Losing weight, finding me, healthy, easy recipes

Archive for the ‘Emo eating’ Category

Two Twinkies, jammy tomatoes

tomato jam 175

Reducing tomatoes to jam-like consistency. Chops from Brushy Creek Farms in Union Grove (NC).

One feels odd, to say the least, taking diet words of wisdom from comic Louis C.K., but in the April 25 issue of Rolling Stone, he does talk sensibly about anxiety and eating. When asked if it helped to realize that his compulsive eating was just self medicating anxiety, he answers: “Oh, definitely. Once you say that to yourself, ‘Oh, this is anxiety,’ you get to say to yourself, ‘Why am I anxious?’ because when something’s bothering you, (if) you don’t name it, you just start eating something. I’m still going to eat the two Twinkies, but when I start opening the second package, I say to myself, ‘What’s going on, buddy?’ That will get me to two Twinkies instead of eight.”

The trick is that you not say, “Shut up, bitch,” when you ask yourself what’s going on. I belong to a generation that wasn’t supposed to acknowledge we even had bodies, let alone listen to them.

But in the last year or so, I’ve tried listening. Amazing how many times sitting down with a book, going outside and planting some basil, drinking water or coffee, works just as well as junk food to soothe a stressed psyche.

Or planting tomatoes, everyone’s favorite vegetable from backyard gardens.  While we wait for nights without frost, I bought a box of grape tomatoes from faraway. This easy recipe from the April issue of Real Simple magazine justifies the non-local purchase (in my mind, anyway). The grits, of course, were (was?) my favorite part of the meal, but the tomatoes, the healthiest. And this is a good way to use a lot when your own  tomato plants overflow, say, in August.

Pork chops with cheesy grits and jammy tomatoes

1 cup quick-cooking (not instant) grits

2 ounces Cheddar (about 1/2 cup)

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

Salt and pepper

4 bone-in pork chops (1 inch thick; about 2-1/2 pounds total)**

1 teaspoon paprika

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 pint grape tomatoes, halved

1/4 cup cider vinegar

3 tablespoons brown sugar

1 tablespoon chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

**I used thinner chops from a local farmer and adjusted cooking time accordingly.

Cook grits according to package directions, stirring in the cheese, butter and 1/4 teaspoon each salt and pepper during last minute of cooking.Meanwhile season pork with paprika, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Heat oil in large skillet over medium-high heat. Cook the pork until browned and cooked through, 6 to 8 minutes per side; remove and set aside to rest.

Add tomatoes, vinegar and sugar to drippings in skillet and cook, stirring often, until the tomatoes are soft and the liquid is syrupy, 3 to 4 minutes. Serve pork with tomatoes and grits. Sprinkle with parsley. Makes 4 servings, 645 calories (that’s with 10 ounces pork and bone each), 26 g fat. Because I cooked only 2 servings of pork and tomatoes, I was able to have leftover grits for breakfast several mornings. Yum.

Category:

Compulsive eating, Emo eating, Meat, Simple foods, Spring, Tomatoes

Tagged with:

Addiction, the sequel (again!); stir-fry problem solvers

A friend’s child went into drug rehab this week. And the way my friend describes the drug use is exactly my thought process when I’m getting ready to medicate my low moods with over-eating:

“S/he was only using a few times a week. S/he’d use, feel good. It would wear off. S/he’d get sick (feel bad) and think, ‘Just this once, it won’t matter if I use again.’  ” And again. And again. We junkies know how that goes just in case you thought being addicted to food is any different than being addicted to other substances providing instant highs, subsequent lows.

OK, it’s not against the law to finish the ice cream in the container when a half serving remains. But the sugar makes me feel lousy in the short run, the fat, in the long run. A significant portion of my difficulties running up and down stairs, after all, is the 40 extra pounds packed about my mid-section.

