I’m in my usual countdown panic as I try to tie up things in the UK and think ahead to what I’m going to need for the next 6 weeks in Canada.

And I’m still reflecting on this past week of “stepping back”.

All in all it’s been a good thing.  I’ve been chilled out about food and have lost the weight I gained due to stupid eating.  I’ve done a bit of running and a bit of walking and have enjoyed not writing it all down.

In my “counting unhatched chickens” way, I was thinking that I would have a relaxed week, get a final diagnosis from the senior consultant and then get on with life in whatever direction it was going to go.

But instead, as is normal in these “pre-hatched chicken counting” situations, I didn’t get any news at all from the appointment. Instead,and I quote the consultant, “we are back at square one”, which means that I know nothing more than I knew 6 months ago. I feel knocked back and maybe not quite as reslilant as I thought I was feeling.

But one good thing came out of a not very good appointment.  Firstly, I decided to take the husband into the room just so he could witness what I’ve been up against.  The senior doc was NOT pleased that I was seeing him rather than the other guy but – and this is the new thing for me – I just didn’t care. I think maybe I’m getting to the point where I’m not feeling awkward about being a pain.

Anyway, after telling me that there was no news, he leaned back in his chair and said, “Would you like me to refer you to the specialist liver unit for a second opinion even if it is a bit early for that?”

Old me might have given the decision back to him, asked him if I should wait until his team had had another chance.   New me just said, “Yes, I would.”

New me was also still too polite to ask how I could possibly get a second opinion when I hadn’t had a first one yet. But never mind.  I figure, God willing, I can be rude when I’m an old lady.

The slightly humourous thing about hospital appointments is that, when you step on the scales, everyone is hoping that you haven’t lost any weight. The nurse who weighs you smiles and commends you for not being much lighter than you were 3 months ago, and the doctor comments on how well you’re not losing.  I didn’t dare tell them how bloody hard I’d been working to lose it.  And I was truly glad to know that I could sit there and not worry that the pounds were falling off for the worst possible reason.

Funny old world.

I’ve taken a few days off – mostly because I’ve got deadlines – but partly because I needed to stand back for a bit to get some perspective.

I’m one of the few people I know who like installation art and one of my favourite installations is a collection of supposed fragments from a bombed out museum.  In order to look at it, you have to get very close to see what the fragments are,

then you have to stand way back to get a sense of the enormity of the piece.

If you stand back even further and watch people looking at the installation, you see a sort of slow dance of people walking up to the wall then backing away, then up and back again and again.

And I think that’s what this blog has become: you can see me peering carefully at my behaviour and my motives for a while and then watch me take a few steps back to try to get to grips with the whole picture.

I’m in that last week of my 3 months in this country and have so many deadlines and appointments that my first plan of action is to crawl back under the covers.

My second plan of action is to walk carefully through the next few days, acknowledging that I’m stressed about meeting up with the liver specialist and stressed about getting my business finances in order and stressed about chasing up late payments (WHY do the larger institutions treat the little guys so badly?).

I also confess to feeling stressed about not being where I wanted to be with the weight loss – but really, there’s nothing I can do about that so I’m going to relax  for the moment, stand back and take a good look at the big picture, ideally without the company of unrefined carbohydrates.

I will also go for a run or two or three despite the weather and despite my sincere desire to stay in my pjs and watch endless episodes of the Gilmore Girls.

One weekend of binge-headedness can really set a person back.  I feel like I’m standing a block away from a sign that says “What I Want” in big letters but I can’t quite make out the smaller print.  In my head, it says that I want to have a smaller and fitter body but it’s all a bit blurry.

So what happened to 139, you ask?

Indeed.

So much of my disordered eating happens when my external voice is saying one thing but my internal voice is saying something else altogether.

EX V: I want to weight 139lbs

IN V: I’m not sure I want the pressure of keeping the weight off.

