Been There, Done Fat

Another year, another Thanksgiving. My favorite holiday of the year. None of the hype and crype of Christmas with the debt-inducing pressure to BUY. Just plain & cheap. Probably not unlike the original Pilgrims – plain and cheap. A gathering of family and friends, a major league spread representing all the food groups, and sometimes even the full spectrum of colors. Cranberry sauce, yams, green beans, turnips, stuffing and gravy, “buh-day-dohs” (as my great aunts from Worcester, MA pronounced “potatoes”) turkey-lurkey, yummers. An edible cornucopia of delectable dishes.

It is also the day where binging, for lack of a better word, is allowed and actually encouraged by society. Pile the poultry on top of mountain of mashed and stuffin’, drown it in the butter/flour/broth concoction known to non-cooks as ‘gravy’ because, well, turkey and dressing can sometimes be dry, and give it some color with a spoonful (or 2) of cranberry sauce. The 6-week-period from pre-Thanksgiving to Christmas is pretty much the only time of year where you can buy 2lbs of butter for $5. Normally, a pound of butter is in the $$3.49-$3.99 range. Not from mid-November to December. Nope, butter is cheap.

In any case, I am not here to discuss the latest circular. I want to discuss how I made it through this Thanksgiving without diving into a full-on bacchanalia. I have been tracking my daily calories on Livestrong.com since the middle of October. I set up a goal of losing 2 lbs a week, and Livestrong offers a suggested daily caloric intake based on my weight and my target weight. It is completely reasonable. So reasonable in fact that I have been consistent with entering my food selections for over a month now. And feel immensely better physically because of it.

For me, this is HUGE. Like seriously mammoth. The approaching holiday was giving me some agita though around the tracking. Do I track it if I know I am probably going to go over? Can I stay within the daily goals? Is that a realistic expectation on Thanksgiving? To be perfectly honest, I am not anywhere near the point where I can divorce my feelings and my self-esteem from a long weekend of indulgence (working on it, it’s all about “progress not perfection”), and I also knew that I was not ready (or willing) to preach some edict about how I would be stoic and full of willpower and make it through the weekend overindulgence-free.

So, I came to the realization that approaching the weekend trying to living under a self-mandate edict of “no sweets, no treats” would pretty much guarantee a near-to-full regression to the days of not tracking calories, not being aware of the food intake, and ultimately, binging (without the purge). Clinically, ‘deprivation’, i.e. willpower holding me back from eating a cookie or 3, is contraindicated in my case. In every day speech, if I don’t have a cookie today when I want it, I’m going to eat 20 tomorrow. Big old ugly backfire, and the reason I am where I am today. So, eat the friggin’ cookie or cookies, and don’t worry about the calories for this weekend was my motto.

(It’s just now occurred to be that I probably could have changed my goal of losing 2 lbs a week for those 4 days so that I would be “allowed” more calories, and that way, I could have stayed consistent with the tracking. Oh well, next time)

And guess what? I started back on Monday tracking the calories, and went a little over the reco, but nonetheless, am back tracking. I did, however, manage to eat oatmeal every AM during the long weekend, and I think that helped keep me in more ‘check’ than I might have normally been. So, little by slow, steady, steady – just keep doing the drill.

Food. It’s my friend, it’s my enemy. A refuge, a demon. Brings me comfort, brings me pain. Fulfills me & depletes me. A puzzle. A contradiction. A constant dilemma. I’ve had a love-hate relationship with food for a long time.

I wouldn’t say managing my intake is one of my strengths. When I like something and it warm-fuzzies my brain, I want more of it. A lot more of it. “Nom nom nom” to me is like “NOMNOMNOMNOMNOMNOMNOMNOM!!!!!!!!” A small scoop of ice cream? Why even bother. That’s a tease. Give me a quart – hell, a gallon – of Moose Tracks with it’s smooth, sultry fudge that melts in your mouth while you crunch on mini peanut butter cups, all with creamy vanilla cool sweetness and my pleasure center EXPLODES. Ahhhhh….just writing about it triggers a Pavolvian mouth-watering response. NOMNOMNOMNOMNOM!!!!!! (beep beep be-de-beep)

Sugar is my thing. Always has been. I remember checking Dad’s pockets for quarters or using my allowance money to surreptiously procure a $100,000 bar or Reese’s Peanut Butter cups while my mom scoured the grocery store aisles for the healthiest, wholest foods around for her family. A treat for me and my sister at home was Fig Newtons (Fiber! Good Fiber!) and when we were allowed to have “Life” Cereal for breakfast – yeah, the “Hey, Mikey, he likes it” cereal (side note: Mikey did NOT die from drinking pop rocks and coca-cola together although I did avoid that combo well into my 20s although why I was contemplating it at all in my 20s is another story) – it was a pretty special day. And – every so often, we got to have a Coca-cola – Usually at my grandmother’s house during the holidays.

