The Cookie Monster

Another holiday season draws to a close and I breathe a sigh of relief. No more holiday dinners to navigate. No more holiday parties to agonize over. No more Christmas cookies. Let me repeat that last one.

No. More. Christmas. Cookies.

I encountered a new nemesis this holiday season. As if the sugar cookies and chocolate kiss mice and coconut snowmen were not enough, a new and more powerful foe emerged. An enemy strong enough to bring even the most resolute to their knees. What could this scourge be, you ask?

Creamsicle fudge.  <Shudder>

I am sad to say that I was completely powerless in the face of creamsicle fudge.

Well, so be it. Now, thank goodness, it’s back to my regular eating routine. Yes, yes, New Year’s Eve is still on the horizon, but I will celebrate at home and keep the calories to a minimum. Thankfully, the dreaded Christmas Cookie Monster is now settling his head for a long winter’s nap. Whew!

What did you say? We're having a Second Christmas?

Oh no.

The Darkness and the Light

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted very much recently. It’s not that anything has been wrong or that I’ve been too busy. The truth is that I’ve been stuck in an emotional stew of my own making, a muck of petty complaints and minor annoyances. I suppose we all have our pet grievances and that we all get mired in them from time to time. I had decided to just give myself a little space to find a way out of that darkness, but I got jolted out of my funk pretty quickly after learning of the elementary school shooting on Friday in Connecticut.

I have no intention of going off-topic to talk about that tragedy other than to say it made me realize how much I have to be thankful for. By that statement I’m not saying that my life suddenly became problem-free, just that I see my problems in a different light.

Like my struggle with the food culture. When I took on the challenge of managing my weight six years ago, I thought it was simply about diet and exercise. I figured I’d have to develop a few new habits. I had no idea how it would disrupt my life, that I’d have to develop new habits and new ways of thinking about absolutely everything, that sometimes it would feel like I was at complete odds with everyone around me. I could never have foreseen myself agonizing over whether I should go to an office holiday party (which I did not go to by the way). I could never have pictured how stressful the thought of Christmas cookies could be. Or how bent out of shape I would be that the vision I had of life after weight loss would be so far from the reality of it.

Yet, seen from my new perspective, the upset fades away. This is about my health. It’s a worthy fight. So if someone doesn’t understand why I choose not to eat something, all it means is that they don’t understand. If someone can’t offer me support in the way I need it, all it means is that they can’t offer support in the way I need it. If someone thinks I’m too rigid or picky about my food choices, all it means is that we disagree. If sticking to the diet and exercise routine that keeps my weight in check is hard, perhaps things worth doing should be hard.

None of us gets everything we wished for. With rare exception, that is not a tragedy. It is life. It only took me fifty-five years to figure that out. Better late than never!

Party On Dude!

There is a decision that I have to make. It should be an easy one, but I’m finding it surprisingly hard. The question is: should I go to my office holiday party?

I’ve always gone to my office holiday party. In past years, the custom was that we all went out to lunch at a restaurant. Each of us ordered our meal from a pre-determined menu and it was a sure bet that one of the choices would be something salad-y. This year, for reasons too convoluted to get into here, the plans are different. This year, the party organizers decided to have the lunch brought in. The way it was explained to me was that we would have a local restaurant cater the party. I thought this was a good idea.

Until I saw the menu.

The menu for our holiday party this year is pizza and wings. This is not what I picture when I hear the words “catered lunch.” Don’t get me wrong. I like pizza and wings. A lot. And I don’t want to eat pizza and wings. A lot.

A few have already told me not to make a big deal about it. After all, it’s just one meal. I can eat one piece of pizza and suck it up for sake of the group. Even though I love pizza and will need supreme levels of willpower to eat just one piece.

Sigh.

The holidays are such a minefield for the formerly fat. The way I’ve been dealing with them is to eat like everyone else on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day, gain the inevitable two to four pounds, and then labor (alone I might add) with losing those pounds afterwards. It’s not an ideal approach, but it allows me to enjoy some time with family and friends without feeling like the big killjoy. On other days, I tow the diet line as much as possible. Including at the office holiday party. You see, my plan includes two days of diet debacle, not three. You might say that I’m being awfully rigid. To that I say, welcome to life after a large weight loss.

Here’s the other thing. I keep wondering why it is that I have to make all of the accommodations? Why can’t we meet halfway? I eat some of your gooey Christmas creations and you make a couple less fattening dishes? Would that be so crazy?

So, should I go to the party or not? If I go, I will either eat too much stuff I shouldn’t or I will spend the entire time struggling to avoid eating too much stuff I shouldn’t. If I don’t go, maybe some co-workers will be bothered, but then again, maybe they won’t. Here’s the real question: whose needs matter the most?

I’ll let you know.

'Tis the Season

Another Thanksgiving under the belt! Literally. All in all, it was a good day. To be expected, I ate too much and even gained a couple pounds. I feel at peace with that though because it was only a couple pounds and I know I can lose those before the next big holiday food debacle.

As I’m sure you know, Thanksgiving, or to be more precise, Black Friday, kicks off the big holiday gift shopping season. For the last few days I’ve felt bombarded with ads imploring me to buy, buy, buy! It seems somewhat ironic that the orgy of eating that is Turkey Day should be followed as a matter of course by an orgy of shopping. It makes me wonder what it is about our culture that glorifies extreme consumption and makes us always crave more, whether that means a bigger, gooier cheeseburger or a bigger, flashier flat screen television.

We even define ourselves this way, as consumers. If you look up the word ‘consume’ in the dictionary, it has several meanings, some of which have to do with eating, drinking and generally enjoying something. But the word can also mean to be used up or destroyed, as in the sense of being consumed in a fire, for example. I find this very interesting.

There are many ways to think about the act of eating. You can eat to live or live to eat. Food can be something to have fun with or a chore to prepare. And yes, you can be a consumer of food, eat it, enjoy it, use it up. It seems to me that if your eating-mindset can be defined by the word consumption, then you are most likely in the moment, enjoying the taste or how a food makes you feel. You are probably not thinking about what the food might give you in return, whether that means something good (i.e., vitamins and minerals) or something not so good (i.e., saturated fat or refined sugar).

You could also think about eating as nourishment. Nourishment is defined as something that sustains and aids in growth. If you are eating to nourish yourself, then you are definitely thinking about what the food will give you in return, both in terms of immediate nutrients and long-term health. This may sound preachy, like I’m using the simple act of eating as a way to pass some kind of culinary moral judgment, but that would be pretty foolish of me considering I’ve spent way more of my eating life in consumption mode than in nourishment mode. Let’s just say it’s something to think about.

Sometimes, like on Thanksgiving, I think enjoying a meal that would be considered excessive under normal circumstances could be nourishing. To occasionally cut loose with those we love is good for us, physically, emotionally and spiritually; to eat that way every day is another matter. It’s hard to make that distinction when everything around you is screaming buy, buy, buy! Eat, eat, eat!

In the end, the best advice I can give is this. Consumer beware.

Let The Eating Begin!

