Oct. 26: This just isn't healthy

Why the skull pic?  I had no idea what kind of photo could accurately capture my day, so I picked this one just because I like it.

Today, I recognized that my behavior just isn't healthy at all.

It was a really stressful day.

First, I had to yell at 3 people before 9 am.  This didn't start my day off well, and I hate having to be grumpy at work.  Sometimes, though, a chick has to put her foot down and make some racket or the guys she supervises just won't listen.  This was one of those days.

Then the phone calls started.

Many of you know about my recent financial issues.  After being unemployed for over a year, I finally had to make the decision to walk away from my house and car.  At this point, the house is still on the market and I am hoping to sell it before it gets foreclosed on.

I really felt as though I had come to terms with all of this - I made my decision, I downscaled my life, and I was at peace with it.  But today, I got calls at work from not one, but both of the banks holding mortgages on my house.

First came the feeling of humiliation: trying to discuss personal finances with a million ears around.  Next, came a bit of anger: I told the person calling that she was not to call my workplace again and gave her an address to which she could send mail regarding the matter.  She kept shouting at questions and then called me back 10 minutes later.  I know that I have not followed on my part of the agreement - I have stopped paying the mortgages, but still, there are laws about this kind of stuff.

Then the headache began.  It crept up my neck and surrounded my skull and squeezed like a boa constrictor.  My already short fuse got shorter until there was no fuse at all, just kind of a wick before the dynamite.

But that is where it gets scary.  I started thinking about food.  Salty fried disgusting food.  I tried to distract myself with popcorn but it didn't work.  I took two bites of my salad and then felt this rush of....desperation.  I wanted to get out of there and I wanted to eat and eat and eat.  I told everyone I was taking 30 minutes (I had planned to eat at my desk today).  I immediately went to McDonalds and got a burger and fries.  I read a magazine and inhaled that food so quickly my esophagus hurt.  I had to sit there for 10 minutes after eating to allow the food to settle.  I felt such dread at the idea of going back to work and picking up that phone.....well, it was tough to go back.

But back I went, and I was calmer and more productive.  My daughter is at her dad's for the night and dinner was not greatly improved over lunch.  I had Doritoes and refried beans (homemade refried beans - no added fat but I'm sure the Doritoes cancel out the virtuousness of the beans.)

I don't want to get fat again.  I don't want to wake up in 6 months and realize that I am back up over 200 pounds.  At this point, I am 10 pounds over my "healthy weight."  It's not outrageous and it is losable.  But I have to come up with a better way to deal with this anxiety.

I'd like to tell you the plan for tomorrow, but I don't really have one yet.

Basically, I'm at the point that all I can think to do right now is pray for an answer, and for the strength to overcome.

I write this because I know many of us that fight this battle have felt overwhelmed by the "enemy" - the complete loss of control that takes over in a difficult situation.  We aren't alone.  We need to share it and make that burden lighter.  We need to throw away the guilt because this is like an illness.  We can get better but we must realize it isn't a personal weakness or a reflection of us that relapses occur.

My next meal, as I often say, will be better.

Oct. 24: Square one...again

How many times am I going to have to start over?

As many times as it takes, I guess.

The last week has been less than stellar.  If I was an alcoholic, I would call it a relapse.  I had a food bender for an entire week and I'm scared to get back on the scale.  You couldn't even imagine the amount of food I consumed. I was tucking into it pretty much every waking moment.  I have no idea why I lost all sense of control like this.  Mentally, I'm feeling good (aside from said food bender.)  The visit with my mom was not absolutely horrible.  Work is great, life is great - I just lost it.

So, here I am again at square one, trying to keep away from the temptations that are everywhere.

Last night, I threw out all open sources of temptation.  Into the garbage went cake, cookies, chips and ice cream, all heaped together in one nauseating pile.  I even emptied out the packages and dumped ice cream on the dry goods so I would not be able to go in and dig something out.  I don't know if I would've dug something out, but the way things have been going, better to be safe than sorry.  This was my equivalent of dumping the vodka down the sink.  Bagged up and ready to go are all of the still-sealed sources of temptation.  I'll be dropping those off at the food bank when I go to the grocery store today.

Did this horrible cacophony of cravings come from some stress that I did not recognize?  Did I give myself an inch and take a mile?  Did some horrid preservative or additive trigger this awful bingefest?  Was it some dreadful combination of all of the above?

I hate that I have to start over.  I felt so successful, like I had beaten the bingeing and emotional eating once and for all.  But start over I must.  At least this time, I know what to do.

The plan is detox.  Crap food detox.

~  No sources of MSG (proven to trigger cravings in many people)
~  No processed sugar
~  Water instead of diet soda
~  Real food, prepped and easily accessible at all times
~  Brisk walk with the dog before and after work

This week, I'm not really restricting calories.  I'm counting them, keeping them under 2000, but the goal is to switch myself back to actual food, not packages of chemicals.  Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither will I be able to repair this damage in one week.