But I’ll spare you a full food history for this post…I’m writing today because I have spent the last 4 weeks on a fully-loaded fiber excursion. I mean major league change in daily consumption. It all started because a friend of mine at my new job – who was also at my old job, but we had never spoken (that’s going to be a whole ‘nother story and written on a different blog “workplacecultureisreallyimportant.com”) had shared with me that she had lost a significant amount of weight and reversed a serious cholesterol issue mainly by incorporating significantly more fiber into her diet.

Given my desperation around my weight and health, I actually asked her questions about it when she mentioned it to me. I let my guard down and shared some things about weight and my food stuff with her which is completely out of character for me. This is MY problem, MY secret shame – I can’t talk to someone I just met about it?????

Well I did, and I still am. When I told her that I needed to fix my situation, that I was tired of living like this – trapped in the obese body of someone I never imagined I would be – she said one word. “Oatmeal. Start eating oatmeal.”

She didn’t say “Stop eating sugar, stop eating carbs, try a protein-only diet for 2 weeks, don’t eat anything after 6pm, fruit is the DEVIL, pasta makes you GAIN weight, avoid high-fructose corn syrup at all costs, gluten is a killer, bread is the devil’s work, fat-free salad dressing can be good, spew spew spew spam spam spam…” and all that other crap we are bombarded by on a daily basis, that burrows its way into our food psyche, and makes it nearly impossible to view, much less ENJOY, food in a less-than-phobic way. ‘S’ did NOT subscribe to the Draconian ‘Cult of DEPRIVATION.’

(Side note: just the word ‘deprivation’ initiates a visceral response in my body. My flight or fight response hyperactivates and I begin to feel panicky. Working in the Not the best way to try to rework a relationship with food.)

Yes, my pal S told me to ADD something to my diet if it wasn’t already there. I was ‘allowed’ to continue eating whatever I wanted – no food was forbidden – but she suggested that I just try adding some oatmeal. What a NOVEL, ingenious and completely logical approach to changing years and years of bad habits. Make a small and simple change that is manageable and acheivable.

So, I have added oatmeal. McCann’s Irish Oatmeal Tin (3 x 28 oz.) to be precise. And using my tendency toward compulsiveness to my advantage, I have had it every morning for the past 33 days.

It’s been 8 years since I have been a “normal” weight.  Since then, I have gained an incredible amount of weight.  In the high double digits.  I can’t even go into to numbers, mainly because I don’t know them, and even if I did, at this point, I would be too ashamed to share them.

It’s horrifying what has happened over the past decade with my weight. I make it sound as though I didn’t participate in this.  In some ways, I didn’t.  I simply wasn’t present half the time where I was eating cookie after cookie and pint after pint of ice cream.

But I’m not really writing to continue to lament the situation.  I’m writing to be, in some ways, accountable to achieving my goal of resolving this unacceptable state I am in. And to articulate the thoughts and behaviors that have brought me to this place, and the thoughts and behaviors that will bring me out of this place.

I have already started on the path to resolution.  I have been mindful of my caloric intake every day over the past 30 days, entering the food I eat into a diary.  And I am happy to say that I have stayed within the guidelines for each week since I started.

This is a miracle.  A veritable miracle. You’ll learn why soon enough.

There are so many things to say.  How to organize the narrative, what to share, what not to share, and more importantly: WHY share?  Why go public with something that has been so intensely painful and shameful for me?  A few reasons, really.  To be accountable.  To be honest. To be free of the weight, both figuratively and literally.  To let it go by letting it out.  And – if it helps anyone else along the way to not feel so hopeless or alone in their pain and battle of the bulge and the binge, well, that would just be amazing.

I’m on the path.  Trudging the road to happy destiny, and abundant health.