Beginning (Yet) Again

There haven’t been a lot of blog posts lately because I’ve fallen into a really lousy place with my fitness and health. I put back on 50 lbs. of the 78 that I had lost, and working out became really really difficult.

Mostly, I’m annoyed to have to do the same work all over again and that the endocrinologist from the HMR clinic, who stated to my primary care doctor that if I left his care I would just gain all the weight back, appears to have been right. I hate for that jerk to be right, but still had to leave the HMR program because losing weight just isn’t worth it if you also lose a healthy liver in the process.

I digress.

I’m trying to get back on track, but since I turned 40 everything has become harder. My already sluggish metabolism has slowed further, my set point is higher, my hip hurts, my heart rate feels way too high when I do exercise. Most likely I’ve harmed myself in ways I’m not even fully aware of by weight cycling yet again, but I don’t know what else to do other than get back on the horse and try, try again. Accepting myself at this size is still not an option.

So I’m trying to get back to daily workouts, zumba, the treadmill, yoga - a combination thereof that keeps me active every day. I’m trying to get in 10,000 steps per day and I treated myself to a new Fitbit (the Charge 2 which I’ve nicknamed ‘Little Brother’) to help me keep track of things. I actually earned the Fitbit for free, because my health insurance company kept sending me gift cards when I synched the data from my old Fitbit to their website so they could see how much I worked out. Sadly, as always, working out a lot doesn’t make you lose weight if you still eat too much. My old Charge HR Fitbit (which I nicknamed ‘Santa’) was sent to one of my best friends so we can both track and help support each other – which helps a lot.

I’m also reading a new book which has a method for conquering binge eating that I’ve not tried before. Binge eating remains the diet-related problem that is keeping my weight high; I love healthy food and I’m very knowledgeable about it but it all goes out the window when I arrive home from work alone in my house, physically and mentally tired, and hungry.

Anyway... starting weight 268, goal weight 180. Here we go. Yet again.

The Pasta Conundrum

I’ve made it pretty clear at this point that I’m not a fan of fad/crash diets like Paleo or Atkins, and I absolutely think that HMR is a bad idea. That being said, I acknowledge that every body works in a unique way and if something works for you in a way that makes you feel great and is sustainable long term without causing dangerous weight yo-yo’s, then cool. Listening to your body is key.

I’m not an anti-carb or even low-carb eater. I think carbs are part of my balanced diet, and I like them. They do need to be limited somewhat because they tend to be very calorie dense, but outside of that I think carbs are yummy and great.  However, something weird is going on with me and pasta.

I make pasta about once a week for dinner, and then portion out the leftovers for lunch at work for the next couple of days. At dinnertime I’ll prepare myself a bowl, eat it too quickly and feel as though I’ve eaten nothing at all, then go fetch myself an entire second bowl. It’s like when I eat pasta the mechanism that tells me I’m full just completely shuts down. Afterward, I feel uncomfortably bloated, bubbling, and sick.

At first I thought it was just because I was eating too much, but I came to realize I was bloated, bubbly, and sick even after eating my carefully measured portions of pasta at lunch.

Thankfully this can’t be celiac disease, true celiac is still fairly rare and I do not suffer from it or any other kind of food allergy. I eat bread and plenty of other gluten containing products daily with no problem whatsoever, but pasta apparently does not agree with me so I’m thinking I’ll have to eliminate it from my diet.

This makes me sad as I love pasta, it’s a quick easy dinner that provides plenty of lunch leftovers, but it’s just not worth the cost – it causes binge behavior and makes me feel awful afterwards. In keeping with my own advice to listen to my body, it’s got to go.

Now to come up with some tasty pasta alternatives that the guys I live with will actually eat...

Are Your Bits Fit?

I have officially become one of those people who wears a health monitor all the time. And it is addictive.

A few years ago a friend of mine recommended that I start using a metabolic tracker called the Body Bug to ensure that I’m burning more calories every day than I eat. She even offered to loan me hers, so that all I’d have to do is set up an account for myself without paying for the device. Since at the time the company was charging a monthly fee to use their services, I opted not to use it. It wasn’t a high fee, I’m just cheap.

The technology has evolved pretty rapidly since then, as have the costs. The device I purchased (technically Ted purchased for me as a Christmas present) is called a Fitbit Charge HR. It normally retails for around $150.00 and the associated phone APP and web monitoring services for it are included in that one time cost. Ted got mine for a steal because it’s a rebuilt unit. It arrived in as-new condition and works fine, so I have no complaints about it being rebuilt. True it didn’t come with an instruction manual, but its user friendly and I figured things out pretty fast on my own. You can also obtain a copy of the manual somewhere online if you really want one (I wound up not bothering).

Its about the size of a watch.

