Look before you leap

Oh man.
Lent is not going well.
I cut out dessert, and now all I think about is dessert. Seriously.
In the past year and half, since getting on this path to health, I’ve never restricted my self. I still ate pizza and desserts and chips and everything, but I did it in moderation, and I never really felt deprived.

I am feeling deprived. Seriously deprived. It’s all mental. And this is such age old ‘why diets don’t work” kind of stuff. Once you tell yourself you can’t have something, it is all you want, and you think about it, and your mind tricks your body into thinking it needs whatever is being withheld more than anything, and then you cave. And when you cave, you cave good. I do anyway. For the past month, as I’ve tried to retrain my focus on healthy eating habits, I’ve been having dessert probably about 3 times a week. And on the nights that I didn’t have it, I didn’t think about it too much.
But now…it’s bad.

And I’m a little scared.

Many of you know that I used to be a binger. I didn’t purge, just ate. And ate sugar. And I hid it. I have a distinct memory of taking a box of girl scout cookies out of our families stash and hiding it under my bed, and eating it in secrecy in like two days. The fact that I can now have an open box of cookies in my pantry and eat them like a normal person is a big step for me.
But, with this Lent deal..I find myself thinking about how I can sneak the food.
Uh oh.
Each month we celebrate the birthdays in our office with a cake during our once a month all staff meeting. Well…like I’ve said previously, the spirit of competition is high around here for the wellness competition, and when I didn’t have a piece of cake, my male co-workers (who are all on a team together) were ribbing me and trying to get me to eat a piece of cake.
I didn’t eat the cake, and when I sat back down at my desk, I seriously planned on how I could have a piece of cake, I would just have to sneak it so that no one would notice.

This is not good.
I did some thinking this afternoon, and I think I have to give up, giving up dessert foods for Lent. It triggers my binge eating/sneaking food behaviors. The most important thing in my healthy journey is learning to have a healthy relationship with food, and I can’t compromise that.

Doughnuts...Donuts...D'OH!

oh man, yum.

Photo Via:Veer.com

Lately, I’ve been craving a donut. A good one. Donuts aren’t something that I eat on a regular basis, they are actually few and far between. For a few reasons:

1. If I eat a donut, my physical response to sugar triggers and I want to eat 10. And they just go down so easily!

2.If I eat a donut once, and it doesn’t catapult me off my “path-to-health” then I start to justify in my mind that it is ok to eat donuts more often. Which is really the same as me climbing into the catapult and yelling “let her rip….food binge here I come.”

3.They don’t have any, ANY, redeeming nutritional value. Obviously that is what makes them taste so.dang.good.

Photo Via: Veer.com

Yesterday (or maybe it was this weekend, but I just read it yesterday) Kath posted an excerpt from Fit From Within, By Victoria Moran. A book that I read a few months ago. I enjoyed the book, but it wasn’t life changing for me. But seeing this quote “Nothing that you eat rationally, and out of choice, will interfere with the fit from within process.” Really made me think about my food choices and HOW I eat.

I am still working on wrapping my mind around this concept. Everything that goes in my mouth should be eaten rationally and out of choice. It is so easy when my blood sugar is low to eat whatever my hand grabs first, so that I can function. That eating isn’t done rationally or out of choice. Eating a donut, and eating it quickly and then eating another one of out the dozen, is not eating rationally and out of choice. That is eating that is driven by something else. Let’s call it Food “ID” psych 101 anyone?

Anyway….so for me the next step is being able to eat a donut on a Saturday morning, rationally and out of choice.

Happy Belated Blog Birthday!

I missed my own “Birthday”September 13th was my one year blog birthday! Oops! It’s ok, that is pretty much my MO. Unless someone in my life walks up to me and says “it’s my birthday.” You can pretty much guarantee that I’m going to be late on birthday wishes and a card. Apparently my blog is no exception.

So, in celebration, and as a result of a comment on my previous post, I thought I would tell my story. I’ve told snippets of it here and there, but not in a conclusive, organized (ha ha) manner.
So here goes.

Enter Allison age 8
Eight is the age that I first wrote in my journal that I needed to go on a diet. Isn’t that heartbreaking? I was bigger than the other little kids, and I knew, through society and my mother, that losing weight and being smaller is what would make me socially appropriate.

I didn’t diet. I don’t think I changed my eating habits at all. But I felt fat. Fat! At age 8! For the record I was an active little kid. I played Soccer from age 6-15 and I did gymnastics from 4-12.

