Tag Archives: food addiction

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DAY 395: The Skinny on Obesity

One of my tried-and-true tricks for helping myself refocus when I need a reminder of why losing weight is THE priority, is to watch some of the videos that helped positively reinforce my mindset at the very beginning.  I’ve mentioned this before in specific reference to the British series “Fat Doctor” and the role it played in shaping my work early on.  (I still recommend that one, particularly the episode I’ve linked to in my 12/1/15 entry.)  My current rut is the first time I’ve gained back a great deal of weight, and it feels the worst because of the milestone(s) I undid by allowing that to happen.  So, I’ve been doing a lot of self-cheerleading to recreate my positive attitude and remind myself that I’ve done it before, therefore, I can do it again.

Several weeks ago, I discovered a series of documentary-style videos by the University of California called The Skinny on Obesity.  I watched the whole set in the dead of winter when it was hard to convince myself that going outside was really necessary, and the motivation I got out of it was enough to last me a few weeks.  Not only was it interesting and informative, but it was presented in a very clear and matter-of-fact way that was easy to follow.  I learned a lot from these videos and have already returned to them many times for more inspiration and education.  Altogether, the entire suite takes just about an hour to watch, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.  However, if I had to recommend only one video, it would be this one.  More than anything I’ve ever read, watched, or heard, this presents information in such a clear way that it made me feel like I understand food at a basic level for the first time in all of my years on Earth.  Watching this video in particular, it was like a series of light bulbs going off.  Just eye-opening stuff.

Soooo, partially in thanks to the lessons these shorts have re-taught me, I’m on a vegetarian diet this week.  I’ve done this a few times since beginning my mission over a year ago, and it’s consistently yielded good results.  I’m not totally after just a drop on the scale this time, though; I’m in a position where I actually need to re-detox — which I remember the symptoms of and can feel happening — and reset the way I think about and consume food.  My plan of attack in the gym this week is light:  just arm weights and maybe a mile here or there on the elliptical if the mood takes me, or in the unlikely event that I don’t make my steps on a given day.  Next week, I intend to ramp it up.

One reason I’m letting myself off the hook physically is that I don’t want to overwhelm myself with so many readjustments that I’m setting myself up for further frustrations when I fall short, which is bound to happen when you try to change every single thing in one fell swoop.  Unfortunately, though, the self-hook-letting-off is primarily out of responsibility:  I have a knee injury.  I say that without knowing what it actually is; I just know I have some occasional shooting pain and there’s a lot of cracking and sustained soreness going on.  I want to get below the lowest weight I had hit and see if that’s enough to alleviate it, but without overexerting it in the process.  So, elliptical only so it doesn’t put too much pressure on my joints, and not until next week once I’ve got the food part on lock.  Also, I’m in a really shitty mood this week, so it’s just not the time to be forcing myself into stuff I know I’ll be too petulant to actually do, which will only create disappointment in myself.  (Ahh, self-awareness.)

Something that was reinforced to me through this whole lost month I just had is that all the pieces I had delicately set up to keep myself on track are very important.  It’s not just the big, obvious parts, like meal planning and working out; it’s also the small forms of positive reinforcement through podcasts, articles, videos, and writing in this blog.  It all matters, so it all needs to happen.  Lesson re-learned.

On that note, I hope you’ll watch the videos I plugged and find some motivation in them for yourself.  If nothing else, the educational value is incredible, so share far and wide!

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DAY 308: Snow daze

Snow my god!  Snowtastrophe!  SNOWBLIVION!!!!  I’m more tired of tortured snow puns than I thought possible.  Snowzilla?  REALLY?  I thought it couldn’t get worse than Snowpocalypse and Snowmageddon.  How about snowverreaction?  Tossing “snow” in to replace the first syllable of some cataclysmic word is not clever.  I can handle the transportation paralysis and forced hibernation; it’s the criminal level of forced portmanteaus I can’t handle.

Please stop.  You’re doing unspeakable things to English.  What did English ever do to you?!  SNOW YOUR ROLL.  (That’s how it’s done.)

Anyway, back to my life as a fat girl, which I realize is the actual purpose of this blog…

I’m pleased and a little shocked to report that after 4 nights surrounded by mountains of homemade cookies at my parents’ house, I had not a single one.  NOT ONE.  I should emphasize that I was not only surrounded by the cookies, but surrounded by people eating them.  FOUR DAYS OF PEOPLE EATING DELICIOUS COOKIES AND I DIDN’T EVEN HAVE A BITE.  I leave here in about an hour, and I have no plans to break that streak.  It was so difficult, and I wanted to eat all of them, which is why I knew I couldn’t have one.  I can’t believe it.  I escaped without surrendering!