It has APP software that syncs the device to your smartphone, and also desktop software to sync it to your PC. Everything interacts with everything else, so you can log what you ate for lunch on your smartphone and log dinner on your PC (this is a HUGE improvement over the Daily Plate I’ve been using, whose mobile device software does not communicate with its web version for the PC), and you can check all your stats on either device at any time.

Setting up my account was super easy. It wants all the expected metrics: age, height, weight, gender, fitness goals, etc. You can be “friends” with other users in a very Facebook-like way, but I haven’t bothered with any of that so far.

When the Fitbit is fully charged and you unplug it from the computer, it flashes a message that says “HUG ME” on its little screen, encouraging you to put it on. It does, in fact, make me feel like I want to put it on. Manipulative software!

Note: the USB connector that plugs the Fitbit into a PC to charge is a proprietary shape, so if you lose it you are rather hosed.

The device uses something called a three-dimensional accelerometer to track the movements of the user wearing it. This device can detect when you’re walking, sitting, running, lying down, and climbing flights of stairs. It’s the size of a microchip and situated in a device that looks like a skinny wristwatch. We really do live in a remarkable technological age. It also tracks what your heart rate is doing and beams all this information every few minutes back to home base.

The inside of the unit showing the heart rate monitoring diodes.

The unit has a single button on the side and a very small screen. Tapping the button causes it to scroll through the time, how many steps you’ve taken today, how many miles you’ve traversed, how many calories you’ve burned, how fast your heart is currently beating, and how many flights of stairs you’ve climbed. Holding the button in signals the unit that you’re beginning a deliberate workout period and holding it in again tells that timer to stop.

Meal and water tracking is very easy. The database of foods is huge, it has a bar code scanner that works via your smartphone’s camera, and if you still can’t find the food you’re looking for you can input it manually. You can also set up favorite foods that you eat frequently and meals you eat frequently for quicker tracking. It reminds me a lot of my beloved Daily Plate – just now I can use my smartphone or a PC to track instead of having to sit down at a PC.

I think the most fascinating feature is the sleep tracker. If I wear it while sleeping I can glance at the APP on my smart phone in the morning and get a report on how many hours I slept, how often I woke, and how frequently I was restless. I sometimes call my Fitbit “Santa” because it sees me when I’m sleeping, it knows when I’m awake…

Overall I really love this thing. I thought the band would annoy me while typing but since you wear it situated a bit higher on the wrist (above the wrist bone so that the monitor is flat against your skin) I don’t notice it much. My sole complaint so far is that during my Zumba workout it claimed that I burned around 800 calories (combining the metrics it knows about me, what the accelerometer was reporting back, and what my heart rate was). I find that claim very, very difficult to believe. Usually at my highest impact workout I assume I’ve burned somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 – 500 calories per hour.

However I admit I haven’t yet been hanging out with my Fitbit for a full week yet so I’m willing to give it a chance and see if I’ve been selling myself short for caloric burn. I just don’t want to be tempted to eat more calories because of wild claims of calories used. The scale will tell.

Quitter! Quitter!

It’s been entirely too negative around this blog lately, so to mix things up I’m going to tell you why I quit.

No, seriously – it’s a good thing!

I started my journey toward losing over 100 lbs. on the HMR system. It turned out to be a very bad idea for me as the artificial and/or extreme low calorie nature of that diet caused my liver to start failing, however it did take off the first 35 lbs. that needed to go.

When I left HMR (on my wise Doctor’s orders) I went to Weight Watchers. There I had a great leader and fantastic, supportive classmates – and I took off another 40 lbs. WW is a decent program, their system of tailoring your personal diet to include those things you love while encouraging you to try new ones is smart, and it’s something that people can do for life – which is very important for weight loss sustainability.

I don’t agree with them 100%. For example, they push milk which I think is unnecessary for adult animals (it’s baby food). Also they try to get you to figure out how to stay within your points on days like Christmas and your birthday – I personally believe there are days when you should just forget the whole restriction deal and enjoy yourself. There can be an almost fearful attitude toward food at WW that I think isn’t 100% mentally healthy.

However, I was happy on WW and it’s easy enough to ignore what you don’t agree with and take to heart all the useful, encouraging things that they offer.

Through no fault of WW I began to suffer diet fatigue about seven or eight months ago. I had simply run out of energy to keep doing the same things I’d done before. I remained on the program, slogging along, but my weight began slowly but surely creeping upward instead of downward. I knew I had to try something new, and as much as I would have liked to add a new plan to my existing old one, my diet budget being what it is (I have a spending allowance I dedicate to my weight loss efforts) in order to try something new I had to give up WW.