EX V: I’m going to work hard for 6 weeks and not worry about where I end up. My behaviour will get me where I want to be.

IN V: There’s a DEADLINE! You’ve got the family bbq on the 8th and the birthday dinner on the 9th and then off to see all those people and you want to be THIN.

EX V: I want to be in great shape even if there’s tough news about my liver.

IN V: If you’re going to lose half your liver, you might as well party now.

And finally,

EX V: I can do this one good choice at a time.

IN V: FEED ME (bread, butter, pasta and wine).

So there it is: the two voices of Millie – and one is more persuasive than the other this week.

On a positive note, I shredded 5 years worth of documents yesterday and filed or got rid of anything that wasn’t going to be pertinent to the next few months.  I want to come back from my summer hiatus and have a calm and orderly office that actually has room for my body as well as my paperwork. I have drawer space!

And, I ate less yesterday than on Tuesday and less on Tuesday than on Monday.  So it’s getting better and I’m getting better and I’m going to start listening to my internal voice rather than just shutting it up with food.

Was it because I was thinking about binge eating?

Or was it just that the “perfect storm” was approaching and there was nothing I could do about it?

On Saturday, I listed the life ingredients that can cause me to binge.  So why didn’t I mention that I was feeling several of those things, and that I was going to have to negotiate a social event and then 2 days alone?  In other words, why didn’t I admit that the clouds were building and I needed a plan to avoid doing what I was obviously going to do?

I woke up on Saturday morning feeling grumpy and twitchy.  No amount of exercise or healthy food made me feel better.  I kept fast-forwarding through the next couple of weeks and allowing myself to stress about the “to do” list.  I also allowed myself to turn “what I want” into “what I must do”.  That’s not a good mind-set for me.

That night we had friends over and I just wanted to have fun.  Nothing at all in any way wrong with that, but I wasn’t admitting to myself that I couldn’t imagine reigning myself in again.

I woke up the next morning with a bit of a hangover and a weird impatience for the husband to leave on his business trip and let me get on with my work.  Ha! I DID have plans for work but there was that almost-but-not-quite-subconscious alter-ego making plans for what I was going to eat once he was out of the house.

And eat is what I did.  It wasn’t particularily junky food and some of it was even planned.  But it was pretty non-stop and way way too much for any woman of my size and stature. And, of course, there was baking.

This morning, I woke up feeling vaguely ill and it took me a long time to get out of bed to face the day (and myself).

What were my choices?

• I could do it again because I have another day alone, but I’m relieved to say that didn’t appeal at all.
• I could put it behind me and relish the clean slate – zero the journal and act as though today was the first day of the week.

But I wasn’t sure that was quite right either.  I’ve definitely moved on from blowing a whole week/month/year but now I need to move myself along a little further.  It’s GOOD that I’m willing to draw a line under negative eating behaviour and move on.  But it’s better to look back and FACE IT before I wipe it off.

That’s the difference.  I’ve been moving on without looking back, without learning from my rather spectacular crash and burn episodes.  So I went back to my journal and wrote down everything I could remember eating in the past 48 hours.  And I remember a lot – partly because much of it was planned so it was only the significant “extras” that I needed to remember.

The total?

• Sunday: 2600 calories

• Monday: 2500 calories

That’s  interesting because I would have thought I’d eaten much more yesterday.  At least, my mindset was much less healthy while I was eating yesterday so it felt like a binge rather than just eating too much with friends.

An the outcome of this exercise?  Well – basically, the “worst” I can do isn’t all that bad.  My ultimate disaster – the shameful binge – is actually just a couple of days of overeating.  I reset my Nutracheck goal for this week to “maintenance” and all of a sudden it’s all completely retrievable.  I will keep running and walking and eating sensibly and I’ll leave it a couple of days to weigh myself.

But it’s all ok.  It is.

I may have just disarmed the binge. I’ll keep you posted.

Donna’s post about bingeing really got me thinking about what it is throws my eating into disarray.

