If you can't trust yourself, who can you trust? I ask this as a serious question because the truth is that most of us don't trust ourselves. We set up a bunch of rules for ourselves and wag a metaphorical finger in our general direction and essentially say, "don't cross these lines." This feeling that we are not to be trusted likely stems from childhood and being scolded by our parents or warned about doing or not doing things. They often did not trust us, and in my case they didn't trust when there was no reason to mistrust, so a pattern is established in which we believe we cannot be trusted to do what is best.
Recently, I talked about my half-assed approach to calorie counting because I was feeling that I didn't need this tool to know how much I was eating to the same extent as I did when I started in June 2009. I absolutely needed it when I started as I had no idea how much I was consuming (likely up to 3000-3500 calories a day, I'm sure). I only knew what I was eating and felt I ate pretty healthily. As I've said many times before, even healthy food has calories and you can get fat as easily on nourishing food as on empty calories. I realized that, unless you educate yourself fully (and that includes looking at the weight of food and weighing and measuring it to see what a portion should look like, not eyeballing it or guessing), you really can't know how much you are eating when you have the type of distorted perceptions I had.
A few days after writing that post, I decided that it was time to give it up entirely. There were several things that I realized. One was that I was using calorie counting more often than not to decide to eat more. I was looking to see how much wiggle room I had. The other thing I realized was that I was ready to test fly listening to my body more carefully rather than using artificial constructs. I have a very good idea not only of how much I need to eat, but also how much hunger I need to endure. The latter is very important for me because when I was much heavier, I never knew true hunger. I simply ate any time I was not full. A truly empty stomach was not something I often experienced. Now, I know what it feels like to wait until I'm genuinely hungry to eat.
So, with the experience and education of the past few years behind me, I thought it was time to trust myself with food to a much greater extent. It feels strange at times not to count at all (which I'm trying not to do, not even in my head), but it really isn't nagging at me as much as I may have expected. I've been in a certain food space for a long time and I have a body that is better adjusted to less food and smaller portion sizes. I also have a mind that knows what is "enough" to keep losing weight and I know when I'm eating more than necessary. Counting calories doesn't really change either situation.
This isn't exactly a transition to "intuitive" eating because my body is not one that has a sufficiently altered biochemistry at this stage such that I can eat when I'm hungry (or "think I'm hungry"). I still have to push the margins a bit and wait to be hungrier before eating or I will fall back into a pattern of habitual overeating. However, between mental and physical changes, I think it's time to fly without a net and move a little closer to a normal relationship with food by kicking out the use of a food logging program. It's time to build more trust in myself when I deal with food.
Time will tell if I'm as ready as I think emotionally and physically. At this stage, I'm looking to continue very slow losses. My initial goal was to be at 150 lbs. by the end of March of this year, but it is clear that I'm not going to get there unless I go into some sort of dramatic weight loss plan. I'm absolutely unwilling to do so because I refuse to adopt a highly dysfunctional relationship with food, even in the short term, to reach an arbitrary number. I've come too far to step back to that sort of life. I see that as more destructive than remaining fat. What is more, I do not think such measures are really necessary (and might make things worse in the long run because of metabolic slowdown
Last time I weighed myself, I was around 170-175 lbs. (at 5' 4"/164 cm. in height). From now, I'd be happy to just average a 1-2 lb. loss per month, mainly to get out of the weight ranges that qualify me as "obese". This is overwhelmingly because of health insurance costs, but I also wouldn't mind having a smaller belly apron so there was less skin on skin contact (which causes sweating and chafing, still). I also think it would help my gimpy knee and sometimes still aching back after walking to take more pressure off of both. However, I'm not going to sweat it so hard for a magic number or to fit a beauty ideal. I'm in perfect health and quite mobile. I only suffer pain under specific conditions (walking more than 4 hours or certain weather conditions). Beyond that, I just want to continue to put food in its proper place in my life by not thinking about it anymore than necessary or analyzing its composition. You know, the way people who aren't defined by their bodies live their lives.
Showing posts with label mechanistic processes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mechanistic processes. Show all posts
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Those Mechanistic Processes
I don't talk much about the mechanics of what I'm doing anymore, because I have made a strong effort through time not to focus on them. Early on, because my habits were so destructive and distorted by a sense of food relationship "normality" that was beyond what my body required, I had to educate myself and attend to what I was doing with greater vigilance. Once I got healthier habits and more understanding in place, I slowly started to kick the training wheels off and operate less artificially and somewhat more naturally.
