Tales of a Rubenesque Yogi

For most of my life, I have wobbled somewhere on the spectrum of physicality between being curvaceous and being fat. Between being oh-so-close to fitting into the narrow band of physical acceptability, or to being relegated as the fat friend on a tv show, or to being the kind of person who would only appear on tv as part of a weightless competition. I remember in middle school watching as one of my naturally slim friends compared the size of our thighs, and then exclaimed that both of her legs could fit into one of mine! I wasn’t as enthused as she was, and while I’m not sure if it was the first time I measured myself against a peer and came back lacking, but I know that it wasn’t the last. Looking back on photos, I wasn’t really fat as a kid, just curvy. I had wide hips, a well padded tush, and a chest that popped into existence sometime in the 4th grade and just kept right on growing. But those kind of comparisons have the nasty tendency to sneak into your psyche and take up space without signing any kind of rental agreement.

When I discovered yoga in my late teens, I was at a diet clinic disguised as a wellness retreat, desperately trying to lose weight I was absolutely certain I needed to lose. Colonics, wheatgrass shots, raw food, green juice, every kind of sprout on the planet and there in the middle of it all was yoga. Every other piece of “wellness” that I took away from that retreat I have had to work to discard, but the yoga has stayed and changed and grown with me. From size 12 to size 26 and back to somewhere in the middle, yoga has been with me. It has gifted me with the unique lens of telling people about my interests and watching their response change based on my weight at the time of the conversation.

Telling someone that I do yoga, and teach as well, as a tender young size 12 usually engendered a response along the lines of, “oh that’s cool where at?” while giving the same answer as a heartier size 26 would almost always result in a “DO you?? Oh my gosh, GOOD for YOU!” It invariably reeked of well meaning praise, and it just as invariably put my back up, made me feel pitied, condescended, and less for having accomplished what I had. I also found that people would still be willing say to me that they felt they couldn’t do yoga until they had lost -insert arbitrary poundage amount here- of weight, but then they would definitely get back to it/would start it.

The amazing thing about yoga, though, is that it doesn’t require you to be a thin white woman to do it. Admittedly, that’s a large portion of the population, but that’s something a lot of people are working to change. I tend to say that yoga is for every body, but not every part of yoga is for every body. That’s not me saying you can’t do yoga if you are larger bodied, but rather saying you might not be able to do crown pigeon if you have bad knees, and bow pose is a bad idea for anyone with lower back problems, and that if you have extra tissue around your belly and chest, it might be hard to breathe in happy baby pose without a modification.

The larger concept of yoga, of stretching and moving and breathing and connecting with body and self, that is for everyone. And those who choose to make you feel that not being able to do every pose perfectly means that you can’t do yoga have way bigger problems in their life than whether or not you can do lizard pose. I do have a hard time breathing in happy baby pose, but it feels good on my hips, so I do it anyways. Yoga was not created for thin white women, it wasn’t even created for women. Some of the first recorded asanas come from monasteries in India, where they would use a series of stretches to help prepare the body for long periods of silent meditation and prayer. This was particularly for young monks who had recently arrived at the monastery and weren’t accustomed to the particular challenges associated with long periods of sitting in quiet contemplation of the universe. Just because we are not young monks in the remote corners of India doesn’t mean we can’t do yoga, because it has evolved from that, and it continues to evolve past something that is only for the thin and rich. Just take a look at social media today- if you look in the right places, everyone is doing yoga. Check out the amazing Jessamyn Stanley and her company The Underbelly and see where that leads you.

When I first started teaching yoga, I began by teaching at a couple of gyms, and got used to seeing people do an about face when they were about to come into the class, only to see me as the instructor and decide something else sounded better. I get it, most people are at the gym to lose weight so why would they take a class from someone who has obviously failed at this incredibly important task? I spent years thinking I would only be successful as a yoga teacher if I could finally lose the weight, and feeling like a failure for not being able to make it happen for any kind of long term period of time. Losing weight and keeping it off is incredibly hard, as it turns out, as well as being damaging to my metabolism, my hormones, and my body.

