Weighty Matters

Even after a year and a half, I’m still amazed that much smaller portions are more than enough.  In the world of an active compulsive overeater or binge eater, there is never enough food.  We want to eateateat, then eat some more.  If we aren’t eating, we’re thinking about what we ate or, more often, thinking about what we will eat next.  It can get obsessive.  Let me tell you, the constant food thoughts are exhausting.

I’ve had a really great two weeks with my food and exercise.  For this I was rewarded by good, steady weight loss after the long stall.  Today, even though I’d brought my lunch to work, around 11 o’clock I developed a true desire to eat something different than the 0% fat blueberry Greek yogurt.  I got a deep craving for a really good cheeseburger.  Fortunately, my boss and a friend were also in the mood to walk to the restaurant next door.  Bonus, my boss was willing to plate share.

The burgers are big at this restaurant.  We know that from long experience.  They also add a healthy serving of good fries.  In the past, I easily plowed my way through the entire basket of food.  These days, even if I could manage to force all of it in my stomach, it wouldn’t stay down long.  Honestly, I have no desire to eat that much food any more.

When the basket was served, my boss told me to go ahead and cut in, and then remove whatever portion I wanted.  I cut off a third of the cheeseburger patty, leaving behind the bun.  Four or five French fries were more than enough.  I also claimed the pickle spear and left her the tomato slice.

This meal amounted to the smallest fraction of what I used to eat before, but it was the right portion for me.  The three of us had a fun time chatting while we ate.  When we were finished, I was absolutely satisfied and didn’t crave one more bite.  Less was definitely plenty.

What a great, welcome change.  It’s good to remember that I can go out, enjoy delicious food while socializing, and not have to gorge myself in order to be happy.

The title of this post is a still-slightly-new-to-me attitude that I’m trying to ingrain in my head so that I can reinforce good recovery behavior.

I have a history of yo-yo dieting.  I could go great guns for months on some diet or another and lose a good chunk of my chunkiness right until the day I fell off of the proverbial dieting wagon.  At first I didn’t understand that this was my compulsive overeater’s version of a relapse.  I only knew that once I went off track of the diet plan, I couldn’t seem to steer myself back on course.  I didn’t bounce back.  When I fell, splat, that was it.  Diet over and the lost weight was regained in short order.  To add insult to injury, those pounds usually brought along friends and I ended up weighing more than I did before I started the diet.

Emotionally, that pattern “dissed” me — as in dismayed, discouraged, disappointed, and, eventually, dissolved my motivation to try again.

There’s a lot of emotional and physical suckitude inherent in that lose/gain/succeed/fail pattern.   If I’ve had any lingering fear during this whole journey, it’s that my history would repeat.  Even after weight loss surgery, it’s possible to screw up the process and regain all of the lost poundage.  How’s that for a horrifying thought?

Trust me, I have pondered a lot about how to counteract such an established behavior cycle.  Looking at myself with complete, no bullshit honesty, I knew that I would not be “perfect” on my food plan for the rest of my life.  Falls were going to happen.  If I truly wanted long term success, I needed to take on the challenge of developing a new pattern.

That’s when I began to consider more than how I could prevent falls.  Not falling would not be enough to succeed in my new lifestyle.  I needed to learn how to bounce back after it happened.   But how?  The first step, I came to understand, was to believe that I could bounce back.  Being imperfect was okay and didn’t mean that every effort put forth before the fall was ruined or doomed.   I could and would get back on my feet, on my plan.

Secondly, I couldn’t fool myself.  Just because I accepted that I would be imperfect, and even that there would be times when I consciously decided to veer from the plan, I had to maintain awareness and rigorous honesty.  I have an eating disorder.  There is a world of difference between making the choice to eat off of my plan, and doing so compulsively without thought.  If I don’t support my own awareness, then compulsive eating takes over and sets up a pattern of thoughtless eating bite after bite after bite.  I don’t bounce back from that my friends.  I crawl and try to pull myself up off of the ground.

There’s more to consider and ponder, but for right now, these steps are a good start.  For the last 17 months, I’ve had long periods of great success with steady, rapid weight loss, times of stalled weight loss, and a couple of vacations where I put back on a few pounds.  I have not, however, experienced crashing to the ground and not being able to get back on track at all.  I’m not yo-yoing.  This is good for my confidence.  It helps to ease my underlying fear that I will eventually regain all of my weight.  I’m learning, by experiencing positive actions, that it’s possible to bounce back onto the wagon and return to the recovery road.