It's important to say that, when I say "healthier", I don't mean embracing food puritanism as I eat everything (candy, cookies, cake, chocolate, salted snacks... all of the "evils" in the dieting world). I always ate healthy food like fruit, vegetables, and whole grain and continue to do so. That was never my problem. My problem was too many calories and that likely is the problem most people have when they overeat. Most people aren't fat because they're scarfing down donuts and fast food. They're fat because they eat too much of everything, including healthy food.
I've written about this before, but far too many people attach moral judgment to food choices and body size rather than address the issue rationally. If you eat cake, you will remain fat and are weak-willed. If you eat whole wheat pasta with olive oil and vegetables, you will be thin and health and have will power. This thinking contributes to obesity problems because so many people eat well and are still fat. They believe that their food purity should insulate them from fatness, and believe it is inevitable that they be fat because their pious consumption results in obesity.
You can convince yourself that you are eating well and a healthy and reasonable amount of food if you don't dig too deeply into the facts. I know I absolutely did this. Once I dug into the facts (a process that I hated doing with a burning passion), I knew that I was habitually overeating. What was worse was that I discovered just how little extra food it took to send my daily caloric intake into the stratosphere. After taking a good hard look at what I was eating, I slowly adjusted downward. After two and a half years of doing this, I have a much better idea of how much is "enough" to maintain a smaller weight without as much diligence and scrutiny. I have, in essence, created a new "normal" for my life.
To that end, I find that I count calories in a very half-assed way now. I often track breakfast and lunch and make a good guess at dinner. While many people would see this as "slipping", I see this as progress. I don't want to be clinging to calorie counting for the rest of my life to reassure myself that I'm doing "okay". I want to live "normally" on all fronts, and, if at all possible, that will include not applying artificial measurements to my food intake. At the moment, I'm not quite ready to stop entirely, but there are days when I just don't bother at all.
All of that being said, I can't emphasize enough the value of knowing food information early on when trying to deal with your relationship with food and I think that calorie counting as an educational tool has value. "Dieting" culture is so pervasive and extreme that it is easy to view all practices related to it as distasteful, obsessive and destructive, but it is not the tools that are the problem. It is the way in which they are misused, overused, and relied upon exclusively that are the issue. They are not a way of life, but a helpful way to forge a path to a new way of life.
It is this confusion that makes people obsessed with weight loss and body composition so obnoxious. They never move on to normality (life without "dieting") and cling forever to the tools of diet culture because they don't believe they can get by without those training wheels. What is more, they become angry at any suggestion that anyone can be successful without them. In essence, they are people who believe they can never walk without this crutch and grow hostile at the suggestion that anyone can as it makes them feel bad about themselves as they're convinced they can't.
Though such people give calorie counting and the tools of dieting a bad name, for people who are greatly obese as I once was, your body chemistry is so imbalanced that it is difficult (in my experience) to rely on intuitive eating. Sometimes, the only way to really understand what you're doing is to pick up some of those tools and learn. It takes a very long time for the hormones and neurological responses to realign themselves to other patterns and your body will fight you all of the way, so you can't just eat what feels right. "What feels right" is often going to be too much because that's the message a big, fat body is going to send as it will endeavor to maintain the status quo. That is what bodies do.
In fact, some short-term research indicates that bodies never adjust hormonally or neurologically once one has been fat, but frankly, I believe the studies are poorly constructed. They are based on following people for little more than a year and having put small numbers of people on severe calorie restriction (600-800 calories). In my personal experience, it takes just under a year for the first sense of realigning to occur and more years for it to continue the process. I don't have people measuring my leptin and ghrelin numbers, but I do know how my sense of hunger and satiety have changed as time has gone by. Of course, I've eaten relatively close to the edge (1500-2000 calories) and engaged in modest exercise all along. Perhaps my body was not shocked the same way study participants bodies were. Perhaps I'm simply a freak of nature.
All I can say is that, in my case, something in me at a basic level changed and changed again. It is a lot easier now than it was in June 2009. This is not mind over matter nor "willpower" (a word I detest). It's not about my superior character strength or psychological integrity. It's about the changes I've been making slowly coercing my body's chemistry into a new normal in which I am accustomed to different energy consumption patterns. I've written about this before, but patterns are not merely psychological, but biological and the mind can be slowly changed and the body will, eventually, go along with it.
So, now that my body is responding with less intensity to eating a healthier (i.e., smaller) quantity and at less frequent intervals, I've been able to strip away some of the mechanistic support structures such as careful tracking of food. I feel good about this because, ultimately, I want to be able to just go about my life knowing how to eat without having to give calories a second thought. I feel like I'm on the right road to this particular destination. I'm in no hurry to get there and that makes it all the easier to keep going, but I am pleased at the progress I'm making away from anything resembling "dieting" structure in my life.