Thanksgiving is almost here! If there is one holiday that sums up our food culture perfectly, this would be it. It is a day expressly designed for conspicuous overconsumption of a plethora of “goodies” that are not so good for us. Oh sure, Halloween has candy and Christmas has cookies, but Thanksgiving has it all! It is a mother lode of mashed-up, carb-laden delight, with all manner of potatoes and squashes and stuffings, whose main reason for existence is to soak up copious amounts of butter, cream and greasy drippings. And don’t forget the signature dessert of the day, pumpkin pie, but also the runners-up, apple and mincemeat, no calorie slouches themselves. Even normally healthy foods are not safe on this annual homage to gluttony. Consider the plight of the noble green bean, the poster child of food that is good for you, yet on this day it seems it must be smothered with cream of mushroom soup and crispy fried onions.

Thanksgiving was tough for me during the first few years of maintenance. Even at times when I was doing fairly well distinguishing the concept of nourishment from all of the other meanings I had assigned to food, on that one day it seemed that no matter what, food was love, food was family, food was belonging, and if I couldn’t eat all that stuff, I was alone and forlorn. I did manage to get past that, thank goodness. The last few years, what has worked best is to just be conscious and avoid a total pig-out. Being conscious means that I don’t eat something just because it’s there. Avoiding a pig-out means that I only take a second helping if it’s something I truly love.

Recently, we’ve decided to share the cooking duties for my family’s celebration. My mother does the turkey and mashed potatoes, my sister-in-law does desserts and appetizers, and I do the side dishes. This has actually been a great thing because I get to have fun with vegetables – you all know how much I love vegetables! The first year we did this, I made my favorite cold green bean salad. This recipe is nothing like the green bean and mushroom soup dish I mentioned above. It’s full of crisp veggies and fresh herbs, with a lemon vinaigrette dressing. Before I made it for Thanksgiving, I had thought of it as a summer dish, but it worked quite well for the holidays and so now I make it for Thanksgiving every year. Last year, I experimented with roasted Brussels sprouts. Another big hit. So much so that I’m going to add roasted cauliflower to the side dish menu this year. Having something delicious and lower-calorie on the table is a big help to keep the meal satisfying without risking a big weight gain.

All that said, I will still probably eat too much on Thanksgiving. I will also probably gain a couple pounds. The thought of that used to make me crazy because I equated gaining a couple pounds with regaining the entire hundred pounds that I lost. Now I know that as long as I get right on those couple pounds, I’ll be okay. You could say that this realization is something I give thanks for.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Talking Turkey

It’s hard to put my finger on it, but something feels different. We’re just a little over a week away from Thanksgiving and I should be a nervous wreck by now, worrying about what I will eat, how much weight I will gain, how agonizing it will be to resist the tantalizing delights that will be placed before me. The reason I think I should be a basket case is because this is how it has been for me since losing one hundred pounds. Yet, none of those thoughts has surfaced. What I have been thinking is that I will eat enough to feel satisfied, maybe a bit more than I should (whatever “should” means), and life will go on. If I do gain a few pounds, I’ll just buckle down and lose them in the weeks following the holiday.

Why the shift? Well, my weight is in the low end of my range right now. Being lighter always reduces my worries about regaining. I suspect it may also have something to do with the fact that I’m approaching the five-year anniversary of maintaining my goal weight. In all of my past attempts to manage my considerable tonnage, I’ve never kept it off this long. My usual pattern has been to lose big and then gain it all back in a year or two. But this time, I’ve somehow beaten the abysmal odds that a newly slender person faces. So perhaps I feel a bit more confidence in my ability to keep Inner Fat Girl at bay, knowing of course that the trick is to avoid over-confidence.

Yet I don’t think any of that completely explains my lack of angst. There’s something else going on inside my head. I’ve talked a lot in this blog about the food culture that surrounds us. What I haven’t talked about as much is the food culture that lives inside us. By this I don’t mean food neuroses or anxieties, or family food traditions, but rather the beliefs we hold about food as it applies to each of us individually. Like my past conviction that I could not resist York Peppermint Patties – or anything with a name that began “Ben and Jerry’s…” And my current view that high-carb fare is a deadly foe. Perhaps those notions are fading away, replaced by a new belief system that holds among its articles of faith that food is not a Lorelei, beautiful, seductive, enticing me towards certain destruction, but rather that eating is a way to take care of myself. Something to be savored and enjoyed. Maybe even (ya think?) that I’m in charge, not the chocolate.

Could it be that everything I’ve held true about eating is not so much false as it is merely the way I’ve chosen to understand food?

If I get to choose, then there is hope for the future.

Outside Looking In

It’s been my experience that if you’re a person who has a tendency to put on weight easily, for whatever reason, and you lose a lot of weight, by whatever method, you really don’t have a creamsicles’s chance in hell of keeping it off unless you get outside of the food culture. Oh sure, there are other hurdles to overcome, such as dealing with your body’s sensitivity to certain kinds of foods, or understanding the destructive eating habits you’ve developed over a lifetime, but the kicker for me has been food culture. Getting outside of that culture involves many challenges. I’ve had to confront the force of habit and belief, at a micro-scale that is excruciating, as I decide, meal by meal, bite by bite, what I will and will not eat every single day. But at its heart, getting outside of the food culture is about much more than what you decide to consume. At its most elemental, it’s about relationships.

Some of my fondest childhood memories are of times when my family sat around a table and shared a meal, at big holiday celebrations, but also on typical nights, talking about what happened at school that day over my mother’s famous creations, Swedish meatballs over egg noodles, sauerbraten and red cabbage, or ground beef and potato casserole. There were also times with my friends, when we went out for soft ice cream cones and Cokes, or later, pizza and beer. Those foods are forever linked in my mind with feeling connected to people I care about. Now that I stand outside of the food culture, I often feel adrift and alone. It’s a lot like looking in a window, watching a group of people having a big party, and I can’t find a way to get in. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a tragedy, it’s just disconcerting.

The medical establishment seems to be working hard at developing treatments for obesity, but there’s a defect in their method. They keep focusing on the individual out of the cultural context. In my opinion, no weight-loss drug, no diet, no “healthy living” program will solve the obesity puzzle until we address the disruption in kinship that a person experiences when they lose a lot of weight. The urge to be part of a caring community is so strong that if being slender means losing connectedness, it should be no surprise if regaining the weight seems the lesser evil. How I’ve managed to cope with this, I’m not really sure, but then I have been a bit of a loner for most of my life. I’ve always thought of that as a personal flaw – who knew it might have an advantage!

Simply put, we don’t eat in a vacuum, we eat in community. I believe that until we fully accept the role of culture in our struggles with weight, we will continue to struggle to find a solution that most people can live with.

Candyland

It’s Halloween and there is candy in the house! By candy I mean: York Peppermint Patties.

Six years ago, before the start of my most recent weight loss effort, I was powerless against York Peppermint Patties. When I got home tonight and discovered that my husband had bought a bag of them to pass out to trick-or-treaters, I experienced a moment of panic. Would my living room be the scene of a candy apocalypse later tonight? Especially as we have yet to welcome a costumed visitor at our door.

Truth alert. I’ve already sampled the bag. Two patties to be exact. Did they taste good? Um, yes. And no. The peppermint rush was intoxicating, but they were awfully sweet. As in awful. I’m not so sure I want to eat another.

