Sometime last year I wrote the following and then forgot about it. I was delighted to trip over it again today because it’s just a helpful way to think. It doesn’t really matter how you approach weight loss as long as it doesn’t become toxic in your life. A burden. A guilt trip. A health-destroyer. A pleasure-killer.

Here’s the old post:

Although I can talk “goal weights” with the best of them, my fantasy weight loss goal is actually having food be a complete non-issue. You know – like when they ask a celebrity or a chef what they ate on a “normal” day and the answer is something like:

For breakfast I had a cup of espresso and a slice of mango. Lunch was a a couple of biscuits with a chunk of really strong cheddar and a cup of tea. Dinner was grilled salmon with new potatoes and green beans from my garden and a glass of white wine.

Yeah sure – and a packet of 40 cigarettes.

I KNOW it’s not true but it’s still my fantasy to have healthy eating “just happen”.

But how do I balance that goal with my long and sordidly unbalanced history with food?

• Step One: Remove as many “diet trappings” as possible.

What does that mean? No more weighing of self? No more journalling? I guess it’s essential to decide which elements of the dieting trap are toxic and which are helpful. This is purely personal; one woman’s help is another woman’s poison.

• Toxic – Interesting exercise. Turns out toxic is a state of mind.

thinking about food all the time.

ruining happy social times with thoughts of “I can’t eat that”.

tying my weight to any concept of success or failure of me as a person

behaviour that leads to guilt about eating

allowing myself to get carried away by short term results aka dieting euphoria

To sum up : negativity and obsessing of any kind.

• Helpful – but only helpful if they don’t lead to the toxic stuff above

weighing self

measuring waist

weighing and measuring ingredients and portions

journalling food

How do I use those helpful tools in a non-toxic way? That’s the cruncher. I guess my question is my answer. To be non-toxic, these things have to be tools rather than obsessions.

*******

And back to today – Have I managed to detox my dieting life?

In many ways, yes. I’ve decided that I don’t need goals and deadlines – just permission to mix the intensity of planning to lose weight with the more relaxed approach to keeping it off. I never have to be “on” or “off” a wagon – just eating good food and moving my body sometimes to lose weight and sometimes just to enjoy staying the same weight.

If I can continue to do this then my life will look less like a rollercoaster and more like a gentle dance of the sort you see in Pride & Prejudice – just coming close and moving away – nothing frantic and no particular exhilaration.

This is the closest to food sanity that I’ve been since I was a very small child. It feels good.

Last week’s “freedom” experiment morphed into a diet journalling exercise that has been most illuminating.

Before I eat, I have been asking myself (in writing):

• What do I want this food to do for me?

• How do I want to feel after I’ve eaten it?

And then I’ve been recording the results.  Here’s an assortment of entries from the last 9 days:

Sunday

2:30 No lunch yet and feeling hungry. What do I want from food? ~not to feel hungry. ~ to just get by until supper. 

Rushed to ferry. Ate pistachios and San Pellegrino lemonade sitting at the dock. Don’t feel hungry anymore but also don’t feel satisfied. Will cook a big pot of chili when I get home. Feel like I need protein and vegetables.

Monday

I want to eat to alleviate the fact that I have to face the Christmas party at Mom’s care home. I ate a bowl of chicken chili and felt full but not uncomfortable. Guess what? Food doesn’t take away responsibility so off to the party.

Party – not the least bit hungry but glad I went. Shared an orange with Mom and had a cup of coffee and a cookie just to be sociable.

Later

In the evening I remembered that I had all sorts of candies ready to decorate a gingerbread house. This is normally permission to to be stupid with food- just because it’s there.

Ate 2 toffees then made a cup of tea. Ate 2 more. Do I want more? Not really. They don’t add anything positive to how I feel. They don’t make me feel less hungry or nourished. They don’t leave a good taste. So will I eat more? Not if I want to get where I want to be.

So I didn’t. I have had that large bag of candy in my possession for a week and have eaten only 4.  This is a result which may just deserve the adjective, “miraculous”.

One caveat: I’m doing this during the sanest two weeks of my hormonal month. Therefore, I’m committed to keeping this going right through the nuttiness of Christmas and people and hormones just to see if I can still get results.

Whatever, I have rarely felt so in control of my eating and so satisfied by what I do eat. As I said earlier: illuminating.

Not giving up on finding a solution to this disordered eating is the best I can offer at the moment. I’d rather report a big loss and do a “happy dance” about how loose my jeans are (that’s the way it works in Weight Loss World) but, instead I’m just plugging along trying to work out why most of my eating has nothing to do with physical hunger.

Of course, I have insight; no one writes about a subject for three years without developing a little insight into the matter. But I find that I need to deep revisiting those insights in order to make progress. This is all about making progress – keeping weight off and heading towards food/body healing.

