Chocolate Heals All Wounds

Hey, I’m not dead yet!

I’m shocked to see it has been a month since the last time I posted. Nothing was wrong during that time, just my life got very busy for a while. I’ve noticed that the busier I am, the less I exercise. That bothers me. I’ve also noticed that the busier I am, the more I want to snack at night. That bothers me too. You certainly know this equation: less exercise + more snacking = snug pants.

The usual explanation for this turn of events is that when you get busy, you don’t exercise because you don’t think you have enough time, you get more stressed because you’re not exercising enough, and – viola! – you start eating for emotional reasons. There’s some truth to this. It’s harder to resist the siren call of certain foods (chocolate!) when you’re worn out trying to compete in the Multi-tasking Olympics that is our modern lifestyle. Besides, who wouldn’t enjoy a tasty treat at the end of a long, frustrating day?

Yet, I have to confess that I find this whole concept of emotional eating a bit disturbing. I know I've talked about this before, but it bears repeating. It’s not that I don’t think emotions play a role, but that the role of emotions gets disproportional coverage whenever the subject of obesity comes up. If you believe the mainstream media, especially magazines and talk shows aimed at women, it often seems that our national weight problem is mainly due to the inability of overweight people to get a grip. If only the weight-challenged could “heal” the emotional wounds that cause them to overeat, they would effortlessly lose the extra pounds and life would be just peachy.

This seems so simplistic to me. It’s also a case of blame the victim that ignores the contribution of the environment. How the food culture in this country promotes fatty, sugary, salty eating as normal. The way the food industry routinely churns out new products that are expressly designed to be irresistible to human taste buds. The tremendous social pressure to overeat in certain ways at certain times. Think mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving. Barbeque and ice cream in the summer. Christmas cookies. Endless Christmas cookies.

The focus on emotions also allows the inadequate response of the medical and insurance community to be quietly ignored. I often wonder why my health insurance will not cover nutritional counseling for a person (like me) who has struggled with morbid obesity for most of her life. But if it’s my fault because I’m “too emotional,” well then, better to rearrange my digestive system than try to reconstruct the fragile mess in my head. This focus on my individual failing also keeps me from asking why the American Medical Association doesn’t condemn US farm subsidy policy that favors the production of corn (for high-fructose corn syrup) and sugarcane over fresh fruits and vegetables.

So yes, I’ve been eating more because I’m under stress right now. And yes, it’s an emotional reaction. I could delve deep into my psyche and figure out what wounds I’m trying to heal with chocolate, but I prefer a more direct approach: I don’t keep foods I can’t resist in the house. It works every time and it don’t cost a dime.

I’m getting teary-eyed just thinking about it.

Perfection

I’ve been reading a lot of other blogs lately written by people who’ve been through what I’ve been through: losing a lot of weight and working to keep it off. It’s been cathartic to finally find a community that gets it. Until now, I’ve shared my experiences with people who’ve never been seriously overweight, or conversely, with those who have but think there’s no workable, lasting solution to obesity. To finally talk to folks who’ve been there and done that is thrilling to say the least.

One thing I’ve noticed is that while everyone I’ve encountered in weight cyberspace has had similar experiences, many have drawn very different conclusions than I have. This fact actually excites me because I’ve learned some things and discovered new perspectives that can only help as I move forward on this weight maintenance journey. Even when I disagree with what someone says, I can see where they’re coming from and respect that their opinion was arrived at just as honestly as mine was.

There’s a big idea that many of my fellow bloggers have expressed that I completely disagree with, that we have to deal with mental issues – about food and self-esteem among other things – before lasting weight success can be achieved. I’ve brushed the surface of this topic in previous posts about emotional eating and our relationship with food, but I want to explore one aspect of this a little further. I seem to detect something dangerous lurking beneath the waters and that is the specter of Perfection.

Every person who’s ever been seriously overweight has dreamed of the perfect life they will have when they finally reach whatever magical weight they’ve established for themselves. In fact, one of the biggest challenges to maintaining a large weight loss is mourning the demise of that cherished belief, when you reach your perfect weight and find that a perfect life still eludes you. How different from that is this idea that you have to perfect your mental state before attempting to deal with your weight?

