Habit is a bitch. Really. We don't even think about the collection of stuff that populates our head, all the billion things that make up who we are, all the habits that make up the way we perceive the world.
Ok, not all those things are habits exactly, but this is my profound thought for the day, so I get to put it that way. And when you try to make lifestyle changes, all those little habit gremlins pop out from under the bed and scream, NO, this is WRONG, I am not supposed to do this that way.
Michael has not been eating very much lately, particularly of the sort of things that he used to really love... proteins, mostly. Which is fine. I mean, I figure that if this were a Bad Thing, he'd be hungry, right? He's not hungry, he is losing weight, and he feels ok (well, actually, he doesn't, but I don't think that these things are connected; this is mostly structural stuff). And just about every day, he asks me... "am I eating enough? I don't think I'm getting enough protein but I just don't want any more ." I think that this is just all about expectations and perceptions and the loss of something that used to give him pleasure, however "wrong" that might have been. Ill-judged, maybe, more than wrong. Anyway, he expects that food will give him the kind of pleasure that it once did... which I really think means, "food will allow me to turn off my head for a while and comfort myself." Something that we both used to be fabulous at doing.
But things change. The role of food changes. Tastes change. The thing that doesn't change is all those habit gremlins, the things that make me think that there should be twice as much food on the plate, the things that make him think that he should be eating more even though he's not hungry and he doesn't actually want anything else.
I don't have any solution to this, of course, except maybe awareness... the more you think about the patterns, the easier it is to let them change. Which means, still unbelievably hard but maybe just one notch or two less.
I caught the tail end of some program on TLC the other night called, I Eat 33,000 Calories A Day. Or something like that. It was another program of super-obese people... I have mixed feelings about these things, a combination of interest and horror and some resentment, because there always seems to be a "look at the fat people in the zoo" element to them. I didn't see all of the show, but I did see most of the last segment, which was about a 640-lb. woman called Lisa, I think. And there were two things that really struck me.... one that I'll write about now, and another that I'll save for tomorrow.
The first was what she said about her family... she said that her mother had had a thing about sweets, that she'd buy things like that and hide them... but that Lisa knew how to find them. I listen to things like this and muse about the complexities of food behavior, about where these problems start. For both Michael and me, there were echoes of that same kind of thing. My mother never bought "good" stuff for general consumption... things like cookies and chips and so on. But she would buy things like that and "hide" it in a cupboard that no one was supposed to go into. Stuff that was essentially for her. Michael reports the same kind of thing... that his father would buy things like cheese and cakes and hide them in the wardrobe and measure how much was there. Besides being a little weird all in all, I wonder how this kind of thing plays into food attitudes.
I look at my son who has, in my opinion, no food issues at all. He eats until he is not hungry and then stops. He's a teenager, so he sucks down milk like there was a direct line to a cow, and can eat a staggering amount of various things... but he will have things like Doritos and candy around forever. I finally threw away the last of his Halloween candy from more than a year and half ago. He has never been denied food. He has never been told that he could not have certain kinds of food... and he's always been fed a variety of food, both of the very healthy and the more junk sort. He prefers the good stuff although he loves a lot of the junk, too... but the point is, he could have these "forbidden" foods around forever and totally ignore them, especially if he was told not to eat them. Even these days, we'd have to throw it or eat it within a relatively short period of time. The compulsion remains.
Would we have been different if we had grown up in environments in which food wasn't some kind of prize? Was this true for you, and how do you think that it affected your interaction with food?
I don't know what's happened to this week, really. As much as anything, it's just been incredibly busy, lots of errand-running and little things that have made it chaos all the time. Yesterday my son had his birthday party... we still have a bunch of 14 year olds strewn randomly around the place. And I've had a few college kids working odd jobs and so on... and I've been to Rochester every day this week, which is at least 4 days too many.
And food hasn't been great. Except yesterday when we did indulge in a slice of pizza (just one!) ordered for the party, it's nothing you can really put your finger on. Just a lot of days of eating not quite right, not quite often enough, not the right portion size, things like that. And I think it's all going to weight out to not good at all. I might be wrong, and there are still two days in the week, but I'm not optimistic. And bracing myself.
