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The Company We Keep

I was thinking about the fact that I ate more than I should/wanted to when I was on that boat, and my husband was not around.  When he is with me I worry about what he’s thinking and end up eating less, or more healthfully. To impress him? That’s not good.

On the other hand, when I am with my mom I tend to give myself permission to eat everything in sight and to make the worst choices, because that is what she does.  She definitely played a large role in my habit of eating to squelch emotion, eating to celebrate, eating when sad or bored or tired or depressed or angry. I’m not blaming her, I’m just saying… this is where it started, and how I learned to pass it on to my poor unwitting next generation as well. Even now (or maybe especially now) she will always choose the richest, meatiest, chocolatiest, thing on the menu. Maybe because she is in her 80s and she thinks, why deprive now? She has never been on a diet as far as I can remember, except right after her open heart surgery when her cardiologist made her go on a diet. My father pretty much administered it and she was very angry and resentful about the stuff she couldn’t eat.  After a few years she just kind of ignored it and I think ate even more as a bounce-back.

Anyway. We will all eat with all kinds of people with their own food issues, all the time. And the thing that is important is to keep grounded in our own plan, our own commitment to what we are going to eat or not eat.  In the past, I’ve been with people who ate like birds, and it made me nervous and panicky, and want to eat even more. Or else I would get in some stupid, silent “I can eat just as little as you!” competition.  That then backfired as soon as I was out of their sight.

I’ve been lucky that nobody has really tried to push food on me since I’ve started this. A friend came over for dinner and brought a beautiful looking pound cake but I wasn’t tempted and she was also really sweet and apologetic, and the people who could eat the cake enjoyed it. (guess who? Mom!) I think it’s a lot easier to say you are on a diet for medical reasons than for vanity reasons because if you just say you want to be thinner, people say, Oh you look just fine!

I am almost relieved that I have this medical “excuse” to fall back on. But really, we all do. We all need to be healthier and more conscious.

How do the people around you affect your eating habits? And how do you deal with it? (if at all) Foodie wants to know!

2

Reality Check

Back home now, to the Home Scale. So there was good news and bad news. The bad news is that it didn’t reveal that I’d lost six lbs on vacation, like the scale in the fitness center said. More like two. But I also consider that great news; to be able to lose two pounds on vacation where I was constantly eating in restaurants or at buffets and even had some slip ups. And two pounds is really what I consider “real weight” and not water-weight or other factors. I was suspicious of that huge “loss” anyway so I am not massively disappointed. I feel like now that I am home I can get to the real work.

2

Relief, and Enduring Discomfort

I went back to the fitness center this morning and YAY the scale was the same nice, low number that it was two days ago. WITH clothes.  So yay, and a pox on that stupid mall bathroom scale!  (WHY do I do these things???)

Between our room and the fitness center there is an ice-cream shop right on the corner. I have to walk right past it a few times a day. They make those warm homemade waffle cones and the smell is overpoweringly enticing.  I don’t necessarily even want ice cream, but the smell of those cones is incredible. (one good thing to remember is that smelling doesn’t cost any calories)

I remembered something from this great book I’m reading, as I smelled the waffle cones on my way back from the gym. One thing they ask is to rate your discomfort in dealing with some weight-loss challenge. Ie, how uncomfortable do you feel on a scale of one to ten, when you have to avoid something that you want to eat. First, make your scale. One is sitting comfortably in a cushy chair, and ten is childbirth. (HA) I’d say, walking by that waffle smell is about a 2 or 3 on that scale. In other words, I can deal with it. Take about ten steps and it’s over.

Now I’m going to meet a buddy who has gestational diabetes and we can have a healthy luch and bemoan the state of our pancreases (pancreii?) together. Yay.

2

All The Weights Of My Life

We are on vacation now, which means I can’t be stepping on a scale every day. This is admittedly making me a little nervous. I’m of mixed feelings re the scale. Some people say you should never weigh yourself but just judge things on how you feel, your clothes fit, etc. Some people say you should not weigh yourself more than once a week because weights fluctuate so much daily, and you can go crazy from the miniscule ups and downs. And then others say you should weigh yourself daily so that you can adjust your behavior based on the feedback you get on the scale, but not more than once a day.

I’ve found that when I go long periods without weighing myself, it’s because I am afraid of the scale. I know it’s going to give me bad news so I avoid it. And if that goes on for too long, the news just gets worse and worse. So for me, I think it’s important to do that reality check.

Right now, I think (if I am the same as when I left home on Saturday), I am at what I call “normal overweight.” Meaning I’m still about 20 lbs overweight according to my BMI, but it’s also the weight that my body has defaulted to over the past 5-10 years.