I don’t usually get food crazy because of just one thing. Instead, my worst behaviour needs both an emotional reason and an opportunity.

In no particular order:

• hormones
• fear of the unknown – the big picture – like not having a pension or proper jobs but a mortgage that runs till we’re 70.
• fear of the unknown – the little picture – like work that needs doing but I’m not sure how it will go.
• anger
• boredom
• grief
• feeling constrained by the weight loss process
• confused feelings about losing weight (more fear of the future, perhaps?)
• over-eating in a social situation- ie buying into the “off the wagon” mindset

Alone, each one of those things is usually manageable.  I can go for a walk, talk to someone, go to bed, get myself distracted.  But in certain circumstances, any of those things can be the catalyst for the “perfect storm”. And the circumstances are?

• being alone
• having simple carbs in the house, even just as ingredients.
• having company but being angry at said company (not naming names but he knows who he is. )

These situations aren’t like the times that I just sit around with friends and eat too much in a social context.  What I’m talking about is the next level – the step beyond eating too much in a happy, normal, celebratory way.

For some people that will mean eating 2 loaves of bread, a jar of peanut butter, a cake and donuts all in one sitting.  For others it will mean eating a couple of chocolate bars or 2 bowls of cereal.  For me, it’s about making sure that I feel full all day long.  It’s not the quantity of food but the mindset that defines bingeing.

The post-binge shame is such a terrible place to have to pick yourself up from.  It always feels like “sqare one”, as though you’ve made no progress at all, as though you have to figure out the process all over again.

The worst time for me was after my dad died and I was alone with my grief for a whole month.  I would wake up feeling ok but the “must be full” mindset hit by early afternoon and I would self-medicate until bedtime, get up and do it all again.  And every day, after the upsetting experience of visiting my brain-injured mom, I would head to the grocery store, creating the perfect opportunity to think that a bag of Cheetos or a loaf of olive bread looked like a viable supper option.

People who do this are not obese losers who don’t take care of themselves.  We’re people who’ve learned over time that food offers (very) temporary relief from something that we don’t want to deal with in the light.

In the light.  That’s where eating should be done – like the rest of our living.  And we should speak our worries and fears and define our sadness and bring it all into the light.  Healing doesn’t happen in the murky darkness where bingeing takes place. (That’s a note to self.)

Peace, not perfection.

Thanks to the weighing every day exercise, I’m now unmoved by the little ups and downs – but a lack of progress these past few weeks has really started to get to me. So I decided to look back at my most successful times of weight loss and do what I did then to get the same results.

What started as a straight-forward quest for information turned into a chance to stand back and see the big picture of these last couple of years.

Jan 2008 – Jul 2010:  The Show So Far

Jan 2nd 2008 – Weigh in heavier than any non-pregnant weight.  170 lbs

Jan, Feb, Mar – work really hard and lose 12ish pounds for a family wedding. (That’s from memory as I only kept my starting weight) 158ish lbs

Apr, May, Jun, Jul – Ditch gym, stop journalling (ie stop trying) and gain back all but 5 pounds. 165 lbs

On July 21st I step on the scale and something changes in me.   I weigh 165 lbs and am fed up, but I’m then galvanised by something Mardee writes over at BCB.

Aug & half of Sep – I lose 9 pounds by working hard and writing about working hard. It’s the first time I can see real change in my attitude towards the process of losing weight.  I’ve looked back at my NutraCheck journals and I was eating 1600 calories a day and counting things like cleaning and shopping as “exercise” – but I lost steadily over those 6 weeks.  Interesting and not sure what to do with that information.  156 lbs

Mid-Sep, Oct, Nov - I rush home to Canada to be with my dad because my mom is taken ill.  I lose a further 6lbs by simply being too busy and anxious and sad.  I’m also never alone in the house, so don’t engage in the usual bingeing behaviour brought on by that sort of stress.  I continue to lose a couple of pounds in November (148 lbs) once it’s decided that I need gynae surgery which leads to…….. 

