Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

This post continues my series on all the surprising things I’ve learned in my quest to maintain a 100-pound weight loss. Today I want to take on something I have struggled with my entire life and that is my relationship with food. If you are overweight, you know what I mean. I’m talking about all those nutty things that go on in your head, making you feel powerless around the foods that keep you fat. And, like I did, you might harbor the conviction that once you straighten out your relationship with food, you will suddenly and magically find all of the excess weight melting away. Your new food sanity will bring you to a rarified state where maintaining a healthy weight will be easy, effortless even. What I’ve learned in the last five years about this belief is this:

Unexpected Nugget #4: My relationship with food is not the problem.

How can I possibly say this? Wasn’t I the master of the midnight pasta binge? An ice cream extremist? The girl who could never eat just one cookie when the whole box beckoned? Isn’t that proof positive that my relationship with food was all screwed up? That I was all screwed up? After all, those things cannot possibly be called normal behavior.

Well, that’s one way to look at it. Here’s another. Maybe my brain was perfectly sane. Except that I was addicted. To sugar. What if I did not have a dark, twisted relationship with food at all, but instead had a physical addiction to sugar – and its kissing cousin, high-fructose corn syrup – that drove me to crave sweets? Or other foods, like pasta, that turn into sugar when you digest them?

The idea that it’s all in our plump little heads, that our relationship with food is profoundly messed up, keeps the blame for obesity on the overweight person and off of a food industry that makes fat profits by designing products full of sugar that we are unable to resist because we have become addicted to them. When someone points out this fact and takes aim at the problem, like Michael Bloomberg and his ban on oversized servings of sweetened soft drinks, that person is mocked and condemned as an agent of the ever-growing Nanny State, trying to take away our Big Gulp freedom. The irony of all of this is beyond comprehension, because once sugar gets its crystalline claws into you, you are anything but free.

So, here’s the deal. My relationship with food is and has always been just fine, thank you. What messed me up was my love affair with sugar, which is why sugar and I are no longer a couple. As any ex-addict will tell you, once you get liberated from your drug, it’s best to keep it as far away as possible, though that’s easier done with things like nicotine or cocaine, since you don’t need those substances to survive and it’s unlikely anyone will insist you have just one little Christmas Cigarette or Holiday Hit.

My estrangement from sugar is a bit trickier. Sometimes he tries to woo me back, as abusive boyfriends are wont to do. It’s not a perfect situation, and sometimes I slip up. But I’m not crazy either. And neither are you.

Cake Walk

In recognition of my five-year weight-maintenance anniversary last month, this week’s post continues my series on all the things I’ve learned (and didn’t expect to learn) in my quest to maintain a 100-pound weight loss. This week’s surprising revelation has to do with a cherished concept in the culture of dieting and weight loss, namely, low-calorie versions of your favorite guilty pleasures. In other words…

Unexpected Nugget #3: “Lite” food is not the answer.

Is that booing that I hear in the background? Of course it is. We love and depend on “lite” food. There is an entire industry devoted to telling us that we can have chocolate cake, not only have it but eat it, and stay lithe and slender at the same time. That’s possible because the chocolate cake is not the bad old version of our childhood, full of sugar and butter, eggs (yolks included!) and full-fat chocolate. No, it is “lite” chocolate cake, made with calorie-free sweeteners and other ingredients with hard-to-pronounce names, simulating the chocolate cake we crave at a mere 100 calories per serving!

Now, I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, it’s comforting to know there’s an alternative that doesn’t break the calorie bank for those times when all resolve fails and nothing but chocolate will do. On the other hand, I can never seem to eat just one 100-calorie serving of anything. I also have to wonder about the healthiness of all those ingredients with names right out of chemistry class, methyl-ethyl-this-will-give-you-cancer-or-at-least-gas. My main concern, however, is a philosophical one:

Does eating “lite” versions of the foods that made me fat keep me stuck in a mind rut that makes it harder for me to keep from getting fat again?

