And Another Sunday....

Somehow, a week has slipped by.

And what have I done this week? Kind of nothing, amazingly enough. It's spring break here, and as always, I'd had all these plans to get caught up with everything in the world, and mostly that hasn't happened at all. Discouragingly enough.

And so that's what I've been thinking about. Procrastination.

I've been reading this book lately about, basically, fixing what's wrong with your life, I guess. And the premise thus far is that we create our own problems/obstacles by the way we think about them. "The way we frame the problem" is the way I'd put it. Which I pretty much agree with. And that change is hard because we are resistant to change, because most of our difficult behaviors serve us in one way or another. Thus we have to be willing to let go of the... the reasons why we've kept the behaviors, I guess.

I have been thinking specifically about procrastination, which is probably the specific behavior that is annoying me the most these days, because it invades about every facet of my life. I procrastinate about doing work-related things, home-related things, exercise-related things, writing down food... you name it. And it's easy to focus on the behavior and say, obviously what you need to do is stop procrastinating. But I guess that my thought from reading this book, to the extent that I have, is that it's not the procrastination that's the issue, it's the underlying stuff, the ways in which not doing these things allows me to... I don't know. Maybe fail to take responsibility for my own successes or failures, because I'm always going, oh, if I'd done this, it would have turned out better. I kind of can't explain that so that it makes sense, but it does make sort of an internal sense to me. "It's not really my fault since I didn't do everything that I could have." Something like that.

I need to figure out how to get past this and, trite though it sounds, allow myself to succeed.

Sunday

Some days, I sit down to write, and I think, this is the wrong stuff to put here. This blog is supposed to be about something. About weight loss or something like that. But I think... I don't know, I guess that for me, weight loss is about 10% what you actually do and 90% what you learn not to do. And at the end of the day, that's all behavioral modification, and your ability to do that is all about consistent effort... which in turn is all about the rest of your life.

It's a sunny afternoon, Michael's asleep, my son is at his father's, and I'm cleaning the kitchen. Or I'm supposed to be, anyway. I got derailed by thinking too much, as usual. And missing my mother. It's been 8 months, and I suppose that the grief has lost its immediacy. But it's like a wound that scabs over but still hurts all the time. I begin to think that there's no end to this. I can't talk about it, and I can't stop feeling it. It seems to be one of those things that is a marker, after this thing, you will never be the same. It's like having children... it's impossible to understand really what it's like to have kids until you do, and then there's no going back; your understanding of life is different forever. (Yes, I know, Circle of Life; I'm one second from humming Lion King songs.)

And I think, as I do so much these days, about where I am and what's next. About getting to some different place, where I'm not just replaying the same choices over and over again, where something actually changes. I was reading this on Escape from Obesity this morning... and, yeah, I can relate to missing the "happy" binging, to when food, a day of food, was a real source of pleasure. It's not anymore... but there's a part of me that wishes that it still was. Or, more accurately, that there was something that gave me the simple kind of pleasure that I used to be able to get by sitting down with high-carb foods and a good book and just letting the world go away. And, yes, I'm ashamed, in a way, to say that. I have different pleasures now, but it doesn't mean that I miss the old simple ones. Everything these days seems complicated and full of thought and just not easy.

Everything is ok. But some days, I just feel so profoundly tired, tired to the core, and I want to go back to a time when life seemer simpler and the choices less limited.

Tuesday night

I feel like I ought to post something, but I have no idea what to say, really.

It's been a busy beginning of the week... it's when all my classes are, and I'm so far behind on everything. Plus Michael has something that is probably just flu (but every time he feels unwell at all, my heart stops because I'm afraid of another recurrence of these breathing issues and mysterious weight gain, still unsolved).

But mostly, I just can't put any thoughts together that make something like a coherent post.

How do I feel? Not so nauseated and drugged as I felt for the first few days. Ok, I guess. Better than without it? Just too soon to say. Maybe. Just maybe. But the nausea and lightheadedness and fatigue make it hard to say, oh, yeah, this is a good thing. On one hand, I feel like springing out of my chair and getting a lot of things done, and on the other... well, I'm pretty lethargic.

