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Posts tagged ‘binging’

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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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

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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

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Spring still sprung **

Beloved youngest daughter with Tristan, a lovely Thoroughbred eventer suffering from fear of frogs

“At most, there are two kinds of dysfunctional families: those who don’t talk enough and those who talk too much.” Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation, 1994

I grew up in the first kind and married into one of each. Visits to my first in-laws featured late-night, alcohol-fueled rants of the George and Martha “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” variety.

So then I went back to what I knew: silences and conversations about things that matter not at all. Which is how we all find ourselves now tangled in the dilemma of my increasingly fragile in-laws’ daily care. No one discussed it when it might have been productive to talk.

One thing I’m sure of and that is that I must care for myself, no matter what!  Failure to do so means almost immediate weight gain and feeling like do-do as I slowly slide down the slippery slope of sloth (I just made that up). I cook willingly for my in-laws, but it has to be food I can eat without ballooning up like a sea elephant. I will keep up with my exercise. I started tai chi this week and have promised myself I’ll start Weight Watchers next Tuesday. I need help with the last 16 pounds and with thinking of what I’m doing as a healthy lifestyle, not deprivation or punishment.

This afternoon’s three mile walk: Honeybees abuzz in the Carolina jasmine and little peepers peeping up a storm in the ditch next to an empty chicken house at the 1-mile point. 

 I never hear these happy frogs without remembering the trail ride we took here on the farm a few springs ago, down the hill behind our house to a creek and ditches teeming with the hormone-riddled jokers. Who knew a towering Thoroughbred, when hearing surround-sound peeping, would turn himself inside out? He did, but our daughter managed him very competently. (Had I been the rider, I’d have turned inside out with him. She thought it was fun when he lost track of one of his feet and tripped over it.)

I need this 6 days a week to nudge me away from depression (anger turned inward?), anxiety, longing and food which is such a quick, easy fix.

“I’m always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere,” says Wurtzel in Prozac Nation. Me, too. If I just have this fistful of graham crackers now, instead of waiting and spending my 1,000 calories at dinner out tonight, I’ll feel better, lighter, happier, less encumbered, the way I felt when I was a kid.

Aha! That’s where the imaginary part comes in. If anything, I was more miserable when young and the reality of eating these graham crackers is that I’ll feel fat and frustrated, not good about myself, the way our daughter did when she got that lovely, frisky gelding back in line.

*Not necessarily metaphorical.

Category:

Exercise, Food addiction, Weight loss, Why overweight?

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Personal trainers;re-gaining that which has been LOST

Margaret the hysteric

These are my personal trainers. I found them by the road.

They don’t wear Spandex. They don’t swan around, showing off their ripped abs. They don’t have books in development.

They don’t scream at me; they work for kibbles. They’re so pleased when I walk even a little bit that their tails go in circles. (I’d like to see Jillian Michaels do that!)

What more do you need, other than shoes and leashes? Thirty

Panda the joyful

minutes a day, and you’re all happier, healthier and, we hope, a mite leaner. I have so missed any kind of exercise while I’ve had the cold of the century for the past two weeks that I actually can’t wait to get out with them today. And not just so I can eat more.

I’ve been using — not even sneaking — my “gateway drugs” of refined carbs, sugar and computer solitaire to slip farther down the slippery slope of packing weight back on. However, it’s not my fault. None of it.

Tara Parker-Pope’s lengthy and very disheartening “The Fat Trap,” published in the New York Times at the end of December, says, in effect, that I’m fighting my own body, that researchers are finding very real metabolic changes in those who’ve recently lost weight, changes that make it tough to lose more. Sigh. On top of the holidays, feeling poopy, my body is readying for future famine. Not bloody likely, but there you have it: “a biological and metabolic backlash triggered by weight loss.”

Ever since I got serious about getting smaller, keeping a food log, eating better and exercising, I’ve had to fight the urge to tell people it’s what I “do” when they ask. But, seriously, it’s a job. I wasn’t successful when I had jobs or even when I had children at home.

I have to be one of those vigilant people she describes “who are never NOT thinking about food” in order to keep off the weight, and I can’t always do that (holidays or vacations, for instance).  

To paraphrase Parker-Pope, she’s not going to give up on her own weight loss, she’s going to continue to eat well and to exercise, but she’s not going to be so hard on herself when she backslides in one way or another.  Me, too, what she said.

Mitzi the stoic

Category:

Exercise, Food addiction, Weight loss, Why overweight?

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Out of my comfort zone

I had to pack up my lunchbox and water bottles this week and move to a friend’s home about 70 miles away for some temp work. I was much more anxious than I’d have predicted — kind of like a recovering drunk, I guess, leaving her support group. I wasn’t taking my bike, didn’t really know the walking places, wouldn’t be in my kitchen and wouldn’t have round-the-clock access to livestrong.com and my obsessive calorie-counting.

