It's worth it :)

Holiday eating (forced social eating!) and more sweets than usual. It's too awkward to get an ingredient list from everyone at a potluck so despite my best efforts I'm sure I've had sugar. I can tell because the day after sugar I'm ravenous all day. But it's worth it to wait for my eating window! I just bought a holiday dress in size 8.
Last year's was a 14.
:)
All the effort really is paying off!

Let’s make it easy on ourselves

Is it easier to eat well when there’s a big chocolate cake sitting in front of you or when there’s a lovely plate of veggies and hummus?

Veggies, of course. So don’t put a chocolate cake there.

It’s all about avoiding the need to use your willpower. Save it for when you really need it; those times will certainly come. Don’t test yourself just for kicks and don’t make every day a battle royale. Find a way to design your day that makes it possible to meet your goals.

Great post from Brad Pilon about throwing the Halloween candy away to eliminate temptation. I also heard a wonderful podcast by Bevan James Eyles about creating the right environment to promote success. Everything seems to point at the same thing: Take charge. Plan. Change the environment. Create a context conducive to your goals, be they weight loss (like me) or studying for school or anything else.

For me, candy is my downfall. My plan: avoid it entirely. I don’t have it in my house at all. If a guest has it I’ll stick it out of sight in a cupboard. In stores I avoid the candy aisle like the plague. I lie to friends and colleagues who offer chocolates, saying, “No thanks, I’m not big on sweets.” If I were Pinocchio my nose would stretch across the room. (Is it magical thinking to hope that it could become true through repetition?)

Though I have to admit, all the holiday candy out now makes me a little nostalgic. Mmmmm. We had some good times together, Christmas candy and I… Eating bags of Reece’s alone in my room then feeling so gross and embarrassed that I hid the wrappers so no one would find them in the trash… Oh wait, maybe those times weren’t so good. ;)

The point being, we don’t need to torture ourselves unnecessarily.

Food addiction?

The University of California hosts public lectures by various researchers and professors on a wide range of subjects. The recordings are available through iTunes U for free, just download iTunes to your computer and search for UCTV. I love the ones about health and medicine in general and the whole series on obesity.

One about food and addiction asks, Can food cause addictive behavior? The short answer seems to be: Yes, it can. Link here.

This is the blurb: What environmental factors contribute to obesity? Kelly Brownell of Yale University is the Public Health Director at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. He explores causes and prevention of obesity and other nutrition problems. He integrates information from many disciplines and specialties ranging from the basic physiology of body weight regulation to world politics and legislation affecting issues such as agriculture subsidies and international trade policies.

Dr. Brownell mentions that Coke and Pepsi’s trade association, the American Beverage Association, raised their lobbying from $1 million/year to $20 million/year to defeat the sugared-beverage tax. I’m becoming convinced that soft drink companies are in the same moral swamp as tobacco companies. If consumed as directed, harm is done to the consumer. I was in Atlanta, GA recently and ended up touring the Coke facility there – they really are masters of marketing. (Evil, evil marketing. Somehow they've convinced us to equate carbonated sugar water with love, family, and happiness.)

I’m really interested in what people think of the lecture on food addiction. It made me think of this post by Brad Pilon, which points out that there’s no conspiracy to make us fat. The conspiracy is for food companies to make money by selling us more food. They actually don’t care one way or another if we get fat, as long as we keep buying. We are collateral damage in their campaign to improve their bottom line.

This also relates to other musings about willpower. I think we need to re-think willpower; if we swear we won’t eat something, then eat it, it’s not just that we’re weak. We’re obeying our bodies. The problem is that our bodies sometimes don’t know what’s best for us. Realizing that overeating may have an element of food addiction, with all the crazy dynamics of addiction, may give us another tool to tame our eating habits.

Dr. Brownell says that at a meeting that included nutritionists and addiction specialists, the addiction researchers were much more open to the idea of food addiction than the nutritionists. There seems to be a collective mental block about recognizing that food affects us in a million ways beyond simply giving energy. This NYTimes article about a ketogenic diet to treat pediatric epilepsy also mentions the difficulty the medical community has with accepting food as therapy. As Hippocrates said, “Let your food be your medicine, and your medicine be your food.” Medicine is powerful, and so is food.

This post is already a bit all over the place so I'll go ahead and repost a great lecture by Dr. Robert Lustig about why sugar (especially fructose) is bad for us – basically, it’s metabolized like a poison, just like alcohol. I really recommend it to anyone trying to cut down on processed carbs; it’s great motivation.

To sum up: current research indicates food can cause addictive behaviors. Use that knowledge as a tool when examining your own relationship with food!

