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.
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.
This is my total favorite thing that I've read lately, a post on Cranky Fitness about entitlement. An absolute must-read if you're thinking about the whys of weight loss... as in why did I do this stupid thing that wasn't really good for me? Which everybody does. And which is either the first step on the road to a lot more bad choices, or it's just one of those things, and you shrug and try to make your next choice better.
It partly just makes me think about how much my eating habits have really changed... most of the time anyway... because for me, that first slip into the "wrong" food meant, ok, you screwed up today, that means that you have to start over again tomorrow... but hey, since today is already a writeoff, let's have more pizza and chocolate. It is amazing how many calories you can pack in on this line of logic. Even more if you say, I've screwed up this week... I don't need to restart until Monday. And of course, before Monday, it's time for a big Farewell to Food because after Monday I'll be perfect forever, so I'd better buy all the things I love to eat Sunday... and my eyes were bigger than my stomach even then, so they would be leftovers on Monday... and, yeah, you know this story, right?
Which in turn makes me think about how much of eating is about habit and familiarity. There's an appallingly bad UK show (which you can see on BBC America) called You Are What You Eat. The very irritating host goes into to the home of the unfortunate fat person, humiliates them for a while (including putting everything they eat for a week on a table), gives a lot of advice that will make you cringe if you eat low-carb (although she does push whole foods), and examines their poop like an ancient Greek reading chicken entrails. Then she puts them on a diet of things that look revolting, badgers them into exercise, and in 8 weeks, wow, they're perfect! Well, actually, they're not, but they do in fact look a lot healthier for leaving off the chips and eating whole foods and so on. But the thing that is actually interesting and kind of amazing is that these people invariably start out as "we never eat fruit and veg because we don't like it/can't be bothered/don't know how to cook it." And then they spend eight weeks bitching and moaning about how horrible it is to have to (1) actually prepare things in the kitchen, and (2) eat something that they're not used to. But at the end, two miraculous things happen... they learn that when you prep stuff in the kitchen all the time, you get good at it, and that you can acclimate yourself to just about any kind of diet and learn to like it. But you have to put in the legwork to do it, and changing habits takes time.
I have so many thoughts about this that I don't know how to wrap this post into something neat, and one of the things that I wanted to talk about is the ways in which people are different when it comes to dealing with food... and how useless it is to try to impose your way on someone else. But to try to keep to a theme, let's just think habits. And practice. Over the last two+ years, I've gone from cooking very little most of the time to cooking 2-3 meals per day. And, wow, am I fast. I can whip up a meal that looks like you spent hours on it in about 30 minutes tops. That's practice. But what I fight with more than anything is habit, particularly the notion that there should be three things on my plate... you know, meat, starch, veg. That's been the hardest thing for me with low carb, and the related thing to that is portion size. After all these years, my eyes are still bigger than my stomach, and I still think that I "need" more food than I really do. I am working on this. But it's a hard, hard habit to break.
On today's agenda... try to get ourself back on the exercise that we skipped for the last two days. And a delightful trip to the dentist (sigh), which will also give me a chance to run to the grocery store that's farther away a stock up on cheaper meat.
What's for dinner? Probably steak with an apricot-soy glaze, and cauliflower mash with sauteed leeks.