A huge reason for that is that I took a few minutes to make preparations, like organizing a snack survival kit for all 4 days, before leaving my place.  I also made sure I got in all of my steps according to Jiminy in spite of being off routine and needing to make an extra effort to work out.  This involved scoring a week-long pass to a local gym so I could get legitimate workouts in since exercising outside wasn’t really on the menu this time.  So, yes, it took a lot of additional work to pull off what is second nature to me when I’m in my natural habitat, but make no mistake:  it was still overwhelmingly a mental struggle.  I had to constantly remind myself that I’m on a mission here, and there is no pause button.  I have impending weigh-ins and momentum that should not be compromised.  I haven’t had that much trouble with temptation since before I started losing the weight, and I couldn’t believe how hard this was.  I had to tell myself over and over again that I had a choice:  have a cookie and be mad at myself, or resist them for this entire visit and be immensely proud.  I chose pride, and I feel AWESOME!

Along the way, I had a couple of memorable weight-loss moments that impacted me and became part of my arsenal of resistance.  (WOW, that sounds militant!)  First, when the snow stopped on Saturday, my mom and I shoveled out the driveway and de-snowed my and my brother’s cars that were parked there.  Even with two of us, it took an hour to finish because of how much snow we had to clean up.  With all that work, I never got winded or tired, and I kept thinking to the last time I had to dig out my car and how laborious it was.  All I had to do was clean the snow off of my car and shovel a little bit behind the rear wheels so I could back out of my outdoor parking space at my apartment.  That’s something that shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes with the quantity of snow I was dealing with at the time (maybe 2″), but it took nearly a half hour.  I went inside afterwards feeling completely exhausted and was covered in snow from being so big that there was no way to brush off my vehicle without leaning against it and getting snow all over me.  That was then.  This year, my body never made contact with the cars when I was cleaning them off, and I actually enjoyed shoveling for the productive workout it gave me.

At my grandfather’s party yesterday, I made the mistake of wearing a sleeveless dress in the dead of winter.  At a certain point, one of my mom’s cousins, who’s a massage therapist, came up to me privately to say hi.  He didn’t waste a lot of time getting to,  “I don’t know if this is a polite thing to bring up with a woman, but…” and went into how amazing and toned my arms look.  He said that as a massage therapist, he notices these things, but I must be doing some work on my arms.  He asked more about it and said to keep doing whatever I’m doing, because the effect is obvious and looks great.  That made me feel pretty rad!

Beyond that, people kept telling me how happy and confident I seemed, and that kind of threw me because I don’t really think I was doing anything to give anyone that impression.  It’s not like I was front and center, but pretty much everyone I talked to make some remark about that.  No one asked about the weight loss, but I could tell that sometimes they were waiting for me to say something about it (and I didn’t).  I guess I’m carrying myself differently and just projecting this stuff.  And the 3″ heels that made me a respectable height probably helped and would give the illusion of confidence to most people.  😉  Oh, and then I ate a piece of the birthday cake, and was fine with that choice/had planned to do it, anyway.

It’s about time for me to be getting ready to hit the road, so I’m gonna wrap this up here.  Not an earth-shattering update this time, but I had to record for posterity that it is in fact possible for me to spend this much time in an environment inundated with my trigger foods and not cave to them.  It’s possible because IT HAPPENED.  Woo!

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DAY 290: Sweet dreams

My subconscious is hilarious.  Between the competitive baking shows I’m now hooked on watching and the absence of sugary deliciousness in my life since leaving my family after Christmas “break,” I am constantly dreaming of desserts!  I wake up in the morning half-convinced that it was all true, and I really spent the past several hours pigging out on brownies, cupcakes, cookies, cakes, pies, fudge, ice cream, and solid blocks of chocolate.

I’ve had this type of strange dreaming happen before:  when I very first started losing, and over the summer when it started getting tiresome.  I’m not worried about it, I’m purely amused.  It’s like my inner child is screaming for goodies and the only way it can have them is in my nocturnal imagination.  OK, inner child!  Enjoy the fake calories!