Years after I started teaching, while on a break from teaching myself, I was introduced to a friend of a friend who turned out to be one of my former students from that very gym. She had in fact become a yoga teacher herself, and was getting ready to teach her next class. She was larger bodied woman much like myself, and she told me a story about taking my class, and listening to my words and music, and how she had laid in Savasana, and wept over her life at that moment. Afterwards she said she felt a profound sense of relief, and closure. She had the realization, laying on the floor in a dimmed room in LA Fitness, that she wanted to give that relief to other people and if someone who looked like me could do it, why not someone who looked like her?

Reader, I cried. At that time, I was taking a break from teaching yoga because I was at my heaviest weight and here was someone telling me that I had made her life better with my yoga, even yoga taught while I was larger. Especially yoga that I had taught while being larger. That I had inspired her to go out and do what she wanted, and go on to inspire other people. I felt overwhelmed and full of gratitude, which was ironic because she was in the process of thanking me, and I just wanted to grab her and say thank you a thousand times over. I went back to teaching yoga after that, and I have no regrets. The more I teach and do yoga, the more I love it. I created new classes, I started working on online content, I linked up with a local studio to offer new classes and workshops, because when it comes down to it, I just love it. I would do myself a disservice to remove it from my life because society dictates that I have the “wrong” body for it. I don’t want to think that I can only do it when I’m at a certain size, or only do it in public or for pictures when I’m at an even lower size. My body is my own, and the fact that I can use it for yoga is one of my great pleasures, even if it does mean that there’s a little bit of huffing and puffing in happy baby pose. That’s just life, baby.

Carrot Soup and the Power of Friendship

I made carrot soup for a school assignment earlier this year. As a person who has never been particularly science minded or inclined towards cooking, getting a science based degree in nutrition felt like an uphill battle most days, but especially when confronted with carrot soup. As a person who doesn’t like cooked carrots, I pondered the assignment of making carrot soup (twice!!) and nearly quailed. Luckily for me, I live with my best friend, Eleanor, who loves cooked carrots and loves me enough to commit to eating mystery soup for me.

Once I had secured her promise to fall upon the sword of cooked carrots, I set out to make the inimitable Alice Waters’ Carrot Soup. And then we made another version with different flavors. And then we made the original version again and served it to friends with grilled cheese sandwiches. Now, imagine my shock and delight when it turned out to be some tasty shit. Nothing like the mushy carrots I had been braced for, Alice Waters’ carrot soup is light and vegetal, flavorsome without being overwhelming, an amazing compliment to a dish or a base to build a dish on. Seriously, so good.

When Eleanor and I first moved to Portland, we packed as many books (and clothes and pots and pans, I guess) as would fit in my beat up Civic and set out to move hundreds of miles away from our families more than a decade ago, the results were surprisingly amazing. Not unlike the carrot soup. And, much like the carrot soup, it’s possible that there were people who doubted the outcome of two young women from SoCal moving to the PNW without even winter coats to aid them.

Having crash landed in Portland, even with the doubts and fears, (our apartment contract fell through the day before we arrived and we lived at a Days Inn for a week) it was still somehow amazing. We made it through the rain and the cold (seriously so cold, don’t move to Portland from San Diego in November you WILL NOT BE EQUIPPED) because at the end of each day we came back to the home that we were creating. A home that we were able to create just as we wanted, a sanctuary to be ourselves and spend innumerable amounts of quality time together.

We talked and laughed and grew and all of those moments together in our home warmed the rest of our lives with the sort of golden glow one might expect from, say, carrot soup. Away from our friends and our family, in a new city with new jobs and a new home, we reached out with the blindness of someone making a new recipe for the first time and they don’t know how it’s going to turn out but they have to eat and then- and then it’s amazing. It works. You make changes to it over time, because who makes a recipe for the first time and doesn’t think about tweaks that they would make, and over time it grows and changes and becomes a part of you that you treasure and keep close.