Today on Facebook, someone I know posted a picture that they picked from some other site.  The picture said, “Food is the most abused anxiety drug.  Exercise is the most underutilized antidepressant.”

Friends, I have to say that those two statements really resonate with me.  Can I actually say with any certainty that “most” applies in either case?  No.  I don’t have the data.  In reality, they could be massive generalizations.  However, I absolutely know that this is how I feel about food.  It is my drug of choice for anything — anxiety, stress, fear, sadness, nervousness, you name it.  It’s readily available without a prescription, too.

This is not a new realization.  I’ve understood this about myself for a few decades.  I’m much healthier about it these days, and self-medicate with food a lot less than I used to, but that doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes fall back into using it as my anti-something drug.  (Last night’s popcorn, for example!)

The new realization is the second statement.  I know in the last year, or thereabouts, I’ve come to enjoy exercising.  I’ve embraced a more active lifestyle and can downright revel in the wonder of being able to move with greater ease, power, endurance, strength and flexibility.  I just never thought of it as an antidepressant.  Somewhere along the journey, I’ve begun to be aware of the mood-lifting endorphin affect created by exercise.  I believe I’ve even experienced the occasional Zumba-high.

Reading that sign on Facebook put some pieces together for me.  I’m going to be more aware of how I feel emotionally during and after exercise.  I also want to see if I can work this into an effective tool for myself whenever I feel the urge to reach for the drug to numb the undesirables — the anxiety, stress, fear, and so on.   Think how much better off I would have been yesterday at home if I’d done a walking program for even 15 minutes instead of eating some popcorn.  What if I could teach myself the alternate drug of choice?  I could stand up from my chair and dance in place for even a couple of minutes as a substitute behavior for compulsively eating.

Positive Action Changes Everything (P.A.C.E.).  I really like the idea of not merely focusing on the cessation of the undesirable behavior, but instead redirecting myself to a more desirable action.

Something to work toward, I think.

I’m heading out this weekend for a short trip to attend the wedding of friends.  As of right now, I’m not taking my computer.  I don’t think I’ll go three days without a new blog post, but whatever I write will need to come from my phone which is, thank goodness, fully functional once again.

Who else has plans for Memorial Day Weekend?

For many millions of people, food is never an issue.  They enjoy it, eat when they’re hungry, stop when they’ve had enough and that’s that.

Then there are those of us for whom food and eating are always issues or challenges because they are not just food and eating.  They’re symptoms or drugs or whatever of other diseases, addictions and what have you.  Even after weight loss surgery, there are still many, many times when I obsess over food, crave things not on my food plan, and/or have to battle the compulsion to eat anything any time anywhere for various reasons having to do with an eating disorder.   I honestly can get crazy over it which totally sucks.  It’s a hell of a way to live, fighting the food demon or, as some people used to say in OA, facing the beast in the cage many times throughout the day.

So, on those days when food and eating are not issues, I really take some time to acknowledge and appreciate the freedom from compulsion.   I’ve had four days like this in a row since returning from Kansas City. This is semi-miraculous, considering that I arrived home to a jammed schedule and plenty of stress-inducing situations.  In other words, I’ve been compulsion-free even though I’ve been smack dab in the middle of things that used to trigger my compulsion and make me crazy in need of food to calm down, destress, and “cope”.

Can I tell you how much I love it when I can face food questions with a metaphorical shrug and “whatever” attitude?  I’ve been able to make my food choices, do my planning and consume my meals without emotional hassles bugging, upsetting, or stressing me out.  This, my friends, is what “normal” people must experience on a daily basis.  It’s a much easier way to live, let me tell you.

The fact that I notice when I’m not compulsion-ridden sort of shows how often the eating disorder impacts my thinking, even when I’m abstaining from the practice of compulsive over eating.  I think it’s good to notice, acknowledge, and ruminate over it too.  The goal for me is to have more days like the last four, than ones where I am fighting the disorder.  Success breeds success.  Each good day strengthens the foundation.

There were so many years (decades) when I was always in a heightened state, usually unhappy and stressed out, about food and eating.  Days like today, I enjoy realizing that I don’t always need to be wrapped up in the old ways.  I always need to be vigilant, of course, but food doesn’t always have to be an issue.