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.

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 have found the “tare button” on my weight loss week and though I know there is a crate-load of calories already in my journal, I have “zeroed” it for my sanity.

Last week I came to the conclusion that the only way to avoid sugar was to avoid sugar. (Deep, I know).

So how did I end up with the leftovers of a baked cheesecake in my fridge for 24 looooooong hours?

I was being nice, and sensible and rational, honest.  But while I can be all those things when other people are around, I find it hard to find reason when I just want to cram cheesecake down my gullet.  It’s not nice or sensible but it’s reality.

Fact: I love baked cheesecake but I don’t think about it.

Fact: I have not once in the past, oh, twenty years craved cheesecake, made cheesecake or bought cheesecake.

Fact: Proximity makes a mockery of avoidance.

I’m not sure that last sentence makes sense but I like the sound of it.  The FACT is that having a cheesecake in my fridge over-rides the fact that I don’t have any particular desire to ever eat cheesecake.

I believe this alone points to a diagnosis of disordered eating.  And no matter how “ordered” I have managed to get my eating over the past 2 years, I can fall into a vat of cheesecake with the most disordered of disordered eaters.

Have I said cheesecake enough?

I think it’s out of my system now so I won’t say it anymore.

And I’m going to take a break from weekday wine for a bit too.  It’s time to get more nutrition for my calories.  But more of that tomorrow.

When my mom’s best friend was dying of breast cancer, she told me something that has rattled around in my head for the past dozen or more years. Sitting there holding her mug, she uttered the simple words, “I wish I’d never given up cream in my coffee.”

Yes, she was a lifetime yo-yo dieter.  I’d seen her overweight and slim but she was always beautiful – naturally so as well as perfectly groomed and dressed.

“I wish I’d never given up cream in my coffee.”

A couple of years later, my mom threw another “rattler” into my psyche with, “You know, I’ve worried every day of my life about being fat.”

These things were said by 70 year old women – women with wisdom and experience and intelligence, a shared wicked sense of humour and a resilience for all the hard things life threw at them.

I use those two phrases to keep a check on my crazy levels so I guess it’s as good a time as any to ask them again.

• Will I one day regret not having cream in my coffee? (not that I like cream in my coffee – but the equivalent for me)

I’ve just asked the husband if he really misses anything from the days when we ate with no real thought for fat content or calories in general.  He figures he misses home-made pizza and full-fat Cumberland sausage with mash with (his) home-made Yorkshire pudding – but fully acknowledges that we only stopped making them because we didn’t have a family here to eat them and would eat the whole lot ourselves.  We still have these meals when we have a crowd to feed.

And me? I don’t think so. We like both the taste and ritual of food too much to banish things we really like.  I’m not a great cook but I love having people round the table eating and drinking and laughing.  I actually think that’s when I feel properly alive – does that sound funny?  This past weekend we served Jamie Oliver’s Five Hour Braised Lamb – two big pans which just got plonked on the table and everyone served themselves. Happy times.

There are certainly some foods that I don’t trust myself to have in the house unless a crowd is going to eat them.  Did I say some?  I meant loads and loads -truckloads – and that’s right near the top of my list of things to conquer in the next part of my life.  Though I did have a little breakthrough in that arena this morning.  I went to get blueberries out of the freezer and realised there was ice-cream left over from the weekend’s dinner party.  Not long ago I would have ditched porridge with blueberries for an ice-cream breakfast but it just didn’t appeal.

That’s actually bigger than most people would understand. I’ll let you know if I succumb. Maybe that can be my Lenten discipline: living for 40 days with a tub of ice-cream in my freezer.  Wow – that sounds spectacularly pathetic.

• Will I look back and say that I’ve spent every day worrying about my body?

Maybe not every day and I had a few “skinny breaks”, but from the age of about 8 till 47, I spent an obscenely wasteful number of hours worrying about being fat. Even when I wasn’t particularly fat. (I’ve just identified a precious gift from my mother!)

When I saw these Before and After Quitting photos, I felt sad for my young mom self.  There was so much good going on in my life: I had amazing family, great friends and life was full – but I worried and worried about my body without actually taking control of the situation.  That’s the regret – not that I didn’t like what I saw in the mirror, but that I didn’t just do something about it.

So the next logical question for me is:  Is writing daily about weight issues not just another way of “worrying”?  Oddly, it’s not.  It’s a way of saying things and getting them out of the dark corners of my mind into daylight where I can see how useful or harmful they are. It’s my way of “doing something” that I should have done all those years ago.  I have stacks of journals full of my handwriting covering more than twenty years – but I never once used them to DO SOMETHING about the one thing that made me so unhappy.

So here we are, all caught up to the present.

Is there a lesson?

Don’t give up cream in your coffee if you really love it.

But don’t eat the ice-cream in the freezer just because it’s there.