That was hard. I love my leader and my classmates. And I was a coward – I knew I was leaving but didn’t tell them. For one thing, I knew they’d try to talk me out of it, but my mind was made up so I knew that was a waste of time. I wasn’t quitting my efforts to get where I want to be, but I was leaving their company and in the end I slipped away very quietly. I guess a lot of people do that.

So I joined a gym.

I’ve said in the past that gyms aren’t the right choice for me because if I have to go home, change clothes, and go back out again – I probably won’t go. Well, I’ve also said in the past that WW isn’t for me, so obviously I change my mind a lot.

Deliberately working out isn’t precisely a natural activity. Human instinct encourages us to conserve energy whenever possible just as our metabolisms strive to conserve calories, it’s all about survival. Over the years when I trudge along on a treadmill or elliptical machine, it’s all I can do not to stare at the clock, waiting for the time when I can cease this boring activity.

So there’s a trick to it. I’d heard of this trick before, I’d just never managed to successfully implement it until now.

Find something physical to do that you think is ridiculously fun.

That’s where Zumba fits in. Silly, I know. Most of the time I’m pretty sure I look like a baby hippo hopping and flailing around that studio. But it really is a big dance party with great music and energy and moves I’m able to follow and lots and lots of sweat. It lasts a whole hour (unlike my generally half hour treadmill sessions) and I don’t even notice the time flying by because I’m enjoying myself.

Apparently I will go home, get changed, and go back out – if where I’m going is to a big, fun dance party.

Group exercise is so different from going it alone at home. The energy of a great instructor and the rest of the class lifts and carries me along, helping me to work harder than I would have on my own.

It’s awesome, I’m going three times a week, and my membership also includes access to a lot of weight lifting machines. Since lifting weights is a varied activity, it doesn’t bore me to tears like hamster wheel activities do.

In addition to that, I still take walks and hikes with Ted.

This is all well and good, but there’s a great saying that goes, “you can’t outrun your fork.” What this refers to is that physical activity alone isn’t going to effect weight loss. It's easy to consume back the calories burned in even a strenuous workout and it’s a lot harder to burn a significant amount of them than people think. So I’m also using the Daily Plate (my favorite old standby) to track my calories and the quality of my nutrition.

I’ve found that when it comes to weight loss, loyalty to one specific method doesn’t really work for me. In order to continue and fight off boredom and diet fatigue, I’ve got to shake things up a bit. Zumba is my new shakedown.

Favorite Food (Fat is Awesome)

This is my favorite food:

I sometimes refer to the avocado as proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.  Lately I've been happily buying up six packs of beautiful gator-pears at Costco for about a buck each.

Recently, my Mom-in-law asked me what foods are good for the brain.  I responded: fat.  I give this response because fat is what your brain cells are made out of, so it’s a logical assumption on my part that eating fat will provide fuel for your brain.

Avocado is my topmost, favorite, super-happy way to eat fat.

Over the years I've had a love/hate relationship with edible fat.  At one point I was firmly on the, “if you don’t want to BE fat, do not EAT fat" bandwagon.  I have since, after better research, gotten off that one.

It was silly of me to get on there in the first place since technically I've known better since I was in my early twenties.  Twice in my life my attempts to force my body to be thin have made me seriously ill.  Most recently I tried giving up food in favor of subsisting only on “health-shakes” with a predictable result that is well documented earlier in this blog.  The short version is that my liver’s response to the diet was: “Nope.”

A decade prior to that, I tried a slightly less drastic seeming (but in retrospect similar) plan where you leave all the food choices up to your consultant and eat only the pre-packaged insta-food that they sell to you (cough*JennyCraig*cough).  I lost weight at first, but since their quickie meals had almost no fat in them my gall bladder was left with nothing to do.  Bored (and undoubtedly angry) it formed stones and had to be removed.

You’d think I would have learned back then that forgoing real, fresh food was a bad idea for me – but sadly I did not.

These days I’m working on dealing with the root mental cause behind my obesity (an eating disorder) and feeding myself with the freshest, most nutritious things I can find, research, and afford.  Avocado is an important part of my dietary choices.

Here is why I love the pebbly green monsters:

1)      They taste awesome.  The avocado often reminds me of a hard-boiled egg yolk for richness and flavor, but it’s even better.  It’s creamy, delicious, and satisfying.  When I take a bite of avocado my brain responds by saying, “mmmm… yes, fatty goodness.”  There is a valid reason why we crave fat and receive a pleasure response for eating it – that’s because we need fat in our diets and it is good for us.

2)      They play nicely with others.  When eaten with other vegetables the oils in avocado actually help your body absorb the nutrients in the other vegetables more effectively too.  Almost every day I eat a big bowl of cut, fresh, raw vegetables.  Adding half an avocado in with the mix and stirring it all up together with a little salt and pepper looks a bit weird, but is 100% better for me (and better tasting) than any salad dressing.