It’s this simple: eating a sweet and juicy orange, or a crisp and crunchy carrot, will never be satisfying as long as the ghost of chocolate cake haunts me. Though “lite” chocolate cake may be an improvement, calorie-wise at least, over authentic chocolate cake, it keeps the idea firmly planted in my mind that the way I am eating now is inferior to the way I used to eat. It is a poor second, a grim and unfortunate accommodation that I’ve had to make out of biological necessity. Since I can no longer eat “real” chocolate cake, I find myself stuck with “lite” (read “fake”) chocolate cake. This frame of mind leaves me vulnerable to feelings of self-pity. It is a psychological state in which I can wallow in the unfairness of my genetics. It’s the place where it’s easy to say: F*ck it. Where’s that cake?

Here’s what I say. Desensitize your taste buds to all of your guilty pleasures. Do it until chocolate cake, real or fake, is such a distant memory that the sweetness of an orange makes you woozy and a carrot seems the cat’s meow. This might seem like a harsh prescription, but once you’ve exorcised your food demons, it’s much easier than you think. You think it’s hard because the Food Powers That Be have brainwashed you into believing that a life without cake is so onerous that even “lite” cake is better than no cake at all.

The truth of the matter is that life without cake can be pretty darned delicious.

Indulge Me, Indulge Me Not

In my last post, I talked about confidence, specifically the common belief that achieving a large weight loss will lead to confidence that you’ve got this weight thing handled. Those of you who have actually been there/done that know how ridiculous this idea is, yet it persists.

This is not the only false concept out there about weight loss and weight maintenance. In recognition of my five-year weight-maintenance anniversary, I’ve decided to share all the things I learned (and didn’t expect to learn) in my quest to maintain a 100-pound weight loss. This week’s unexpected nugget is…

Unexpected Nugget #2: The occasional indulgence hurts more than it helps.

You’ve probably been told that one of the secrets to maintaining a healthy diet is to allow yourself an occasional indulgence. It goes like this: If you completely cut out of your diet that special food that you absolutely love, what will happen? You will feel deprived of course, that’s what. These feelings of deprivation will build day in and day out until you finally explode, blowing your carefully constructed healthy eating plan to smithereens. The only way to avoid this horrific fate is to include an occasional small indulgence in your eating plan. This could mean that you allow yourself a cookie or two once a week. Or pancakes on Sunday morning. Perhaps a square of dark chocolate after dinner. These little extravagances will satisfy your cravings and keep you on the straight and narrow.

So, why does the occasional treat have the exact opposite effect on me? For me, one cookie leads to two cookies and then three and then I stop counting. Who eats one cookie anyway? If I go for a few weeks without eating cookies, here’s what happens:

The first week is torture – all I can think about are cookies.

The second week is a state of meh – something is missing and I can’t quite put my finger on it.

The third week is neutral – not happy but not sad either.

The fourth week is serene – what was the problem we were talking about?

To put it bluntly, the occasional indulgence only reawakens the craving beast. You would not tell an ex-smoker to have an occasional cigarette or a recovering alcoholic to have an occasional drink. It is not all that different for us recovering foodies. Our addiction is to sugar. Or salt. Or creamy, greasy stuff. Or all of the above.

You may recall a previous post about my “no-sweet” experiment. I eliminated most sweetness from my diet, eating sweet foods only if they were naturally sweet, such as fresh fruit. The result of that experiment was that my cravings decreased significantly and I felt more at peace with a low-fat, low-sugar way of eating. Recently, I’ve begun allowing a few sweet foods back in my diet and guess what? My cravings are increasing, along with a growing sense of struggle with food.

You may be thinking that if being thin means giving up cookies or pancakes or chocolate, forever, well to heck with it, you’ll just hold onto those extra pounds. Sometimes I think that too. And sometimes I don’t. It’s all part of the journey.

The Myth of Confidence

You might think that I would feel a sense of accomplishment about maintaining a hundred-pound weight loss for five years. Given the grim statistics, the fact that the vast majority of people who lose a lot of weight gain it all back within a year or two, it is indeed a big deal that I’ve pulled this off for this long. Yet somehow, I’m having a hard time patting myself on the back. I think I’m too mired in the weeds of what it takes, day to day, for Outer Thin Girl to ward off Inner Fat Girl, and that makes it hard to see the larger (or should I say smaller?) picture.