At Nine, my parents separated. At nine I started sneaking food. That is what I called it. Not bingeing, sneaking. Sneaking food meant finding any dessert in the house and sneaking some. Cookies, candy, etc. I did not associate this behavior with my parents split…yet.

Ages 9-18. I continued to sneak food. Knowing what I know now about bingeing, my binges were different. I didn’t eat dinner and then eat two pieces of toast and a bowl of ice cream and 3 cheese sticks or anything like that.
My binges were specific and private. Example, I was a Girl Scout. Girl Scout cookie time, was terrible for me. One year my mom was the “cookie mom” meaning that all of the troops cookies were delivered to our garage and then doled out. Including the extras. I would take whole boxes of cookies and hide them under my bed, probably eating a whole box in day. I knew exactly how many cookies were in each different type of box. 16 cookies in a tagalong box, 21 in do-si-do’s….40 in Thinmints.
I should probably mention that My parents got back together when I was 10, and the bingeing, the sneaking, did not stop.
Eventually the power of sneaking, the need to sneak moved past just true dessert type food. Anything that could be construed as “sweet” I sneaked. Waxy covered protein diet bars, baking chocolate. Finding the bag of chocolate chips and melting it down and eating it with a spoon before soccer practice.

My parents tried to help me, they mentioned that maybe I should go live on my Uncles Farm for a summer, doing farm work. I can’t remember the wording they used, but the implication was that this structured environment would help me. I violenty refused that idea.
The thing is, the whole time this was happening; I didn’t feel consumed by it. I mean, I was. But it didn’t totally run my life. I had friends, and extracurricular activities, and stuff. It was just a part of my life. I didn’t recognize it as an eating disorder or even disordered eating.

Fast forward to college. Freshman Year: Sneaking food in a dorm, is a lot harder when you don’t have a stocked fridge and pantry to raid. But I still managed it, in different ways. My roomie and I had a mini fridge, in which we often had a tube of raw cookie dough. I never bought any. I realized that was ridiculous, but my roomie did. And when she was gone at class, or out somewhere, I would sometimes sneak spoonfuls of her cookie dough, quickly and with the fear of being caught.
But….by circumstance…the sneaking…lessened and got better.

Sophomore Year: There was this guy, I was wildly into him. He was also my best friend and a psychology major. I don’t remember how we got on the topic, but somehow we got to issues with parents, and I just sort of blurted out that I started sneaking food when my parents separated. He looked me straight in the face and said, “you have an eating disorder.” Now, I should also mention that I have a slight problem with authority. Generally whenever anyone tells me something about myself that I disagree with, I tend to get a little defensive. This was the firs time that I just..didnt’. I looked him back in the eye and said, “I guess you are right. I do.” And then, he made me an appointment at our student counseling center. I have an aversion to counseling….but that is another story for another time.

I went to the one appointment, talked with the student counselor. And I acknowledged my eating disorder. I talked with her for a bit, and to be honest, I don’t remember the appointment at all. I remember filling out the form, and putting my reason for beign there as “eating disorder” but I don’t remember anything else that was said in my appointment, other than our initial 3 minutes of pleasantries and why I was there.

I made a follow up appointment, and then “accidentally” on purpose slept through it the next week. I never went back. But that day changed me. Looking my problem in the face, acknowledging it’s presence made worlds of difference for me. That same year I wrote a paper for my personal and exploratory writing class about having an eating disorder, and used it as a tool for guiding myself through the “why” of it all. It did come down to my parents separation, and trying to fill the void that I felt, but it continued. It became a habit, it became my coping mechanism for stress.

In the following years I moved off campus into an apartment, and eventually graduated and got married and now I live with my husband. And I can honestly say, I’ve probably had only 3 or 4 issues with “sneaking” food since then. It’s been six years.

Losing weight has been a completely separate journey for me. I didn’t lose a ton of weight when I stopped sneaking food, in fact I was probably at my lowest weight since high school when I had that counseling appointment.

My breaking point for weight loss happened on my honeymoon. I was getting ready in the bathroom to go to a nice dinner with my husband, and I realized that I had stretch marks on my stomach. I’ve always had them on my thighs, and breasts, and on my love handles, but never on the front of my stomach. That was it for me. I started slowly and surely working on getting healthy. Going to the gym and eating properly. That was in February, I didn’t start losing weight until July. It took me a while to find my groove. It’s been a long road. There have been ups and downs, both literally and figuratively.