That’s why it was SO SO SO frustrating to have put weight back on over the summer.  I was just cruising through my days – downhill, feet off the pedals, hands off the handlebars. It felt so good and was pretty upsetting to realize that I was actually just riding fast, without brakes, into a brick wall.

OK – so I stopped and tried to get back to my “normal” which is paying attention to what I’m doing and taking off those stupid 7 pounds. SEVEN. Not seventy.  But still. It’s heading up and, unchecked, would certainly end up thirty again.

Right now I’d chose sane over thin – except when I look in the mirror. Can I please have both?  Can I please live a life of moderation AND have a waist?

Anyway – back to the insight.  I was reading a column by a woman who’s fighting anorexia and she was talking about how her eating disorder was really about keeping control in a messy world.  It reminded me of the discovery I made some time ago that eating whatever and whenever, for me, is about freedom.  I’m a terribly responsible person and would never engage in any kind of reckless behaviour that could possibly harm anyone else but I need FREEDOM – from routine, from responsibility, from expectations.

But I can’t be irresponsible.

I can’t just go out and drive fast or refuse to work or take drugs.

I’m not going to have an affair because I’m still completely in love with the man who’s been in my life for 30 years.

I was tempted to pitch a tent at St Paul’s but I don’t like protesting under anyone else’s banner.

I could certainly drink but I grew up in a family soaked in alcohol so I try to exercise some restraint there.

I did take on a profession which is unstable and unpredictable but leaves me pretty much in control of my time. That feels good.

I did let my hair go grey which happily horrified quite a few people, but they all seem to like it more than I do now so it hardly feels rebellious – though I am happily free from hair dye.

So that leaves eating. When I feel constrained by the responsibilities of my world, I eat. Of course, choosing the freedom to eat when and what I eat is also rejecting the freedom to wear the clothes I want or to like what I see in the mirror.

So – just for today – which FREEDOM do I choose?

Actually – that’s got to be asked more often than once daily. When I’m faced with a food decision today, I’ll ask myself what I’m doing: nourishing my body or satisfying my need for freedom.

Better get to it.

So here’s some new research that I think any long term dieter could have written – but in plainer language.

Purpose: Weight loss is critical in the fight against obesity yet only about 20% of individuals maintain weight loss long term. This review examines the psychological factors influencing weight loss maintenance….

Conclusion: Evidence indicated avoiding dichotomous thinking, eating to regulate mood, and disinhibited eating were associated with weight loss maintenance. Increased dietary restraint, perceived benefits outweighing costs, lower/stable levels of depression, and more positive body image were also associated with weight loss maintenance. …

And it all means?

If you want to maintain a weight loss (and I would add, lose it in the first place), get rid of the following behaviours:

• dichotomous thinking = All or Nothing, On or Off Programme, On or Off the Wagon

• eating to regulate mood = Ice-cream* or Cheese* Therapy (insert applicable food.)

• disinhibited eating  = “I eat because it’s there.”

And add the following behaviours:

• increased dietary restraint = too big for a one-liner. This is the whole lifelong commitment to a new and better way of eating.

• perceived benefits outweighing cost = “I’d rather wear that dress than eat that doughnut.” (I know there’s a better deeper reason but it didn’t just pop into my mind the way the dress image did.)

• lower/stable levels of depression = (in my case) keep talking it off and keep moving.

• having better body image = being motivated to make big changes out of love rather than loathing for my body.

If these really are the secrets to success  – and they ring true to me – then I’m going to work with them for a while.  I know an awful lot about dieting. I know what to eat. I know how much to move. But I’m not getting the results I want – because I’m not being consistent with the things above.

So from this point till I’m bored (can’t promise a timeline), I will notice and work through these things on a daily basis.

The curve balls. I know; it’s life. But I didn’t duck very well and one of them hit me square in the face. I woke up this morning feeling bruised and sad and wishing that things could be different.

Vague, yes? Sorry about that. Some things don’t get blogged about. But I CAN say that I ended up eating out of anger and frustration and sadness.

I also had a weird blow-out with the old WW buddies. Oh well. That’s nothing compared to the other stuff. I decided a long time ago to remove myself from angry people, so I did.

It’s interesting to see how really sad & angry and virtually sad & angry are completely different. One requires sorting and solving; the other requires moving on and keeping going.

Here’s the tricky and relevant bit: neither of them gets any better or any more solved by stuffing the feelings down with food.

And RIGHT THERE – that’s the place that separates the “Just do it!” people from those of us who need to work this thing through with more than just self discipline and an over abundance of positive maxims for amazing living. (There should be multiple exclamation points in there but I don’t have the stomach for that this morning.)

So – a new day. One foot in front of the other. Mindful eating. Forgiveness (of self and others). That’s all I can offer from this not very chipper perspective.