What’s more interesting to me at this point is to start understanding what I’ve learned in these last five years. It’s funny, because what I thought I would learn and what I’ve actually learned have turned out to be radically different things. So I’d like to take a little time in the next few posts to talk about what I’ve discovered, to share with you some of the unexpected nuggets I’ve unearthed along the way, starting with…

Unexpected Nugget #1: Confidence has nothing to do with it.

You’ve surely seen the Jennifer Hudson ad for Weight Watchers that has been airing since the beginning of the year. Jennifer is the picture of confidence, flaunting her new, slender body with a supreme conviction that she has this weight thing handled. And, yes, you can get it handled too. It’s not just this one ad, though. You’ve seen a parade of celebrities strike this pose: Marie Osmond, Jessica Simpson, Kirstie Alley, Valerie Bertinelli, Oprah Winfrey. In the Dogma of Diet Programs, it is canon law that sure as spring follows winter, confidence follows weight loss.

Um, yeah.

This is the biggest lie. That when you finally achieve your “perfect” weight, you will gain an enormous confidence that will carry you for the rest of your (thin) life. For me, the opposite has been true. It’s my lack of confidence that I “have this weight thing handled” that has been key to keeping the pounds off. I never assume that I can eat anything with abandon. I always worry and strategize when I know I’ll be in a situation that involves cookies. I don’t trust myself to have certain foods in the house. Jennifer Hudson says that Weight Watchers works for her because it lets her eat “real food.” But I know that “real food” is just code for “food that makes me fat,” so I try to eat “real food” (i.e. bread, pasta, potatoes, even <gasp> chocolate) as infrequently as possible. All because I have no confidence whatsoever that I will ever have any of this even close to “handled.”

You don’t need one iota of confidence to maintain a large weight loss. What you do need is a strong motivation. My motivation comes from an experience I had in which my excess weight hampered my recovery from a relatively minor surgery. For about a week, I was a complete invalid and it scared the crap out of me. I just didn’t want to go there ever again and in that moment I resolved that I would lose weight. Every time my resolve starts to waver, I think of how it felt to be an invalid and that sets me straight. Your motivation might be something different and it doesn’t matter what it is – what matters is that you have it.

Here’s the real truth of the matter: the smug complacency of confidence is one of Inner Fat Girl’s best weapons in her quest to defeat Outer Thin Girl. So forget confidence. Your best defense against her sneak attacks is to outsmart her with a measured dose of fretting over food.

‘Cause a little worry goes a long way.

What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been

Five years ago today, February 11, 2008, I ended a year of dieting and reached my goal weight of 145 pounds; I’ve been maintaining a 100-plus-pound weight loss, give or take, ever since.

Sometimes, in the day-to-day slog that is maintenance, I forget how ecstatic I felt that day. Life seemed unreal and magical. Everything I’d always wanted was in my grasp. I remember it as a time of enormous energy and enthusiasm.

A lot has changed since then. I suppose it had to. Maintenance is hard, folks, really hard. It’s not easy to sustain that initial rush of euphoria when everything around you appears hell-bent on enticing you to eat all of the foods that made you fat. The basic message has seemed to be this: if you want to stay at this new and lower weight, YOU must make whatever accommodations are needed; asking for changes in the environment, well, that’s just downright unreasonable. After all, it’s only one little cookie, right?

But I’ve decided that five years of struggle is enough. My goal for the next five years is to find a new paradigm for weight maintenance, something more peaceful and uplifting. I don’t know what that looks like yet, but the thought is pretty intriguing. And invigorating. I’ve also come to see that the last five years have taught me something and I don’t think I could have learned it any other way:

Being healthy is a journey, not a destination.

Beyond Maintenance

Next month I will celebrate my five-year anniversary of maintaining a 100-pound weight loss. It seems like it was just yesterday and yet a lifetime ago. I honestly expected that maintenance would be hard, but I had no idea just how difficult the road beyond would be when the scale hit that magic number, my “goal weight.” For to lose 100 pounds and maintain that loss is not a grand victory in an epic battle, as the world would have you believe. Instead, it is thousands upon thousands of infinitesimal skirmishes, fought and won second by second every day. Or fought and lost second by second every day. The experience of staying lean, it seems, is not unlike being pecked to death by ducks.