It is undeniably true that people have issues with food. It is also undeniably true that food issues can significantly affect what you eat, how much you eat, and what you weigh. But I believe you can take care of your body and reach a state of health that includes being a normal weight without having to clear out every eccentricity and neurotic cobweb from your head. I’m a perfect example. I’m way crazier about food now than I was 100 pounds ago, but I’ve managed to work with my nuttiness. The key is having a strong motivation, which for me was created out of something that happened seven years ago.

In the summer of 2005, I had relatively minor surgery on my foot and had been told that I would need about a week to recover. My recovery took nearly four times longer than that because I had to use crutches while my foot healed and I was simply too out of shape to do that. During that time period, I was a functional invalid and that realization hit me hard, as I was only 48 years old and thought of myself as resilient. It brought me face-to-face with the future and how I might cope with health issues as a 70-year-old woman who weighed 250 pounds. The terror of that vision set me on this road and I’ve never looked back, neuroses or no.

So, I don’t agree that food issues have to be resolved or healed or made peace with in order to lose weight for good. And there is no such thing as a perfect relationship with food, no matter what you weigh. All I can say is start where you are and do what you can. Whatever happens, it is better than waiting for a perfect opportunity that will always be just beyond your grasp.

I'll Have Seconds With That Emotion

Today I’d like to take a slight detour and talk about the psychology of food. You know, emotional eating. The cultural take on emotional eating goes something like this: Girl has a bad day at work. Girl gets upset. Girl goes home and eats a half gallon of Chunky Monkey. Girl feels better for five minutes. Girl hates herself for the rest of the night, and since she now hates herself, proceeds to polish off the last of the macaroni and cheese, along with a bunch of corn chips and guacamole. Some might call this a food binge. I would call it my life before I lost 100 pounds.

Obviously, a person who would do something like this is seriously disturbed, no? And isn’t that what we believe, even if we don’t say it out loud? A person who is fat is a person who’s lost control. A person who’s undisciplined. A person who is probably psychologically and emotionally deficient in some way, otherwise they would get motivated and DO SOMETHING about their weight.

That’s exactly what I believed about myself for most of my life. That there was something seriously wrong with my head. If only I could straighten out my screwed up psyche, then I would find the strength to stay on a sensible diet and lose the weight once and for all. Not only that, but I believed other people (translation: normal-weight people) were better than I was simply because they could eat cake and stay thin and I could not.

But then I lost 100 pounds. I didn’t lose 100 pounds because I cleared out all of the squirrelly, twisted mazes in my mind. In fact, in some ways this weight maintenance deal has made me more neurotic than ever. I lost weight because I put myself in the hands of a doctor and a nutritionist and DID EXACTLY WHAT THEY TOLD ME TO DO. Yes, I know, that’s an un-American thing to say. I let someone else tell me what to do. Shocking.

Yet, I lost the weight and have kept it off for four and a half years. In that time, I’ve learned a few things. Like how our intrinsic beliefs about what constitutes “good food” chain us to a way of eating that keeps us fat. How food manufacturers design products that are highly palatable (translation: highly addictive) to keep us coming back for more, and oh yes, keep us fat. How our own willingness to discount our strength and believe in our deficiency keeps us from questioning the status quo, and yup, keeps us fat. And instead of getting angry – because maybe you have a genetic predisposition to gain weight and you need help to learn how to deal with that, but instead you are pushed and prodded by the food culture to eat the very foods that will make your genetic predisposition become reality – instead you blame yourself for being an idiot who wants to have her cake and eat it too.

Have no doubt, emotional eating exists. But the question is, did I eat the way I ate because I was screwed up? Or did I eat the way I ate because I didn’t know a better way to deal with life’s difficulties and no one was able to show me a better way? My observation is that most of us have weird, eccentric nonsense banging around in our heads and you can’t really predict how bad it is with any particular person just by what they weigh. Overweight people are not more emotionally disturbed than thinner people, but they do have to deal with an awful lot of disturbing stuff, like being portrayed as out-of-control nut jobs when in reality they just have a physical condition called obesity.

Whew! I feel better now.