After 17 years in this baseball free country, sometimes only a baseball analogy will do. (Out in left field is the other one.)

So. Saturday morning, while packing for the weekend, I was thinking how lovely it was to be heading towards Christmas with no operations/hospital visits/scans/waiting for results looming on the horizon. Five minutes after I had that thought, the mail dropped through the slot, (yes, we still have Saturday post), and there was a letter from the breast clinic saying that I needed to come back on Tuesday (yesterday) for further investigations following my mammogram.

Have I mentioned that was going to be my first Christmas since 2007 which didn’t include medical stress? 2007!

The ending is happy. My work on Tuesday got cancelled, allowing me to keep the appointment. The appointment went great and they aren’t concerned any more. So – normal levels of life stress have resumed.

The point of writing this is that this is what life is really like. If I want to lose weight and keep it off, I need to be prepared to work through the extra stressful times as well as the normally stressful day to day living.

I sort of managed it. I had a wonderful relaxing weekend and made consistently good choices with food – considering that I have no expectations of losing weight this week. I didn’t actually fall apart until after I got home from the appointment yesterday and had a bit of a “post trauma” rest of day – just needing to feel full all the time and eating when I wasn’t hungry. This is my final frontier in disordered eating and, though it happens less and less, it certainly happens.

On the positive side, I walked 6.5 miles yesterday – 2.5 just commuting to the hospital and back and 4 at a good clip with a friend in the evening.

Anyway – life goes on. I want to be slim, fit and healthy so I’d better be ready to push through the muck of life and take care of myself along the way. And by take care of myself, I don’t mean giving myself permission to overeat just because it soothes my nerves for a while.

I need to write something here that sticks with me through the next 5 days.

• 3 days of motorways, hotels and lovely socialising.

Followed, without time for a breath, by

• 2 days of trains, long long work days and exhaustion.

Is what I’m doing right now taking me towards that feeling of being completely at ease in my body?

Weight-wise this year, I have accomplished nothing but a gain – which isn’t exactly where I wanted to be headed.

However, I have increased my list of things I simply will never do again. And they are?

• Weight Watchers.  I will happily direct others towards WW but I am completely over it myself.  I simply don’t need the crutch of points over just knowing what and how many calories I’m eating and expending.

It’s the beginning of the third week and I’m wavering between encouragement and disappointment.

• Weight: It’s all over the place between 146 and 148 – up and down and up and down and etc…..

I’m not used to this stubborn lack of downward trend – especially when I’m eating the correct input/output balance of calories that should lead to a loss. That’s discouraging – but I’m still down overall and I can’t possibly not lose a little given the way I’m eating and moving.  So I’ll plough on.

• Exercise: Yesterday I did my “accidental” 10k in 70 minutes.

Must explain the “accidental”.  I run 5k with a group of women every Sunday and the group meets around 2.5k from my house.  We are currently without a car so, if I want to run with the group, I need to cover 10k.  Last week I walked down and back.  This week I ran a bit and walked a bit down and back and ran most of the 5k in the middle.  Result: a 70 minute 10k.  I’m looking forward to improving on that next week.

So the “things to do by 50″ project moves forward.  My hair is almost all grey, I’m into the New Testament on my read through the bible and I can now cover a 10k in a respectable time.  If my weight isn’t exactly where I envisioned it, then I can hardly beat myself up.

If, on my 50th birthday, I wake up weighing 147lbs but able to run 10k in an hour, I won’t be disappointed.

But I still want to get that waist down another inch so I will keep working hard till the end of April to see if I can do it.

EDIT!  I wrote the above in my dressing gown, went upstairs, put on my jeans and did up my belt.  To the next hole.   Just the motivation to keep going and show a quick 2 fingers to the scales.

I know what I want.

I know what I have to do to get it.

I haven’t been doing that.

And I know why.

Because I’m at the slow end of weight loss and these next few pounds will require sacrifice. And I’m not in the mood.

So the question is: Am I more in the mood to drink wine every night or to get these last few pounds off and finally keep that promise to myself?

I’m heading off for a weekend of work with a little socialising in the evenings and I’ll be eating out for seven of the next nine meals. On Monday morning, I’ll decide what I’m going to do but I know for a fact that it will not be a decision to faff around for the next three months with no real results.  I’m done with wasting time.

I keep going on about wine, not because I drink vast amounts but because it’s the one thing I could cut out of my diet which would not reduce my nutritional intake.  I’ve been averaging about 1500 calories in wine every week and that could easily be turned into a calorie deficit if I drank mineral water instead.

In other words, I don’t really have to wait until Monday to decide what I have to do.  I think it might be time to give up severely curtail the demon drink if only for my waistline.

After the weekend.