Losing Half, Gaining More

If you’re looking for some Good Food motivation, here’s one that doesn’t seem to be at the forefront of discussions: Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating by Jane Goodall.

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time on food research lately to understand exactly what it is that I’m putting into my body(and my family’s bodies). This is the book that sparked it all for me 5 years ago(can it really be that long??) and I decided to re-visit, knowing how much it moved me. It began my desire to not just lose weight, but to learn about and appreciate the fuel that I eat daily. It also sparked for me an intense desire to understand the larger global impact of the food that we eat and that we can so readily access here in the U.S. It was an incredible introduction for me because Jane Goodall is amazing – her gentle nature and  beautiful voice convey the things that she discusses in the book with so much grace. Her strong convictions matter and she manages to deliver them in a manner that’s somehow not overwhelming, daunting and seemingly so much larger than us.

It’s funny, the more I get to “know” people through their weight loss blogs, the more I see so many similar sentiments that are expressed regularly. One of the things that I have especially notice is that many overweight people seem to be in the same boat as me – we could tell you nutritional and food information up on side and down the other. The challenge continues to be in applying that information to our own lives. I have a feeling that if you’re reading this post because you have a blog of your own or just a general interest in weight loss or food issues, much of this information is probably not new to you. I still felt like sharing, though – just in case it might help someone out there who wants to start to gather more knowledge about the food we consume.

Along with this book, some other resources that you might like if you’re also looking to learn more about our food sources and the larger impact that our diets have:

• Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural history of Four Meals, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto and Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual
• Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
• Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation
• Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean and Fair
• Eric Schlosser’s documentary Food, Inc.
• The documentaries King Corn and Super Size Me
• Food Week – a blog post in one of my favorite, thoughtful, inspiring blogs – Aura Joon
• You Are What You Eat and Just Eat Food – two fantastic family-focused food posts on In the Little Red House
• Grocery List Part 1 – also family-focused – at The Clean Eating Mama – looking forward to more from her!

So, that’s my list. For now. There’s more – always more. But that’s my list for today. Have more to share with me? I’d love it! It all makes me even more excited to get started on our garden – I can’t wait to get digging in the dirt!

I chuckled when I read Token Fat Girl’s post last week. Specifically this:

• “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m not fat from the meals I choose to eat. I’m not fat from a nice plate of really delicious food. I’m fat because I eat too many seconds. I’m fat from eating too much in private (snacking) and I’m fat from too many calorie dense sweets.”

I have literally said that phrase more times than I can count – and it started with my mom saying it. I believe wholeheartedly in eating wholesome, nutrient-dense food that isn’t processed. If you look in our fridge, you’ll see spinach, arugula, peppers, oranges, celery, carrots, grapes, hummus, whole wheat tortilla, cheese, organic yogurt and milk. You might open our fridge and do a double-take back at me and wonder how on earth I got to the size that I am on the food in our house.  So, while I’m thinking of it, let’s delve in, shall we?

1. I eat too much. All of my servings are easily double what I need. Even when I eat the healthiest things, too much is too much – it’s still creating a surplus of calories in my body, and weight loss is at it’s core a math equation. Calories in vs. Calories burned, and I’m still putting a whole lot more in than I’m burning!
2. I eat most of my meals alone – thus enabling the extra servings that I would never eat in front of other people. I’ve started to really try to sit down with my kids for breakfast and lunch rather than feeding them while I stand and wait for their nap time to have my lunch. Eating with them makes lunch more enjoyable and it also gives me even the slightest bit of accountability – even though they’re young, I just want them to see me enjoying food for nourishment in appropriate portions; then eating until not-quite-full and moving on with my day. When I don’t eat with someone else, I almost always eat in front of the computer and I am so much less mindful and present – that makes it so much easier to overeat!
3. The psychological aspects of why I eat too much are ridiculous. They go so deep and I honestly don’t know why. It’s all a tangled web of the shame aspects – even shame that I really don’t have any major psychological trauma from years past that should have caused me to go off the deep end.

A positive for today: Today was a day with the kiddos. I just could NOT get it together. That’s ok – we’ll move on. But the tv was definitely on more than our normal(which is next to never) and I happened to flip through and see that show The Doctors. There was a woman on talking about hating her spider veins. While I understand why people hate them, I’m also thankful that a positive to my current focus of just getting some weight off is that things like spider veins and stretch marks aren’t even remotely on my radar of things to care about.

p.s. I think I’m ready to get writing again. It’s the perfection thing – I want to have amazing, perfect posts to put up. But just writing on here is very clearly a great accountability tool for me. I’ve gone in circles about writing a food log on here. I read many other weight loss blogs and many have food logs as a personal accountability piece and I wonder how much it truly would help? Even maybe a separate tab where I just keep a list? I don’t know. My issue is honestly with committing to it – I’d be lying if I said I really want to world to see what I eat every single day. It makes me feel naked!

p.s.s. Reason number 53,445,46,546 for needing to lose weight: we got hammered with snow last week. I loooooove snow. Wanted to go play in. Oh wait…I don’t have a winter jacket that fits:( I’ve been wearing my husband’s discarded fleece jackets for the past two years, so on the snow day I wore his Carhart and down vest to get out with my little one and deliver cookies to neighbors. Believe me, I looked *super* cute:( I have a really nice winter coat, but it doesn’t do much good if I can’t zip it up in the snow!