One of the key things I’ve embraced from the start is not to practice absolute, categorical denial of anything.  I have sound reasons beyond the obvious “I don’t wanna,” and they’re my big 3:

  1. It’s unrealistic.  Eliminating entire swaths of food from your diet may yield drastic losses in the beginning, but it’s not sustainable in the long term.  Once you inevitably reintroduce your no-no food group, there’s a much higher likelihood that you will over-indulge like a fiend, and you’ll end up right back where you started.  Furthermore, are you really going to go through the rest of your life without ever having another slice of birthday cake, glass of champagne, or piece of candy?  No, you’re not, and you don’t want to.  Admit it now and you can work around it.
  2. It’s unhealthy.  The secret to all of this is balance.  If you cut out a whole brick of the food pyramid, you’ll have to figure out how to consume the good nutrients that were in that brick from somewhere else.  That’s math you’re not going to want to do.  Just eat less of the less-good stuff and you’ll be fine.
  3. It’s avoiding the real problem.  If you’re an over-eater, losing weight is extra challenging, and that’s because you don’t know how to eat just enough.  Without mastering moderation and portion control, you’re not going to truly change the bad habits that landed you in Fat Land in the first place.  You have to invest the time in training yourself to learn this new way of nourishing yourself.  Swearing off certain foods is not the way to do that.

 

***Of course, there are exceptions to this:  foods with no nutritional value, or that are chemical based rather than nutrient based, like pop.  I fully gave that shit up ages ago.  Everyone should!

In summary, the best approach — inherent difficulty notwithstanding! — is to keep everything in your diet, but learn how to control it.  It’s absolutely easier said than done, but it’s the only way.  Staying away from some foods entirely will only make your cravings for those foods harder and harder to resist until you eventually cave massively and end up hating yourself for the binge you go on.  It’s the oldest cliché in the weight-loss book, but it is a lifestyle change, and that means… CHANGING YOUR LIFESTYLE.

Meal planning and preparation solved almost all of that problem for me, and it’s why I can feel comfortable having a pint of Häagen-Dazs in my freezer right now.  I bought it two days ago and had actually forgotten it was there until I opened my freezer door this morning while putting my lunch together and saw it.  At this time last year, it would have been impossible for both of us to be in the same living quarters without me either constantly thinking about it or devouring the whole tub in one sitting.  This pint is for a special occasion, though, making it a low-risk temptation.  (Full disclosure:  There are 2 pints in there, but the second one will be for a later date when I feel like it’s appropriate.)

Conventional wisdom in weight loss is that you’re not supposed to reward yourself or celebrate milestones with food.  That makes perfect sense to me and I have adhered to it like a champ.  However, I’m making an exception for a few notable events coming up the week of January 17th:

  • The 17th is day 300 of my mission.  That’s a BFD, and it deserves recognition.
  • The 17th and 18th are also weigh-out dates for two of my DietBets that I have rather big numbers to pull in order to hit, but the fact that I was able to make it even a possibility that I could win after falling back around the holidays is reason enough to celebrate for me.
  • The 19th, I have a follow-up appointment with my doctor.  The last time I saw her was in mid-July, when she told me she bet she wouldn’t even recognize me the next time she saw me.  I had someone who recently came back to work from maternity leave actually not recognize me when we saw each other yesterday for the first time in 4 months, so I’m hoping my doctor’s prediction will be true.  And that will be after SIX months without seeing each other!
  • I’m closing in on losing 100 pounds, and if I keep up the pace, it’ll happen in time for that week.

 

So, yes.  Chocolate-peanut butter ice cream is in order that week.

I’m crazy enough to be looking forward to more sweet dreams tonight!

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DAY 286: Fun with food

One of the ways I’ve found of making this whole weight-loss racket enjoyable has been through trying new recipes.  I’ve always liked cooking, but I got away from it for a long time because of a combination of no time (full-time job + grad school is a BAD idea), a presumed lack of logic in preparing full meals for one person, and sheer laziness — Hot Pockets are easier.

In 2015, long before any weight-loss efforts commenced, I had the idea (NOT resolution style!) that I would try making at least one new recipe every week.  I can gladly report that I was successful in that endeavor.  I doubled up on new recipes a few times, which made up for weeks when I was traveling and not doing any cooking.  It was a great experiment, and it led me to become more creative and adventuresome in the kitchen.  It also helped me discover that there are foods I didn’t think I liked that — hey! — I do like!  (I’m looking at you, Brussels sprouts.  I’m sorry I stalked you.  Please repeal your restraining order against me.)

When I threw in the added element of trying to lose weight, my food preparation routine was a true gift.  Not only did it ensure that my meals were already planned, pre-portioned, and ready to grab and eat, it also made it virtually impossible for me to get bored of what I was eating.    To keep up with the need for at least one new recipe every week, I subscribed to the paper editions of Cooking Light, Clean Eating, All Recipes, Eating Well, and Bon Appétit.  I also started following a few cooking blogs at Brussels-sprouts levels of obsession.  I can’t get enough!  I’ve loved this accidental culinary eduction, and I’ve even grown to love my ritual of cooking pretty much all day Sunday in preparation for the week ahead.