I’ve not been writing because I’ve been too busy worrying. Sad but true. I function ok when I’m stressed – unless that stress is caused by worry. That is, caused by something that gets worse rather than better by trying to think it through.

I’m not a huge worrier by nature but I’m a persistent worrier when it takes hold. So that’s why I haven’t been blogging.

But here I am, pushing past the worry and still trying to get off these last few pounds. Of course, if I was really trying, they’d be gone. I’m only sort of trying………probably because worry lends itself to being squashed down with food.

For days I’ve been fighting the urge to eat and losing most of the battles so, yesterday, I decided to change tack and give into my need to feel full and not have to prepare much.

Here are the essential elements of my Worry Wort Diet:

• bulky, filling food
• carbs
• alcohol
• quick and easy to prepare
• can be spaced out over the whole day
• some sugar

Here’s today’s menu:

• Porridge with blueberries and yoghurt
• 2 mugs of coffee
• 4 ryvitas (jam optional)
• 4 mugs of tea
• Covent Garden potato and leed soup
• 3 or 4 clementines
• baked potato with a tin of tuna and peas
• raw carrots
• red wine – 2 x 100 ml glasses
• 1 mug of hot chocolate

I don’t have a huge amount of work to day while I wait for news on funding for 4 separate projects.  I live in from feast to famine on so many levels of my life.  Right now it just means that I need to keep busy, try to balance my time between things that need to be done and things that I want to do.

I won’t be blogging tomorrow unless a bit of late inspiration hits me on return from the hospital.

I’ve discovered the benefit of keeping online documents: it’s easy to see what you’ve done right and wrong over a period of time.

The week that I had the most encouraging weight loss:

• I ate porridge with blueberries and yoghurt for breakfast every day.
• I ate filling cauliflower and potato soup for lunch every day.
• I ate lots of different dinners but all with a bit of protein and carb and a lot of vegetables.
• I drank only one glass of wine all week.  I think there might be something in that.
• I drank a bottle of mineral water while watching tv at night.
• I snacked on Ryvita and cream cheese and fruit.
• I had my usual 5-6 cups of tea and coffee – with and without caffeine.
• I stuck to cappuccinos when I was out and counted for a full fat one rather than resent a skinny one.

The surprising thing is that I didn’t get to the gym that week – which worries me a little because I don’t want to lose muscle rather than fat.  However, I did walk on four days.  Still – I’d rather have a lower weight loss and a better shape.

Besides daily wine, what else wasn’t on the menu?

• butter – but I had olive oil every day.
• sugar in any vast quantity
• cheese – though I did have super parmesan reggiano  on a couple of meals.  I don’t count light Philly as “cheese”.  It’s something else altogether – a non-offensive dry cracker prevention system maybe.
• crackers other than Ryvita.  To quote Donna, “I can one and two point myself to death with crackers.”

OK, I’m sitting here thinking, do I want to lose weight more than I want to drink wine?  It’s a serious question.  For the next week I’m going to say Yes.

Do I want to exercise more than I want to hibernate?  The honest answer is No – but- I want to lose weight more than I want to hibernate so I’ll go.

Do I want to be free from journalling and measuring more than I want to lose weight?  Hmmmm – Yes – but for the next week I’ll sacrifice the freedom to grab to food and eat it for the freedom to zip up my jeans.

It’s all about choosing between freedoms.

I just read over the menu again and I’m happy to say that it’s all food that I’d eat even if I weren’t trying to lose weight.  It’s all tasty and filling and colourful.  So my challenge isn’t so much what but how much.

So for two days I ate what I wanted and, most tellingly, what required no preparation on my part.

EUREKA!   I think I’ve just discovered something!

I’m not so sure that I get into the habit of eating carbs because they have some powerful effect on my physical self.  I think I eat them because they are easy.  When I give myself permission to eat whatever and however I want, I choose lazy eating.  Bread is lazy.  Bread and butter is lazy.  Bread and butter for two meals a day is really really lazy.

Bread and butter with a couple of really nasty leftover chocolate thingies is beyond the pale of lazy.

According to my on-line journal, I have gone from eating twice the required amount of fruit and veg to virtually nothing.  I didn’t even eat the fruit garnish on my lunch plate at a restaurant yesterday.

So today it’s back to cooking porridge and making soup and preparing vegetables.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

Gracie’s post has got me thinking hard about why I’m no longer addicted to sugar.  There are still times when nothing but sweet will do – but they’re not nearly so bad or frequent as they used to be. I can satisfy the craving with a bit of chocolate rather than a huge bag of something.  I do know that it’s still hard to stop at one sweet treat and if I buy a large bar of chocolate, it’s going to be gone in one sitting rather than eked out over a week.  So I guess I’m not in any way “cured” – I just don’t assume any willpower around sweets.

OK – I think I’ve found the thought that stops me from eating junk most of the time:  It’s the phrase/knowledge/conviction that “It’s not worth it”.  The calories ingested are in no way equal to the pleasure gained.