I just put up a post on my other (non-weight loss) blog about menu planning and the cooking I did this weekend, but I wanted to go into a bit more depth around it here.

Do you ever feel obsessed? With food, nutrition, organic, contents, ingredients…it’s a neverending list. Most overweight people that I speak with have so much knowledge about nutrition and how we should be eating, we just hit the roadblock in actually applying it to what is going into our mouths. (Raise your hand if you’ve ever said, “I know what I should do to lose weight – I just don’t do it!”)

I’m sort of over feeling obsessed. Especially because I think a big part of it is related to what other people think about what we’re eating – in restaurants, when I give my kids snacks at the park or playdates, what’s in my shopping cart at the grocery store…I’m OVER that feeling.  Yes, of course, I want(and need) to eat in a more healthy manner. I also need to just eat less in general – regardless of what food I am eating.

When I really think about it, the worst things that I eat happen when I don’t have “good” things at home and go eat out. I obsess about having perfect food in the house, then don’t want to eat what we have and go out and eat complete junk. When I have relatively healthy things that I enjoy and can eat in moderation at home – this is the time that I take care of myself the best. I eat normal serving sizes. I don’t feel deprived. I don’t feel obsessed about everything that is or is not going into my mouth.

So, I decided this weekend to stop obsessing about having only {expensive} organic meat in the house and therefore not buying it much. Only organic produce, only organic snacks, etc. Yes, I do feel strongly that eating organic is the option I’d choose if I had all of the money in the world to spend. But, I don’t.  So we’re(we being both of my selves;) meeting in the middle more and I’m relaxing a bit and I already feel so much better. I ate like a normal person this weekend(including a bologna sandwich on white bread – not the norm, but a much appreciated treat in this house and I counted the points).

When I stop obsessing, it’s like letting out a deep breath that I’ve been holding for a long time. It allows me to just cook some meals that I know we enjoy and have them in the freezer for easy dinners. It allows me to stop framing the meals that I’m planning in the sense of, “what would other people think of this meal” and lets me just choose things that I know we enjoy rather than what I “think” we should be eating.

Everything in moderation, even if it’s not perfect. I can definitely live with that.

p.s. That white bread? So not happening again any time soon. It was like eating air – didn’t fill me up in any way and so not worth the calories!

I had no intentions of sharing recipes on this blog, but this salad was yummy, so I thought I’d share. Especially since it’s not a “recipe,” but just a bunch of ingredients thrown together in a salad. It’s what I had around, so I thought I’d try it and it turned out to be a really great combo.

The Components:

• 1+cup baby spinach
• 1+cup arugula
• 1/8 cup sliced almonds
• 1/8 cup dried cherries
• 1/8 cup crumbled Gorgonzola cheese
• 2t red wine vinegar
• 1t olive oil

WW Points: 6

I didn’t have any mushrooms, but portabello mushrooms would have made a really fantastic earthy and mellow addition of texture to the flavors without a ton of calories/points.

I meant to take a picture to add, but I ate it and forgot.

When I really think about it, if I mirror the food I feed my 2 year old and give myself the same – I would totally lose weight and have a much healthier diet. Seriously. This little one lives on: Yogurt, Eggs, Cheese, Whole Wheat(or some sort of whole grain)Toast, Oatmeal, Peanut Butter, Fruit of any kind, Cottage Cheese, Chicken, fresh/raw veggies, Cheerios and a popsicle thrown in here and there. Obviously she eats more than just that stuff, but those are our go-to foods for her. Why am I not just feeding myself the same things that I always have around??

I wander into the kitchen mindlessly opening the fridge for something to eat and never grab the healthy options right in front of me. In the past week (or so) I’ve started grabbing these things and it’s coinciding with more exercise to create the week that I’ve felt better and more energetic than I have in literally YEARS.

Things I’ve started to grab when I want to shove something in my mouth:

-Baby Carrots

-Celery

-Pepper Strips

-A banana

-An apple

-A yogurt

Seriously, the only thing on that list that I was really eating before is the apple. I have texture issues sometimes, so I just didn’t love to eat a banana or yogurt. WHATEVER. I just told myself to get the heck over it and deal with the texture so that I’m not dealing with the “texture” of cottage cheese on my arse as a result of liking the “texture” of a McD’s cheeseburger and french fries more than a banana. Plus, it’s cheaper and I don’t have to waste gas driving to get a banana since it’s already in my kitchen.

Lesson learned.