Through my forays into the wide world of recipes, I have developed a particular appreciation, and knack, for picking apart several recipes and Frankensteining them with my own strokes of inspiration into formulas that I think would add up to something yummy.  It has not led me astray yet.  I was particularly proud of what I concocted for this week:  spiced butternut squash soup.

I used to shy away from making very involved soups like this.  All the recipes I’ve ever seen for butternut squash soup call for roasting the squash, then cooking it stove top for a while with all the seasonings and other ingredients (which usually include heavy cream, a no-no for me), THEN putting the whole mess into a blender fresh from the hot pot, and serving.  That sounded like a poorly sequenced series of steps to me, and it also daunted me to think about handling a hot mixture and putting it directly into my finicky blender.  Finally feeling confident enough to tinker around with this myself, and since the eastern US has finally decided it should start acting like winter here, I went for it this week.

Luckily, my local grocery stores carry pre-sliced, pre-seeded chunks of butternut squash, so that spared me probably an hour’s worth of work.  A pound and 4 ounces costs a surprisingly reasonable $2.99, so I was able to pick up 3 packs for what I would normally spend on a large package of chicken breast.  I cut the squash cubes into slightly smaller chunks, then tossed them directly into a pot of boiling water as if getting ready to make mashed potatoes.  Ain’t nobody got time for roasting.  Once the chunks were tender, I strained them, let them cool for about 20 minutes, and then blended them with coconut milk and vegetable broth until smooth.  Finally, I poured the contents of the blender back into the pot and seasoned the hell out of it with savory spices, then let it cook at a simmer until the thickness just kind of looked right.

It.  Tastes.  AWESOME.

I will admit that much of the reason I’m posting this is that I just want to broadcast my soup success to anyone who will listen.  Beyond that, though, it’s a great example of how this process of losing weight can go when it goes well.  It’s ALL an experiment.  It’s about forcing yourself to be brave enough to try something new and knowing that there’s no wrong way to do a good (read: healthy) thing for the right (read: healthy) reasons.  It boils down to one thing:  TRY.  You might even have fun.  🙂

So, I’m extra into soups now, and have learned through one of my aforementioned recipe magazine subscriptions that “souping” is the new juicing.  It’s just what it sounds like.  You heard it here first!  Maybe!  Anyway, I think I’d like to try a new soup every week for January.  If anyone out there in the DietBet crowd/blogosphere has a beloved soup recipe they’d be kind enough to share, please post it here or send it to me in a message.  I’d really appreciate your help in building my ever-expanding recipe arsenal!

Many thanks and happy souping!

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DAY 262: Once an addict…

Some people, like me, have addictive personalities.  I’ve been this way ever since I was a small child who obsessively watched the same movie over and over again on repeat until I got sick of it.  I’ve done this throughout childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, with everything from movies to TV shows to songs to books and even to people.  It’s an odd pattern of novelty becoming comfortable, then too familiar, then boring and/or annoying, which triggers a need for something new… until the pattern itself gets annoying and I return to something old and known until I again wear out my interest in that and need to go back to the new again.  I don’t know what it is that makes me this way, but I know it’s always been how I am, and I therefore have no expectation of changing it.

Obviously, the worst place where this special little cycle of mine pops up is with food.  Remember Oreo Cakesters?  You don’t?  Well, you must have been sleeping during that period where they existed, and I ate them all before you had a chance to try them.  (They have since mercifully been discontinued.)  I also had a Papa John’s phase, a fried chicken phase, even a freaking Hamburger Helper phase, just to name a few.  These were all bad food-addiction/compulsion-fueled habits I had before I had the thing that changed it all:  a routine.

Now that I have a framework within which to conduct my daily life, everything else is so much easier.  I’ve learned to adapt my addictive personality to a healthy way of life, which means preparation, preparation, preparation.  I’ve also learned that you can apply a potentially dangerous pattern to a positive endeavor by simply replacing the addiction.  (Simple in concept, of course.  It’s certainly a challenge in practice!)  I’m no longer obsessed with filling my belly; I’m obsessed with shrinking it.  I’m addicted to exercise.

Yesterday was the first time I’ve attempted my (formerly) usual elliptical run since before I got sick, which was well before Thanksgiving.  I’m still not entirely recovered, and my body is not keeping that a secret; I was coughing and my nose was running from just a couple of minutes in.  In the end, I was only able to do one mile of my usual 3+, but I’m happy to report that my speed is still intact (under 12 minutes!), and DAMN, it felt good to sweat from something besides a fever!