It’s been interesting. My biggest NSV (non-scale victory) has been coming home mid-week this first Wednesday, snacking all the way home, entering my calories-in and calories-out on the computer and eating nothing else that night. I don’t expect I’ll have lost anything by the end of these two weeks, but maybe I won’t have gained either which, I guess, will be an SD (scale detente).

There are wonderful places to walk around my friend’s condo (and more dogs than I’ve ever seen in one place in my life) and lots of people out at all hours walking. Combined with 15 daily minutes of yoga, that’s good exercise for these 10 work days. (Even with the clearly marked bike lanes everywhere, I’m chicken to ride my bike in city traffic.)

When I lived in Charlotte for 10 years, I was a single mother of two, working my first fulltime job. My friend’s condo is in our old neighborhood and what’s surprising is not how much has changed in the 23 years since I left, but how little. Surrounded by that old environment, I recognize suffocating feelings of loneliness and dependency, wanting nurture. Which translate to wanting to eat. I did fairly well recognizing and managing that until Thursday night when I was tired. Cravings + fatigue = deadly tendency to eat in effort to “feel better.”

In the words of Anthony Bourdain in “Medium Raw” (HarperCollinsPublisher, 2010): “Where was my reward for all this self-denial? Shouldn’t I have been feeling good? If anything, all that relative sobriety pointed up a basic emptiness and dissatisfaction in my life, a hole I’d managed to fill with various chemicals (read: foods) for the better part of twenty-five (read: sixty-six) years.” 
 
My friend shared some of the Kona coffee and pineapple shortbreads she brought back from Hawaii in January, and I managed not to finish the entire box, even though she said they needed to be eaten. I did eat five (250 unnecessary calories) and felt better but not as masterful as I’d have felt if I’d had a glass of skim milk (80) and gone to bed.
 
I can’t pat myself too hard for not finishing the box because — like sex — I’ve kept most of my overeating private through the years. If you don’t see me eat that box of Wheat Thins, I didn’t, and we’ll ascribe my pudge to genes, etc.
 
We ate four suppers out and that was also a challenge because — even though dining out is shared and public — my friends wouldn’t judge or probably even think about my scarfing down a bacon cheeseburger with home-made potato chips and ranch dip.
 
The tricks for me seem to be complex carbs (like carrot sticks or fruit) before I go out and something that will take lots of time to chew while in the restaurant. Something like the wonderful, if over-priced, salad I had Thursday afternoon with two beloved former newsroom buds: Baby greens and lots of them, a lemon-thyme vinaigrette and a balsamic reduction, orange slices, a few candied pecans and three light-as-air goat cheese croutons. That kept me occupied through two Amstel Lights and lots of laughter.

I’ve eaten white beans braised with fresh rosemary and Mediterranean tuna salad (no mayo), black bean and corn cakes with tomatillo salsa, as well as the best salmon cakes and hushpuppies I’ve ever had in a restaurant. Friday He Who Ate Peanut Butter While I Was Gone and I had take-out shrimp tacos and Asian chicken salad from the Cluck ‘n’ Cup in my office building.

On Monday it starts again and I’ll struggle again to find some inner discipline, a structure, to which I can cling while staggering along this healthy eating path. My problem — in an unsalted almond nutshell — is that I’ve always looked outside myself for that structure. To a software program, a weight-loss organization, a diet buddy, a blog….Inside me, I find only cookies and more cravings.

Category:

Exercise, Restaurant eating while dieting, Weight loss

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Body of the Year

Near the finish of Louise Erdrich’s dreary “Shadow Tag,” Irene, who is trying to end her marriage (or maybe not) and to stop drinking (ditto), wonders “as I will do every day of my life exactly what I will do without a drink…” The syntax is a bit gnarly, but I get it. Oh, boy, do I.

Every day I wonder what I will do without a mouth full of food, all day. How I will get through the late afternoon, the evening,  go to bed and to sleep without over-eating.

I would be surprised if people without food issues spend time every day around 4 or 5 p.m., thinking, “What am I going to eat tonight (that will make me happy ((at least while I’m eating it)))?” Why isn’t good health, a few consuming passions, a good marriage, good children and grandchildren enough? Why do there need to be snacks and entertainment (I also look at the TV listings every morning to see what I’m going to watch that night)? Why, as my shrink used to ask me over and over and over, can’t I be content with myself doing nothing?

The answer, of course, is easy without being at all simple: As a child, I had to achieve to get any kind of positive attention, praise, love. There was no such thing in my childhood as just being. I was a trained seal who sang, played the piano, showed dogs, got the best grades, etc. So, now, in the evenings by myself I want more seals, music, awards, etc.