I'll be back today with the week's food prep after I check out the sales at the grocery store. Good, bad or ugly, I'm going to blog about it, because recording it makes me accountable.

May 31: The Refeed That Ate the World

See Godzilla? This was me today, and that train?  That would be the sugar train that I got on.

It all started when I didn't eat breakfast.

I wasn't feeling the best and considered skipping my refeed for today, then I decided to go for it.  The problem with that? A complete lack of planning.

What was supposed to be an organized refeed basically felt like a binge.  I was supposed to consume, in a five hour span, 177 grams of carbohydrates while keeping the fat under 50 grams. (These numbers are based on my lean body mass).

1.) My five hours turned into six, because I simply couldn't eat that much food in that span of time. 

2.) I ate basically nothing but sugar and a cheeseburger.

3.) I was 8 grams short on carbs.

4.) I was 21 grams high on fats.

I ate:

A cheeseburger

A cupcake

A cup and a half of ice cream

A protein shake made with milk

A whipped cream filled donut

I don't think that is what the author of RFL had in mind when he recommended carb loading.

Let's face it, I'm a perfectionist.  I get very upset with myself when I do things less than perfectly.  (Well, not everything but important things - otherwise I'd be upset an awful lot!)  I wasn't even going to write about this fiasco, and then I realized, everybody screws up and when i started this blog I promised the good, bad and ugly.

Today was ugly.

If I write the kind of blog where everything is perfect all the time, it's not believable nor is it very inspirational.  Who can relate to a dietary saint?  While I am pretty strict, I screw up, and this is your hard, cold, low-carb, high-fat evidence of that fact.

Here's the thing.  This could be a setback.  I'm not eating such low calories for 6 weeks of my life because it's fun.  But I'm not going to quit.  Giving up is not going to get me to my goal but persevering will.

I've said it a million times and I want you to tattoo it to your eyelids if you need to.  If you are what you eat, you have another chance to get things right the very next meal.  That means, three or four or five times a day, however many times you eat, you get a do-over.  And if more of those do-overs go right than wrong, YOU WILL EVENTUALLY REACH YOUR GOAL.

So I'm calling an end to this day, and starting fresh with my egg whites tomorrow morning.

Mar. 18: Emotional Eating

It seems like the world is programming us to be emotional eaters. Think about popular culture: in nearly every chick flick, the skinny blond sadly grabs a spoon and a gallon of Ben and Jerry's out of the freezer to bemoan her love life. What they don't show is the ever-widening butt of people who indulge in this habit.

I think emotional eating is somewhat a newer issue. 75 years ago, there wasn't the ready access to prepared food that there is now - you couldn't go to the grocery store and grab a bag of chips and a gallon of ice cream like you can now. Between the addictive chemicals in processed foods and the abundance of sugar making your blood sugar go up and down like a yo yo, is it any wonder that bingeing has become a pattern behavior?

One way to help combat emotional eating is to go back to the beginning of it. Do you remember when you first began to binge to make yourself feel better? I do.

When my first child was 6 months old, my husband at the time and I moved way out in the country to this beautiful old farmhouse. We both loved it. What I didn't expect was that the fighting between us would lead to him taking off with the car for 3-4 days at a time, leaving me alone and isolated with a baby for company. We didn't have long distance service on our phone and my family all lived 1000 miles away. I did not have one single friend in the local calling area. I got more and more depressed. To make matters worse the only thing in walking distance was a little convenience store about half a mile down the road. I remember doing my husband's laundry and scrounging enough change from his pockets to equal about $5. I would put the baby in the stroller and trudge down the highway to buy BBQ potato chips and candy. My step was lighter on the way home; I couldn't wait to get home and stuff the food into my mouth as fast as I could. I gained about 30 pounds this way.

After that, a pattern was established. I dealt with stressful situations by numbing myself with food. I ate my way through my unhappy marriage and my subsequent divorce, I ate my way through a stressful job and when my beloved father became terminally ill, I really chowed down. Each stressor brought with it a certain food in which I took comfort.

Here's what I learned: through research about what I was eating, I discovered that certain food additives trigger responses in the brain. Briefly, they give your brain a boost in serotonin, the chemical that is lacking in a depressed person. Unfortunately it's only a temporary effect, triggering the urge to eat that food again.

Keeping a very detailed journal is what helped me get over emotional eating. You have to delve back to the very origin of it. Did you start doing it as a child because you saw your mother doing it? Was there a certain circumstance that occurred, triggering the beginning of this unhealthy cycle? Once you identify these triggers, you can begin to recover.

Since I began this journey I have definitely had serious stress in my life. My teen daughter moved in with her dad. My business bottomed out. Money is definitely in a shortage. However, not once have I turned to food since I made my personal discoveries. Before any and all of these things would have sent me diving headfirst into a bag of Doritos.

So today's exercise: When is the first time you recall bingeing because of unhappiness?