I’ve amped up the fitness addiction by signing up for more Diet Bets.  As of yesterday, I am now committed and paid into a total of FIVE (one of which I’m hosting — join me!) between now and mid-February.  I’m still trying to recover the lost ground in my Transformer, and it doesn’t look like I’ll quite get there in time for the round 4 weigh-in a week from now, but I WILL win the game.  I’ve also set a pretty ambitious goal to hit for the end of the year.  I won’t be crushed if I don’t hit it, but I WILL totally redeem myself — and be a total fucking champion — if I do.

Finally, I set up another follow-up appointment with my fabulous doctor for January 19th, 6 months after my last visit with her.  I can’t wait to hear what she’ll have to say at that visit!  It gives me extra motivation to reach my goals.

Through replacing the addiction, I’ve become so singularly focused on achieving my fitness goals that I’ve gone back to not even caring about my old trigger foods.  Those plates of temptation are just masses of needless calories that will sabotage my plans and make me mad at myself.  Why go down a path of destruction?  I’ll pass.  Gym, please.

Sorry, Christmas cookies.  Maybe next year!

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DAY 253: Real fever, cabin fever

Oh no — I got sick!

Most normal people, when they’re sick, curl up on the couch and proceed not to move for days.  I spent day one of my sickness fighting it off by driving 5 hours back to my place from my parents’ once I knew I was succumbing to illness (dramatic!), and using my last ounce of strength to go immediately to the grocery store after making the trip so I could have something to eat for the next however many days (assuming consciousness was part of the deal; it wasn’t when I got sick last year).  I made soup on Sunday between episodes I was clearing out of my Hulu queue and, when my internet crashed for several hours, watching The Holiday on DVD.

I’m on day 4 of this craptastic sickness, and I seem to be recovering incredibly quickly by comparison to last year, when I was fully out of commission for 8 days.  It’s surely partly due to being a different sickness, but also partly due to being overall healthier now than I was then.  That being said, I definitely fell asleep last night in the midst of a full-on Pizza Hut fantasy.  I’m telling you, I could smell the imaginary pizza through my stopped-up nose and taste it on my dry, chapped lips (even though I can’t smell the soup I’ve been forcing myself to eat, or taste the sriracha-coated Brussels sprouts I’m also forcing myself to eat).  I take solace in knowing it’s probably more about missing being able to enjoy the experience of eating than it is about actually wanting Pizza Hut.  I woke up with no trace of that intense craving.  (Luckily, that craving hit after business hours!)

BUT…

I am now spending cold, rainy days all alone, loafing around the house with no strength to do anything productive, like pick up the piles of tissues lying on every surface in the place.  It’s a Herculean effort just to take a shower, even though that’s the one moment of the day where I have full operation of my lungs.  And I’m bored.  I’ve cleared out my entire Hulu queue, and it’s not replenishing because everything is on stupid “winter hiatus” — whoever had that idea should be savagely beaten.  And because I’m bored, I’m getting powerful cravings for food I don’t actually want when I’m not even hungry.  Dafuq??

Exercise.  I need exercise.

Unfortunately, the knives I’m currently storing in my chest wouldn’t cooperate with physical activity beyond getting into and out of bed.  Hell, I have to be strategic about how dire the need is to blow my nose, because doing so triggers a coughing fit that’s not necessarily worth the nasal relief.

Basically, this sucks.  I’m lonely, I have cabin fever, I crave junk but can’t really eat (or taste or smell) anyway, my body craves exercise but can’t really move, and I feel like I got hit by a truck.  Waaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

Suddenly, I remembered what kept me company when I started out on this solo mission to lose an entire person’s worth of weight from my own body:  weight-loss shows.  In April and May, I replaced binge eating with binge watching The Biggest Loser, My 600-Lb Life, Downsize Me, Extreme Weight Loss, and, most importantly, Fat Doctor.  FD is a British show that follows 2 people per episode through their struggles with weight, and they ultimately undergo gastric bypass surgery to save their lives.  Because it’s not a prudish American production, people speak very plainly about their experiences at morbidly obese sizes, and they actually show the patients’  operations.  It can be hard to watch, but it’s also helpful and hopeful.  If I hadn’t had these people’s stories to identify with — and to warn me — it’s difficult to imagine how I would have blazed through the beginning of the weight-loss process.  I don’t know why I haven’t mentioned before how instrumental these shows were with keeping my commitment on track early on.