No one ever talked to me about maintenance in all the years I struggled with my weight. When I reached my goal weight five years ago, after a year-plus of dieting, I had no idea what lay ahead. Was I doomed to a life in which I would need to exercise endless willpower and engage in an on-going battle against feelings of deprivation? Or, would I undergo a miraculous transformation at some point, where eating a healthy diet would become effortless, joyful even? So far, it’s been something in between. There have been days of agony and days of peace and days of edgy calm before the storm.

At this moment I am at ease. The York Peppermint Patties have not whispered in my ear tonight. I think that maybe the accumulation of habit over the last five years is starting to work in my favor. Perhaps my expectations have changed too, in that I no longer look to food to make everything all right. Getting from there to here has been a bit dicey at times, but here I am and I’m glad of it.

No one can tell a newly slender person with any degree of certainty how to embark upon weight maintenance. You have to make the journey on your own. Oh sure, I can give you my story, but your story will probably be different. All I can say is find support wherever you can and hang in there. If you do, you will eventually find what works for you. It’s worth it, even if it takes a long time.

For most of the last five years I’ve felt like a fat person in a thin person costume, but I’m beginning to get a glimpse of a land off in the distance where that’s not so anymore.

Take that York Peppermint Patties!

Hurricane Sandy

Last week was very busy (traveling for work and evening activities every night I was home) and I had little time for any kind of online life. This week I have all my fingers and toes crossed, hoping that Hurricane Sandy doesn’t live up to her hype, as I seem to be living right in her path. Of course, all my friends and family have been having a field day with the fact that this storm has the same name as I do.

Listening to my name being used over and over again in reference to a hurricane reminded me of something someone once said about me. It was probably fifteen years ago and I was speaking with a woman I met in a course I was taking at the time. She said that in the short time she had known me, she had come to think of me as “Silent Storm.” As in calm, cool and collected on the outside, hurricane-force emotion on the inside. I did a double-take when she said that, not because I was taken aback at such an uncommonly honest statement, but because I realized in the moment that it was true.

Could it be that much of the agony of the last five years, as I’ve struggled to master what’s necessary to maintain my weight loss, has been about that “Silent Storm”? Would all of this be easier if I found a way to shut off that voice of swirling panic and doom in my head? Knowing that you’re doing it to yourself is both good and bad. Good because you have some measure of control and can actually do something about it. Bad because it involves delving into your psyche. In my experience, psyches do not take kindly to being delved into.

Hurricane Sandy will unleash her wrath on us in the next few days and then go away. If only my inner Hurricane Sandy would do the same.

The Stuff of Life

At the root of all of our beliefs about food is a simple idea: Food is Good. Food is literally good in the sense that it keeps us alive. It should be no surprise that the thing that makes our lives literally possible should develop so many positive associations, becoming synonymous with things like celebration. Love. Giving to others. You could say that food is the original joie de vivre.

Back in the day, before such triumphal creations as Hot Pockets, food was a simple pleasure. This was a time when the term “food manufacturer” meant a farmer. When the vegetables you ate came from your garden, or the farm stand down the road. When a milkman (and they were all men!) delivered milk to your doorstep in glass bottles, each with a thick layer of cream rising to the top. When you couldn’t wait for summer because that was when you could buy fresh peaches again after a long, dreary winter without. Food was local and seasonal, and because you couldn’t have anything you wanted at any given moment, you really appreciated the rare occasions when you had that special treat.

Big Food changed all of that. First off, modern refrigeration and transportation techniques have allowed us to have peaches (or strawberries!) in January, even in places such as where I live in upstate New York. And second, we got “improved” flavors. I put that word in quotation marks because what I mean by “improvement” is that lots of fats and sugars and salts were added to products to create über-flavors, SO appetizing, SO delectable, SO scrumptious, that mere food in its natural state could not compete. We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being able to indulge in any food we crave at any given moment (and we do crave them because they have been designed to be irresistible), yet these same foods (full of fat, sugar, salt and preservatives) do not promote good health and may even be making us sick.

In reading my recent posts, I’ve noticed something else about all this. As much as I talk about all the foods that tempt and taunt me, it doesn’t seem that I see food as a good thing. More than merely lamenting that I can no longer indulge in my favorite guilty pleasures, I seem to be caught up in the messy business of untangling myself from a painful and addictive pattern of eating, where food is the devil on my left shoulder, enticing me to allow my Inner Fat Girl to reemerge. In other words, food does not bring me joy and pleasure, the stuff of a good life; it brings only one of two equally disagreeable states: 1) deprivation, when I deny myself the foods that made me fat; or 2) brief moments of respite, when I allow myself to eat with abandon, followed by the inevitable weight gain and its constant companions, shame and self-condemnation. Rather than embracing food as good and life-preserving, I guard against it to protect myself from harm.

How did my ideas about food become so perverted? I’ve realized that staying at this lower weight is probably not sustainable if I continue in a state of mind that treats food as something dangerous. But I’m not sure how to flip the switch to a more positive outlook, where food is both a good thing and a healthy thing. I had some successes recently by staying away from “improved” foods – my “anti-sweetener” experiment for example – but it’s still a work in progress.

And I guess I just have to keep working on it.

Mystery Lunch

Do you believe that eating should be spontaneous? By this I mean, you notice it is 11:55 AM and this observation prompts you to ask, “Gee, what should I have for lunch today?”

I am rarely spontaneous about eating. You could say that I plan my meals, but that would be an understatement. A more accurate description would be that I have an ironclad lock on my meals. Be it breakfast, lunch or dinner –even snacks – the form and content of my daily intake is rigidly prescribed. I follow detailed nutritional guidelines that my nutritionist has laid out for me and I also limit all foods that I have found to be problematic.  Essentially, I eat the same stuff, in the same way, day after day. I follow these rules when I go out to restaurants too– and it is often quite a feat to fit restaurant meals into anything resembling a diet friendly to keeping lost weight at bay.

Yet though I keep this strict daily discipline, I’m beginning to think that, deep-down, I believe eating should be spontaneous. This could explain why I get so agitated at things like surprise Boss’s Day celebrations. Yes, it was over the top, but there was fresh fruit and I could have eaten that without any damage to my weight maintenance efforts. It’s true that I would have had to endure the indignity of passing by vast quantities of sugary baked goods, sorely testing my willpower, in order to reach the fruit, but here’s the real thing: I had already eaten my allotment of fruit for the morning and I was determined not to disrupt my eating plan for the day. If that sounds anal and absurdly inflexible, well, I can see how you might see it that way.

Let’s look at this in a larger context, i.e. my entire life before 2007. Before I embarked on my final weight loss undertaking, the only way I ate was spontaneously. At any given moment, I had no idea what my next meal would look like; I consumed whatever was easy and whatever was there. The result of this practice was that I ate very few vegetables or fruits and copious amounts of bread, pasta, cheese and junk food. It’s no wonder that I eventually topped out at 253 pounds. Part of the task of the last six years has been learning to put some sanity and structure into my eating regimen.

But is it too much? Have I gone too far? I can’t answer that question other than to say that where my pre-weight-loss habits made me feel scared and out of control, my new habits give me a measure of comfort, even when they make for awkward social situations like what happened at the Boss’s Day celebration. I’m not yet confident enough to loosen the grip on my diet. If I did, I fear that my Inner Fat Girl would seize the opportunity to mount an offensive and regain lost territory as I regained lost weight.

