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Archive for the ‘Maintaining weight loss’ Category

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

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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:

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

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Stoic the Vast and Dora the Explorer; Tomato-cornbread salad

Here’s the thing: A whole lot of stuff does not matter once you get past, say, the quarter-century mark. My husband, Stoic the Vast, thinks that applies to everything (that it doesn’t matter), but he’s wrong. Some things do matter, just not the way people behaved in your high school class 50 years ago.

My classmates Mary and Barb and Mary’s 94-year-old mum, Elizabeth.

As Stoic likes to remind me, our brains aren’t fully formed until we’re in our mid-20s so when we were 16, 17 and 18, we were pretty much idiots. Actually, it seems like I must have been rather a rude idiot because there were more than a few women who looked at me sideways with no love at all. I obviously dismissed them as not important and must still because I don’t remember any of their names after spending 4 days with them last week. A whole lot of my classmates are a whole lot nicer than I am and, consequently, seem to have a whole lot more fun. Hmmmmm.

The woman on the back of whose neck I wrote  with ballpoint pen is still friendly, who knows why? Which is good because I liked her then and enjoy her mordant wit now.

My entire reunion experience was a lot like Liz Lemon’s on “30 Rock” according to our youngest, Dora the Explorer. Most of my classmates thought Stoic was in our class and liked him a lot, and I found out I, too, was not especially nice unless it suited me. Hmmmm.

I think now, after those 4 days and driving about 1200 miles, that my family and the times were more to blame for my unhappiness than my classmates. As Stoic told me every time we went anywhere in a bunch, “These are some really nice people.”

We had just over 100 in our Class of ’62. Twelve have died, and yet 69 came back so that was most of us.  Stoic is very fond of the food in central Pennsylvania, and we ate a lot of it.

Thursday dinner through Sunday brunch I managed my eating. Once we got in the truck Sunday midday, though, all bets were off. I ate too much on the road and then again Monday but pulled myself back up onto the wagon on Tuesday with no great damage done. When I overeat, I not only don’t lose weight, I feel lousy, too. Slowly, slowly, it is dawning on me that I do myself no favors over-eating and under-sleeping.

I walked in Pennsylvania and have walked since at home. I’m getting ready to go yank weeds for an hour. I’ve entered my calorie and water intake on livestrong.com. The reunion was not the end of my taking care of myself but, I hope, a lengthy beginning.

And with Dora about to leave for four months in East Africa, my world feels like a friendlier place.

We came home to wheelbarrows-ful of tomatoes and there’s nothing better you can do with them than this allrecipes.com salad. Recipe says it makes 10 servings, but that would be 10 servings for mice only, not hungry persons. The avocado and the cornbread combined make something celestial.

Tomato-cornbread salad with avocado and cilantro

5 cups 1/2-inch cornbread cubes

1-1/2 pounds tomatoes, stemmed, skinned, seeded and cut into medium dice

Salt to taste

2 garlic cloves, minced

1/2 red onion, cut into small dice

1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro

2 avocados, cut into medium dice

1/4 cup olive oil

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

Ground black pepper to taste

Heat oven to 250°. Place cornbread cubes on rimmed cookie sheet; bake until bread dries out, about 30 minutes, then set aside to cool. Salt tomatoes, stir in garlic and let stand until juicy, about 30 minutes. Drain off liquid. Toss onion, cilantro, avocado, olive oil and vinegar with tomatoes. Add pepper and adjust salting. Add bread; toss. Let stand 10 minutes before serving.

And to think I’ve never liked cilantro before this summer!

 

Category:

Aging, Handling anxiety without food, Maintaining weight loss, Salad, Summer salads, Warrior Run High School Class of '62

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Puppy poop

It’s hard to fault a day in which a kitty shares her lunch chipmunk. Even a day when the air is like wet bread. Puppy and I walked 2.5 20-minute miles this morning. For her, that’s not even stretching her paws. For me, it’s faster than lightning, and I was soaked at the end of those 50 panting minutes. Then I tackled the wisteria and some other garden issues for two hours.

This is the final push: 4 weeks and 2 days until My White Knight and I walk into my h.s. classmate Barb’s house to stay for 3 nights. I want to lose 6 pounds in these 4 weeks+. Yesterday I told livestrong.com I want to lose 1.5 pounds per week (instead of 1) and upped my daily exercise to 2 hours. (Meanwhile, My White Knight will lose that much, damn his eyes, by giving up his second cookie on his second work break.)

The problem isn’t the two hours — it’s doing anything else afterward, not to mention house/crate-breaking said puppy. We haven’t had a puppy in 14 years or so and I’m remembering why. If dogs are good at being dogs, puppies are absolute geniuses at being puppies with puppy teeth and puppy poop!

I’m either going to eat from the garden or eat 300-calorie frozen suppers until August. I’m going to eat Italian ices instead of ice cream at night, and I’m going to sleep. (This is not difficult after 3 hours of exercise and walking a puppy about 20 times.)

I am proud of myself for not falling face-forward onto the groaning board on July Fourth, for having just a bite of the fresh peach pound cake and half a chocolate chip cookie while savoring a piece of Hungry Girl’s Banana Split Pie (under 200 calories).