3)      They are so, so good for us.  The fat in an avocado is the kind that a body truly needs.  Cholesterol lowering, triglyceride lowering, blood sugar regulating, heart protecting, yummy yummy fat.  The same type as is found in nuts and olive oils.  Studies show that people who regularly consume avocado tend to weigh less.  The reason why is unknown – my guess is that it’s just because they’re a popular food among health nut types.  However personally, I've noticed that the satisfaction they give me helps me to resist the siren song of fats that are less good for me.  After my avocado salad at lunch I’m feeling pretty sated, so when they roll out the afternoon cake at the office it’s a lot easier for me to avoid it.

The entire fruit contains on average about 235 calories, so I try to eat only a half per day.  However if I slip up and eat the whole thing that’s not a slip I’m going to cry about like I would chowing down on too many potato chips.

In conclusion, if you haven’t had the opportunity to get to know these little beauties I encourage you to give them a try.  Since most people encounter them for the first time as guacamole – here’s my recipe.  Enjoy!

Carolyn’s Guac:

·         4 ripe avocados - diced (Haas avocados are ripe when the skin is very dark green and they give ever so slightly when squeezed)*

·         1 large, ripe tomato – diced

·         ½ red onion – minced

·         2 or 3 garlic cloves – minced

·         1 big handful of chopped fresh cilantro

·         The juice of 1 lime

·         Salt and pepper to taste

Combine all ingredients and mix well.  Eat with veggie sticks, pita, tortilla chips, or use as a spread on sandwiches.  This is also a great topping for baked chicken or fish.

*Note: Alton Brown refers to the avocado as an “edible food grenade” because once they've been popped open they will oxidize and turn brown very quickly.  The acids in lime juice and tomato will help to slow this process, but if you need to store any extra guacamole make sure you cover it very carefully with a tight layer of saran wrap pressed firmly against the surface. Air is the enemy!

Living With Binge Eating Disorder

I’m absolutely crazy about these candies that come out around Easter called Robin Eggs.  They’re basically a Whopper malted milk candy coated in a layer of chocolate, then coated again with a hard, sugar layer on top.

One serving is 8 candies, and there are 180 calories in a serving.  There are seven servings in a bag so the bag contains a total of 1,260 calories (a day’s worth).

I am completely capable of polishing off the entire bag in one sitting.  Feel free to gasp in horror, but that’s the ugly and occasionally shocking reality of binge eating disorder.

I love these candies and don’t want to live the rest of my life without ever enjoying them, but I also don’t want to hurt my physical and mental health by binging on them and I know that if I buy them and put them on the shelf with my other snacks eventually I will do just that.  If I’m lucky I’ll manage to eat them in two sittings instead of one, but that’s still not an acceptable amount of empty sugar calories to consume in one day.

So here’s the coping method:

I bought the bag when I was not hungry, brought it home, opened it up and immediately divided it into seven appropriate serving sizes.  There were four candies left over so I had to even them off (yum).

I placed a single serving into my cupboard, and Ted hid the rest away somewhere in the house.  When I want a serving, I need to ask him to bring me one.  It’s up to me when I would like a serving, but dividing them up and hiding them cuts off my ability to turn them into a binge.

Obviously this method is tricky if you live alone, but if you have a good friend who lives close by or a neighbor you trust who are willing to help out, that would work too.

I will always have an eating disorder, but I want to be a person living the rest of my life in recovery from it rather than being a slave to it.  Balancing things I enjoy into my life in a way that I can live with isn’t easy, but it’s worth it.

Pre-Diabetic

It’s that time of year again, time for our annual physicals.  My Doc now works with a health care network that lists all of a patient’s blood work numbers on a website so that if you want to, you can go over them yourself.  Honestly all I really needed to hear from her was, “everything looks fine,” and I didn’t obsess over each number like I used to.  Primarily I wanted to know that my liver levels were normal a year after my liquid diet induced liver failure scare, and happily – they are.  I seem to have recovered completely.

My husband didn’t fare quite as well.  Although every other number for him was textbook normal, his fasting blood sugar came back high, earning him the “pre-diabetic” label.  His Doctor wants him to work on his diet and check back in three months, so we’re planning on reversing this situation with dietary changes so that he doesn’t have to take an oral medication.  He already walks two to three miles about four times a week, which I’m sure is helping the situation a lot.  We’ve both been walking that much for over a year, and annoyingly he can still walk faster than I can jog.  I’ll always be jealous of his long, gorgeous legs.

