Atkins, day 1.

[serinde]

Here I am in the world of no-carbohydrates. Well, under 20 grams per day, anyways. So far today I have had bacon, more bacon, chicken salad, gravlax, cream cheese, my requisite 2 cups of salad (with a very tasty Whole Foods italian dressing), and an Atkins Cappucino [sic] shake, the latter which I am currently drinking. It tastes pretty vile, but it seems to be dealing with a crankiness that felt not unlike low blood sugar (coupled with a craving I couldn't identify) that crept over me on the way home, so I'm tucking it away with a certain complaisance; many thanks to naudia for providing the powder. Total carb intake for the day so far: 9 grams.

I had a cup of green tea earlier, in flagrant violation of the injunctions to drink only decaf, but their only recorded objection seems to be that caffeine is Generally Bad (as opposed to being harmful to the diet theory), so buggrit. Not as if I'm a six-cup-a-day coffee achiever here.

In other news, our storm-of-the-century for this month has turned out to be a fizzler: rotten to walk through, but the accumulation is laughable.
I was having a failure to grasp the two moves we were working on (not doing utterly pathetic, but not quite getting the hang), but then we started doing freestyle in small groups and it got interesting. I moved forward to grab the current defender (nage), a black belt, in the approved fashion (two-handed grabs today), he did a maneuver which started with an ukemi, which is a faked blow...which I, not realizing what he was doing, because recall that this is freestyle so you can do whatever throw you like, did not recoil from. Thus, his hand met my nose with not inconsiderable force. (Some people just sort of gesture when they do an ukemi; others put force behind it, which is called having a "strong" ukemi. This is not wrong, I gather, just different. On the one hand it can have bad effects on dim newbies like me, but on the other it seems to have much more of an effect when you are redirecting uke.)

My nose is not broken, and in fact it didn't even bleed, but it _did_ stop me in my tracks and drop me. Much to my chagrin, my eyes teared up and stayed so for a few minutes, though I managed to keep from bawling or anything, thank Hastur. The poor black belt (I think his name is John) was utterly taken aback and very apologetic. Claire took me to the side and had me sit and talk to her for a few minutes--I said I was fine and willing to plunge back in, but she said I ought nevertheless take a bit of time to relax and re-center. So I did and that was fine, and then I rejoined the group, and acquitted myself fairly well (though John could hardly bear to do anything to me but the most gentle of maneuvers, in spite of my protests that I was fine and not at all gun-shy; a perfect microcosm of the problem men can have with women in combat).

I told Claire after, in the locker room, how I was actually glad that it happened; I had been dreading, off and on, what would happen when I took a real hurt in class--I still have blush-producing memories of the time I tried to qualify for SCA fighting, without ever having struck a blow in anger before: long story short, on the third hit I burst into tears, and common reaction though it be the mortification is with me yet. (The groin pull doesn't count, because that didn't start hurting for a couple days after.) So now I've taken it, and it was okay, and I got up again without a problem; I can handle it. Go Me.

Comments

[galeogirl.livejournal.com]

There's a book you might like called Kill the Body and the Head Will Fall. It's about women and violence. The author took up boxing while writing the book and devotes some time to talking about her fear of being hit in the ring. In my experience, once you realize that a single blow probably isn't going to kill you, it gives you a lot more strength and confidence in yourself.