So, alone in the house last night (well, if two not particularly housebroken dogs, a rambunctious kitten and two pissed-off cats count as alone), I had this chat with myself: “Yes, it will too matter. Go to bed. Feel good about your strengths, instead of bad about your weaknesses. Think about your supper and how in most of the world, that was probably a day’s worth of food.” And I did. Yay, me.

And that supper was so good, we polished it off in two days, with me forgetting to take a picture. It was a gingered Cashew Chicken from the January/February issue of Cuisine at Home magazine, a recipe that answered two of my frequent quibbles about stir-fries: 1) They all taste the same and 2) the meat is overdone to a fare-thee-well. Remedies: 1) Toasted sesame oil, fresh ginger and chili garlic sauce and 2) pre-cooking the chicken.

Cashew chicken

1-1/2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into 1-inch cubes

1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil

3/4 cup roasted cashews

1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger

1/3 cup low-sodium soy sauce

1 tablespoon chili garlic sauce

1 cup scallion slices (green part)

Find chili garlic sauce in Asian foods section of your supermarket. Use it in recipes or splashed on jasmine rice like ketchup on a burger.

As with any stir-fry, have all ingredients ready to pop in the pan before you fire up the stovetop. Cook chicken in saucepan of boiled salted water until cooked through, 4 to 5 minutes; drain and refrigerate tightly covered,  if not using immediately.

Heat oil in wok or skillet. Add cashews; stir-fry until fragrant, 1 minute. Add ginger and stir-fry 30 seconds. Stir in soy sauce and chili garlic sauce, then add cooked chicken; stir-fry 2 minutes more. Stir in scallions. Serve over rice.

Makes 4 servings, 381 cal and 20 g fat each.

Category:

Chinese food, Emo eating, Food addiction, Simple foods, Weight loss

Tagged with:

Ten commandments

Things I need to accept:

1. All weight “lost” will be found as soon as I think I can eat like a normal-weight person. I dropped to 186 pounds before my high school reunion in August and, magically, I’m back up to 203 after yesterday’s first of two Thanksgiving dinners this week. Beef producers should study my body chemistry for secrets of efficient and speedy weight gain.

2. I need to list everything I eat every day. I cannot decide I’m tired of logging into livestrong.com and just keep the list “in my head.”  I pride myself on my memory, but, amazingly, I can forget an entire sandwich when calculating calories eaten!

3. Sugar’s my gateway drug. That’s how three “tastes” of cranberry turtle bars wind up being three entire shortbread-cranberry-caramel-dark chocolate cookies. And a search for something to go with them because, after all, it’s late and eating supper at this hour should allow extra calories.

4. I am the Queen of Rationalization.

5. Sugar makes me feel lousy. After my usual overdose, my skin itches, I feel tired and “hung over,” my joints ache and — I don’t know how much scientific support exists for this idea — my immunity dips. I do know that whenever I overdose for a lengthy period of time like the holiday season, I get sick.

6. I must exercise. Not so much for weight loss but for maintenance, for keeping my joints fluid. After two months of bronchitis and pneumonia this fall, I couldn’t move without hurting somewhere (which means sitting and noshing). An adjustment by the chiropractor and her advice to “walk as much as you can, as fast as you can to get lubrication into those joints,” and I realize — at last? – that this is as necessary, or maybe more so, than brushing my teeth.

7.  Fruits and vegetables. Vegetables and fruits. Three-quarters of the plate. My goal with my contributions to yesterday’s dinner was to bring some of both to the family table that I could eat for seconds, rather than ham or bread or dessert. Holy cow — it worked, pretty much.

8. “Just do it” is not mere merchandising. It’s how grownups live. They just go for their walks, just go to bed, just fix a real meal. My mini-epiphany when grocery shopping a few weeks ago and fretting about something I’d missed a few aisles back: I can get it/try it/fix it/eat it another time. I have enough (a very difficult concept, along with delayed gratification, for addicts’ damaged psyches to grasp).