You can never be too careful wherever Inner Fat Girl is concerned.

Breakfast!

Here was the scene that greeted me when I came into work this morning:

 What you are seeing is a spread, approximately ten feet long, of every type of baked good under the sun. There were cookies, donuts, brownies, muffins and strudel. There was an especially crumbly, flaky, sticky little pastry whose name I could not quite recall. The shiny items towards the end of the lineup were bagels of every variety, with abundant cream cheese and butter. The inspiration for all of this was the celebration of National Boss Day.

I have to admit that I was a bit scared when I saw this baked goods blowout. The very foods that have been my life-long nemeses were laid out in front of me, beckoning.  One of my co-workers said, “Sandy, have something to eat!” When I demurred, saying that I couldn’t eat those kinds of things, she said, “Oh, come on, one little piece won’t hurt!” Hmm, where have I heard that before? But then came the kicker. When I replied, thanks, but I think I’ll pass, she said, “We got fruit salad, you can have that.”

Sigh.

Yes, I can have fruit salad. I like fruit salad. And I’m sure that the intent behind this breakfast bonanza was genuinely well-intentioned, an expression of caring and camaraderie. But, forgive me for saying this, it seemed particularly cruel to ask a former fat girl to pass through a gauntlet of ganache on the way to the lonely bowl of mixed fruit. It’s kinda like inviting a recovering alcoholic to a wine tasting, telling them not to worry, we got you a carton of grape juice.

In my last post, I talked about how our culture seduces us with non-stop food porn. As my experience this morning shows, it’s not just the mass media, it’s us too. We do it to ourselves. A person who has lost a lot of weight, and who wants to keep it off, has to deal with this daily assault on the culinary senses. It’s one of the main reasons that so many people regain in my opinion. To add insult to injury, the companion paradigm is that obesity is a personal problem. So we surround the newly slender person with temptation at every turn, and when they finally cave, it’s their own fault! Then we wring our hands, wondering if we’ll ever find a way to help obese people conquer this problem. It’s positively diabolical. And by keeping obesity an object of personal shame, we never have to look at the milieu that fuels it.

By the way, if you’re wondering how my office adventure ended, I didn’t eat anything. My willpower prevailed. And I felt like a complete and total schmuck.

But a thin schmuck.

Pampering Ourselves

Did you ever notice how when we talk about pampering ourselves, if is often code for a high calorie food indulgence? Our food culture has been infused by the idea that doing something nice for yourself means eating chocolate or ice cream or a big bowl of pasta in a (pick one) cream/cheese/butter sauce. I know that this was certainly how I related to food for most of my life. As in: tough day? Well why don’t you curl up on the couch with a big scoop (or three) of Cherry Garcia? Go ahead, you deserve it!

I was thinking about this very subject today. I had the day off from work and it occurred to me that it was time I had a real day off. Not just a day away from the office, but a DAY OFF. After all, I work hard. I deserve some downtime. As I contemplated what a DAY OFF looked like, I imagined myself sleeping late, skipping my usual exercise routine and eating whatever gooey thing I damn well pleased. But then it hit me – that’s not being nice to myself. That’s slipping back into old familiar habits, habits that resulted in my weight topping out at a whopping 250 pounds. And 250 pounds is not a good place for me to be. If I really wanted to take care of me, I should embrace the luxury of having the time for a long, leisurely run, and later to be able to linger over a salad at lunch. Which is what I finally decided to do.

Yet, I continue to struggle with the concept. And the culture around me doesn’t help much. I ran across an article recently that pretty much sums it up. We are constantly surrounded by media images that distort our perceptions of eating. Why wouldn’t you feel deprived eating a small piece of grilled chicken and a salad for dinner when you have been hypnotized by up close and intimate shots of creamy Olive Garden Chicken Alfredo (a mere 1440 calories and 82 grams of fat)? We have been sold on the belief that this is not excess, or something to eat only for a special (and rare) occasion, but that it’s normal. What we should expect. What we deserve. Every day.

It’s been hard to clear all this crap out of my head. I’ve been working on it, really working on it, for five years now and still this nonsense won’t give up the ghost. I have to keep reminding myself of the good stuff. How my back doesn’t hurt as much anymore now that I’m lighter. How nice it is to walk up several flights of stairs without getting winded. How much I enjoy the adrenaline rush at the end of a long run. On a bad day, I see the effort required to achieve these pleasures as a chore, an affliction visited upon me by the Evil Gods of Fat. But when I am thinking clearly, I realize that every bite of broccoli is actually a small gift of health that I give to myself.

And I deserve it.

Chowmageddon

I continue to enjoy this all too brief respite from The Pigs that early fall provides. It actually occurred to me that I should try to use this food-breather to get my weight down a few pounds in preparation for the Chowmageddon that starts with Thanksgiving and doesn’t let up until after New Year’s. If I can roll into our annual National Olympics of Power Eating a bit on the light side, perhaps the inevitable five pound gain won’t be so onerous.

I keep wondering why we are so prone to pig out during the holidays anyways. I don’t think it’s just that we are tempted by the standard-bearers of the season, the pumpkin and pecan pies, the dizzying arrays of Christmas cookies, those little cocktail wieners that wiggle their way into every holiday party.  Or that the shorter days and falling temperatures make us crave warm, carby comfort food. Or even that it’s family tradition, you know, how Thanksgiving isn’t really Thanksgiving unless you have your mother’s green bean casserole with cream of mushroom soup and crispy onions. It’s something more elemental. In my opinion, it’s a case of pure entitlement.

Okay, entitlement is a big political buzzword these days, but I’m talking about something slightly different. We don’t demand sweet potatoes with tiny marshmallows as if they were our American birthright along with Social Security, Medicare and endless episodes of Reality TV. It’s more that if we can’t have our guilty pleasure, if we have to eat something <gasp> healthy, like roast turkey breast without gravy, we feel slighted. Duped. Cheated.  It’s not fair. It’s not right. It’s not the holidays.

I am not immune from this phenomenon. As much as I worry about all the fat and sugar-laden fare I will encounter between late November and early January, I have to admit that I have prepared some of those dishes – and will do so again. In other words, I have been the agent of my own demise. Why am I so attached to a Norman Rockwell picture of holiday celebration, an image that’s not only idealized but, if we are honest, completely unrealistic? And while I’m asking questions, tell me, why does apple pie, oozing sugar in a buttery crust, say Thanksgiving in a way that a simple baked apple does not?

But, you say, apple pie tastes better than a plain apple. Well, taste is a subjective thing. Since last June, I’ve been running an experiment – I’ve stopped eating foods that are sweetened. The sweetest thing I eat now is an orange with breakfast. The first thing I noticed was that my appetite calmed down. Way down. It was quite astonishing how much the simple lack of sweetness in my diet decreased my desire to eat. After four months of this, not only have I stopped craving sweets, but when I occasionally do eat something very sweet, it seems odd and over the top.

I suppose that back in the bad old days, when food was scarce and a person might have to subsist on nothing but turnips for extended periods, the occasional bit of something sweet (or creamy, or salty) was cause for celebration. Perhaps even something deserved, if you consider the harshness of the rest of their lives. Our prehistoric ancestors may have passed that sense of entitlement onto us and we still live it, especially when the first cold weather descends, even though we can order Pizza Hut Stuffed-Crust Pizza and Cinnamon Sticks any night of the week.