Dec, Jan 2009 – Yes it’s Christmas and the kids are home and it’s festive – but I’ve also decided that I’ve lost weight so easily these past 5 months because I’m actually dying of cancer.  I start to eat to prove to myself that I can gain weight.  And guess what?  I do!  Up 5 lbs between Christmas celebrations, health insanity and then recuperation time. 153 lbs And then….

Feb - At the end of Jan, just when I’m starting to feel like myself again, my dad dies.  I fly home, go see a brain injured mom every day and sit alone in his empty house for a month – and eat my grief for both of them.  Walking saves me from anything worse than a 3 pound gain but that’s 8 over all and I go home feeling like I’m starting again – only this time I’m sad as well as determined. 156 lbs

Mar, Apr, May, Jun – Go back to Weight Watchers and lose 5 lbs in 4 months.  But I’m at the gym a lot so my body is changing and I’m not frustrated by the slow weight loss.  The net loss for 12 months is 21 pounds.  149 lbs And what a ride.

Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct – Back to Canada for the summer then return to the UK and Weight Watchers.  I’m playing with the same pound or two.  I’m no longer writing, not excited about the old Bootcamp board and in need of a change.  I know that WW isn’t really the answer for me even though I love the people. I am faffing around and going nowhere – so I decide to start this blog.  150 lbs And then…..

Nov – I lose 7 pounds in a month and look great.  I’ve also got chronic stomach issues and am once again flung back into the medical system.  Looking for gall stones, they find “something” on my liver.  Here we go again with the, “It’s been way too easy to lose weight, I’d better eat to make sure I’m not dying” thinking. 143 lbs And guess what?

Dec, Jan 2010 - It’s Christmas!  And I’m eating to prove I’m not dying and I gain weight.  This is not a pattern I expected to see.  It’s very interesting that the two times I’ve been down towards the weight I want to be, I haven’t been well so I bounce away from it as fast as I can. 147 lbs

Feb, Mar & half of April – I sort of try but am pretty caught up in either seeing doctors or worrying about seeing doctors.  I really do lose my mind when my health is out of wack. Lose 3 pounds  – mostly in a couple of weeks where I paid attention. 144 lbs

Apr, May - I’m worried about the fact that I lost weight while feasting over Easter so yet another episode of “eat to prove I’m not dying”.  Then back to Canada to sit alone in a house, not grieving this time but worrying about the thing on my liver. I have this mindset that, if something’s seriously wrong, then why bother with worrying about eating and exercise? I gain 5 pounds in the process. 149 lbs

May - There’s an awful lot of thinking about the weight loss process but not an awful lot of  DOING. I’m tempted to call “failure!” but the fact is that I still didn’t gain significant weight.  And this time, just seeing a couple of pounds up made me recommit to doing something for myself – to getting what I want rather than sitting around talking about what I want.  148 lbs

Jun, Jul  (ie now) I decide to go for what I want and what I want is to weigh in the 130′s – anywhere in the 130′s will do.  I also decide that, if I end up really sick, I want my body to be in the best shape it can be. (I’m still waiting on the official plan of action re: the liver) I’ve been running and feeling stronger and breathing better.  I know that I can get results with the weight loss if I don’t let my social life get in the way. Today I weigh 145 lbs.

And that’s the show so far.  Two and a half years from seeing that 170 on my scales.  Two years from deciding to write about the process of stopping the weight loss/weight gain pendulum.

Have I stopped the pendulum?  Not completely, but the swings are much much smaller than they were two years ago.

• I know that a 25 pound weight loss doesn’t happen on a straight road. Life means curves, switchbacks, deadends and hellish hairpin bends.
• I no longer do “all or nothing”.
• I no longer think in terms of on and off wagons.
• I know (boy do I know) that life just gets in the way sometimes.
• I know that it’s possible to keep going anyway.
• I know that sometimes weight will apparently fall off me – usually when I’m stressed.
• I know that exercise helps me stay emotionally balanced.
• I know that I can do this.