I digress…

As I’ve mentioned previously, my husband has had a medically “normal” body weight his whole life, so he is now a living contradiction to the assumption that fat = diabetic, and thin = healthy.  He has an unlucky genetic predisposition toward the disease since his Mom has it, and like Ted my Mom-in-Law has never been overweight a day in her life.  That being said, my husband is a healthy eater but has also spent his entire life eating pretty much whatever tasty thing he wants when he wants it.  Fortunately he often wants healthy things, but he also adores anything made from meat, fat, flour, and cheese (heck, who doesn’t?) Looking at a food he wants and telling himself that he can’t have it isn’t going to come easily to him.  Me, I’ve been practicing that behavior since I was 12.  Although a person might always be naturally thin, as time passes they’re still not going to get away with indulgence eating the way they could as a twenty-something.

After discussing the idea of dietary changes with him, I decided to take a look at my own fasting blood sugar number from my recent test.  Turns out it came back as 68.  The ideal range is 65 – 99, so mine is about as perfect as it can get even though I’m still classified as obese.  When I mentioned this to Ted he said I just had, “good genes,” but I know in previous years that score has come back as high as 102, so I believe it’s my current eating patterns that are causing the number.  I sat down and thought about what it is about my eating that would contribute to the effect based on my own nutritional research, trial and error.  For what it’s worth, here’s what I came up with:

1)      I eat about 2-3 cups of raw vegetables at least four times a week.  This isn’t really salad since I skip the lettuce and dressing parts and just cut up a bowl of whatever looks fresh and good at the grocery store, focusing on getting a variety of colors and textures: cucumbers, celery, carrots, mushrooms, tomatoes, bell peppers, etc.  I rough chop them into a bowl, sprinkle on some seasoning like 21 Season Salute from Trader Joe’s and a little salt, and I’m good to go.  A word of warning: if you choose to do this it will give you gas until your stomach adjusts to that amount of raw fiber.  At this point I’m so accustomed to it I could probably digest the front lawn with no gastric distress.

2)      Minimal white foods.  A friend of mine who is an avid runner once told me that she eats nothing that is white.  At first I thought that sounded crazy, but she was pointing out that things like processed cane sugar, bleached white flour, and white potatoes really aren’t the best nutritional choices.  I absolutely cannot live a happy life (or permanently stick to any eating plan) that doesn’t include bread, pasta and pizza, so I don’t adhere to this rule as religiously as she does, I just keep it in mind as a guideline.  It includes having swapped mashed potatoes with sweet potatoes at dinner time and substituting spinach and steamed broccoli instead of pasta when I’m having pasta with meatballs.  Vegetarians will disagree with me on this one, but if I have to choose between pasta or meatballs, I’ll take the meatballs every time.  The protein gives me good fuel, is satisfying, tasty, and keeps me full a lot longer.  I also eat limited bread.  Don’t get me wrong, I adore bread and I’m not an anti-bread, gluten free by choice, no-carbs person by any means – I just acknowledge that floury breads and pasta are high in calories for a low volume of food, and I know that the white flour converts very quickly to glucose in the blood, causing blood sugar spikes, so I stay aware of how much of it I’m eating and keep it limited.

3)      This is the really hard one for me: I ditched daily desserts.  I have a single serving of white flour, fat and cane sugar-based dessert about once every two or three weeks.  This means saying no, on a daily basis, to doughnuts, cake, candies, cookies and pies that appear at work for general consumption.  With very few exceptions, I’ve flipped a switch in my brain that says if it’s in the office and I didn’t bring it with me, it’s off limits.  Period.  I’ve had to, because trying to mitigate the damage done in the office environment by a constant influx of refined sugar was just too difficult.  Although I do eat one to two pieces of fruit on most days, I’ve had to let go of the beloved tradition I grew up with that dessert always follows dinner.  Fructose (the sugar found in fruit) and sucrose (white cane sugar) act very, very differently in the body.  One is perfectly fine for me to consume on a daily basis, and one is unfortunately not.  It’s hard at first, but gets easier over time as it becomes a habit.  When I do have dessert (and I absolutely DO still have desserts), it’s out in a restaurant, or to celebrate a special occasion, and I make sure ahead of time that it’s always exceptional and always totally worth it.

Since my husband isn’t much of a sweet eater it’s probably number 2 that he’s going to need to work on.  He adores soft pretzels, potato gnocchi, mashed potatoes and chewy hoagie rolls like a true Philadelphian.  These are all fine, tasty foods that I wouldn’t ask anyone who loves them to live a life without – I incorporate all of them into my own diet after all.  It’s just going to be a lowering of volume while simultaneously increasing the things that don’t cause a person’s blood sugar to spike like Old Faithful going off.

This is going to be a challenge.

The "Split Plate" Charge

This falls squarely into the, "no wonder people have a hard time maintaining healthy body weight" category...

