Back again

Sorry about that little hiatus; Daughter started summer camp this week (so far, so good!), so it threw a little wrench into what had been gelling into a summer routine. It's good that she's going, since that way she isn't required to spend 24 hours out of the day in the company of a 3 year old and she's learning more about socializing outside the safety of our home, but we miss her around here when she's not here.

At any rate, I'm back and about ready to name my new goals. Based on what I learned during the week I was recording everything I ate, I plan to do two things: 1) try and substitute fruit during my late-afternoon cravings. I noticed that things start falling apart food-wise around the time that i start falling apart at the end of the day. It's the late-afternoon slog when I'm most likely to start going after junk food, and it's junk food that I have the hardest time turning away from when I've had enough.

I should say that I don't have anything against junk food, per se. My issues are more behavioral than nutritional: I go after ice cream, when, in fact, I find that it isn't something that I like very much or that gives me much satisfaction. I like a little sometimes after a meal - a scoop in a bowl kind of thing, not a sundae - but for the most part it's actually something I can take or leave. Potato chips, another weakness during my down times, are a different story; they're not kidding when they say that you can't eat just one. I certainly can't, and it's altogether too easy for me to be well on my way to finishing a large bag before I realize what I'm doing. In the case of potato chips, it's always best when I have a set portion (think pre-packaged serving bag) during a meal and avoid them at other times.

I figured that since I really need to up my consumption of fruit in a nutritional sense, and since it has not only fiber but also sugar, it might work as something of a pick-me-up come late afternoon. So, that's my first goal - eat fruit in the late afternoon, and generally try to get in 2 fruits a day.

2) I want to keep journaling my food intake for the time being. Not everyday, necessarily, but enough to get a random snapshot from time to time of how I'm eating. The process of recounting what I ate, as well as the conditions surrounding my eating, seemed to help me keep some attention on the activity of eating, so it seems like a way to go.

I could add more goals to the fire at this point, but since I find myself easily overwhelmed (=paralysis) lately, I think these are good to start.

For the record, I didn't have any fruit yesterday. Let's see how today goes.

July 2

Yep, I missed a couple of days. I think I can reconstruct yesterday, but June 30 is hereafter consigned to oblivion.

But, yesterday I ate:

Breakfast - two waffles w/ margarine and syrup. I was hungry, and there were no Cheerios left.

Lunch - Madras Lentils (!!) with one cut-up hotdog. It was goooood.

Snack - M&Ms again (we were at my parents' house, and they keep a stash. True to form, though, they were too sweet and I found myself drinking tea to kill the sweet taste again.

Late afternoon scrounging - finished a bag of potato chips. I was hungry-ish, but not starving; it was more a response to feeling dog-tired after swimming with the kids.

Dinner - *sigh* - Mickey D's. Chalk this up to sheer laziness. The food wasn't even that good (and the sad thing is it really can be. Try it in Japan - the fries, in particular, are delicious there, just because someone cares enough to change out the oil occasionally and not serve up fries that have been sitting there for a long time).

'Dessert' - I have these Italian ices that I love, and I had a strawberry-flavored one last night. They are not only tasty, but they're also good at cooling me down in our hot bedroom during the summer. :)

After almost a week of keeping an eating journal, I'm beginning to discern certain things - both good/less good.

Observations:

1. The late afternoon is a hard time for me. I'm not only peckish - which is fine - but I'm tired and starting to run out of energy with the kids.
2. I have a very, very hard time being around a container of something that's historically - if not actually - tempting without finishing it. Included here are things like potato chips, cake, and ice cream; things that I'm never particularly hungry for in of themselves, but which hold a kind of mythic allure in my mind. Fast food is a bit this way as well, although I've been slowly learning to taste it for what it is.
3. I just don't get hungry in the morning after breakfast. It's not a long stretch between breakfast (which I don't eat until at least 30 min. after I take one medication, which I usually take while I'm getting the kids' breakfast together) and lunch, and I find that I have plenty of energy to go on throughout the morning.
4. If I melt into the couch after dinner and I'm not watching anything in particular on TV, I have a tendency to get munchy, even though I might not be hungry.
5. It seems to be less emotion, per se, than energy that drives my non-hungry eating. When I'm worn out from doing kids all day, I tend to want to hide out from them and scarf food down. When I'm getting a 'break' from the family and house by going out for awhile, I tend to wind up at restaurants that I'm not very interested in, just because it feels like something I deserve on some level. I also eat - or, at least, feel the drive to eat - when I'm kind of procrastinating.