I have every intention of being where I want to be when the calendar ticks over to 2011. God willing. Health willing.

Am I the least bit embarrassed that it could take 3 years to lose 30 lbs?

No! Just incredibly grateful for the chance to sort out issues which have affected my life since childhood. And, when I say “sort out”, that doesn’t mean I have illusions of perfection. It means I know it’s possible to be sane and balanced and content with my body and my eating.

“Peace not perfection”  is the slow weight loss motto.

We always get the little bananas but this one takes the cake.  Wish we could always get them this size.

Just add 10g of peanut butter for an 88 calorie post-run snack.

I get frequent emails from RealAge – you know, health news for people with no attention span, which suits me just fine most days.  Usually I read and delete but yesterday I got fed up with the words “a new study” or “recent research” that they throw out there all the time.

One of yesterday’s tidbits interested/annoyed me enough to go looking for the original research.

According to the abstract, the researchers’ hypotheses were:

that dieting, or the restriction of caloric intake, is ineffective because it increases chronic psychological stress and cortisol production—two factors that are known to cause weight gain; and to examine the respective roles of the two main behaviors that comprise dieting—monitoring one’s caloric intake and restricting one’s caloric intake—on psychological and biological stress indicators.

Basically they wanted to prove that dieting fails because both reducing calories and tracking calories increase stress levels.

121 women were split into four groups:

• monitoring & restricting – ate 1200 calories/day and tracked their caloric intake
• monitoring only – tracked their calories but ate normally
• restricting only – were given 1200 calories per day in prepared food so not tracking was needed
• control – ate normally and did not track calories

The results?

Restricting calories increased the total output of cortisol, and monitoring calories increased perceived stress.

The RealAge advice based on this one study?

So while it’s good to think about what you’re putting in your mouth, don’t obsess about it. Watch portion sizes, choose healthy foods, be aware of how many times you visit the snack cupboard, but don’t make things too difficult.

I do get the point about stress and obsessing and fully accept that starvation is bad, but I think the overall advice is pretty poor. And I’m especially pissed off that they make it sound like “eating more” and “winging it” are going to help you reduce belly fat!  BELLY FAT: every woman’s enemy.  I can’t believe that an editor didn’t stand back from both the headline and the advice and think, “Oh no – that could do more harm than good to overweight people who are completely out of touch with how much food they really need.  And using the belly fat thing is probably a little too emotive.”  You’d think. You really would.

Pamela Peeke has come up with a much more reasoned response. And yes, I think it’s reasoned because I’ve had similar thoughts myself.

I hadn’t realised quite how angry that one little email made me.  Maybe we should do some research into the effect of poorly thought out health advice on cortisol levels then we could follow it up with a really helpful headline and a “tip of the week”.

Flatten your belly with this reading habit.

If you want to lose belly fat, don’t read snippets of health advice on the internet.

Le weekend is over again.  How does that happen?

It went well: socially fun, foodly balanced, exercisedly active.  And, even though I picked Holland from the beginning, the right team won the World Cup.

The foodly balanced social time was a huge bonus for me.  I did that classic WW thing and looked at the menu online before I went, made my choices BEFORE the wine was poured, and stuck to them – alway crucial, that one.

The conversation was great, alcohol was limited in the best way, and there were jugs of water on the table (still not that usual in the UK).  It was a truly lovely evening.  Must learn to repeat that behaviour……….

Yesterday friends phoned to go for a quick walk.  The husband’s spine is in a bad way so it had to be something fairly sedate.  Luckily we live in the land of urban seaside walks so a dash (slow dash) around a marine lake did the trick – followed by half pint at the pub.  One just about paid for the other but it was worth getting away from the work sitting on my dining room table. (Note – put office back into functional position this week.)