I have blogged before about my frustration with restaurants who charge me more money for ordering less food or less highly caloric food.  For example at breakfast last weekend I asked for my omelet to be made with egg beaters instead of real eggs, and that they hold both the cheese and toast.  They charged me a dollar more for the egg beaters and gave me zero money back for letting them save about four or five ounces of cheese, two slices of bread, butter and jam.  I saved about four or five hundred calories and paid $1.50 more for the privilege.  If you attempt to do something like order tomato slices or fruit in place of oily hash browns that can be anywhere from another $1.50 to around $4.00 charge, so I usually skip a fruit side dish and just eat an apple when I’m home.

A number of restaurants these days are catering to those of us who want to eat healthier, such as Seasons 52 and Harvest Seasonal Grille – which boast unique menus with a large number of entrees that fall under the appropriately sized 500 calorie mark for a meal.  They also specialize in fresh, locally sourced, seasonal ingredients, and as a bonus are quite delicious.  Fresh food is pricey, so even though your dining experience at such a restaurant will be quite healthful it still costs a lot less money to eat a fatty cheeseburger and fries.

On average, restaurant portions of food are between two and three times larger than necessary for a meal.  Knowing this, I very deliberately cut a lot of my meals in half before I even begin eating them.  Since my husband and I tend to order very different meals in restaurants (he doesn’t go in for this “hold the butter” and “hold the cheese” nonsense that I tend to pull) so it’s never really occurred to me to just order one meal for two people.  For this reason, until recently I didn’t truly know what a split plate charge was.

Apparently if two people go into a restaurant and order a single meal for the pair of them, many restaurants will tack on an extra five dollars or so for serving a single plate of food to two people.

So, let me get this straight… they bring one meal, they save the entire cost of ingredients, labor and energy consumption utilized in making another meal, and they get to charge more money for the one they did provide – simply because there happens to be two bodies sitting at the table?

Can anyone explain why this is an acceptable and commonplace practice?  I’m just not getting it.

And is this kind of bass-ackward business practice contributing to why so many restaurants go under and close down within a year or two of opening?

Makes a good argument for restaurants that serve the entire menu a la carte.

Mentally Unhealthy Food Culture

I have spent the past ten months mostly depriving myself of food that my brain perceives as “bad”.  These are items I feel I do not deserve to eat because I have been (and still am) obese.  Things like desserts offered after dinner at my parent’s house or cakes, cookies, and doughnuts constantly on offer at work.  I’ve also avoided bringing certain types of foods into my home which count as dangerous in my mind because I know I have difficulty not seeking them out and consuming all the available supply of them if I can do so without being discovered.

I adore chocolate, but I have been having my husband hide it from me in our home and only bring me a single, controlled serving when I ask for one.  When I discover fast food leftovers that the guys leave in the fridge I’ve been guilty of angrily stuffing them down the garbage disposal and then yelling at my family for leaving pitfalls in my path.

There’s no delicate way to put this: that kind of behavior is seriously messed up.

All of this is evidence that I have a very disordered and mentally unhealthy relationship with food.  Its importance is completely out of proportion in my life.  I’ve come to realize that treating food like an addiction and an enemy isn’t a sustainable way to live a healthy and balanced lifetime at the weight that I desire.

I have a co-worker who usually keeps several small servings of chocolate in her desk.  She forgets about them for weeks, and then when she feels like it will eat a bite – perhaps a single Hershey’s kiss for example – and leave the rest for later.  I have told this co-worker on many occasions that I cannot do what she does because I’m a food addict and I’m helpless to do anything but obsess over and consume all available quantities of chocolate in my possession relentlessly until it’s all gone.

The problem with this is that I’ll never be anything other than a helpless food addict if I don’t start working to develop the same normal, natural relationship to foods (including treat items) that my co-worker has.  So as of this month I’ve started practicing some behavior modification.

For right now, I’ve added two baby steps to my daily routines:

The first is that I purchased a jar of chocolate hazelnut spread (something I’ve been known in the past to dig into with a spoon and eat and eat and eat until I’ve made myself sick) and put it in my desk at work.  For breakfast, I dip out a single tablespoon serving and enjoy it on my toast.  By having it at work I’m not tempted to pull out the jar when I’m home alone so I’m getting practice eating a sensible portion of it in a place where I feel safe.  I’m teaching my stomach (and more importantly my brain) that a single serving is satisfying, enjoyable, and enough.

The second thing is that I’ve begun to have dessert again while in social situations.  When I’m at a family dinner I obtain a sensibly sized portion of the treat I most want (like two or three bites of brownie for example) and slowly enjoy it.  Again, since I’m not alone I’m not in danger of my addiction behavior kicking in and can safely practice getting used to being satisfied with a very small serving of high calorie / high sugar / high fat treat.

At the same time, the only responsible party in either of these situations is me.  I am not foisting responsibility for what I eat onto any other person.