Well, that’s a nice story, but it doesn’t solve my problem, does it? My first idea, to lose some weight before the holiday madness begins, may be the best strategy for now. Chowmageddon is a mighty force, stronger than kryptonite even, and I’m not taking any chances.

My Big Fat Stereotype

Whenever I write about my internal struggles due to being a weight-challenged person, I always wonder whether I am playing into cultural stereotypes about overweight people. For example, if I talk about my past emotional eating habits, do I somehow give credence to the idea that fat people are out of control around food? If I share the unhelpful voices that bounce around in my head, do I reinforce a belief that obese people are somehow psychologically deficient?

Yet, if I hold those things back, do I risk doing just as big a disservice? I firmly believe that a major reason so many people fail at maintaining a large weight loss is because we are not honest enough about what is required, not just physically but emotionally and spiritually even. Consider that you have to change your entire way of life, as well as learn to co-exist in a cheeseburger and cookie-obsessed world.  And as if all that were not hard enough, you also have to deal with whatever inner demons you have about food. That’s real no matter what someone else might think about it.

What about those inner demons? I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: I don’t think there is a person alive who isn’t a little squirrelly about something. Some of us are prone to road rage. Some of us have been known to shop compulsively. Some of us are addicted to Honey Boo Boo. And some of us have a nutty relationship with food. In other words, we are all blessed with our own distinctive dark side. It’s like that 1980s movie “Ghostbusters,” you know, the part where Gozer the Gozerian says, “Choose the form of the Destructor!” How we cling to our Destructors!

So, yes, I am a little crazy about eating. Just as other people are crazy about something else. But here’s the thing: I was not one-hundred pounds overweight because I’m a little unhinged when it comes to food. My experience convinces me that being one-hundred pounds overweight is the result of multiple causes, physical, mental, and cultural. If I were to magically erase all of my inner food-madness, I would still have to deal with my genetics, my biology and my family’s propensity for Christmas cookie overload.

All of which leads me to the conclusion that I may as well let all of my mental baggage hang out. If that causes someone to judge me (or overweight people in general) in a negative light, well, okay. You could look at it another way though. You see, surviving as a fat person in a world that denigrates you for being heavy takes a lot of strength and courage and grit. It makes you resilient. Tough. Tenacious.

Stereotype that.

The Food Whisperer

One thing I’ve learned writing this blog is that I will never be short for topics to write about as long as that little voice in my head never stops blabbering. I know you know what I’m talking about because we all have that little voice. I suppose it’s possible that other people experience it differently, but for me, that voice is mostly a scold. Every day she tells me that I’m not good enough. Not good enough for what, you ask? Whatever it is I just did, am doing or am planning to do, that’s what! No detail, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, escapes the purview of my inner shrew.

As you might guess, Little Miss Picky is quite a food critic. She is extremely opinionated also, at ease with passing judgment on every morsel to pass my lips. To make matters worse, she has a photographic memory and provides me with vivid images of the less than stellar food choices in my past. She seems to delight in reminding me of those many nights, too many to count, spent on the couch with a comforting bowl of macaroni, butter and cheese. Or the endless broken promises, the times I swore that I would eat just a few potato chips, only to realize later that I had eaten the whole bag in a salt-induced frenzy. Even when I’ve done well by any objective standard, eaten in a way that is low-fat and chock full of fresh fruits and vegetables, even then my inner nag won’t shut up. She points out that the piece of grilled chicken I ate today was a bit large, wasn’t it?  Was there a piece of skin left on it? You do know how much fat is in chicken skin, don’t you? It’s enough to drive a girl insane.

This is the main reason that I am skeptical about whether mindful eating could work for me. I’m afraid it might be playing right into Little Miss Picky’s hands. I can picture it, my new health-conscious self trying to get in touch with nascent cravings for leafy salads dressed with lemon vinaigrette, when the old finger-wagger butts in and says, “You really think you crave salad? Ha! That’ll be the day!” And then, after she finishes humiliating me, she turns on the charm, cooing softly in my ear, “Don’t feel bad honey. Just have a big square of that nice, gooey, cheesy lasagna.” Yes, she does seem a bit bi-polar at times.

Before I started losing weight, I thought the change was all about my body, but I’ve discovered it’s really been more about my head. Even though establishing new diet and exercise habits has been hard, it’s been a cinch compared to establishing new beliefs and attitudes about food. And so far, I haven’t silenced Little Miss Picky, I’ve just become more adept at ignoring her. I look forward to that day when she gets tired of being snubbed and decides to go torture someone else.

By the way, Little Miss Picky has a comment on this post. She says she can’t leave because she’s not really a voice in my head, but a part of me that I refuse to recognize. Oh boy, she’s pretty devious, isn’t she?

Fear of Flying

For most of my life, I was on automatic pilot when it came to eating. That doesn’t mean I didn’t think about food. The truth is, I thought about food all the time, but here’s the catch: I didn’t allow any of those thoughts into the space between the impulse to eat (call it the itch) and actual eating (call it the scratch). As soon as the vague notion of, say, cheddar cheese made itself known, I simply went right to the fridge and got myself a chunk. Or two. Or six. In the thirty seconds it took for me to accomplish that culinary dash, no brain cells were required to break a sweat.

The last five years have been the opposite of autopilot. I’ve found that I’ve needed to rethink just about everything having to do with food, every day, every meal, every minute. To be honest, it’s been exhausting and I often wonder whether this is something I can continue to sustain for the long term. The one thing that keeps me going, believe it or not, is my complete disdain for clothes shopping. It’s a habit developed, I suppose, from decades of being unable to find nice clothing in my size. Yet even now that I have many choices of outfits that fit and look good on me, I still find clothes shopping to be a chore. The thought of having to go out and buy a new and larger size wardrobe is a powerful incentive to stay on the straight and narrow.

It occurred to me recently that perhaps a large part of the stress of the last five years has been due to a belief that I should be able to develop a new kind of autopilot. In this healthier version of mindless eating, I train myself to eat sparingly and replace those cheddar cheese cravings with longings for broccoli. Peaches. Perfectly poached filets of salmon. For some reason I have this idea that eating should a natural impulse, something I should not have to think about. It should as simple as itch, scratch. I often wonder if other people who struggle with weight feel that way. Doesn’t it seem preposterous that such a simple act as eating should require so much forethought and planning?

I’ve been reading a lot lately about mindful eating. This concept seems to exist somewhere in the middle of the continuum between autopilot and the obsessive-compulsive dance I’ve been doing with food. As I understand it, mindful eating is about being more aware of the messages your body is sending and then acting on those messages. Such as eating when you feel hungry and not eating when you don’t. Being in tune with how some foods make you feel good and others make you sick, or jittery, or fatigued. It sounds like a good idea, but I don’t know that I have what it would take to pull it off. It seems that mindful eating would require the ability to relax and silence that infernal voice in my head, skills that are not among my strong points.

Well, I guess we each have our own path and our own struggle. For now, I just have to muddle through the transition as best I can, hoping that maybe someday I’ll be able to sit down and enjoy a meal without so much angst and premeditation.

Then again, maybe not.