There was one episode of Fat Doctor that was especially gut wrenching, one that I think back to involuntarily and then subsequently can’t get out of my head for hours.  I’d encourage anyone in need of a reality check, of motivation, of a reminder of why they’re doing this to watch this episode (do NOT read the comments below the video if you want to avoid spoilers, which WILL take away from the impact of watching).  Again, this will be an emotional viewing, but man, will it be worth it if you’re struggling right now.  Even if you’re not struggling, or not even trying to lose weight, or have never been obese, I would encourage you to watch this episode.  It will provide you insight into what being dangerously heavy is really like, and why people who live this every day are so desperate for a change.

Perspective, my friends.  Pizza Hut sounds so stupid now.  If you need me, I’ll be catching up on season 4 of Fat Doctor.

On a lighter note, I can’t wait to work out again!  How sick is that?!

 

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DAY 238: Peek-a-boo!

I’M ALIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE!

Full disclosure:  possibly the biggest reason why I haven’t posted in so long is that counting the days since my last update was such a chore!  How sad is that??

It’s been a super, super packed last 5 weeks.  Fall is always my busiest season because it’s my favorite season, so I tend to fill it with more things that make me happy.  First of all, my birthday was in mid-October, so that happened.  A few days after that, I left the country for two weeks of travel.  I returned from that to a VERY full plate at work which fully consumed me up until even today, and over the weekend that just ended, I hosted a dinner party at my house whose menu was entirely pumpkin-themed — and homemade.

Needless to say, between the complete lack of time, the travel, and the general overbookedness of my life the last month plus, my fitness routine pretty much jumped off a cliff.  I have weighed myself once since I got back, but I really don’t even remember what number the scale said; I only registered that, not surprisingly, I had gained a few pounds since the last time I weighed in for anything.

I am stressed and tired.  I haven’t seen the inside of a gym in over a month.  I have gorged myself on desserts, café drinks, and unhealthy restaurant food.  I have dropped the ball with meal and snack prep (until this week — phew!).  I’ve spent a fuck-ton of money on all of the above.  And, oh yeah, it bears repeating that I GAINED WEIGHT.

Now here’s the really weird part:  I’m OK with that.

I knew what I was doing as I was doing it.  I consciously chose to eat cupcakes, ice cream, chocolate, and so on instead of being extra vigilant with my diet to compensate for the impossibility of going to the gym.  I had a burst of uncontrolled living life as it happens, and ya know what?  That’s what typical people do, I hear.  It felt great to feel like a normal human for a bit.

It also felt pretty gross.

My energy levels are SOOOOOOOOOOOOO low.  I found that while I was on vacation, I consistently got exhausted — not a little bit tired, but honestly just completely wiped out — around 2 PM every day from A) not eating at consistent intervals throughout the day, and B) having totally erratic bouts of exercise.  Being off of that game for 2 weeks and returning to a moment where I’d so overcommitted myself to professional and personal events that it prevented me from taking care of myself and returning immediately to my healthy lifestyle meant I started eating on the fly again, which meant the return of those nasty chemicals.  I’ve started experiencing cravings again, and having to fight with myself not to indulge.  I’ve felt desperately hungry from irregular eating, which makes me eat too much when the time for food finally comes.  I’ve been short tempered and irritable.  The inertia from inactivity makes me feel lazy about going to the gym, and makes me actually not WANT to go.  The combination of not eating or working out properly has affected the quality of my sleep.  I’ve been feeling draggy and getting headaches.  I feel a step away from disgusting.

That’s exactly why I know I must resume my routine.  NOW.

Because of the weight gain, I won’t win my transformer round that weighs out today/tomorrow.  I hate that.  Hate, hate, hate that.  I liked looking at my DietBet profile and seeing a perfect streak of nothing but wins.  I’ve ruined that.  I can still win the 6-month bet, though… and I fully intend to.

I came to work today with my survival kit all prepared:  lunch box packed with AM snack, lunch, and PM snack; backpack filled with gym clothes.  As the old cliché goes, this whole thing is more mental than physical.  All I have to do is physically act on what my mind knows will lead to success, and I can fix this and still hit my year-end goal for the weight loss.