It's important to say that, when I say "healthier", I don't mean embracing food puritanism as I eat everything (candy, cookies, cake, chocolate, salted snacks... all of the "evils" in the dieting world). I always ate healthy food like fruit, vegetables, and whole grain and continue to do so. That was never my problem. My problem was too many calories and that likely is the problem most people have when they overeat. Most people aren't fat because they're scarfing down donuts and fast food. They're fat because they eat too much of everything, including healthy food.
I've written about this before, but far too many people attach moral judgment to food choices and body size rather than address the issue rationally. If you eat cake, you will remain fat and are weak-willed. If you eat whole wheat pasta with olive oil and vegetables, you will be thin and health and have will power. This thinking contributes to obesity problems because so many people eat well and are still fat. They believe that their food purity should insulate them from fatness, and believe it is inevitable that they be fat because their pious consumption results in obesity.
You can convince yourself that you are eating well and a healthy and reasonable amount of food if you don't dig too deeply into the facts. I know I absolutely did this. Once I dug into the facts (a process that I hated doing with a burning passion), I knew that I was habitually overeating. What was worse was that I discovered just how little extra food it took to send my daily caloric intake into the stratosphere. After taking a good hard look at what I was eating, I slowly adjusted downward. After two and a half years of doing this, I have a much better idea of how much is "enough" to maintain a smaller weight without as much diligence and scrutiny. I have, in essence, created a new "normal" for my life.
To that end, I find that I count calories in a very half-assed way now. I often track breakfast and lunch and make a good guess at dinner. While many people would see this as "slipping", I see this as progress. I don't want to be clinging to calorie counting for the rest of my life to reassure myself that I'm doing "okay". I want to live "normally" on all fronts, and, if at all possible, that will include not applying artificial measurements to my food intake. At the moment, I'm not quite ready to stop entirely, but there are days when I just don't bother at all.
All of that being said, I can't emphasize enough the value of knowing food information early on when trying to deal with your relationship with food and I think that calorie counting as an educational tool has value. "Dieting" culture is so pervasive and extreme that it is easy to view all practices related to it as distasteful, obsessive and destructive, but it is not the tools that are the problem. It is the way in which they are misused, overused, and relied upon exclusively that are the issue. They are not a way of life, but a helpful way to forge a path to a new way of life.
It is this confusion that makes people obsessed with weight loss and body composition so obnoxious. They never move on to normality (life without "dieting") and cling forever to the tools of diet culture because they don't believe they can get by without those training wheels. What is more, they become angry at any suggestion that anyone can be successful without them. In essence, they are people who believe they can never walk without this crutch and grow hostile at the suggestion that anyone can as it makes them feel bad about themselves as they're convinced they can't.
Though such people give calorie counting and the tools of dieting a bad name, for people who are greatly obese as I once was, your body chemistry is so imbalanced that it is difficult (in my experience) to rely on intuitive eating. Sometimes, the only way to really understand what you're doing is to pick up some of those tools and learn. It takes a very long time for the hormones and neurological responses to realign themselves to other patterns and your body will fight you all of the way, so you can't just eat what feels right. "What feels right" is often going to be too much because that's the message a big, fat body is going to send as it will endeavor to maintain the status quo. That is what bodies do.
In fact, some short-term research indicates that bodies never adjust hormonally or neurologically once one has been fat, but frankly, I believe the studies are poorly constructed. They are based on following people for little more than a year and having put small numbers of people on severe calorie restriction (600-800 calories). In my personal experience, it takes just under a year for the first sense of realigning to occur and more years for it to continue the process. I don't have people measuring my leptin and ghrelin numbers, but I do know how my sense of hunger and satiety have changed as time has gone by. Of course, I've eaten relatively close to the edge (1500-2000 calories) and engaged in modest exercise all along. Perhaps my body was not shocked the same way study participants bodies were. Perhaps I'm simply a freak of nature.
All I can say is that, in my case, something in me at a basic level changed and changed again. It is a lot easier now than it was in June 2009. This is not mind over matter nor "willpower" (a word I detest). It's not about my superior character strength or psychological integrity. It's about the changes I've been making slowly coercing my body's chemistry into a new normal in which I am accustomed to different energy consumption patterns. I've written about this before, but patterns are not merely psychological, but biological and the mind can be slowly changed and the body will, eventually, go along with it.
So, now that my body is responding with less intensity to eating a healthier (i.e., smaller) quantity and at less frequent intervals, I've been able to strip away some of the mechanistic support structures such as careful tracking of food. I feel good about this because, ultimately, I want to be able to just go about my life knowing how to eat without having to give calories a second thought. I feel like I'm on the right road to this particular destination. I'm in no hurry to get there and that makes it all the easier to keep going, but I am pleased at the progress I'm making away from anything resembling "dieting" structure in my life.
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