I get alarmed when I’m at “high overweight.” This is when I begin creeping towards, or sometimes even surpassing, my All Time High. Which is what I weighed the day before I gave birth to my daughter.  I’ve been in touching distance of that weight, and even passed it, a few times this year and last. NOT a good feeling, especially when I look at pics of myself at nine months pregnant.

It’s pretty sick? that I can remember exactly how much I have weighed at various points in my life. I remember how distraught I was in middle school when I passed 100 lbs and many of my friends were still in the 80s and 90s.  When I was in high school and running on the track team, I was probably at my all time low for this height. I weighed more in my latter years of high school and then in college.  Then it started creeping up. When I was 27 I went on a trip to southeast Asia and lost 26 lbs after two months of trekking 8 hours a day and not eating very much.  I know exactly what I weighed the day I got married.

Getting pregnant and having kids put me in a permanently higher bracket. First, I got pregnant and we lost that baby after six months. I’m a person who eats when in grief, not the kind who loses weight when in grief. Then I got pregnant again, had that baby, and three years later did it again. I did have gestational diabetes with the 2nd pregnancy and did a LOT of exercise and food monitoring during those months. After I had the baby I was at one of my all time lows again.

So here I am at normal overweight again. All I want is to get into that normal BMI range. The highest BMI # is fine with me. It feels like a long way off.

I’m trying to just focus on avoiding the simple carbs, exercising every day and not getting overfull this week. It will be interesting to see what the scale says when I get home.

1

The Lure of Biggest Loser

I basically turn my nose up at many reality TV shows, but I am a total sucker for The Biggest Loser, (and also Top Chef).

This season of Biggest Loser started out in a really uplifting and heartwarming way. People on this season were “the biggest ever,” meaning some upwards of 400 lbs. But everyone seemed to be earnestly working hard and rooting for each other.  There was a hint of Bad Attitude before, but last night it really hit the fan. It was so bad. People fighting and screaming and such. It was really unpleasant.

I have been most interested in the medical aspects of this show; the guys on the Black team who don’t look SO bad, until you look at their body scans. The doctors present their transparent body scans next to one of a “normal” body. They point out the enormous pockets and layers of fat, and this one guy whose lungs have been pushed up into the shape of orange slices, rather than full length lungs, because he has so much abdominal fat pushing up from below.

This is something I have long been afraid of: that if somebody opened up my body and removed my heart, it would be this slippery butterball. And that the truth about my diet will be out.

I guess the blood test was one way that I got a little insight into my insides. Which was a hard truth.

Anyway, 3 weeks into The Biggest Loser, the guy with no lungs goes back to the doctor and the doc gets rid of ALL OF HIS MEDS (10 pills per day) except one (he didn’t say which one). I was rather shocked at that. Was he really at normal levels for EVERYthing after 3 weeks, or was that doctor practicing really irresponsible medicine?

Speaking of medicine. I am taking a certain drug, Lisinopril, for my high blood pressure. One of the side effects of this medicine is a tickly, dry, super annoying cough. Last night I feel like I was coughing all night. I have had this cough for over a year. Before, I was on something called Diovan, which had NO side effects, but my health insurance changed, and suddenly Lisinopril was $3/bottle while Diovan costs $90.  It’s not rocket science, but it’s annoying.

Anyway, I hope that if I can lose enough weight I can stop taking this BP medicine altogether, and my cough will go away.

Some nice news: I have lost about 4-5 lbs since last week.

2

Scare Tactics

I love certain kinds of foods so much. Mostly carbs and dairy products. I could easily give up sugar, chocolate, alcohol, meat. But the combination of carbs and dairy – ie wheat and cheese – are like heroin to me. Macaroni and cheese. Grilled cheese. Quesadillas. Pizza. Any kind of bread-and-cheese combo is good. Potatoes and butter. And sour cream. Mmmmm.

I also love rice. My mother made steamed white rice nearly every day of my childhood, and continues now. It is hard to resist. How will I resist?

I’ll tell you how. I did not eat one simple carb today. I saw the bread sitting on the counter. I saw the rice cooker half full of rice, and the leftover phad thai in the refrigerator. How did I not even want to eat it? I scared the crap out of myself.

Everytime I looked at something that could possible raise my blood sugar at all, I visualized a needle. With insulin. Going into my soft, tender skin. When I felt the hint of a temptation, I raised the stakes and imagined amputated feet and legs. This was not hard because I used to be a physical therapist and was actually an expert at wrapping lower-extremity stumps. The cause for 99% of these amputations was diabetes. I could take it even further and visualize blindness, which is one of my greatest fears. I’d gladly give up my legs to save my eyes.