I think it’s also a particularly female experience. I’m sure men worry about their weight too, but I don’t think they reach the level of crazy that women do – and I have certainly known crazy when it comes to my weight, both at times when I was lighter and at times when I was heavier. I remember that when my husband first started developing a paunch in his forties, rather than seeing it as a tragedy (as I saw the unwanted flabbiness on my own physique), he joked that his newfound belly was his “power source.” I do not believe that any woman would ever be so self-accepting. The women I know (including me) agonize over every tiny imperfection in our appearance. We berate ourselves for having real, lived-in bodies. We obsess over every small indulgence (chocolate!) and mostly have resigned ourselves to a perpetual state of defectiveness.

Lately though, a little voice in my head has been nagging me, posing a question that I would prefer not to confront. It asks: what could I do in the world, what could I have done already in fact, if weight were not the overriding narrative in my life? What would my life be like if I were not trapped in this endless do loop of diet success and diet failure, defining and judging myself by the size of my dress rather than the size of my impact on the world? Why have I accepted a lifelong preoccupation with a number on a scale when I could have been preoccupied with learning and doing and making the world a better place?

Perhaps I’m being overly dramatic. But then this is what goes on in my head. The last five years have been an emotional rollercoaster and I’m ready now for some solid ground. I’ve decided that the task for the next five years is to figure out how to live a healthy life (which includes a healthy weight), while also living a life that is about so much more than obsessing over health and weight.

I’m not sure exactly what this means, but I think living in the question is often better than finding the answer anyway.

An Ode to Slow Food

My resolution for the new year is to slow things down a bit. That may sound a strange thing for an American to say. After all, don’t we love to compete with each other for who is the busiest and most stressed out? Isn’t “24/7” a badge of honor (even though very few of us actually work anything even close to “24/7”)? And aren’t resolutions supposed to be about doing more, better? Be that as it may, I am determined to decelerate.

One area I’m going to focus on is meal time. There are far too many days when I cram food down my throat as fast as I can so I can get to the next item on the To-Do list. My average breakfast lasts about three minutes, gulped as quickly as possible so I can get out the door to work. Lunch is an all-too-short hour packed with exercise and errands in addition to eating – that is when I’m able to take a lunch break. By the time dinner comes around, I’m often too tired to cook, not because I’ve been worked to the bone, but because my job is hectic and disjointed. So I mindlessly microwave something and eat in front of the tube, before starting the end-of-the-day ritual of getting ready for the next day, preparing the next breakfast and lunch that I will very nearly inhale. It’s an incredibly unsatisfying way to eat. Is it any wonder that I find myself struggling with chocolate cravings in the evening?

We are told that a calorie is a calorie and that weight maintenance is nothing more than the management of calories in/calories out. If you buy this, then a Lean Cuisine lunch at your desk is no different than soup and a sandwich with a friend at a sidewalk café. But they are worlds apart. The first is a matter of utility; the second is enjoying life.

I find myself longing for the experience of a leisurely meal, sitting across a table from another person, nibbling between breaks in the conversation. I fantasize about hours spent gabbing, having friendly arguments over politics, listening to tales of everyday triumph and tragedy, all the while crunching on a salad between sips of iced tea, or savoring a biscotti with a cup of coffee. In this way of being, large quantities of food are not required. What is required is quality, and not so much the quality of the food as the quality of the experience and the relationship. This seems a more civilized way to eat, something far removed from mere nutrition.

We often talk about our bodies as if they were machines and food the fuel, to be monitored and measured and optimized. In that paradigm, you get lectured by your doctor for eating the “wrong” things, right before he gives you a prescription for the latest appetite suppressant. But what if the body is not a machine at all? What if it is a gift to be lovingly nurtured? In that paradigm, you eat foods that bring health and energy, in an enjoyable atmosphere with people you care about. In that scenario, the only prescription you need is permission to take your time.