I cannot live the rest of my life saying, “NO – NEVER” to these foods and I cannot continue to hide behind the lie that it’s easier to have nothing than to enjoy a correctly sized, small portion.  Avoiding certain foods entirely out of fear is not moderate, mentally healthy eating behavior.  Complete and strict abstinence will result in continued obsession over what I cannot have, then anger, resentment, eventual breakdown, and finally binging.  Putting the responsibility onto someone else is simply unfair – not to mention an unsustainable practice since nobody can watch over another human being all the time.

Instead I need to re-teach myself to hold all foods in their proper place: enjoyable, but not that big a deal.  I need to learn that not having a huge portion or all available servings of a treat doesn’t make the small taste I did have any less valuable or enjoyable.

Someday I want to be in a place where I can be comfortable having any type of food in my house because it’s just food, it’s not a mistake or an addiction substance or a problem in any way.  I want to get to a place where my body and mind are used to what proper proportion looks and feels like, instead of an incorrect chemical process kicking in and driving me relentlessly to binge.  If I’m going to make a change that lasts for life, I have to practice.

Over and over again these past ten months I’ve had co-workers, family and friends sigh at me and say, “You’re so good” or, “you’re being so good!”  Or conversely as they pick up a plate of cake they say, “I’m being so bad!”  This is heartbreaking.  Food is not good or bad, it has no moral value whatsoever.  The fact that we say these things (and I have been the worst offender of all – even if mostly in my own mind) is evidence that our society has gone completely off the rails with regards to how we eat.  There is nothing good or bad in any way about food, nor do food choices ever define anyone’s worth or virtue.

The fact that it’s been so beaten into us to self-flagellate mentally and often verbally over something so simple as enjoying a piece of cake is another sad side effect of our cultural obsession with health and thinness as a defining factor in the value of a human being.  It has the exact opposite effect as what is intended: instead of guilting and shaming us all into acceptably thin bodies, it creates people such as me who relentlessly obsess over the “bad” food until we wind up eating an entire jar of chocolate hazelnut spread in one sitting and then have to spend years working off the stored energy and mentally retraining ourselves NOT to do so again.

I can’t speak for other countries, but I know that America’s food and fitness obsessed culture is a very, very mentally unhealthy place to be.

A single petit four of average size contains about 100 calories.  This is an appropriate size and calorie content for enjoying dessert.  Also, it's really pretty!

The Vegetarian Gaffe

Yesterday at a county fair my friends and I encountered one of those food trucks you might see featured on Food TV, specializing in a good deal more than just burgers and fries.  A bit overpriced, but since the opportunity presented itself, we decided to sample their pork parfait (barbeque pork topped with collard greens, mashed potatoes, cheese, and Applewood smoked bacon as garnish) and buffalo chicken nachos (thick, hand cut and freshly fried tortilla chips coated in shredded chicken, buffalo sauce, blue and nacho cheese, celery salt, cilantro).  As you can guess – the food was worth the indulgence.  And splitting things between friends is definitely the way to enjoy such treats without them driving my calorie count for the day too far over the line.

As we were in line debating what to order and my friend asked me what I wanted, my response was, “anything on the menu but the vegetarian selection.  I see no reason to eat at a food truck like this if you’re not going to have the pork.”

At which point the vegetarian standing in line in front of me turned and (chuckling) said that she was the vegetarian ordering that one menu item.

Embarrassing, yes – but she was very nice and laughed it off, as did my friend and I.

It occurred to me that to a casual observer, this would probably look like a moment to indulge in judging the meat eater (me) for their poor lifestyle choices.  The vegetarian I was speaking to was tiny, slim and fit, and standing next to her I’m sure I looked… more than a bit well marbled.  Seventy three pounds down I’m still no lightweight in size, I’ve got some road left to travel yet.

I learned a great phrase from a fellow weight-loss blogger last week: “Your body, your science experiment.”  It really resonated with me because for the past five years that’s exactly what I’ve been doing: trying out different experiments on myself to try and figure out what combination of factors (both physical and with regards to what I could live with mentally) might result in my desired goal of weight loss.

One of the things I tried and failed at rather miserably, was being a vegetarian.  Although this is a tactic that works very well for some, it was not the right choice for me.  As a vegetarian I was hungry constantly, and unable to get the lean animal proteins that satisfied hunger and kept me feeling full for a long time, I was constantly turning to my favorite carbohydrate instead: bread.

I’m not gluten free either, but bread and pasta are substances I do measure carefully and limit due to their high caloric value.  Without meat, I ate far too many flour based foods and went relentlessly over my calorie goals.  The times when I was trying to eat vegetarian were invariably the times when I would wind up binging on entire sleeves of crackers at once.  And a sleeve of saltines contains almost 1,000 calories in one go.