But hopefully if I can keep focused around these, none of these things will be realities in my life.

1

Two Selves, Fighting

I just got back from a long, gimpy walk in the woods. One leg is super tight and sore from doing a lot of very steep stair and hill workout this week. The other side has some sort of pulled groin muscle. So I was moving pretty slowly. But I was glad I went. It gave me a lot of time to contemplate things. I thought of about twenty blog posts while I was out there.

I’ve been down this road many a time, where I swear to focus and eat right and exercise and the whole thing. And once I make that decision, usually from sort of numerical wake-up call (the scale, or blood tests, or blood pressure, all of which have given me BAD numbers) I am generally pretty ON it. But then I drift away from that eventually, and I am back in the land of “I don’t want to think about it” until something forces me to.

I really do believe there is something to that whole “Ignorance is bliss” thing. Part of me really violently resists the idea of being AWARE, and of having to pay attention to this stuff. In fact it makes me want to have a freaking TANTRUM. I want to just live my life, and eat whatever I feel like, and don’t tell me what to do!!!I almost ripped my radio out of my car because I get so enraged listening to that frickin Allison Janney and her Kaiser “Thrive” commercials. They sounded so smarmy and finger-wagging. “Put down the ice cream, and have some nice broccoli! Get off the couch, and go for a walk!” Even if I agreed with stuff she was saying, even if I WANTED to go for a walk, listening to someone tell me I HAD to just got me into this very defiant, pissed off mood. 

I know that when I’m in the whole “paying attention” mode I tend to look back on my “not paying attention” self with a lot of disgust, disdain and shame. There’s like zero compassion there. And when I’m in my “la la la la I’m not paying attention” mode, I tend to look at my other mode as rigid, restrictive, punishing, anal and neurotic. There’s just no winning and there’s no seeing eye to eye. It’s a little bit like the Middle East; the chances for peace seem very fragile.

I know that I am about to enter a phase of paying attention. (which is funny because when I set up this blog, I was going to be coming at it from the OTHER perspective) I hope that I will be able to do it without totally hating that self that I’ve been for the past year or so.

1

Wake-Up Call

I thought about starting this blog a few days ago. I set it up yesterday. During this time, the things I imagined I would write have changed dramatically.

On Thursday, two days ago, I went in to the lab to get some bloodwork done. This at the urging of my physician husband who has been “concerned” about my health. Which brought up huge Feelings in me, because I felt all resentful and indignant that he would be “concerned” about me when I am only about 20 lbs overweight rather than like 100 lbs overweight. It made me feel pathologized and messed up and criticized for nothing.

So that was one part of the whole complicated story. But this morning he came to me with the results in hand. They were not good. Bottom line: my good cholesterol is too low, my bad cholesterol is too high, and I am 2 blood sugar points away from being officially diabetic. (123, and diabetic is 125)

Last time I got these measured I was about 10 lbs less, and was exercising more and doing a modified sort of South Beach thing.

But somewhere in the year or two since then, I started having this “fuck it” attitude and angry about having to change or modify or restrict my diet. The weight came back and well, here I am.

It’s hard. It’s hard. But I think I have sufficiently woken up.

Two of my favorite TV shows are “The Biggest Loser” and “Top Chef.” Ha. SO what does that say?

My lifelong “relationship” with food and my body have been SO fraught, and complicated, and struggly. I started this blog in order to help deal with the struggles.

Please please do not give me  diet advice. I am hoping that people who read this blog will be able to relate to my struggles on some level, and there can be some solidarity, and some way to deal with all of it.

SO here I am. Two days ago, I was all defiant and resentful. Today I am staring that 123 number in the face. I can’t forget the expression he had when he pointed to that number and said, “You were fasting? Really?” And the way his shoulders slumped when I nodded.

I also think I sort of came to this myself, a little bit. On Tuesday I was supposed to write, but had to put it off until the afternoon. My lunch included a lot of (white) rice. In the afternoon I was so tired and out of it I couldn’t even think. I was going to joke that this is what my husband calls “Postprandial Fatigue.” I googled PPF and realized one, it fit my description perfectly and two, that it is a #1 symptom of Metabolic Syndrome, which is what I guess I have. It sort of stunned me because I thought PPF happened to EVERYbody, including normal people. But apparently not. I’ve been mulling on that one for the past few days too.

When I was pregnant with my 2nd daughter, I got gestational diabetes (which puts one at risk for regular diabetes later; I guess it is knocking at my door now). I was able to test my blood and to stop eating sugar like right away and it was no hardship because I was doing it for my baby’s sake.

I hope I am able to make good changes for my own sake now. But I can tell you it is going to be an emotional ride.

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