worse — she now has the emotional tools to recognize his presence, and then dismiss him.

Life Without Ed: How One Woman Declared Independence from Her Eating Disorder and How You Can Too
is a detailed account of life with an Eating Disorder — something that is often misunderstood by society at large. As Jenni points out, it does not matter what size you are or how much you weigh. Ed comes in all shapes and sizes. What matters is the emotional abuse from which so many women suffer in silence, as Ed consumes every moment, telling them what to eat or not eat, what to purge, and how they look compared to every other woman they see. If Ed is destroying your life, or the life of someone you know, this book is an absolute must-read in order to understand the battles with Ed, and how to win them.