With meat in my diet, I binge less, have more energy, and am more satisfied for longer periods of time.  Vegetarianism is a fantastic choice for some, but while seeking a way of eating that can sustain me for a lifetime at my desired health level, it is not the right choice for me.  One more self-science experiment I tried and checked off the list on my way to finding the road I was looking for.

The food truck in question - tasty!

Status Report: 2 lbs. lost, 72 lbs. total

So I had to adjust my daily calorie goal.

I use the Daily Plate to track my nutrition, and I’ve had my account set up so that it steers me toward losing 2 lbs. per week assuming I stick to the calorie guidelines it provides.  This was giving me a daily calorie goal to aim for of 1,010 calories.

I have no idea why it took me this long to realize that me trying to consume barely more than a thousand calories per day is a very bad idea.

For one thing, it’s just not possible for me.  Unless I’m sick with a cold or the flu I simply do not have the emotional fortitude to be that hungry and deprived all day long.  The end result of this is that I was failing, every single day, to meet my goal.  This was demoralizing.

On top of that, assuming I were capable of hitting such a small number, I don’t think it’s actually healthy for a 5’7” adult female of large Scottish build to eat such a small amount of calories each day.  I don’t know if the Plate’s calculating algorithm is off or what, but everything I’ve ever read has strongly stated that the bare minimum for any average adult female should be no lower than 1,200 calories.

So I re-adjusted my settings to have it guide me toward a 1 & ½ pound loss per week instead, and that gave me a new daily calorie total of 1,330 per day.  Still pretty low, but at least somewhat within my grasp as doable.

In other news, I’m three pounds away from my next set of progress photos.  Looking forward to that!

Status Report: 1.4 lbs. lost, 61.6 lbs. total

I seem to be doing a solid 1 & 1/2 lb. loss per week right now.  It's perhaps a wee bit slow, but it's steady and healthy and I'll take it.

I'm averaging five workouts per week, and I've been having a more difficult time getting up early to do them.  However, since it's warming and staying light further into the evening I'm a lot more prone to taking my Ted for an evening walk (or slow jog) after work anyway, so I'm not too worried about my lack of morning-person-hood.

Not too much else to report this week except that I was given an opportunity to join an online inspirational coaching/leadership/fitness group for free for the month of April and I'm excited and looking forward to being a part of that.  It's just a place online to share goals, hold one another accountable to our goals and encourage one another.  If anyone reading this would like to join they have extended the sign up deadline until Friday - just let me know and I'll tell you who to contact to get on board!

This snail is riding a skateboard, your argument is invalid.

Status Report: 1.2 lbs. lost, 60.2 lbs. total

I would like to direct your attention to my weight loss ticker at the bottom right of this blog – it looks like a cute little snail making its way along a very long road.  You will see that it says that I have lost 60.2 lbs. and have 59.8 lbs. to go – which means that I am, officially, closer to my goal than I am to the beginning.  It’s just barely, but I am over the halfway point!

So two things I learned this week:

The first is that if I absolutely, positively have to have a week off – then that’s okay.  I caught a cold nearly two weeks ago and was feeling too weak and sickly to work out.  I also didn’t feel good enough to muster nearly enough care about what I was eating.  So when it came time to get weighed in last Wednesday I knowingly played hooky.  I got right back on the wagon and simply counted the week as a loss.  I don’t know if I put on any weight during my cold week, and I don’t care.  I had too much else going on emotionally to worry about it, so I simply didn’t.

The second thing is that losing weight appears to have affected my ability to recover from illness.  As I mentioned, I caught a cold.  It started Monday morning the 10^th and resolved itself in about seven to ten days afterward just like a normal cold is supposed to.

The thing is, in my lifetime colds have never worked that way.  When I get a cold I’ve always begun coughing within a few days of onset because I have a form of asthma called cough variant asthma (CVA for short) which is set off by getting sick.  The coughing can continue anywhere from a month to a full three months of nonstop misery both for me and the people around me.  I can recall being a kid in school and suffering the disdain and anger of my classmates who were thoroughly tired of hearing my constant barking (although believe me they could not have been as tired of it as I was having to suffer through it).

This time I coughed a bit, nothing serious, and then the cold just went away exactly like it’s supposed to.  Sixteen days later I’m fully recovered and back to normal.

I can’t imagine why a lighter body weight would have such a huge effect on my lungs, so I’m assuming it’s all the exercise that made a difference.  The heart and lungs both grow stronger during cardio-aerobic activity, and that strength must have kept the cough from settling in and making itself at home.

It's an unexpected bonus, and one I am outstandingly grateful for.  Losing an entire quarter of a year to the headache, abdominal aches, lost sleep and negative social ramifications of a constant, nagging cough is beyond miserable.  If this turns out to be a consistent result for me, then it's a life changer.