I am trying to get it back together to start posting food again, but on top of everything else, with Michael sick, I'm mostly eating leftovers. Tonight was Carnivore Night... everything in the refrigerator was meat of a sort, leftover roast beef and salmon and chicken. There are never any vegetable leftovers. Yes, I could have made a salad... which actually sounds great at the moment. No, I couldn't be bothered.

Mostly, I'm just musing. On where to go from here. On what it all means. On who I want to be. Some days, I feel like everything is falling into place at long last. Others, just no clue.

Someone I loved a long time ago used to say, "I have no idea what I will do next. Watch this space." Not a particularly novel way of putting it, I suppose... but I always associate that with him (that, and England in the spring, and jester hats, and cheap red wine, and airplanes, and unbearable sadness and loss). I feel like that, though. Watch this space. Something will happen next.

Dieting for Couples

Ever since we've been married, we've been on a diet.

Ok, not a diet, a change in lifestyle, a way of eating... but whatever you want to call it, we've been trying to lose weight. This has not, on the whole, been a happy thing for us, as you might imagine. Actually, frustrating beyond words might well be a whole lot better way of putting it. There are so many reasons why, but I think that the bottom line comes down to a combination of different styles and issues about control. Both of which seem to be worse when you have people with food issues anyway.

Me, I'm a rules-oriented person. I love rules. I love rules because there's no ambiguity, and I can just say, THIS is what we're doing. Exceptions? Of course not. That would be just wrong. (Obsessive? Yes! A tad too rigid? Well, yeah, probably.) But I am brilliant at rules. Tell me that you want a cup of coffee in the morning, and it will be there every day. Forever. And if you say, "I don't feel like coffee today", I'll be all disconcerted. Because that's what the rule was.

Michael, not so much. All you have to do is tell him that he cannot have something, and that will be the number one most wonderful thing in the universe. And the reverse is also true... he has a pretty low tolerance for anything that is easily accessible and Just No Problem if you eat it. That last bit's not entirely fair... I think it's more that he simply gets tired of things extremely quickly. And I can't say that I think he's ever bought into the low-carb thing heart and soul, even though it's been really successful for him.

All of this leads to, as you'd imagine, more than a little conflict. And it's more and more clear to me that something about this dynamic has just got to change. This is the hard part. He thinks that I want to control what he eats... or part of him does anyway... and so he sometimes gets just furious if I mention that it's necessary to keep an eye on the carb content of what he's eating. Hm. Ok. Yeah, as I type that out, I can see certainly why it's annoying to be reminded of that. But... I don't know, what's the option? I really have a hard time with this, in part because I'm so worried about him and because I can see how poor food choices impact both his rate of weight loss (or lately, not losing weight) and his blood sugar. And then he lies in bed at night and frets about not losing weight, and it's hard not to say, maybe you should have thought about that when you were eating X earlier in the day... (not that I would ever say that!).

The other part is that left to his own devices, he doesn't eat at all half the time. And then he gets really hungry and grabs crackers or something like that. (Side note: an economist friend of mine is doing some really interesting research on how mortality rates change after the death of a spouse. His conclusion at the moment: statistically, there's not much impact on women's probability of death, but a fairly big impact on men, probably because at least some men just don't do the "caring" things for themselves that their wives did... proper nutrition, seeing the doctor.) So it's hard to feel like the caring thing to do is just to get out of the way and let him make his own food choices... especially since I shop and cook these days, because he's really not able to.

Sigh. I am really not sure how to change this, although it seems to me part of a big lesson that life is trying to teach me these days, that it is ok for people to handle things in ways that are different than you would.

Food Musings--The Choice Part

This is the 2nd thing that I was thinking about while watching that TLC show (see last post). A lot of people in this show said, "I can't.... ." I can't control my cravings for food. I can't change my food behavior. I can't lose weight.

This is my particular soapbox, and I've said this before, I'm sure... but I think that "I can't" almost always means, "I am not willing to do this thing." In case I'm sounding either unsympathetic or preachy or self-righteous, I should say that there are a thousand choices that I've made that have had this aspect to them. I'm not any better about this than anyone else, and this applies to work things and relationship things and food things. I have spend most of my life not losing weight because I, on some level, chose not to. Because I was not willing to do it... not willing if it meant that I had to give up certain things that I didn't want to give up (like eating for comfort or entertainment or whatever). On some level, the costs exceeded the benefits, at least in the short run. And in a weird kind of way, I think I'm at peace with that. What I have a hard time with is the notion of powerlessness. There are things in my life, mostly relating to other people, over which I have no power. But I do have power over my own choices. I can choose not to eat. I can choose to eat. Sometimes these choices will be incredibly difficult, but at the end of the day, for everyone, they are choices. No one is stuffing the food into your mouth. And if you let it be, that thought is pretty empowering.