9. I can take a shower. (See name of blog.)

10. When all else fails, I can at least eat something nutritious.  A perfect navel orange, a handful of nuts, diet cocoa with skim milk. I can keep less junk in the house — heaven knows, there’s nowhere I can go up here for a late-night sugar fix except to the kitchen. “No life except what (she) made” writes New Yorker profiler Larissa MacFarquhar of author Hilary Mantel’s stay in Botswana. True of  this empty stretch of  North Carolina as well: No life and no food except what I make.

Category:

Compulsive eating, Emo eating, Food addiction, Holiday eating, Maintaining weight loss, Stress eating

Tagged with:

Addiction, the sequel (again)

“None of her actions was in the least inauthentic, but her degree of alienation from goals, actions, simple states of being — the acute, inescapable self-surveillance of the addict — resembles that rarefied ontological space of the depressive, the anxious, the ill, the poet.” (Joshua Cody’s [sic] — A Memoir, W.W. Norton & Co., 2011)

I’m getting more than a little tired of reading something like the above and slamming to a stop, thinking: OMGsh, that’s ME! (I know good grammar calls for ‘That is I,’ but it sounds SO grammar police.)

It IS me, and I think that standing outside myself is a natural consequence of abusive parenting. As is not being able to tolerate authority without behaving like a 5-year-old (I learned that from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. Finally, I understand why neither my sister nor myself made careers, but just had jobs we mostly hated.)

Of course, it’s not the understanding that’s tough (although it’s taken over six decades). It’s the doing. It’s the grabbing onto something (that would be me, myself and I) and stopping the terrifying slide back into addiction, the 15 pounds I’ve eaten back since my Aug. 10 high school reunion.

Russell Banks’ Lost Memory of Skin has the most spot-on description of addiction I’ve ever read. When The Kid indulges in his addictive pasttimes, “he could feel and almost hear a corresponding series of clicks in his brain. A warm spot would emerge at the back of his skull and spread up over the top of his head until he felt like he was wearing a heated cap.” That’s me and a box of Wheat Thins, me and a pack of Marlboros, me and computer solitaire.

A family member who has never, ever been alienated from her joyful state of being.

The problem is that pesky alienation from your own life, and, again in Banks’ words, “The rest of the time he felt as if he were his own ghost — not quite dead but not alive either. A dust bunny shaped like a person.” Brilliant.

With the big reunion over, baby girl spending the semester in E. Africa, a two-week+ cold and Seattle-worthy weather, I feel as though I’m scraping up against something really meaningful about my addictive personality. (Insert whatever metaphor you choose here: The white water throws her against the rocks, eg.)

Walking the puppy this week, I thought about a friend who told me in July that she’d had breast cancer two years ago. She  didn’t want anyone to know it now or when she was going through treatment because she didn’t want to become the Disease in people’s eyes.

And then I thought: I’ve been happy to have people see me as Weight Loss, not JoAnn. But that is losing/has lost its excitement. It’s time, again and again and again, to get to know me the person, let others know her and get to know them as well.

Russell Banks’ again (this is another life-changing book, can you tell?): “Maybe if he just acts like he has a third dimension whether he’s seen by others or not…if he acts like a three-dimensional man then maybe, just maybe he’ll turn into one. Isn’t that how everyone does it? By acting?”

Wow.

 

Category:

Emo eating, Food addiction, Handling anxiety without food, Handling loss without eating, Maintaining weight loss, Overeaters Anonymous, Stress eating, Why overweight?

Tagged with:

Travels with Tootsie, sweet potato and peanut stew

All communication from E. Africa so gratefully and excitedly received!

Any day that begins with a video conversation with Dora the Explorer and one of her older sisters calling to say they’re coming for Christmas is a fab one.

Saturday morning the Tanzania group was in the middle of 3.5  internet-free weeks on their schedule. So everyone went into a Stonetown internet cafe to upload pictures and talk to their parents. I’m sure all the parental units were as excited as we.