I went to my cousins wedding in Philadelphia yesterday and had such a fantastic time.  We knew that it was in Old City, but didn’t really realize what that meant, which is sort of sad since it’s only about an hour and a half away from us! The hotel was literally half a block from the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. The wedding looked out over Independence National Historic Park and Second National Bank and in such an interesting part of the city – tons of amazing shops and restaurants. We were disappointed that we didn’t have time to spend just walking around, but having a 6 month old at home who needs his food source sort of limits longer excursions for now. This was the longest I’ve left him so far and it was still just so nice to get away for more than just a couple of hours.

The food was FANTASTIC. It also helped me to realize a few things within the context of “celebrations.”  This journey that I’ve committed to has been a long time coming. I’ve been going to Weight Watchers meeting for over 4 months now without actually really keeping track of my food. But, the fact that I’ve continued to go is a huge testament to the psychological aspect of losing weight and how I’m slowly changing. This process seems so daunting and overwhelming as a whole, but it’s the little things that I can control in a day that make me realize that I really am doing this! I really am making lots of little changes in my life, and especially in my thinking!

At the wedding, I didn’t eat perfectly by any means. But I did eat much differently than I would have in the past and that’s a really big step.

• The things that I wanted to eat that weren’t the healthiest, I took one of and just took a bite.
• If I didn’t love what I was eating after the first bite, I didn’t finish it.
• I didn’t take appetizers from servers simply because they had it in front of me.
• I didn’t try one(or more!) of everything – I chose the few things I thought I’d enjoy the most and took smaller portions of them.
• I danced about 10 times more than I otherwise would have because I knew I was burning some extra calories while having some fun.
• I also just committed to completely putting aside my normal feelings of awkward self consciousness that usually keep me from something like dancing in a social situation and it felt SO GOOD.

As a whole, I still ate much more than necessary. But I also would guess that I easily ate half as much as I may have eaten in the past and that makes me really happy. Thinking about all of this and seeing these baby steps that I am actually doing is so empowering. Believing in myself that I really can, and WILL, do this is an incredible feeling. There hasn’t been a defining/”A-HA” moment for me when I just decided that this was the point where I wasn’t turning back. I read so many weight loss success stories where people talk about the one thing that happened that flipped a switch for them, but for me it’s just been a recent consistent realization of small things that have made me realize that I truly an changing. Knowing that I can deal with each situation as it comes and take small steps to get to each thing along the way feels fantastic and it’s been a really long time since I’ve felt that about myself.

Eating in public comes along with so many feelings of shame.  Part of me wanting to start this blog was to vocalize this publicly and begin the process of dissociating that food/shame connection. It runs so deep and the more I think about it, the more I need to just get over it!

Last night, I went out by myself before my Weight Watchers meeting. My husband started to go with me 2 weeks ago and it has been really nice to have him going and do this together. But…Monday nights used to be my time away. I’d leave when he got home from work, go run errands or read quietly by myself, go to my meeting. Basically, just have an evening to myself. So this week, I decided to at least leave the house as soon as he got home from work and meet him at the meeting – that would give me a good 45 minutes alone.

When I have “time alone/away,” my intention is always to go read by myself somewhere. This always translates to EAT and read by myself somewhere. It’s one of the biggest things that I need to work on because eating and spending money are always my activities of choice and there is SO MUCH MORE OUT THERE that I’m missing out on! {Namely: moving my body!}

So, where am I going with this? Here I am, having alone time, wanting to read and I go to my favorite coffee shop. It also has a sandwich area and bakery. It’s completely habit, but I decided to get dinner. Even though I’m on.my.way.to.a.WEIGHT WATCHERS MEETING.

This is my trigger point.

This is my trigger point.

This is my trigger point.

Do I not get that???

Yet I continue to make the same choices. The point where I need to make the choice to have a cup of coffee, a cup of tea, a soda, iced tea – something other than food that I don’t even need.

So, I got the food. Chips. A sandwich. To a normal person, it wouldn’t be a huge deal. To me, it is. It’s the food I eat mindlessly, the food that’s not healthy, the food that I didn’t need in the first place.  Not only do I eat it, but I take it and go sit in the most hidden corner I can find. Just in case someone I know might see me, especially someone in my WW meeting that’s right down the street.

Eating in a shameful way is the worst. It’s the way that I eat so many meals. In the car going through a fast food place(and wishing that I don’t know the person in the window because I’ve been there so many times). Before I go to an event or situation with new people who I’m nervous will judge me for my weight. After my kids are down for their naps in the afternoon and I can sit and eat without anyone else around.

I am an adult. It does not matter what anyone else thinks of me, let alone what they think about what I’m eating. But I can’t shake that feeling in public of being hyperaware that someone is looking at what I’m eating and thinking, “She does NOT need to be eating that!” Probably because I know in my mind that it’s something that I don’t need, but I project it onto others who probably could care less in the first place because they’re thinking about themselves as well.  If someone is actually judging me:

1. They probably know me and just wonder what’s going on with me to cause me to gain so much weight.
2. They probably just want to see me get healthier/happier/taking care of myself(and I’m clearly not.)
3. Both of the above.

So, I ate in the corner. And I don’t want to do it ever again. Regardless of what I’m eating, it’s my choice to make and I’m the only one I need to answer to!