What Pisses Me Off About Fraternity & Sorority

Yesterday I sat in a 1:1 meeting with my supervisor and she asked me a few simple questions:

1. Are you willing, able, and motivated to continue to move the agenda forward in Sorority & Fraternity Life at the University of Tennessee?
2. What is your attitude in how it relates to you and your work?
3. How does your role contribute to the successes of the Office of Sorority & Fraternity Life and the Division of Student Life?

To be completely honest, I struggled in being able to have a positive answer to those questions.  Because sometimes I honestly wonder if we make any kind of impact.  I wonder if the time that we spend implementing leadership theories into retreats, composing assessment for diversity programming, coordinating educational workshops and programs, having 1:1 conversations with students actually means anything to them.  During our conversation I had to mentally force myself to think about the positives and look at how I'm contributing to the success of our students.

Then I read Jess's blog A Message for Fraternity/Sorority Professionals Before #AFAAM and it came at the perfect time.  Thank goodness, I'm not the only one that feels this way.  Thank goodness I'm not the only one that's pissed off.  Thank goodness that there are other people that are concerned about our future.

What pisses me off is that I don't think our students fully grasp the power that they have within their organizations and themselves.  What pisses me off is that we spend most of our time and money on selling an ideal image during recruitment that doesn't get lived up to during the rest of the year.  What pisses me off is that entire chapters will show up to a Wednesday night date party, yet it's pulling teeth to get 5 to show up for a community service event.  I'm pissed off that my women glorify blacking out from alcohol and seem to think it's a right of passage when they turn 21.  I'm so upset that we have to beg members to take leadership positions in our chapters.  I hate that my members can talk all about the gossip they hear from all the other chapters on campus, yet they can't walk into their formal chapter meeting and recite their ritual.  I hate that we have to threaten fines and standards meetings just to get people to show up for chapter events and that things that we should just do out of the goodness of our hearts, like donating to food drives, have to provide point incentives. I hate that the only way we can get members to participate in anything is to turn it into a competition.  I despise that I have to listen to people complain that our community has the negative stereotypes because all the media does is focus on the bad, yet every other week when our office asks each chapter for their positive news to be able to promote it, we hear nothing.  I'm sickened that our members know about hazing and other things that go on and stand beside and allow it to happen.  I loathe the fact that we have alumni that encourage poor behavior and use their lawyering skills to get their chapters out of trouble instead of holding them accountable for their actions. 

Why do these things piss me off?  Because we're better than that.  We took oaths promising to be better than that.  We were founded to empower, lift up, and make men and women better people.  To provide members with guiding principles and values that contribute to our campuses, local community, and society as a whole.  That 150, 100, 25 years ago, our founders created something so that they had a platform to be able to fight and advocate for what they believed in, and we've turned it into a social drinking club.

After being able to read Jess's blog and reflect, instead of feeling bad that I was frustrated, now I think it's a good thing.  I think I'm supposed to feel this way.  I'm supposed to be pissed off.  If I wasn't pissed off, I wouldn't push my students for change.  Is it fun to feel pissed off?  No, not really, but that feeling when combined with just a few energized student leaders leads the way to feeling passionate and motivated.  Gathering together other pissed off sorority & fraternity professionals can lead to collective action where we force the tough conversations to be had.  We've created this reality for ourselves.  It didn't just happen by accident.  So what are we going to do to change it?  We all have the responsibility to do it.  We can sit here and blame university administration, governing councils, or legislation, but in reality, it's our individual members that have the power.  

I don't have a lot of push or pull when it comes to changing the big picture of the fraternity and sorority world, but there are things that I can do here at the University of Tennessee.  And I'm accepting that responsibility with gusto.  I hope my students read this.  I hope they see that I'm pissed off and why.  And I hope that it pisses them off too.  Pisses them off to the point where they stop sitting back and just letting things happen as they always have.

So what are you gonna do?  Are you going to get pissed off?

The Bod Pod

Several women that serve on the board of directors for Girls on the Run with me were talking about the "bod pod" during a meeting we had the other week.  Color me intrigued.  Since losing 150+ pounds, I really had no idea what the make-up of my body was.  I had no idea what was fat, what was muscle, what was skin, etc., so when I heard about the bod pod, I definitely wanted to check it out.