I think there are some things I can to to help mitigate these things:

1. Maybe make the late afternoon a time when I go out of my way to eat fruit. It has both fiber AND sugar, and might do the job in terms of giving me an energy lift.
2. I think the best thing I can do with my tempting foods issue is just employ some willpower. It comes into the house every so often, and I almost always find that giving in to the urge to finish off something is ultimately an unsatisfying experience. As I mentioned above, I've gotten to the point that I'm seeing fast food more and more in the light of this kind of unsatisfying thing, and I even usually think of sweet, creamy foods (ice cream, cake/frosting) in this way. And potato chips give me gas, so there's that. I think I just need to really work on eating them - or not - consciously.
3. It might be nice to stop and have a cup of tea (I'm a tea junkie) while the kids are having mid-morning snack.
4. I really need to walk away from the couch. If I'm tired, I need to go to sleep. If not, I need to either be watching something specific or doing something else.
5. I need to find other ways to take a break - deserved or otherwise - than eating. Reading, perhaps.
   

That's where things stand as of the almost-end of week one. Tomorrow (hopefully) I'll post about where I want to take Week Two.

June 29

Arguably the most useful thing that's coming out of this exercise is a slow-but-growing awareness of the emotional/situational cues that spur non-hungry eating. Specifically, if I'm sitting around on the couch and watching TV only half-interested, I find that I want to eat something, anything. But it's very much like the TV watching - I'm not particularly interested in the program, and I'm not particularly interested in the food. Rather, I'm looking for something to distract/entertain me (I'm not sure which just yet. I know that there are things I could be doing with the time, and I know that there's a part of me that doesn't want to bother...so I wonder if the TV/eating isn't partly a procrastination tactic?).

Today, if I start feeling like that, I might try to throw an 11-minute activity at it to see if that gets me over the procrastination hump without making me feel overwhelmed with stuff I need to do.

Now, on to yesterday:

Breakfast - Cheerios with banana. Was hungry. Reading at the computer. Finished when full enough.

Lunch - some of the curry from the other night, with a relatively modest portion of rice. Was hungry. Reading at the computer. Finished when full enough.

Snack - This is where things were going downhill a little. I had some leftover oatmeal chocolate chip cookie dough frozen and waiting to be baked. We had guests with kids and I baked them up - which was fine. I just fell down at the point of the dough itself; popped one little dough ball into my mouth as I was baking, another later on, and then I finished the rest after dinner - because they were there. I also ate two of the baked cookies, which were good, but there was a combination of procrastination/boredom and completism at work in the dough consumption.

Dinner - two frozen meals. The first was good and I was hungry, but watching TV (for some reason, TV seems to make me less aware than does reading). The second was partly-to-largely for the purpose of getting rid of the sweetness of the cookie dough. Interesting...

June 28

This is the point at which I usually abandon these kinds of things. But I don't really want to this time; I guess part of me is tired of abandoning things all the time, but there's also that I'd really like to see if any of this changes anything in the long term.

So...

Breakfast: Cheerios, as usual. No fruit with it, though. Pretty hungry (that kind that says I ate too much the night before) by the time I ate.

Lunch: Madras lentils with tortilla chips at my parents' house. It was delicious. I never would have thought I'd like lentils - the name is so icky. But there you are. I was definitely hungry at lunchtime; spent it reading the paper.

Snack: M&Ms. I 'wanted' them, but they were very sweet. As usual, I followed them up with an iced tea chaser.

Dinner: I was tired and pretty hungry. I'd gotten the kids H@ppy Me@ls and fought the urge - psychological, not physiological - to get myself a 'snack' as well. Got home, and since Husband was hot and tired, he wasn't hungry, so I had leftover rice and garlic chicken. It was good and pretty filling, and I should have stopped there. But, my son left his fries, so I wound up eating them AND having another medium-sized piece of cake. I was full by the time I ate these, but pretty tired and I think I was kind of 'rewarding' myself at the end of a long day. All of these I ate pretty mindlessly - the fries/cake in front of the TV.

June 27

Breakfast (was really hungry when I ate): Cheerios with sliced banana. Ate while reading, but trying to pay attention to hunger level. Didn't finish bowl of milk left over, since I seemed to be full enough. Thought about not reading, but since I was eating alone it seemed kind of boring (I guess my "mindfulness" has a limit).

Lunch: Husband's potato salad. It was good (except for the bits of Gorgonzola - not my favorite cheese). I was pretty hungry, and I did a reasonably good job of keeping attention on my appetite. I ate slightly past fullness, but not so much that I felt full. I also finished off my son's apple slices while we watched a movie.

Snack(s): I had a little birthday cake with the kids. This time, it tasted a little sweet and was a bit diminished compared to yesterday, but I kept at it. I was hungry when I had it; it filled me, but later on I felt peckish again and wound up finding/eating several handfuls of potato chips. After the first few bites I was more than satisfied, but the texture...