Eleanor and I still live together, 11 years later, in a house rather than a tiny but well-loved apartment, along with my husband, a small army of small dogs, and books and plants as far as the eye can see. We love our house and our dogs and our books and our garden, and every day we are grateful for the decision to pull up roots and plant ourselves here. The results were so much better than I could have imagined.

So, in honor of 11 years of friendship, and the changes it has wrought along the way, please enjoy two variations of carrot soup.

Carrot Soup topped with soft cheese and thyme, paired with a grilled cheese sandwich.

Carrot Soup (OG Version)

Yield: 8 servings

Ingredients:

4 tablespoons butter

1 sprig thyme

2 onions, sliced

2 ½ pounds carrots

Salt

6 cups of broth

Instructions: Start by melting the butter in a heavy bottomed pot, add the onions and thyme, and saute for 5 to 10 minutes, or until the onions are getting to be translucent.

Add the carrots and season and saute for another 5 to 10 minutes, until the carrots get tender and the flavors are melded.

Add the broth, bring everything up to a boil, and then let it all simmer for 30 minutes or so. I like to simmer my soup uncovered because I prefer a slightly thicker more flavorful soup, but I trust you to make your own decisions here.

You can eat the soup as it is here if you want? But for a seriously improved texture I recommend giving it a blend, either with an immersion blender or by tipping the whole mixture into the basin of a standard blender.

Not only is this a hecking tasty soup, it also makes a superlative template for other soups of this ilk. The assignment for school was to make it twice, once as the original, and once as a different kind of soup, and both soups were so good. Just by varying the ingredients you can change the type of soup you want- looking for something very light, as an accompaniment to salad or fish? Get some young fresh carrots, use ghee instead of butter, and strain your broth. You’ll end up with a very orange and delicate soup, perfect to accompany many things. We also tried making it with rainbow carrots but that pic didn’t make the cut because you know what happens when you mix rainbow colors together? Yeah, you get a murky brown color. Still tasty though!

Want something a little more robust, to stand up to red meats or the like? Try more aggressive seasonings, amp it up with bone broth and throw some shrimp on top, as we did for our second iteration. The OG recipe is fantastic, but the versions you can make up yourself are just as good, albeit it in a very different way. Here’s the second recipe we made, with more assertive flavors. We both agreed it was delicious, not necessarily better than the original, but an excellent soup on its own merits.

Spiced Up Carrot Soup served with naan and topped with shrampies and a little sour cream.

Carrot Soup (Spiced Up Version)

Yield: 8 servings

Ingredients:

4 tablespoons of grass fed butter

2 onions, sliced

4 cloves garlic, crushed

1 inch grated ginger

¼ tsp crushed red pepper

Salt and pepper

2 ½ pounds of carrots

6 cups of ginger turmeric chicken bone broth

Instructions: Melt the butter in a heavy bottomed pan and add the onions, garlic, and ginger.. Saute for 5 to 10 minutes or until onions are translucent, add the carrots and seasonings, and saute for another 5 to 10 minutes, or until the carrots are tender. Cover with bone broth, bring to a boil, and then let the whole thing simmer for 30 minutes or so.

I used ginger turmeric bone broth for amped up flavor, but any would work! Try some veggie broth with dashi or another umami booster for a vegetarian option, there are so many directions to go with this. As before, you can eat it here, but for a smooth texture and richer flavor blend the soup with either a standard or immersion blender.

Whichever version of the carrot soup you try, I hope it brings you the kind of pleasure that it brought us. I hope that you enjoy recipes that are simple and full of vegetables and flavor. Most importantly, I hope that you have good friends to eat said soup with, as it is made immeasurably better in the sharing. This blog is intended to be a little bit of commentary, a little bit of recipe sharing, a little bit of health science, a little bit of yoga, and whole lot of fun. If these sound like things that you would also love to enjoy, then welcome. You are already among friends.