Twinkies Are Back! (And so am I!)

Hey, I’m back. I was afraid for a while that I didn’t have anything else to say on the topic of weight, but it turns out I was just really tired. A combination of work stress and being too darned busy in general left me kind of burned out this spring. I’ve been working on carving out more time for rest and reflection recently and it seems that my thoughts are starting to flow again.

While I was on my mini-hiatus, the American Medical Association announced that they had decided to classify obesity as a disease. There was a lot of buzz about this, with some seeing it as a good step and others not so sure. My reaction was pretty ho-hum. I suppose anything that gets doctors and insurance companies to pay more attention to weight and health is a good thing, but it seemed a bit beside the point. This might sound like an odd thing for me to say, but it’s really not. To understand, let’s compare obesity to something else. Say, lung cancer.

Lung cancer is a disease. We all agree on that, right? Well, what if medical science developed a whole range of highly effective treatments for lung cancer, yet we ignored the issue of smoking. People would continue to get lung cancer, by hey, never fear, we can treat it! You don’t mind spending a few months (or years) as a prisoner of the medical system, do you?

This is what obesity-as-a-disease, without a serious attempt to address our hyper-saturated food culture, seems like to me. The drug companies will still make big bucks on each new “breakthrough” diet drug. Hospitals will still market (and profit from) new “breakthrough” bariatric surgeries. And many people, most likely an ever-increasing number of people, will still struggle with the painful consequences of excess weight. Unless, I believe, we start looking seriously at rational public policies, similar to the types of public policies we implemented regarding smoking, that address the harm created by treating food as a mere consumer choice, divorced from any moral responsibility for the long-term health of the people who eat it.

Oh dear, I’m not proposing to take away your freedom to drink a big soda, am I? Or to eat Twinkies to your heart’s content once they come back on the market? Of course not. Eat and drink whatever you like. What I am proposing is that you have all the facts on the substances you’re taking into your body and what they might do to you. And let’s go one step further. What if Hostess took a small percentage of the enormous profits they will reap from sale of Twinkies and used it to do something good, say fund programs for childhood nutrition education?

Now, that I could get excited about.

I Get Tired

I am sometimes accused of being too rigid in my weight maintenance habits. I never know quite how to respond to that. The fact is, I AM pretty regimented in the way I eat and exercise. As I’ve noted before, I tend to eat the same things every day and generally plan meals, even meals out, ahead of time. Same with exercise. I do best when I stick to a pre-determined schedule – certain days walking and other days running, following routes I’ve developed based on time or distance goals. If you’re wondering why I do this it’s because for most of my life I was quite laid back about my health habits; the result of that laissez-faire approach was that I weighed a whopping 250 pounds by my late forties!

Every now and then (as in the recent past) I let go of this rigidity. That’s not because I magically attain super-weight-maintainer powers, allowing me to relax around food and exercise with impunity – it’s because I get tired. Of all the non-stop explaining. Why I’m not eating the pasta (because it causes immediate weight gain). Why I’m not available on Saturday morning (because it interferes with my weekly long run). Why whatever it is that everyone else wants to do doesn’t work for me (because I’m too set in my ways). Eventually I get to the point where I say, OK, I give up, cut me a slice of the cake, and then a very predictable thing happens. I gain weight. I’m dealing with ten pounds of “I give up weight” right now.

When I wax poetic about the kind of environment needed to support me in maintaining my weight loss, this is what I mean. I’m not shunning personal responsibility for my diet and lifestyle, not merely kvetching about the daily assault of mega-calorie, high-fat, sugar-laden foods. I’m making a plea for more understanding, for the simple recognition that there are things I need to do to manage my weight and the odds I will do those things go up exponentially when I follow a regular, even rigid, routine. The odds also improve when I don’t have to constantly defend my choices.

What I’ve learned over the last several years is that if I’m to be successful in keeping off the weight I lost, I need to be as unyielding as the reality of obesity. Other people may have flexibility; I don’t. Other people might be able to enjoy a measure of spontaneity; I can’t. Unless I want to risk weighing 250 pounds again, which I don’t.

And that’s just the way it is.

Go Fish!

Picture a fish lying on the shore, its gills flaring, its mouth gasping, while well-intentioned onlookers shake their heads and wonder why the poor creature can’t seem to breathe. Someone recommends putting the animal in an oxygen tent. Others wonder what previous trauma prompted it to jump out of the lake. It is suggested that perhaps surgery to modify its gills is in order.

If you have any wits about you at all, you will ignore these morons and toss the fish back into the water.

It’s not so different for those of us who struggle with weight. We agonize over how to best motivate ourselves to eat less and exercise more. We scrutinize our screwed up psyches in the quest for a healthy weight through emotional healing. We dream of a magic pill or surgery that will provide the answer that has eluded us. And will continue to elude us because…

We are like fish out of water.

In other words, we live in a fat-and-sugar-drenched environment that is the antithesis of what would support us in maintaining a healthy weight. Yet rather than confront an eco-system so poisonous to the weight-challenged, we blame ourselves for our inability to adapt to it. Is it any wonder that so many of us fail in our battle with obesity?

The world tells us that the reason people become overweight is because they’re broken and need to be fixed. In that scenario, it’s our own fault we’re fat. But what if it’s the other way around? That people become overweight because the world is broken and needs to be fixed? That the problem is not that you ate the Baconater, but that the Baconater exists at all?

I know. Nothing but a big fish story.

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.

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.