Sunday they again left all social media for 10 days. I will admit grudgingly that I’m proud of her for being so bold. And it is exciting and gratifying to see images from across the world — not just glassy-eyed snaps from the latest frat party. Evidently, though, wherever in the world college women are photographed, they stand with their hands on their hips and their torsos slightly turned.

It’s now “only” 12 weeks until the end of this semester abroad so I’m starting to think about African food. That and why I’ve larded on 13 pounds in the six weeks since my August high school reunion. Anxiety, depression and a stinking cold are, I believe, the deadly triumverate, deadly to taking care of oneself anyway. Today was my first walk with the puppy in a week and a half, and I already feel better and less likely to skid into the slough of despond.

The African-inspired slow-cooker sweet potato-peanut stew we enjoyed is healthy, easy and cheap to fix. And until we piled it on noodles moistened with a wee drap o’ cream cheese, fairly non-fat. The 1/2 cup minced fresh parsley is as necessary to the distinct, sharp taste of this stew as it is to tabbouleh.

This seems like something Dora the Explorer, who shops now in open-air markets full of seashells, cardamom pods and “logs” of cinnemon, will enjoy in December. I was a little leery of  the amount of allspice but, honestly, the individual tastes combine into a unique and hearty whole. Even Stoic the Vast, who can usually identify any spices he’s not crazy about, could not name or disparage the allspice. 

Peanut-sweet potato stew (from Time, Inc.’s All You website)

6 small sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 3/4 inch slices (about 2 pounds)

3 red onions, peeled and thinly sliced (I used a smaller amount of chopped green onions because that was what I had)

1 14.5-ounce can diced tomatoes, not drained

1-1/2 teaspoons ground cumin

1/2 teaspoon ground allspice

Salt and pepper

2 cups water

1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley

1/2 cup creamy or crunchy peanut butter

Stir together potatoes, onions, tomatoes, cumin, allspice, salt, pepper and water in a slow cooker until thoroughly combined. Cover and cook for 4 to 5 hours on high. Just before serving, stir in parsley and peanut butter. Makes 4 318-calorie servings.

Category:

African food, Casseroles, Emo eating, Exercise, Fall, Tomatoes, vegetables

Tagged with:

Saying goodbye

You asked what it was like to put our youngest on the plane for 4 months in East Africa.  Sad.  Scary. Lonely, even though her father and I share this challenge.

We’re both eating like bears getting ready for a Wyoming winter (I’ve put back on 9 of the pounds I lost for my high school reunion.) I’ve scarcely exercised and, at the same time, gone back to falling asleep on the couch and going to bed sometime between 3 and 4 a.m.

Our intrepid adventurer is second from the right here on a middle school safari to Colorado when her mother obsessed about icy ledges and cranky bears.

In short, in the first two weeks of this verrrrrrry long semester I’ve quit taking care of myself and my partner. What kind of sense does that make? Perhaps, just perhaps, even though I’ve spent years saying I don’t want my obit to read that my three daughters are in Boston, Baltimore and ”of the home,” I don’t really mean it.

I want the care and company of my children, especially the sunny youngest. I want them here at holidays, here when I want to go to the movies, here when I fix supper. I want them young and dependent (while not really needing anything from me). I want, I want, I want — the mantra of the (food-) addicted. I don’t want to feel so alone.

We tried so hard to be cheerful during her last week at home before take-off. When she would lose something in the tangle that is her personal space, I would tell myself that I wouldn’t miss the drama  of constantly looking for stuff (like I don’t do that enough on my own!).

But I knew better than to listen to me. I knew I’d miss being able to pick up the phone and hear her chirpy voice (although we did talk to her for 25 minutes this past Saturday but Skyping, video or calling, is unpredictable to say the least). Even though we didn’t often make the 7-hour drive to her campus, I think we both miss knowing we could do that if we wanted.