Everything I post these days seems to be stressed and dismal, but it's how I feel. Things have just been hard lately, lots of nagging things that need doing, the situation with my mother, and a persistent fight that keeps coming back up every couple of days, making us both feel bad without being able to get any kind of resolution on it. It makes all the food things hard, too. Easy though it is for me to maintain this way of eating, it's even easier for me to eat too much... and what I want right now is a kind of comfort that I can't get, that doesn't exist really... but yet that some part of me thinks can be found in food. I want to curl up with a book and... something... and shut out all the persistent negative and sad things in my head. No, it doesn't work. No, I'm not going to do it. But, yes, it seems like it would feel good. And maybe it would, until it was over and, as always, the piper has to be paid.
So we pick up and tidy up the pieces and go on. Make some tea, figure out what my student odd-job kids are going to do today, just move on with it all. And eventually it will feel better.
If you want to read cheerful things, you're at the wrong blog today. For that matter, this is not all that diet/low carb/anything of the sort, although I do want to talk a little about maintaining lifestyle in the face of life problems.
I've known since my mother's cancer recurred that the likelihood of a good result was slim. Recurrence in this short a time period is nearly always a terrible sign, and her age is against her, too, and ovarian cancer is a killer. Yesterday my doctor sister decided to say what I already really knew, that she'd seen the scans and that they basically look terrible. The best hope of the chemotherapy is to buy a little time, not cure anything. I knew this already, knew it when I heard the symptoms weeks ago. In a lot of ways, I deal better with reality than with the vague "everything's going to be ok" sorts of notions. At least reality is... well, real. Not an ephemeral hope that's never going to materialize. And then you can sort of plan.
There is always hope. But you have to temper hope with realism. And you have to use the time you have wisely.
I'm just sad. Nothing else, really. There's nothing else to be. There are so many things you could say, so many ironies to it all, which is a whole different story... so many things you could say about living for the day and life and death, and so on. But I don't have the heart for any of them.
The best scenario is that somehow this will be able to bring some healing to my fractured family, and that in turn will give my mother some kind of peace. The last time my entire family was in the same place, maybe 6 years ago, my uncle was dying of pancreatic cancer. This all has a horrible familiarity. But that was the beginning of the deepest and worst fractures. So maybe this will be able to mend some of the things that happened then. Maybe. The scars run pretty deep.
And the other thing that this does is what I do every day... renew my determination to beat this weight thing. For me, for Michael. I'm determined not to let this be a reason to let the structure of diet and exercise that we've so carefully put in place disintegrate in the face of chaos. Determined not to let food be a comfort for things for which there is no real comfort, anyway. I see so many thing... well, I see my own life, and the way that I've gained weight around every crisis. I see other people say, I was doing well, and then this thing happened. And I know how easy it is to go down that slippery slope. I don't want to do that this time. Neither of us can afford that... and I want so desperately to get physically to where we need to be to have the life we want. Yes, before it's too late.
After a couple of really lousy days, too much bad stuff going on, a morning of really good things. Michael's weight is down to 488; mine is down below 280 (if only fractionally), and my publishing contact is supposed to call me today sometime about a bunch of new contract work. Now, if I can get everything planted in my garden and figure out why the outside tap is leaking without having to call the plumber, life will be momentarily semi-perfect. Whew.
The last few days, which have been pretty emotionally lousy, have made me think a lot more than I have in some time about emotional eating and the ways in which we habitually sabotage ourselves. They say that it's harder to lose weight when you're over 40, and I suppose that there are probably metabolic truths to that, but I wonder sometimes whether it isn't just as much about breaking lifetimes of really ingrained habits. Food is such a part of life, such an aspect of so many things we do (and this is even more true if you're the designated cook in the house) that it's hard to separate it from all the little rituals of the rest of the day. And with a lifetime of rituals behind you, creating new ones, losing old ones, is more difficult, through sheer habit and inertia. Even when you think that you've broken something, it's still there, lurking in the recesses of your mind, just like all those old TV commercials and useless factoids that are stored there!