Dinner: Another iffy dinner experiment. This one was a seasoned pork loin that was pretty heavy on the seasoning. I ate some of that, again with some of the potato salad. I was hungry by then, ate to just about full, but the cake kept bugging me and I ate two servings of that in pretty quick order. Now sitting here drinking an unsweetened iced tea and trying to get rid of the sweet aftertaste. A little too full.

June 26

Today (well, yesterday now) I ate the following:

Breakfast. I finished the leftover fried rice my husband made the night before. The ham wasn't right for the dish and added a kind of jarring taste. On top of that, I ate past the point of being full, since my drive for 'completion' (in this case, 'completely' finishing the leftovers) compelled me to keep going. I ate at my computer as I read online, so a lot of it was mindless. It takes a lot of willpower not to start criticizing myself for this.

The rice itself, however, was quite tasty.

Lunch. Husband made me a roast beef sandwich on a poppy seed Kaiser roll. I was hungry and the amount was just right; finished not too full, and no longer hungry. He layered a lot of meat on it, and included tomato and mayonnaise. I ate it while laying on our bed, watching TV (it was - ostensibly - my 'day off'). I had had a small Coke beforehand, which was kind of unsatisfying.

Snack(s). Husband was making potato salad and had prepared bacon. I wound up eating three slices (I love bacon), as well as several spoonfuls of the potato salad. I was a bit peckish when I started, but it was kind of overkill. All eating while doing other things (except slice #2 - stolen - which I really savored). Daughter came home from a birthday party with excess cake; when I got a little hungry before dinner, I ate a pretty large glob of frosting (mainly for the texture, although the sweetness was just right). Again, I was doing other things (cleaning my office); the frosting was the result of peckishness, but the subsequent sliver of cake (for more frosting) was not.

Dinner: Husband made (Sundays are his cooking days) a chicken curry that was only somewhat of a success. Nonetheless, I ate a full plate of it, with rice, and ate past the point of fullness. We were sitting on the couch watching TV; not distracted, entirely, since I was concentrating on the new recipe, but I ate past fullness because of the completist drive. Followed it up with a piece of cake, which was total overkill but was burning a hole in my brain.

Hmmmm...food for thought.

The Mindful Eating Project

I've been overweight for my entire adult life, and a little before that as well. I've never been much of a dieter, however; I tried Atkins - very briefly - as a teenager, and I had limited success with calorie-restricting diets (the usual story - lose, then gain back with interest, weight) through my first pregnancy six years ago. It was around this time that I gave up altogether on the idea of 'dieting' and entered into a kind of eating free-for-all until the present.

This isn't to say that I've become less concerned with my weight, but that my views on dieting have changed substantially. Influenced by books ranging from Linda Bacon's Health at Every Size, Karen Koenig's The Rules of "Normal" Eating, a growing body of writing on 'mindful eating', and books on the history and discourses of the dieting industry, my perception of the usefulness of "dieting" has changed. I no longer believe that "dieting" contributes to a healthy relationship with one's body, that it is helpful in the long-term in maintaining a state of physical healthiness, or that it isn't something that serves the interests of corporate players far better than it serves my own best interests.

As such, I'm embarking on a project of mindful eating. Inspired by the wonderful Habithacker's incremental approach to change (I'm in the middle of 'nest' right now, and what a difference it's made!), I'm setting aside three months to try and alter eating and health-related habits and behaviors that haven't served me well in the past. My goal here is not necessarily to lose weight, although I would not be heartbroken if some of this happened; rather, I want to begin to eat a wider variety of foods and start to shake my emotional dependence on eating.

In contrast with Habithacker, which suggests a small change each day, I'll be working on a weekly goal in the hopes that I can slowly get a feel for things before I complexify it with new behaviors. I am not a nutritionist, a doctor, or otherwise any kind of medical health professional; although I can't imagine having any readers at all, much less ones who would choose to pursue the same weekly goals, if you choose to do so you do it at your own risk. My fundamentally moderate approach to the whole shebang would suggest that you wouldn't be risking very much, but if you have an acute health problem related to your weight, please consult an empathetic doctor, not me.

*******

So, on to week one, in which I keep a food journal.

Why a food journal? Let me begin by explaining why not; as in, what I'm not hoping to accomplish through keeping a food journal. I'm not doing it in order to have a list of foods to castigate myself with at the end of the day, and I'm not doing it in order to tally up calories. I'm doing it in order to get a good snapshot of what, where, and how I eat during the course of an average week.

This week, I plan to keep a running journal of what I ate. I will make no adjustments or allowances for the desire to eat more healthfully, but just eat like usual and see what emerges at the end of the week. I'll keep track of what I ate, where I ate it, and my emotional state at the time (since emotional eating is a biggie for me). I'll save satiety until a little later on in the project.

The game is afoot!