And my mother was threatened by everything I did, every time I looked good or someone told me I did. You can figure out more of my baggage from here. If only it were as easy as the time my blessed shrink explained that “Asthma is the lungs weeping for Mother.” Eating to the point of obesity is keeping the idealized Mother happy, alive and unchanged?

The second part of this eating-right black hole  is that there is no end. I, who like to finish things up and check them off my list(s), can never again eat like a skinny teenager (which I never, ever was!). I guess the “end” is wearing people-sized clothes (not chubbettes) and being able to go for a one-hour walk or bike ride without having to call 911.

A 42-year-old friend just started working with a personal trainer. After her first workout she came to our house and crawled out of her vehicle on her 24-years-younger-than-mine hands and knees. I don’t want to do that. Figuring this is for ever and ever, I want to get gradually stronger and smaller. And my fitness routines have to be free or nearly so (a $20 yard sale mountain bike is about as near as you can get). Which means I have to keep doing what I’m doing, all by myself, alone, because that’s pretty much how life is. No rationalizing, “Oh well, I’m this far, I should be able to eat this, this and this. Just for tonight….”

And while I’m at it, if anyone’s interested, I’m declaring myself a candidate for next year’s LA Fitness Body of the Year. This year it’s 66-year-old Helen Mirren (go, Helen, you rock!). I’ll have to have my tummy lifted into my bra, but after that, I’m good to go.

And, now, home-made oatmeal with raisins for breakfast. He Who Fell Off His Bike This Morning While Making Fun of My Dismount is just putting on the finishing touches. Thirty-eight pounds gone, 14 to go. Then I’ll reconnoiter to decide if I want to try to get rid of another 10, which would take me back to the summer of 1975 and the National Critics’ Institute. Scary. Make that terrifying.

Category:

Exercise, healthy cooking, self-image, Weight loss

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Bender

If I were a problem drinker, last night would have been a bender — my first since last fall. But I’m a problem eater which means I started with too many (unsalted at least) cashews, moved onto ice cream, cheese and cookies and this morning probably feel almost as lousy as if I had been drinking.

Also, the scales are up 6 pounds from a week ago. (My sister’s upset because she has put on 4 pounds since her last annual physical. Amateur!)

I didn’t enjoy the experience nearly as much as I enjoy feeling slimmer and in control of my eating. So why the heck did I do it?

It starts with fatigue. I was exhausted from driving nearly 1,000 miles in 5 days,  sleeping in three different beds and letting my exercise slide during those days. Like a drunk, I started and slid right down the slippery slope. Why is it so much harder to stop after one misstep? Why keep on eating through the evening as though bedtime is some sort of real divider between time to binge and time to pull up my socks and fall back in line?

I had few problems while we traveled and ate out, ordering appetizers and salads in restaurants, sharing desserts, drinking one elf-sized  Corona in the entire 120-some hours away from my obsessive-compulsive calorie counting in Livestrong.com.

But last night, alone in a house I’m so ready to move away from, far from my children, I must have felt unnurtured and uncared for and what better way to care for myself than to eat a couple thousand calories? It’s a life habit and a dreadful one that, I hope, just had to rear its ugly head once again before I climb back on the daunting diet wagon this morning.

So as I told our youngest daughter in a weekend cliche-fest addressed to all our challenges, life is a matter of repeatedly  picking ourselves up, dusting ourselves off and starting all over again. And as my friend Dannye R.P. says wisely, it’s not how you handle yourself when things are going well that determines the person you are……Sigh. As that youngest daughter adds, “Being a grownup sucks!” Indeed, but it is the only way to navigate successfully over the long, long-term.

Being a grownup today will mean for me cooking something healthy with the summer squash tsunami that occurred in our absence. Something like this lovely melange from the March issue of Southern Living magazine.

Sauteed baby squash and leeks

1-1/2 pounds assorted squash babies, halved lengthwise

1 cup prepared baby leeks**

2 tablespoons olive oil

Salt and pepper to taste

1/2 cup crumbled feta cheese (reduced-fat if you, too, have gone astray)

2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh basil

Saute squash and leeks in hot oil in large skillet over medium-high heat 5 minutes or until tender. Season with salt and pepper to taste; sprinkle with cheese and basil. Serves 6.

**To prepare leeks, which likely  have grit trapped between the layers of stem sheaths, cut off and discard all but white and light green parts. Halve length-wise, slice halves very thinly and wash in bowl of clean water. Leeks will float to top  — lift off and drain. Grit will sink; discard with dirty water.

Category:

healthy cooking, Seasonal food, self-image, vegetables

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