The Bod Pod

This particular Bod Pod was at Eddie's Health Shoppe and at first I was a little sketched out, but when more than one woman told me that they had really benefitted from the experience, I figured it couldn't hurt to go through with the test.  As women, we focus so much on the number that shows up on the scale, or what size clothes we wear, and it can get really frustrating to feel like you're working so hard and nothing is changing.  What the Bod Pod does is measure the actual makeup of your body, so it goes beyond just your weight number and tells you what that number is made up of.  When I first walked in, I was a little intimidated.  I felt like I was getting ready to go off in a space ship or something.  But the tests were fairly simple and the whole thing lasted less than 3 minutes.  They ran a series of 3 tests, each one lasting around 40 seconds and I didn't really feel anything while sitting in the Bod Pod.  The technician described it to me as like being on an airplane with the air compression, but I think that airplanes are actually worse than this.  But of course, the test means nothing without understanding the numbers that come from the results, and that was the best part of this whole experience.  Eddie schedules around an hour to sit and talk through the numbers with you and make suggestions for nutrition and exercise, but he actually sat there and talked with me for almost an hour and half.  So here's what my numbers looked like -

When I first saw the weight number, I immediately did what all women do and was ashamed because I thought it was so high.  Society tells us that as women, what's acceptable is between 120-150 pounds, so of course 198 was way too high, never mind the fact that I've lost 150+ pounds (and yes, I've never actually admitted my starting weight to anyone publicly, but if you're smart enough and can do that math, I topped out at 350+ pounds). When the technician handed me the results, I was fully prepared for her to shame me with that high number, but was totally taken aback when she told me that my results were very good.  I'll explain.  If you look at the left hand column, you'll see that 26.6% of that 198 pounds is fat, while 73.4% is lean mass (which you can read is everything except the fat like muscle, bone, organs, etc.).  When Eddie came in and walked through the numbers with me, he says for my age and my height, I currently am in the top 12% of women for my lean mass percentage.  WHAT?!?!?!  I could barely wrap my head around it.  I kept going back to "but my weight is still so high" and he kept having to tell me that didn't matter, my weight was perfectly fine and that some of that weight is most likely the skin that is left over from my weight loss.

Then we took at look at my resting heart rate, which you can see circled in the bottom left hand corner.  I burn 1,802 calories just by sleeping and that doesn't take into account any exercise that I do.  Eddie explained that if I haven't been losing any additional weight (which I haven't for over the past year), that it's most likely because I'm not eating enough calories to counter the amount of calories that I'm burning, so my body is constantly holding on to whatever calories I have so that it doesn't go into starvation mode, especially now that I'm in training for the half marathon and am running longer and longer distances.

Who would have thought that I would be told that I'm not eating enough?  Of course, here's the thing.  That doesn't mean that I get to go back to eating double cheeseburgers and fries (damnit) and Eddie spent the rest of the session walking through exactly what my food intake should look like in order to reach a 16 week goal, which you can see in the top right hand corner of the second picture.  My goal is to lose an additional 14 pounds of fat and potentially 2 pounds of lean mass (which could just be skin or additional water) within 16 weeks.  If I'm able to achieve that goal, that will take me down to around 22% fat mass, which puts me in the "lean" category.  Again, WHAT?!?!  Never, ever, ever in my entire lifetime did I ever think that someone would describe me as lean.  Maybe not obese, but never lean.

Now the hard part begins.  Eddie spelled out a pretty specific diet for me, and I'm very slightly nervous in my ability to maintain it.  While obviously my eating hasn't been horrible as I have been able to lose weight, I've never really restricted myself or been super specific in what I was eating, I've just tried to be careful.  And the thing that scares me the most is that I'm starting this during my four busiest months, when I'm traveling a lot and am going to be in places and situations where I can't necessarily control what I'm eating.  And I actually have to learn how to meal prep.  I've always admired those people that do that, but now I actually have to figure out how to do it for myself.  And forget the random lunches out or the drinks after work.  But how awesome will it be if I can do this?  And especially because I would be ending the 16 weeks right around the time of the half marathon.  Just imagine what this could do for accomplishing that goal.

So I've planned out the next several days of meals, and after I publish this blog post I'm off to the grocery store to get started.  Wish me luck!