Exercise?  I managed to run 2.1 miles without stopping.  Well, except for a quick 20ft walk to catch breath at the top of a hill but I’ve decided to ignore that.  I didn’t get any faster over the whole 3 miles than when I alternate running and walking, so I guess that jog was pretty slow, but it felt like I was finally getting somewhere with my lungs.

So that’s my question:

What is it that makes you (as in me) stop exercising at a given point? I’ve tried to work it out as I come to the place where I HAVE TO stop running.

• Is it the lungs?
• Is it the heart?
• Is it the legs?

The husband says it’s the brain.   I have to say, ever since he said that, I’ve been pushing myself that little bit harder and getting further and further before I stop so maybe he’s right.

I’ve also been making plans for when I’m away for 6 weeks this summer.  I can tell you from here that I probably won’t be a dedicated with the running.  Is that self-defeating?  Probably.

HOLD IT!  I was going to excuse myself from running on the grounds that running looks weird in the little rural village where I will spend the summer.  Really?  And how “weird” will it be to come back to the UK in September and not be able to run a mile?  How much do I want what I say I want?  Enough to risk looking a little strange to some locals who just happen to think that running when there’s no one chasing is a futile activity?

Sigh.  Yes.  And, of course, I’ve got the magic hat & sunglass disguise so they’ll never know who it is anyway.  Seriously, I run past people I know all the time and they never notice.  Walking, they tend to see me – I must be faster than I thought.

Well that little motivational self-talk wasn’t what I was expecting….now on with the week.

It was my fourth weigh-in this morning and I appear to have lost a grand total of 2 pounds in 4 weeks. For the first time ever I want to call PLATEAU!

I always lose weight when I put my mind to it, so I have to ask myself, have I put my mind to it in a 1.5 pound per week kind of way?  Or have I been giving it more like a half pound’s worth of my time and attention?

I think a red herring is that I have been exercising more than ever.  Even when I’m not journalling, I’m still going out for a three to five mile run.  That’s a lot for this old bod.  The other distraction is that I’ve blown a day or two but haven’t gone on to ditch the whole week.  I’ve been very quick to get back into a healthy routine. With all this positive stuff going on, even if the eating hasn’t been perfect, it just feels like I should be losing weight.

So the big question is:  How many of the past 28 days have I actually worked as hard as I need to work to lose 1.5 pounds in seven days?

• Week 1 – 5/7  The other 2 days were spent working out of town.

• Week 2 – 5/7  The other 2 days were of the “lost weekend” variety.

• Week 3 – 7/7  Impressive.  I should to see if I lied anywhere!

• Week 4 – 4/7 – but I blogged about that and actually didn’t get out of control on the non-journal days.

And the exercise?

• Week 1 – 10 miles of running, 1 mile of walking

• Week 2 – 10 miles of running, 3 miles of walking

• Week 3 – 12 miles of running, 7 miles of walking

• Week 4 – 14 miles of running, 4 miles of walking

And the weight loss?

• Week 1 – down 1.8

• Week 2 -0  – an in zero just in case that wasn’t clear

• Week 3 – down .6 for what, by all accounts was a perfect week

• Week 4 – up .4 – ok – well I did say I wasn’t going to lose this week.

So what’s the verdict? Is the plateau real or faux?

Eating: I did well with the eating for 21 out of 28 days, seriously over-ate on three days and ate moderately on the other four days.

Moving: The amount of exercise is amazing for me – but I never actually reached my target of burning an extra 1638 calories per week through exercise.  Hmmm I guess as I get smaller and closer to what I want to weigh, I’m just going to have to move that much more.

I’m sorry to say that this is a FAUX PLATEAU and need to work even harder if I want to get this weight off in weeks rather than months.

I’m not discouraged.  But I am determined. Let’s see if I can manage 4 pounds in the next 4 weeks.