You can enjoy a holiday meal without eating so much you want to throw up. Put down your fork between bites, drink a lot of water and talk to others. Ask them questions because you’re interested in people besides yourself. By the time you and your friends  move to the deck to watch 7 different municipal fireworks displays on the horizon, you’ll be able to pack up those  second helpings as leftovers for the next several days.

Haven’t had a pig-out since April 17 and reading Holy Hunger. Two months of saying to myself, “Really? Why, exactly, do you need that?” is some sort of record for me, and it feels really good. And all this exercise, combined with a good chiropractor, means — I just noticed this — that my joints feel better which, in turn, means I’m inclined to move more. And — this is odd — my hips and waist feel smaller when I move.

Jane Brody’s column on joint replacement in Tuesday’s New York Times says when we walk, we burden each knee with 1.5 times our body weight. That means with every step I take , I slam each knee with 275 pounds. And if I run (!), I can multiply that by 7 or 8, which means around a ton of avoirdupois on each of those old knees. No wonder they hurt after I run!

For a woman who’s spent her life in search of instant gratification, this has been a long, strange trip — two years in October — that should last for the rest of my life. If you’d told me in October 2010 that it would take me this long to lose 42 pounds (seems so trifling in light of “Biggest Loser” and “Extreme Makeover — Weight Loss Edition”), would I have cheerfully skipped down the yellow brick road of gradual fitness? I doubt it. Would I have believed you if you’d told me it would take this long to feel this much better? Yes, and then I’d have eaten a pound of salted nuts!

So it’s kind of a glorious accident that I’ve lasted on the (relatively) straight and narrow. In church we call it grace. Another word for a blessing I did nothing to deserve. Just like the puppy who’ll need at least 18 months to calm the heck down!

To use the vernacular, Black Pearl is both “a hot Southern mess” and “wide open all the time.”

Category:

Animal rescue, Compulsive eating, Maintaining weight loss, Weight loss, Why overweight?

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Set points, sloppy joes and settling points

I think I’m happy to have found this article by Joseph Hooper in the March issue of Elle magazine. It explains why I went at weight work this morning with a bang that’s left me still breathing hard 20 minutes afterward.

There’s no reason for this piece to be titled “Sexy and I Know It,” unless that hed is for a monthly column because the piece itself is about keeping weight off after you lose it and how very, very tough that is (only 2 to 20 percent of losers manage). Mostly, because our bodies themselves are fighting our good intentions. (I nominate myself for a place in what he calls the “one-woman hunger museum.”)

Science is pretty clear by now that anyone losing more than 10 percent of her/his body weight “experience(s) a corresponding change in crucial appetite-regulating hormones.” In other damn words, lose weight and feel hungrier.

And while I’m losing weight, science also says my metabolism is slowing down. Curses! As if it weren’t already comatose. So I can only be successful by doing as the author’s wife — paying “undying attention to what she eats and how much she exercises.”

The silver lining in this big, purple cloud is “outfoxing our uncooperative physiolog(ies) with exercise. ” Weight training and sprint work seem to help, but “The most important priority is to get regular exercise and plenty of it,” as much as one hour daily.

This is a really well-written and researched piece (why I keep lifting quotations). Hooper cites Dr.George Blackburn as recommending that we lose no more than 10 percent of our weight, slowly, then simply maintain that loss for six months “to let your body metabolically recalibrate.” Jury’s still out on whether our bodies actually do that, but I like the idea of just staying for a bit at this weight of 198, which is probably what the authors call my set point. My settling point, which they also use, is probably more like it. Eventually, I’d like to not settle and continue on my way to 174.

In the meantime, I’ll eat a diet heavy in vegetables and fruit, curtail sugar (maybe even dairy and gluten when I can without being a diet diva), and exercise, exercise, exercise. Oh, and get plenty of sleep. Hoping someday to, paraphrasing Hooper, embrace healthier new habits as real pleasures.

I know you can use protein crumbles in your same old, same old sloppy joe recipe, but I’m not supposed to eat soy (too much estrogen) so I  really enjoyed this variation from the April issue of Parenting magazine. My best guess is about 400 calories per sandwich with an onion hamburger bun, 1 ounce of grated cheddar and 1/2 cup of the sloppy joe mixture.

Black bean and salsa sloppy joes

I used a corn and black bean salsa which ups the protein content ever so slightly.

2 teaspoons olive oil

3 minced garlic cloves

2-1/2 cups rinsed, drained canned black beans

1 15-ounce jar mild chunky salsa

1 tablespoon brown sugar

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

1 teaspoon Dijon-type mustard

1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

1/4 teaspoon salt

Cheddar cheese, shredded

In large skillet, heat oil and add garlic, sauteing until golden (don’t leave — it chars in the blink of an eye). Stir in beans, salsa, brown sugar, Worcestershire, mustard, cumin and salt. Bring to simmer and cook for 10 minutes. Spoon onto buns and top with cheese. Stuffs 4 sandwiches.

Category:

good food, healthy cooking, Maintaining weight loss, Sandwiches, Simple foods, vegetables, Why overweight?

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