It's a whole big future over which you have some control. You get to choose. And if it's your choice, it's the right choice for you, whatever it is.

Caveat: there are situations in which we make choices that are not fully informed, and that's one case where people should step in and say, have you thought about ?

Food Musings-- The Way We Grow Up

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?

Life on a Saturday

Not a lot to report today. We're having an end-of-semester party this evening for my students, which will be for me an exercise in seeing if I can do this without eating anything inappropriate or accidentally getting unexpectedly drunk by not eating... I'm buying a lovely bottle of gin so that I can skip the the (high-carb) beer and have my favorite summer drink anyway... heavy on the tonic, light on the gin; I don't drink much at all these days so it works out a lot better that way. I thought about trying to do this all low carb... for about 20 seconds. The fact of the matter is that trying to feed 30-50 hungry students on something besides hot dogs, hamburgers, and crunchy snacks is both beyond my budget and beyond the time I have to put into it. So that's the way it is... and I'll have a burger without the bun, thankyouverymuch. My weight seems to be coming back down from this week's mysterious 2 lbs mid-week extra bloat, and I'd like to keep it that way, although I'm sure it's not going to be a stellar weight loss week.

Last night we watched Atonement... lovely movie; I'd been wanting to see it since it came out, as the book was probably the best book I'd read a few years ago. Usually I loathe movies of books that I really liked, but this one worked, although it was certainly helped by the fact that it's been something like 3 years and I don't recall the book details that well. Have to go back and reread it now. Lots of gorgeous cinematography, too... Shropshire in the summer, and Grimsby seafront (where Michael once worked) done up in an amazing transformation as Dunkirk.

But it's mostly taken me into this strange and pensive mood about the stupidness of life and the way that you only learn things too late, and how those missteps haunt you forever. I often feel that way about my whole life, and I know that in the end, today is another day and the past is a memory... and there's no useful purpose in regret. But it hits me more from time to time, the way in which we stumble through, blind in the moment, only wise looking back.

At the end of the day, though, what do you do except move on, do the next thing on the list, get ready for the party, try to do this day better?

Mostly good things...

Michael is just fractionally over 500 today. If we're very lucky, maybe he'll be below that tomorrow. That would be such good news. He's fretting, as usual, because now that he's really interested in losing weight, it can't be fast enough... and that's, of course, partly because he's in a lot of pain with his knees and everything else. But I can't see that it's possible to average more than a 3-4 lb weight loss weekly, even in his weight range... and trying is more likely to make your body shut down on the whole thing than anything else.

We spent a lazy, warm day mostly watching Property Ladder and marveling that it's possible for people who do everything wrong to make money flipping houses... but of course, these shows were mostly filmed at the height of the market, when you really could be an idiot and still have it all come out ok. And I cooked a lot... roast beef, and a beef stew for later in the week, and one for the freezer. It's going to be a busy week, and those always seem to be the worst here... I'm not home enough to keep things stable. But we'll hope for the best, I guess.

Anyway, in addition to the "I'm not losing enough weight" fretting, he's worrying about not getting enough exercise... and this is just absolutely true in some sense, although we have been doing the seated workout most days. That's really a great thing if you have restricted mobility, and it's a surprisingly good workout (there's a link to that back in March somewhere). But mostly he's not moving a lot... and really, what should he be doing? Everyone says, walk. But walk is hard right now, to say the least. Bike maybe, but that tends to aggravate his knees, too. I think a trip to the doctor is necessary before he does anything else, but really, what can you do under these circumstances? Swim would be good, but a public pool is out of the question, and it will be June before it's warm enough for our pool... plus if his knee doesn't get stronger, I don't know how he's going to get up and down the steps. It's a puzzle, and a depressing one. I keep looking on the low-carb forums for ideas, but no luck so far. (Suggestions, anyone?)