The Adventures of Diet Wonder Woman

Every time I talk about how difficult it is to maintain a large weight loss, someone inevitably tells me not to worry, that things will get easier. I suppose time will tell, but I’m not as optimistic as those around me seem to be. And why should I be? When I consider my genetics, a lifetime of bad habits and the general culture of food working against me, it’s a wonder I’ve been able to pull it off at all.

It is a tempting vision though. I imagine myself as a healthy eating super-hero, who knows intuitively the perfect food for my body at any given moment, and more importantly, who is immune to the allure of the gooey, cheesy, chocolaty devils that perpetually plague we women of a certain weight. If it sounds too good to be true, that’s probably because it is. For just as every Superman must have his kryptonite, the substance against which he is powerless, so must every Diet Wonder Woman have her double-fudge brownie sundae. But no matter, I am no super-hero. I’m just a girl who used to be fat and who has somehow managed to fool Mother Nature for about five years now.

Here’s a question. If all of this did get easier, would my life be better? Would I be happier? Or would I just find something else to get all worked up about? I sometimes think that I’m not really obsessed with food, but rather, I’m obsessed with being obsessed with something. I may have replaced worrying about my ever increasing weight with worrying about why it is that I can’t go to a business seminar without being assaulted by copious amounts of bread and macaroni salad at lunch. What if I stopped expecting my eating life to be a cinch and adopted a more detached stance? As in, oh look, someone at work brought in brownies. Again. How interesting.

What if this is all about entitlement? I was reading Debby’s post the other day about counting as it relates to food intake and it struck me like a thunderbolt. You see, if I get to the end of the day and realize that I haven’t eaten everything I’m allowed to eat, I make sure I eat whatever is missing, whether I’m hungry or not. Because I can. Because I’m entitled to eat it. Because it’s not right if I get less than I’m allotted. It’s almost like I’m six again and raging because I think one of my little brothers got a bigger piece of cake. How dare they get a larger slice! It’s not fair I tell you! Not fair at all!

It all comes back to this, doesn’t it? On the outside, I may look like a competent adult who’s got her act together, yet that’s not quite a complete picture. It’s true that I hold down a responsible job. And I own a house, I vote, I pay my taxes and do all those other things that grown-ups are wont to do. But perhaps I’m still that little girl who is pissed because she suspects she might have gotten a raw deal. She just wanted her cake and size ten pants too. Is that too much to ask?

The main thing I’ve learned in the last five years is that nothing is what it seems. You think it’s just about learning how to eat better, how to take care of your body better, and suddenly you find your entire psyche up for grabs. Not easy. Not even close.

Hey, is there a super-hero in the house?

All In

Why is it that, when it comes to eating a healthy diet, we are either all in or all out? And I include myself in that statement. It seems that there can be no middle ground in our quest for the right way to nourish ourselves. We believe that we must not only eat the foods that are optimal for human health, whether you define that as low-fat, low-carb, ancestral, or some other approach, but we must eat them 100% of the time, without fail. If one stray cookie, one spoonful of Rocky Road, one slurp of pasta crosses our lips, then all bets are off and all hell must break loose. We’ve failed. We were weak. It was inevitable. Everyone knows that diets don’t work in the long run, right? Might as well just have brownies slathered in bacon grease for the rest of the day.

This describes what goes on in my head a fair amount of the time. I am forever berating myself for some dietary slip. And I can really take it to a scary place when I get going. A serving of grilled chicken that is five ounces when my nutritionist says it should be three? Off to the gallows with her! So you can imagine how bad it gets inside my cranium if I eat a piece of cake at an office birthday party. Or have a potato and a slice of bread with dinner in a restaurant. It’s a regular horror show.

Sigh. So exhausting. Why do I do this? Surely it should be possible to eat a generally healthy diet most of the time with an occasional “bad” food thrown in. Surely eating one slice of pie at Thanksgiving should not have to mean that it’s all been for naught and now I should just quietly accept that I have to regain the hundred pounds that I lost. I say “surely” in a desperate attempt to convince myself, by the way. What makes this whole thing so terrifying for me is that each time I eat one of those “bad” foods, I see the effect on the scale immediately.

I wonder if this is one of the reasons why so many people are unable to maintain a large weight loss. If you embark on a new healthy lifestyle, which will necessarily feel strange and somewhat foreign at first, and you think you have to do it perfectly, with nary a misstep, then what do you do when the first lapse occurs? If you’re trapped in the “all in, all out” mind frame, you might decide to give up. I’ll be honest here. There have been many times in the last five years when I’ve been tempted to give up. The little voice in my head says things like, “It’s too hard.” “You’re too busy to spend all this time fussing over food.” “Relax, it’s only a cookie.”

One of the reasons why I write this blog is to answer that ninny in my brain. Slap her up the side of the head even. Yes, it’s hard, but “too” hard? Yes, I’m busy, all the more reason to stay healthy. Yes, it’s only a cookie, but remember that one cookie often leads to another. That dialog is what saves me – even if it means that I have to spend a lot of time talking to myself. Another way to look at it could be that being “all in” doesn’t mean you have to be perfect, but that you keep going even when you screw up.

It’s so reassuring when I agree with myself.

Relax

It’s been a hectic week and I’ve been hard-pressed to find the time to blog. It seems that the pace always picks up quite a bit in September. Despite that heady sense of the return of busy-ness, this is a good time of year for me. It’s a kind of in-between time. The summer is over, so I can enjoy a reprieve from the press of potato and macaroni salad. And it’s still a few months to the national gorge-fest that takes place from late November through early January. There is that little blip at Halloween, but I’ve never been a big candy person, so I expect I’ll make it through that holiday just fine. This is a lovely season, perfect for long walks on cool and sunny afternoons, with few food temptations.

I’ve been noticing how much more relaxed I feel when there’s no major food event looming before me. That’s actually kind of funny. For most of my life, food was relaxation. I liked nothing better than to kick back with a big bowl of something gooey, all the upsets, the frustrations, the irritations of the day melting away along with the ice cream in my mouth. After all, who needs Valium when you’ve got Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia? You know. Chill, baby, chill. So to find myself dreading any situation that involves my former favorite foods, well, that’s a little weird.

How did food get so cozy with my notions of calm anyway? Even though it’s different now – food has become the antithesis of calm – it’s just two sides of the same coin. What I really want is to find a way of life that doesn’t focus so much on food, whether as salvation or damnation. Trading an obsession with eating for an obsession with not eating doesn’t seem like a particularly good trade.

But what other options do I have? For the time being, I need to be hyper-vigilant about my diet. I’m all too aware of the statistics about weight regain – heck, I’ve lived it – and I don’t want to undo all of my hard work because I feel a tad stressed out about eating sometimes. I keep telling myself that eventually it will get easier. I thought perhaps that would happen when I hit the one-year anniversary of reaching my goal weight. But it didn’t. Then I thought it might happen at the two-year mark. Nope. I’m approaching the five-year mark, but still I fret. What if I never get comfortable around food? Can I live a life of continual unease and still maintain this lower weight? I honestly don’t know the answer to that question.

But for now I will enjoy this little autumn oasis between seasons of gastronomic indulgence. Just don’t offer me any cider donuts please.