I think I can, I think I can, I think I can…

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DAY 189: De-acquired tastes

The first time I seriously tried to lose weight, I never really kicked the sauce.  I continued to binge-eat brownies, cookies, ice cream, cupcakes, candy, etc., that I bought on the sly at the grocery store.  I also never fully kicked microwaveable meals out of my rotation; I toted Lean Cuisines, Lean Pockets, and other purportedly “healthy” frozen meals to work for lunches or ate them at home for dinner when I felt too lazy to cook.  I was working just as hard at the gym as I am now — well, that’s arguable — but I was blowing it all up in the kitchen.  It’s not surprising, then, that I used to go to bed at night and REGULARLY dream about stuffing my face with the “forbidden” stuff.  It’s hilarious to admit it now, but I would routinely dream of gorging myself on endless banquet tables of cookies, and wake up feeling physically and mentally sick, but also relieved that it didn’t really happen!  I just couldn’t seem to give up my sugar.

I don’t have a sweet tooth.  I have a mouth full of ’em.

Or so I thought.

Something weird has happened over the past few months:  I am suddenly less drawn to the dessert table.  The few times that I do venture over there, I find I’m not as satisfied as I expected to be by what I consume.  As recently as last week, I found myself completely uninterested in the wedding cake at the reception I went to.  I just… didn’t eat any.  (I’m pretty sure it’s a crime not to eat cake at a wedding, so the bride can never know I rebuffed her celebratory sweets!)

I DID partake in four other desserts while away:
-Gourmet chocolates
-Peanut butter-chocolate rolled oats bar (it was basically a no-bake cookie in bar form)
-3 mini cookie sundaes (“pizookies,” if you’re curious), split 50/50 with my friend
-A blizzard from Dairy Queen

The lab results were mixed:
-The chocolates were unsatisfying.
-The cookie bar was love in my mouth.
-The pizookies were heaven on earth.
-The blizzard was a disappointment.

It made me remember other surprising discoveries along these lines:
-My mom’s brownies suddenly tasted WAY TOO SWEET.  I used to think that was only possible with port wines.
-My former TV companion, chocolate-peanut butter Häagen Dazs ice cream, also suddenly tastes a little too sweet.
-Tonight, I tasted a serving of goodies from my latest Nature Box order, and I can only describe them as funky-ass, crunchy cough syrup pellets.  That’s not what I expected from whole-wheat chocolate chip cookies.

This made me wonder:  Do tastes change with weight loss?

My infinitesimal internet research seems to imply that they do.  Certainly, this is pronouncedly the case with people who had gastric bypass surgery.  As someone who has not had that procedure, I’m not entirely sure how or why I might be experiencing this, but it does seem clear to me that there’s a correlation.

My completely unfounded, untested, and unresearched theory is that this is a byproduct of the initial detox period.  Maybe what I was eating never really tasted good, and it was all chemical reactions happening in my brain’s pleasure center rather than a true enjoyment of food.  Now that I know what actual food tastes like, the sugar-loaded stuff tastes all wrong to me.  Or, maybe it tastes right, like what it actually is:  mounds of sugar and unnatural compounds.

Regardless of the explanation — which I will continue to investigate — I am cool with it.  I no longer feel like I’m missing out because I didn’t taste EVERY SINGLE CONFECTION in a given bakery.  I don’t feel compelled to eat the cookies some courteous bastard brought to my meeting at work.  I pay no mind to the cupcake place right next door to my office, the donut shop directly outside of my metro entrance, or the bag of white-chocolate-pumpkin-spice-covered pretzels sitting in a bag on my kitchen counter right now.  My tastes changed, and so did my mentality.

Oh, and I’ve been sleeping like a baby.

I’d call that a win.

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DAY 106: The best thing I ever did

Every time I see an article like this, I get a little self-congratulatory satisfaction.  I kicked the sauce 15 years ago.

As you can tell from the link, I’m not talking about liquor.  Luckily, I’ve never had much of a taste for most alcohol, so that hasn’t been a source of weight gain or an impediment to weight loss for me.  What I’m talking about is the equally dangerous, harmful, and addictive substance known as the soft drink (which I will refer to primarily as pop, because I grew up in a part of the country that calls it that).

For background, let me go on record and say I used to drink a TON of Coke.  We always had it in the house, and I would have 1-2 glasses with dinner every night as a kid.  Over summer vacations when school was out, I would come in from outside and pour myself a refreshing glass of not water, not lemonade, but Coke.  When my family would go to a restaurant for meals, I got endless refills of Coke.  I never. Stopped.  With.  The. Coke.  No one ever told me I should.  So, for my entire childhood, it was Coke everywhere.  Coke constantly.  Always Coca-Cola.