When we were eating low fat (and I'd just like to throw in here that our life is unimaginably better, as is our marriage, since we stopped obsessing about every gram of fat and extra calorie), I tried very, very hard to break myself of what I call the spoon habit. I'd like to think that everyone does this, but it's probably not true... you spoon out the sour cream or whatever, measure it carefully, and then you lick all the excess off the spoon, thus about doubling what you actually counted. It's the "broken cookies and anything that you eat while you're standing up doesn't count" theory of diet. Admittedly, this is not such a huge issue on a low-carb diet, but metabolic advantage or not, at some point the quantity of food really does count, and if you cook and you lick every spoon or whatever, you are ending up with a fairly significant amount of extra intake. I'd gotten just wonderfully good for a while about eliminating this, but I noticed the other day that it's back, one of those habits that just creep right in when you're not looking. Bad habits require constant vigilance; that's the hard part. Just like I still look longingly at cigarettes even though I quit years ago and would probably throw up if I actually smoked. But in some part of my brain, it still looks good. The funny thing is that the pasta and so forth actually don't look so good any more... I occasionally wish I could eat a little rice, mainly as a complement to other foods, or, this time of year, new potatoes... but it's a passing whim, more of a cooking thing than an eating thing.
But that longing for comfort is still there. Food used to be my... oh, I can't even think of the right word. Everything I pick seems wrong. Friend? No. Comfort? No. Opiate. That's a lot closer to the truth. I used to sit down with food and a book, and that combination of mental and physical engagement just made the world go away. (On a tangential note, I've often thought that if I had never gotten into the habit of reading and eating, I would never have gained so much weight.) These days... well, there's nothing that really does that, not in that kind of way. Racquetball, a little. But there's nothing else that gives me that ability to just shut off all the things that nag at me, not in that kind of way. And we wonder why this thing is so hard to give up... Everyone always says things like, "nothing tastes as good as thin feels." Well, sure. But that's not what it's all about, is it? Not all of it, anyhow. It's easy to find substitutes for the pleasure of taste. It's a lot harder to find substitutes for comfort.
What's for dinner? Roasted chicken with Dijon sauce, if I have any white wine. Cauliflower mash, and maybe a few Brussels sprouts.
Michael: -3.3 lbs, 493.2, total loss since January: 50.2 lbs., (overall loss since 2006, 120.7)
Nina: +0.22 lbs, 280.5, total loss since January: 21.7 lbs.
Not a bad week really. I essentially broke even (but lost a lot last week, so that's ok); Michael did well.
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I have a confession to make, in this semi-public place. I did something today that I haven't done in a long time, sat down with a book and at least twice as much food as I needed and tried to tune the world out. Yes, it was low carb (excess meat mostly). No, it wasn't what one would call a binge. Yes, it was comfort eating. Was it the biggest deal in the universe? No. But does it kind of feel that way... yeah, although it's that kind of day; everything feels like the end of the world.
I could sit here and tell you why I did this... and I did it with perfect knowledge of what I was doing. One of those days, and all that; a bunch of things that just kicked off some deep miserable stuff. But there are always things like this; life is just like this, for me anyway. And I kind of thought that I'd gotten to the point where this wasn't the thing that I looked for; that food and zoning out of this reality wasn't something that I saw as a solution. Sometimes you get to look at just how thin the line is between new behaviors and old, between the person you believe yourself to be now and the person you used to be. It just doesn't take much to slide right back there.
The fact of the matter is that that these days, I think that everything is mostly fine with the way that I eat, but it's a tightrope act. I'm kept in balance by one very powerful force, loving someone who needs to lose weight even more that I do, by the fact that my heart is in my throat half the time because I get so worried about him. And that forces me to make the right choices for me, too. It's a good thing, but it's not stable, you know? I mean, what I do is propped up by him in some sense, like the safety net that's under the tightrope. It's not a bad thing that the net is there, but at the same time, you wish you were brave enough not to need it. Something like that. It's easy to make the right choices for someone you love. It's a lot harder to make the right choices for you. I don't think that's the way it's supposed to be, but for me, at this point in time, it seems to be the way that it is.
What's for dinner? Steak, I think, unless I can get it together and go to the store for some fish, which I'd much prefer.