That Old-Time Religion

In a recent post, I talked about getting outside of the food culture. As I noted, the food culture is a sneaky little beast, hard to see or hear or smell. It’s like the air that surrounds us: we take it in without much thought. In fact, the only time we generally think about air is when it’s absent. Which I suppose explains much of the distress in my life these last few years!

It’s not easy to get yourself free of the food culture’s grasp, partly because of its invisibility, but also because it’s so ingrained in us. Our beliefs about food are not conscious choices, deliberately debated and chosen, but notions that have seeped into the deepest folds of our subconscious brain from the time we came into being. How many of us recall crying as a small child and being offered a cookie to make it all better? And before that, everything you learned pre-memory, being held and comforted by your mother as she fed you? Is it any wonder that food is so strongly connected to feelings of love and comfort and an unshakable sense that all is right with the world?

In many ways, the food culture is like a religion. Think about that for a minute. A religion asks you to have faith in a set of beliefs about how the world works. It explains what is right and what is wrong. It gives you rituals to celebrate and observe that which is sacred. Doesn’t this describe much of how we relate to food?

The beliefs of the American food religion include things like the Food Pyramid and its obsession with whole grains. That ice cream, cakes and pies are acceptable foods as long as they are eaten in moderation, perhaps as an occasional treat, without ever defining what is meant by “moderation” or “occasional.” That chocolate cannot be resisted. What is right? Why a “balanced diet,” whatever that means. And what is wrong? Being hungry. Or worse, being a food radical, as in someone who rejects mainstream foods, you know, those pesky “picky eaters.” The food religion even has a sacred trilogy, those Gods of Good Taste, whom I like to call The Three Little Pigs: fat, sugar and salt.

Giving up the food culture feels a lot like abandoning your religion. You feel excommunicated. Banished. A deserter. And also bereft, for what can replace the cavernous void left behind?

The last five years of my life have been an attempt to answer that question. I’ve had to create a new set of beliefs to live by, in other words, a new religion. I guess that explains why I seem like a convert, even a zealot, at times. My new creed doesn’t quite have the power that the old one did. Not yet at least. But, all things in good time.

It’s not all gloom and doom, by the way. My dinner plans for tonight include poached salmon, a salad, maybe a few asparagus spears, and fresh strawberries for dessert. By golly, I’m starting to feel a religious fervor already!

Duality

There seem to be two camps in the world of food beliefs. One says a calorie is a calorie. The other says all calories are not created equal. I’ve been in the second camp for a while, for as God is my witness <holding clenched fist in the air>, one hundred calories of say, ziti, do not have the same effect on my hips as one hundred calories of say, spinach. I don’t have any science to back me up on this, but I do see the evidence that shows up on my scale. Yet, if I were to get into a heated discussion with a “calorie is a calorie” person tomorrow, I would not be able to convince them of my position even if I brought a two-foot stack of peer-reviewed clinical studies with me. When it comes to food, we believe what we believe and no one better try tell us otherwise.

Here’s another dichotomy. Some people eat to live while others live to eat. Again, I’m in the second camp on that one also. In fact, that’s much of what this whole weight maintenance journey has been about for me, trying in vain to become an “eat to live” person. As opposed to what I have been for most of my life, which is someone who reacted with extreme shock and dismay at the discovery that all of the ice cream was gone. It’s just so darn hard for me to see food as nothing more than fuel. Regarding food as simply nutrition seems a lot like living in a world that has been scrubbed of all color until all that’s left are muted shades of gray. Gray food is not appetizing at all. But then, now that I think of it, maybe that’s the point.

Another twosome: you do know that some people are cooks and others aren’t, don’t you? In other words, there are those who get goosebumps at the thought of buying a new paring knife. Just as there are those who’d rather all the messiness was kept behind the kitchen door, a perfectly delicious meal magically appearing before them. Actually, I am both of those people at different times. When I’m tired, at the end of a work day perhaps, I want my dinner and I don’t want to know about all that slicing and dicing nonsense. But sometimes, on a weekend or a day off, I can really get into cooking. I’m not a baker at heart and I don’t care much for elaborate recipes. What really excites me is when I have a bunch of leftovers that I find a way to make into a particularly tasty dish. That’s how my husband’s favorite chicken sausage and zucchini soup was born.

There’s another thing about cooking. When I cook, the experience of eating is better. It’s not merely the obvious, that when I prepare a dish, I can control what’s in it – think home-made stir-fry versus Chinese takeout. It’s something else, something intangible. I feel more connected to the food. The food is more satisfying. It’s not just something to be consumed, but something worth spending time with, something to celebrate. I don’t think there are too many calories in the celebration part of food.

Which brings me back to my original point that a calorie is not a calorie. And food is more than food. I’m a pretty logical person and the muddle of all this drives me crazy sometimes. But perhaps I protest too much. For while good nutrition is clearly necessary for survival, a meal savored, in all of its meaning and mystery and paradox, is crucial to any life worth living.

Attack of the Fat Monster

I often wonder how I have managed to maintain a hundred-pound weight loss when everything I know about weight says that I shouldn’t be able do it. Of course, I’d like to think that I’m some sort of exceptional person, but my life provides daily evidence to disabuse me of that silly notion. And don’t forget, I’ve lost weight many times before, only to regain it all (and then some), so what’s different this time? Well, I got lots of help this time. I didn’t assume that I knew best because the sad story of my life before this last weight loss proved that I didn’t know a damn thing about how to eat and exercise. I was extremely public this time also, so much so that I started reading personal essays on the radio about my struggles, even going so far as to announce my weight on the air! Were those things enough to make the difference? Certainly, they helped, but I think there may be another factor. This time I did something that I never was able to do before. This time, I got outside the food culture.

Getting outside the food culture is similar to seeing the forest for the trees. If you are just beating yourself up for not eating enough vegetables, you may feel like it’s all about you and your deficient willpower – that’s a tree. But if you get outside the food culture, you will see that many people don’t eat enough vegetables, in fact, you may observe some people who never seem to eat vegetables at all. Then you can begin to understand how your eating habits have been influenced by the environment around you – that’s the forest. It might seem like an obvious distinction, but believe me, when you’re in the middle of a fight to the death between your mouth and a brownie, it can be a life vest.

The food culture is a sneaky thing. At times it can seem like a fifty-foot monster, but I think that’s the way it wants to be seen. After all, if a huge beast threatens you, you can marshal all of your defenses for a head-on attack. What’s more dangerous is what you don’t see, don’t expect, don’t anticipate. To me, the food culture is more like an odorless vapor that seeps its way unnoticed into every crack and crevice. It’s the little voice that never stops cooing, “chocolate, chocolate, chocolate.” It’s that persistent craving for cookie dough ice cream at midnight. It’s the soothing song playing over and over in your head, telling you that you deserve something greasy and gooey and m-m-good. If you’re not aware that this is the way the food culture speaks to you, you might think it’s your voice. And as hard as it is to maintain a large weight loss, it’s even harder to constantly argue with yourself. Maybe you can do battle with yourself for a few months, but eventually you begin to feel wounded, and that’s when the weight starts coming back.

Maintaining a large weight loss didn’t become easy just because I managed to get outside the food culture, but in my opinion that’s when it became possible. I feel a bit discombobulated, because now nothing is automatic – I have to think about everything. Is it any wonder that I feel unnatural and awkward and anti-social so much of the time? But it’s better now than it was five years ago, or even one year ago. Now, instead of seeing the food culture the way I used to see it, as just the way it is, I see it for what it really is, a fat-inducing fog that I’ve been getting lost in for most of my life.