I was one of those kids who really trusted everything authority figures told me, especially my parents and my teachers.  Sadly, this means that if someone had told me when I was younger and impressionable that Coke was actually terribly bad for me — and probably if I hadn’t had such regular, easy access to it — I would not have been a pop guzzler during those development years.  When I finally did get un-hooked, it was kind of a happy byproduct of a different lesson I learned from an adult.

In my mandatory 9th-grade health class, it was the first time a teacher explained the benefits behind the then-recommended 8 8-ounce glasses of water per day tenet.  I decided I wanted to challenge myself to try and drink those 64 ounces of water a day, so I bought a 20-ounce bottle of Aquafina from the vending machine in the cafeteria one day and carried it around with me to classes.  I refilled it during the day from the water fountains in the hallway and aimed for 3 bottles a day, figuring that 60 ounces was just as good as 64.  I would make it through about 2 bottles in school and do the third bottle in the evening at home.  Boy, did I pee a lot all of a sudden.  I instantly became the girl asking for the hall pass in every period.  And my pee was no longer yellow, but clear.  I had never known that was a sign of good hydration.

When I first began that little experiment, I still went straight for the fridge for a glass of Coke when I got home from school.  Pretty early on, though — about 2 weeks in — I discovered I actually wasn’t thirsty for Coke; I was thirsty for more water.  (I now know that I was never thirsty for Coke; I was chemically craving it.)  I gradually, unintentionally, eliminated Coke from my diet.  Before long, I started learning how toxic pop is, and became intentional about my decision.  I avoided Coke almost entirely and drank exclusively water.  Not purely coincidentally, I was the only one of my friends who never had acne problems.  I was also the only one of my friends who didn’t have stained teeth when my braces got removed.  After a while, I didn’t even miss or think about Coke, even though it was still always in the fridge at home.  My little experiment that was supposed to be a short-term thing has turned into a permanent life style practice that I have carried on throughout my entire adult life.  In my early twenties, I graduated to a 32-ounce BPA-free bottle that I fill at least 4 times per day.  I take it with me everywhere.  I am never thirsty.

Almost everyone I know still drinks the fizz.  There are some who think it’s cute to constantly refer to their Diet Pepsi addictions, as if they don’t believe that’s actually a thing while they trumpet their dependency on that shit.  My friends, it ain’t cute.  I know I kind of got off that crap by happenstance, but I am thankful to my teenage self for that every day.  Giving up pop was the best thing I ever did for my health.

I’m not saying I’m better than anyone — I don’t believe that and I certainly don’t mean to imply it.  What I am saying is, that stuff IS addictive, and that’s the goal of soft drink manufacturers.  Our dependency on their product keeps them in business.  I believe that the reason Coke’s recipe is locked away in a vault guarded by dragons and rabid dogs is not because the Coca-Cola company is afraid of replication or corporate espionage, but because if the full list of ingredients were ever revealed BY the company, they would be admitting to guilt of willful and knowing participation in contributing to a public health epidemic.  If the series of links I shared at the beginning of this blog post didn’t illustrate the point finely enough, maybe this will: soda is extremely fucking bad for you.  That these companies are able to profit from marketing poison to the masses in an age where we know how terribly unhealthy this product is, is unconscionable.

I really hope that in the future, we will look back on the days of Coke and Pepsi with as much horror and condemnation as we look at tobacco companies now.  They’ll probably never go away completely, but they can be shamed and stigmatized into regulation the way cigarette companies largely have been.  Just as tobacco products are only available for purchase by consenting adults and labeled with warnings reminding you that what you’re consuming is killing you, so should pop be.  If that sounds extreme, I don’t care.  That shit is unhealthy, addictive, unnatural, a body pollutant, a contributor to disease and obesity, and pure trash.  Should that be in the bodies of children?  Should that be in the body of anybody?

I guess I’m feeling a little angry today about this.  I see people chugging carbonated sugar like it’s no big deal, and it worries me.  Diet-branded drinks do not make it better; in fact, they are likely even worse.  As I’ve mentioned previously, learning about food addiction has been a revelation for me.  In that light, I see the beverage addiction even more harshly.  I can’t believe we willingly put this stuff into our bodies.

That’s what this is all about, though, isn’t it?  We have to have that set of realizations that make us say, “Hang on a sec — what am I doing to myself?”  Whether that realization comes after a heart-to-heart with a loved one, through self-education, or by a complete accident, it has to come if you want to be healthy.  You are the only one who can make these choices for yourself.  You are in control.  You decide what goes into your body.  You.  That’s what I’ve always heard, and what I finally understand.

Funny, for all my youthful reverence of adult authority figures, it’s grown-up me who learned from my teenage self.  Seriously, high-school me:  thank you.