Clothes

After my last trip, doing laundry and putting clothes away led to going through my clothes and pitching tons of clothes and shoes. It makes me feel lighter, less cluttered. When I accumulate too much stuff I start to feel like I’m at the service of the stuff rather than the other way around.

Doing this after a trip seems to help because, after having survived just fine without the stuff for a few weeks, I realize I don’t need it and don’t miss it when I don’t have it available. It’s also easier to hush that little voice in my head, saying “but I got that in [foreign country] / it was a gift from [loved one] / I got that for [special occasion]!” I have lots of gifts and mementos that I use and enjoy – I need to learn to get rid of the ones that I never use and just take up storage space. The stuff is completely irrelevant to the happy memories and the loving relationships!

Among the objects I donated is a lot of size 12-14 clothing. Yaay! I don’t want it in my house. I’m burning bridges with my heavier weight and making a commitment to maintaining a lower weight.

I’m wearing mostly size 10 now. The difference in cut between a size 14 and a size 10 is amazing. I once saw a report about why larger size clothing is unflattering and the designer said that, while thin people all have basically the same shape, large people all carry weight in different places so their clothing has to accommodate a wide range of body types and is generally cut very baggy. In size 10’s I can start to see that the clothing has better construction and is much more flattering to the body’s form.

Looking forward to trying size 8’s… in a few months…

Sweets=hungry. Fat=full.

Have been noticing recently how certain foods make me feel. Specifically: if I have a sweet dessert like a Lara bar after a meal, then it’s guaranteed that 15 minutes later I’ll be trolling the kitchen, opening and closing the fridge and cupboards until I find something else to munch on. If I have an apple or other not-super-sweet fruit then the tendency to snack is much lower. A couple of days ago the last thing I ate was very fatty – avocado/tomato salad drowned in olive oil – and when I woke up the next morning I still felt full! I didn’t even become aware of my stomach again until late afternoon.

If I go over my calorie limit it’s usually because of late-night grazing, not the meals. I think it may be worth upping the (good) fat intake. It’s high in calories but it prevents mindless grazing later. The trick may be eating something that’s just fat, avoiding the combination of fat+carbs (helooo, donuts).

Maybe if I eat the sweet stuff in the middle of my window it will have less of an effect? Or really, is there ever a good time to eat this stuff?

Has anybody else noticed something similar? What is that last thing you eat at night? How does it affect your appetite?

whoa... the whole country is thin...

Traveling again. I’m in a skinny country. Seriously, people here are really slim. (It’s a developed nation; we’re not talking malnutrition.) On the street I keep thinking people are young until I see their wrinkly faces. It’s made me realize that where I am in the US – and I think in most of the country – it’s very rare to see a trim senior. Well, I want to be like these people when I grow up. They’re living proof that old≠fat and gaining weight as we age is certainly not fait accompli.

Things I’ve noticed:

1. Eating is a formal activity, done at a table with silverware and other people. You don’t snack between meals and you don’t eat while walking around. The meal ritual is very important. I think sharing the meal makes it more satisfying and social pressure to not have a fourth serving may help too.
2. Now that I think of it, drinking alcohol is ritualized here too. Almost everyone drinks but it’s generally done in a group, with much laughter, and even on nights out I haven’t seen anybody really drunk. (Speaking for my own circle of acquaintances. Not to say everything is perfect here and somebody is surely getting smashed somewhere in the country.)
3. Serving sizes are modest. Restaurant servings are so small compared to what I’m used to that when the plate arrives I wonder if I should order a second one. Sometimes I do, but usually I realize I’m full after the first plate.
4. Fresh fruit & vegetable stands are on every corner because most everyone picks up fresh groceries every day. These are then used for actual cooking, not just heating up processed things from boxes.
5. People walk. For miles. I get worn out trying to keep up with little old ladies; a quick errand of “just a few blocks” might mean 20 minutes there and 20 back. And this isn’t considered special exercise time, it’s just doing errands.
6. The dark side: social pressure to be thin is intense, especially for women, and size discrimination is common. I feel like I get a free pass for being American but if I lived here I would sort of be expected to get with the (thin) program to fit in.

I think it’s the social rituals around eating that help keep weight down. Maybe I need some of those rituals. Because it’ s not just about willpower. It’s about creating an environment where it’s easy to eat well and exercise as part of daily life.

P.S. I just looked up average BMI’s for women – in the country where I am now it is 24.4, the high end of normal. In the US it’s 28.1, in the overweight range and closer to obese than to normal.

(Body Mass Index: under 18 is underweight, 18-25 is normal, 25-30 is overweight, 30 or over is obese.)