Now a glass of lovely wine is worth it, but I’m not allowed to drink right now so that’s moot point.

A can of Coke is not worth it.

A small Green and Black’s butterscotch chocolate bar is worth it sometimes.

Maltesers are no longer worth it – especially the large bag that I used to cram down between the grocery store and home.

Pink grapefruit gelato is worth it, especially during a long walk along the beach.

Grocery store ice-cream with its “non-dairy fat products” (ie frozen vegetable oil) is NEVER worth it – especially for breakfast.  I know – not a good habit.

Restaurant desserts are almost always disappointing so not worth it.

A good cappuccino with a teaspoon of sugar is often worth it – and nice with a bite of whatever the husband is having.

I’m still not quite sure how I got to this point of peace without sugar.  I know that if I felt deprived it wouldn’t work.  Instead, I think I’ve finally really internalised the idea of choosing which FREEDOM I want.  Every once in a while I want the freedom to eat sugar and fat combined into a luscious something.  But mostly I like the freedom of my jeans zipping up and being able to run.

I can’t say that this is a permanent situation and there’s no way I would casually have large quantities of sweet treats in the house without a crowd of people to finish them off.  But one day I hope to be a grandma and I want to be the grandma with cookies in the cookie jar – rather than the grandma who meant well but ate all the cookies before the kids arrived.

Oh yeah – yesterday wasn’t a superb day as my ulcer or whatever it is was making me feel really ill.  Time to get this sorted out.

I love wine.  Yes I do.

But recently a lot of things have conspired to make me realise that maybe it doesn’t love me back.

Over the years, and especially lately, I’ve tried to quit drinking for all sorts of reasons. I’ve been worried about:

• my liver
• how often I use wine as a stress-buster
• the cost
• how much I didn’t want to give it up
• calories – I reckon 3 bottles of wine  per week add up to the calorie equivalent of 20 pounds of fat per year

But giving up for any of those reasons only lasted as long as the next social function or stressful day or wine offer at the grocery store.

Then, not long ago, it started to make me feel horrible because of an ulcer.  I kept trying to find an amount that wouldn’t make me feel so bad and it turns out the amount is zero.  I couldn’t even think about a glass of wine without feeling queasy so I quit drinking.

Desperate measures I guess, but it’s been interesting to see what happens to calorie consumption when a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc is replaced by a bottle of Perrier.  I’ve also pre-spent the wine budget up till Christmas on a new coat.

The best thing is that there’s no social pressure at all because no one can argue with an ulcer.   The next step is to get rid of the ulcer and not re-engage the drinking habit but, until then, I’m  enjoying the teetotal life far more than I thought possible.

Ok – deep breath.  This is one thing that has tripped me up more times that I can tell you.  If you don’t deal with stuff like this you may be too sane for Talking It Off.  If this sounds like you then, welcome to the Remedial Weight Loss Room.

It almost always involves an impending social event – dinner with friends, a weekend away, the arrival of house-guests.  This week it happens to be all three rolled up into what promises to a joy-filled few days.

So what am I going to do about it?

Option 1

Part of me says that it’s only sane/normal/human (oxymoron?) to want to relax, enjoy and forget about the eating to lose weight. This sounds so sane, but the reality is that I use it as an excuse to eat everything I can find – even in the days running up to the event.  I refuse to do this to myself any more.

Option 2

Make a plan now and stick to it.  Just don’t drink the wine or eat the pie or nibble the biscuit.  And now my negative, whiny, excuse-making voice starts in with all the reasons why this is impossible.  Time blah blah – cooking blah blah- eating out blah blah – socializing blah blah.

Option 3

In my life, there has rarely been an option that is somewhere between ON and OFF (see here) .  So maybe this time I need to redefine an ON day and relax and enjoy.  So here’s my plan.  I’m going to accept that the next couple of days will be filled with food situations either that I can’t control or that I just don’t want to control in that controlling kind of way. (told you I was special)

Therefore, I will do my best.  I will eat till I’m full and not beyond.  I will chose the dessert I most want and enjoy it.  I will constantly remind myself that I am more content and at peace when my clothes fit – not when I’m bloated and hung over.  (WHY is that so hard to remember?)

I can only think ahead a couple of days at a time but here are the choices I can make for today and tomorrow:

• Where to eat dinner tonight for lighter options.
• Non-alcoholic drinks for between glasses of wine.  I love Fever Tree Naturally Light tonic water.  Maybe some cranberry to go with it.
• Make the decision to eat normally the rest of the time – and by “normally” I mean healthily.
• Move when I can – even if I can’t get to the gym.  Just move.

OK.  I think I’ve banished the “eat now eat now eat now” voice.   I have a plan.  I have a flexible attitude.  I’m looking forward to a weekend with friends rather than dreading guilt and physical discomfort.  I’ll let you know how it goes.