We’re proud to have raised — with help — a strong, independent young woman. But did she have to be so strong and independent?

I think about counting the days until December 15, the date of her 36-hour return flight. But an actual number of days seems even more daunting (and more real) than  ”a semester.”

I think about how happy she is, conquering her own fears, making her way in a completely different culture in a very different language. Come on: Who(m) am I kidding? What matters to the narcissist, the addict, is how happy I am!

But all recovering addicts know that relying on anyone/-thing outside ourselves is ultimately an empty premise (anything aside from our Higher Power, whatever it may be). We are the ones who can experience our sadness, turn it over in our hands like a shiny stone, tuck it away and go on, aware of it and strengthened by it. Self-control is just that — reliance on self and all that means.

Aw, nuts. I don’t really want to be stronger, thinner, fitter. I want to be dependent on everyone around me. I don’t want to be sad or hungry or tired or missing the blithe spirits that were my young children.

In the words of an actor I once interviewed on set in Wilmington: “Life is hard, and then we die.” Or, in the words of author Anne Tyler: “People imagine that missing a loved one works kind of like missing cigarettes…The first day is really hard but the next day is less hard and so forth, easier and easier the longer you go on. But instead it’s like missing water. Every day, you notice the person’s absence more.”

Category:

Aging, Compulsive eating, Emo eating, Handling loss without eating, Overeaters Anonymous, Self control

Tagged with:

Calories, a loss of a different kind

Calories, said the country DJ whose wife evidently struggles with food as do I, are those magical little things that sneak into your closet at night and shrink your clothes.  Yeah, so?

Oh, all right, the number I eat is my responsibility — to keep track of and to keep under control. The action I was most proud of this weekend just past was knowing if I stayed downstairs late Sunday afternoon, I’d overeat so I went upstairs with a book and a diet soda.

Lunch with friends and family at the Harmony Cafeteria May 2012.

Sometimes it’s just that simple. Distract yourself. Take a walk; take a shower. Have a cup of black coffee or a glass of water. Eat a piece of fruit, a handful of baby carrots.  Usually, if I can distract myself for 20 or 30 minutes, the urge passes and I can move on with my life (that thing you do when you’re not binge eating).

Sometimes it’s a matter of saying what I want/need: “If we don’t eat supper now, I’m going to go wild and crazy with the rice cakes and peanut butter.” Every day it’s a matter of knowing that there will be more days, that nothing important turns on whether or not I have some of that dessert or skip it. Other desserts and other days will come along.

Every day it’s a matter of eating calories with actual food value. One cup of perfectly ripened red fresh raspberries, for instance, on 1/2 cup lime sherbet with a dollop of reduced-fat whipped cream and ONE Archway windmill cookie. That’s about 300 calories, but I can afford it after two hours in the garden and 30 minutes tossing weights through the air. And the berries have actual food value.

Armsful of granddaughters (no room in lap!) Nov. 2010, a few pounds ago

Old JoAnn would have eaten all afternoon and evening yesterday after Panda, the nicest dog in the world (also the dumbest) chased a passing pickup for the third and final time. Or, as her loving papa said, “Third time that we know of,” since she was a rescue about four years ago. New JoAnn just cried and fondled her still warm ears and put a Sponge Bob Square Pants beach towel around her while the poor fellow driving the pickup dug her a grave in our rock-hard red clay. Cried more and laughed with her papa about how empty the house was last night without her sleeping, snoring, on her back on the couch and then cried some more in the shower. Damn, it hurts to be alive to love and pain and loss, but I guess it

Panda wearing Pony Club polo on a chilly night last winter. Wonderful, dumb bunny! You see only one rear foot because she lost a leg three years ago to a Toyota.

beats the alternative of being dead fat person walking. Maybe, jury’s still out. Today I think I might prefer to be numb.

Category:

Emo eating, Handling loss without eating

Tagged with:

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 31 other followers