But not anymore.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

I got a lot of feedback on my last post, in which I discussed the darker side of losing weight. While I’m encouraged at the upbeat support offered by friends and family, I have to say that I already knew most of what they said. Yes, I have done a really good thing. It probably will get easier as time goes on. It’s true, I just need to hang in there and focus on the positive. Please understand that I didn’t intend to portray myself as wallowing in self-pity. The reason for talking about the hard part is simple: it’s reality.

When a person who’s lost a lot of weight is presented in the popular media, the emphasis is always on the happy stuff. How much better they must feel. How proud they must be of their big accomplishment. Life after weight loss is often portrayed as a perpetual party, an emotional high that never winds down.

Except that’s not the whole story. For all of the truly good things that come to those who lose, there are also many difficulties. I think it’s a lot like marriage – so many of us focus on the joy of the wedding and the hope for unending happily ever after. But then one day you realize that you’re stuck with this really annoying person, who hogs the blankets, leaves the toilet seat up, and watches the same World War II documentaries over and over and over again. That’s when marriage really starts, in my opinion, on the day when you no longer feel giddy at the sight of your beloved. And that’s when life after fat really starts too, on the day when you think you’ll go insane if you have to eat one more salad with grilled chicken. Or explain one more time to your cookie-crazed co-worker why you won’t be trying one of their famous chocolate chip creations, thank you very much.

So imagine you are an unsuspecting previously pudgy person, embarking on a new thin life, expecting all things bright and beautiful, and doncha know you start hitting post-fat speed bumps. What are you to think? You’ve been told that life after losing weight is a non-stop joyfest, yet you are feeling something distinctly other than joy. You might think that it has something to do with you, maybe you’re to blame, or you’re deficient in some way. Perhaps you’ll start to feel discouraged, wonder if you just aren’t up to the challenge of keeping the weight off. You’ve certainly heard how everyone regains the weight they lost eventually, so why not you too?

That’s why I talk about the dark side. Because it exists. Because pretending it doesn’t exist makes it even more powerful. And forewarned is forearmed. If you know there will be moments when you will wonder whether you were nuts to ever think you could do something this audacious, when you will fear that you just may not be up to the task, then perhaps that knowledge will be the tipping point that gives you the strength to weather the storm for one more day, one more minute, or one more cookie.

We formerly fat folk need all the help we can get. Platitudes need not apply.

For Whom The Bell Tolls

A friend said to me yesterday that he was looking for the shortcut to losing weight. I could have laughed and said, aren’t we all? But I didn’t. What I said was: There isn’t a shortcut and that sucks, but too bad, that’s the way it is. Maybe that sounds harsh. I suppose, but that’s really how I feel.

Losing a lot of weight and keeping it off for a long period of time is a difficult enterprise and it takes a toll. Every day I have to pay attention to what I eat, morsel by morsel. Every day I have to find time to exercise, preferably for an hour if I can manage it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a holiday, or a birthday, or a long day at work, I still have to do these things. If I don’t, if on a particular day I say oh to heck with it, I pay the price, which generally means gaining back a few pounds. There is no vacation from this and that fact has done a number on my sense of humor. It’s had an even bigger effect on my ability to conform to the social etiquette, which dictates that you don’t speak the blunt truth about things like weight.

So I guess you could say that long-term weight maintenance takes a toll on your relationships too. I was never the most outgoing person in the world, but I could go to a party, make small talk and generally enjoy myself. Now, social gatherings feel like a minefield. First, there will be all kinds of things to eat that I should not eat. Then, people will offer those things to me and I’ll have to find a way to say no without offending anyone. Or say yes and beat myself up later. Inevitably, someone will make a funny comment about how all the calories in the munchies will be cancelled out as long as we don’t sit down; since I know from bitter experience that this is not true, at least not for me, my choice will be to laugh politely and feel like a schmuck, or be the jerk who can’t take a joke. Or just stay home.

We all want to fit in. When I was fat, I dreamed that if I could ever lose the weight and be slender for good, I would finally be a normal person and fit in. But sometimes I think the opposite has happened. Many days, I feel more like the odd woman out than I ever did when I was obese. It’s not quite what I expected, yet as someone once said, that sucks, but too bad, that’s the way it is.

Why do I persist with this then? Well, I feel pretty damn good physically, better than I ever felt when I was heavy. I also think keeping my weight low will make getting older easier, and I’ve realized that I don’t fear dying nearly as much as I fear being disabled in my golden years. I guess I also still have a tiny bit of optimism left inside me, a mini-hope that someday this will all get easier.

Keep your fingers crossed.

The Body Knows

In a piece I posted about a week ago, one commenter suggested that listening to your body could be a way to find the path towards health. While I have no quarrel with this as a concept, I have to admit that I’m afraid to listen to my body. For so many years, my body said things like “eat more ice cream,” which lead eventually to the day when I tipped the scales at 250 pounds. So is it any surprise that I’ve come to regard my body as a less than trustworthy source of advice?

One of the reasons I lost weight and have managed to keep it off so far is that I’ve stopped listening to my body. I listen to my doctor, I listen to my nutritionist, I listen to other people who have been successful at maintaining a large weight loss. If I listen to myself, I just hear a lot of whining. “Oh woe is me, this is soooooo hard!” “But I don’t wanna stop eating after dinner!” “This is not fair! Not fair at all!”

Still, I like the idea of listening to my body and, in ways unrelated to food, I do. When I feel tired, I go to sleep. When I’m cold, I put on a sweater. When I get really grouchy, I know it’s time to kick back and have some fun. But when I’m hungry? Whole different story.

The thing is, how do I know I’m really hungry? I think there’s a big difference between being hungry and having an appetite for something. We blur that line an awful lot (at least I did), eating not because our body actually needs nourishment, but because we’re seduced by the anticipation of a flavor that we’ve become addicted to. Or because we’re in the habit of eating something sweet after dinner. Or because it’s a family tradition. Or because whatever. Yada yada yada. There are a million reasons why we eat; hunger is just one.

And let’s be honest. I know for a fact that chocolate causes cravings, as does ice cream, and cheddar cheese, and heaping bowls of macaroni. But does anyone really crave broccoli? Cauliflower? Brussels sprouts? I like those vegetables and I’m glad when I eat them. But I don’t lay awake at night having cruciferous dreams. So to say that my body would somehow tell me to eat those foods because they’re super-nutritious doesn’t jive with my experience – it’s my head that tells me to eat those foods. Decades of being extremely overweight have severed any connection between what my body really needs and what it tells me it wants.

This is the real tragedy of obesity, this disconnection of our minds, our spirits, our souls, from our bodies. As I can no longer trust myself, I have to trust others, which is good if they are telling me to do something that is healthy, not so good if they are selling a scam. I often feel quite self-righteous about my resistance to dietary mumbo-jumbo since, after all, I’m following the advice of a doctor, but then I remember that doctors used to think letting blood was an acceptable treatment. Who’s to say that a hundred years from now, people won’t laugh at what passes for standard medical advice now?

So, should you listen to your body? When I have an answer, I’ll be sure to let you know.