Not to get all Jillian Michaels on everyone, but I know that I wouldn’t have been able to succeed at having a healthy lifestyle if I hadn’t conquered my eating disorder. Even if I gained 40 pounds between overcoming it and choosing a physically healthy lifestyle. I wouldn’t have been able to do it with out knowing certain things about my self.
It’s sort of like love, you can’t truly love someone else until you love yourself. You can’t lose weight/get healthy/ pick your phrase, with out knowing why you put too much food in your mouth in the first place.

Pill Poppin....

I am a bad pill taker. I didn’t take regular medication as a kid. Not even a multi-vitamin. I was supposed to take my vitamin, but it was gross. My hippy health freak father made us take “all natural” chewable vitamins, which means they were devoid of sugar, and tasted like..well..what you expect raw vitamins to taste like. All I wanted as a kid was to take Flintstones, but there was NO WAY my dad was going to buy those. Usually my vitamin ended up in the toilet. What a waste of money and needed nutrients!

Anyway, I never got in the habit of taking a multi as an adult. Then I went on birth control. Oh man, the necessity of remembering my pill everyday increased by about a million. At first I had to set the alarm on my cell phone to remind me to take it. For about a year I got good at taking my multi with my pill, then the multi- taking tapered of when I ran out of my bottle of vitamins.

After two years on the pill, I switched to the Nuva-Ring…love it, love it, love it. I don’t have to remember my pill, and the hormones are constant, so I’m not crying or crazy all the time.

So when my gyno asked me if I took a multi-vitamin I said, “Not with Regularity.” Then she asked about my calcium intake. I told her my best guess, and she told me I wasn’t getting enough calcium. Although she only asked me about dairy….I’m sure I get calcium from leafy greens etc. So, she told me I needed to take a calcium supplement. Calcium Carbonate with vitamin D, or she mentioned Viactiv.

I headed out on my lunch break that day to Walgreen’s to check out my options. Uh…there are like a million types of calcium supplments, and Viactive comes in like 40 variations of chocolate and carmel. Who knew!
Then I saw them….

The Adora disks that Tina is always talking about.
I grabbed them, and checked the price. $7.00! Ouch, that was a lot for how few there were in a pack, if according to my doc, I need to take 500mg each day to supplement what I get from my diet. But it got me thinking, I’m bad at taking pills regularly, so even if I spend 15.00 on a bottle that will last me longer, I will probably forget to take them.
And Adora? They are chocolate, in fact they might even be more chocolate than Hershey’s .(Check out Tina’s blog for that too!)
And they have less ingredients than Viactiv...which of course has High Fructose Corn Syrup in it.
So I went with the Adora, with the plan to make it part of my daily routine, by adding it as “dessert” after lunch, every other work day. I’m keeping them in my desk. I figure that will make them last longer, and I’ll be getting extra calcium.

But….here is where I think this could backfire on me. They taste good…not as good as a delicious fresh baked chocolate chip cookie, but good enough to eat more than one.
This is a test of my binge eating recovery. Can I eat them, as I am supposed to, instead of like 4 or 5 at a time. (I realize that they aren’t candy by the way).

Still working on it...

Sigh..I was hungry at 2:15...I had a cup of tea and it occupied my mouth until 3:00pm. I was still hungry at 3pm..and I really had to pee (estimated at this point I had consumed 62 oz of water today, including tea) and then I ate my LARABAR. It was the first time I tasted the cinnamon roll flavor. Very good, not too sweet, which is nice. But..then my body wanted something sweet...ah...attack of the candy jar. I had this mini reeses crispy crunch bar. It was 90 calories. I guess I had the two snacks about an hour apart, and another 16 oz of water. So now i feel super full...and I'm trying not to feel guilty about the candy bar. I know, I know..guilt over food is not worth it and quickly leads to disordered thinking. I'm still trying to find the balance between not feeling guilty about eating things that I "want." and knowing that my body doesn't actually "want" a reeses crispy crunch bar..it wants a good whole food..or something that more readily resembles whole foods. damn...
I'm also afraid to not feel guilty about eating....not feeling guilty about eating is how I ended up with a binge eating disorder and 262 pounds. I didnt' feel guilty while I ate whole boxes of Girl Scout cookies....and I certainly didn't feel guilty while I ate super size hot pockets at 3 am when my husband got home from work (seriously, living next to a convenience store was just about the worst thing that happend to both of us) but I guess I have always felt some modicum of guilt afterwards.
Man....heading towards a healthy relationship with food is tough!