Care: Maintenance vs. Enhancement

I've been thinking about this post and what I'd say here off and on all week. In fact, that's why I haven't posted since the 10th, because I'm trying to figure out what to say on this particular subject.

At first, I was going to write about the need for the caregiver to care for herself. But, if you've ever prowled around any web sites about caregiving or read any books about it, they all touch on this subject and I don't have anything new to say about it. In fact, I recently read a book on caregiving, A Family Caregiver Speaks Up, and Suzanne Mintz, the author, had an unbelievably dead-on comment about why caregivers need to take care of themselves that pretty much says it all from my perspective:

Your own good health must be preserved if you are going to go the distance as a family caregiver. Your own good health is the best present you can give your loved one, and yourself.

Unfortunately, I'm not so hot at taking care of myself. I'm 53, deeply entrenched in middle age, and I've got some of my own health issues to deal with. But, I try to ignore them as best I can. Honestly, though, this isn't because I'm a caregiver to Skip and don't have time for myself. I've never been much for taking care of myself, as in eating healfully, getting plenty of exercise and the like.

This brings us to the title of this post: maintenance vs. enhancement. Right now, I'm maintaining my own self and maintaining Skip's physical self. I take care of her medications, help with all the tasks of daily living (you know the drill), prepare meals, and so on. I do all these for myself as well. But, neither of us is looking at improving or enhancing our physical beings.

This is where we need to take action. We need to move from just maintenance into enhancement. Unfortunately, change is hard. And Skip is not an embracer of change. She says with great frequency, "I hate change," and means it. Change has not been her friend, after all, since it usually means some other MS loss. She won't resist change, though, if I push for it.

What would I like to change in order to enhance our lives? I'd say the two key items are: healthy eating and exercise.

All my life I've been fat (this is a descriptive word, not an epithet, in my dictionary). As a kid, my parents tried to get me to lose weight, but always without success. When I was in high school, they stopped trying (at the request of a counselor I had at the time). In college, I began reading about the fat liberation movement (this was in the mid-70s, when there were many movements afoot), and began to look at size discrimination as an issue of society rather than an issue of my size. I didn't believe I needed to change, society needed to learn to accept me.

Well, this was all well and good until I started to get older and realized that I was using fat acceptance as license for me to ignore the need for healthy living. Something triggered inside me, though I'm not sure what. The pain of staying the same suddenly got worse than the pain of making changes. With a friend, I joined Weight Watchers, completely changed my eating habits, began exercising and, over the course of 2 years, dropped 100 pounds. Unfortunately, I've gained 2/3rds back.

So, how to trigger change? How to shake myself out of my settled-in ways and embrace new habits? This is my current struggle, and, as yet, I don't have any answers.