Wobbling

For the past 2 weeks, I've been living in a suburb in California and in a situation which is vastly different from the cabin on the island I was on before. This makes the second big transition for me in about two and a half months. First, I left the Asian country I had been living in for over two decades and returned to the U.S. and stayed in an isolated rural area. Now, life has kicked up a notch and is more stimulating, but is also moving ahead.

It is the moving ahead part which has been daunting. I've been happy with the ability to walk around and see new places and things. The environment I'm in is closer to the one I was in for most of my adult life. That is, there are people around, places to see, and things to do. However, I'm also living in a huge house after living in two tiny spaces and have to face the steps that most people take for granted and view as normal.

It's hard to convey how complicated life in America feels to someone who hasn't encountered the changes that have happened. It's a little like stepping out of a time machine. Debit cards? Never used one. Driver's license? Haven't driven for about 24 years and it's long expired. Supermarket self-check-out? Never heard of it. Cell phone? Never owned one. All of these things require that I take a deep breath and go through the processes that others are completely accustomed to. In doing so, I feel stupid, naive, and disconnected from this reality. My sense of being an alien in my own culture is more profound here than it was in a bucolic setting, even though my satisfaction with suburban life is much higher.

All of the stress of adjustment has taken a toll on my eating. I have twice now done what I call "wobbling". That is, I eat more than I should for a period of time (a hard wobble), then I start to eat better about every other day (a less shaky wobble), and then I reach a point close to stability. When I was on the island, I wobbled hard for at least two weeks and was shaky for nearly another 3 weeks. It was only toward the end that I felt a return to normality. Here, I have also been wobbling pretty hard for about 10 days, and have started to regain my footing a little faster.

One of the things about this wobbling with my eating is that I never mistake it for the start of falling down. It is inevitable during difficult times and particularly with a complete loss of routine to wobble. I haven't panicked or felt that I'm a terrible person for this. I don't see myself as weak or a failure. I know I can recover and I will find my old equilibrium back. Even though I've gone through two intensely stressful changes and there is really no end in sight for the foreseeable future, I know this is temporary. I give myself the time to adjust and the luxury of not living everyday to my personal standards because I deserve it during this time.

A lot of people feel that it's "wrong" to "cut themselves some slack" during stressful or hard times. I should make it clear that this is not me letting myself go on some sort of eating free-for-all in which I gorge and make myself sick. I don't do that. Part of the benefit of using portion control and not denying myself any food is that there really is zero appeal to going on a all-out food binging marathon. I tend to serial graze too much at these times, though there are also out and out occasions in which I binge a small amount as conscious stress reduction. I know what I'm doing. It is like a cutter cutting herself. The relief is completely real, like a drowning person coming up for air. Even though the behavior is self-destructive, I can't deny that it is effective. It's something I have not yet extinguished, but I do less of and with less collateral damage than before. It's an ongoing process and getting worked up about it isn't going to help anything so I just try to do better the next day (and usually do).

The situation has mainly been my eating more than I need and not tolerating hunger for very long. It's the difference between buying a bar of chocolate and saying "I'll eat one square a day" and ending up eating two, or eating at night before bed rather than going to bed a little hungry. I may or may not be gaining a little weight from it, but I'm not overly concerned as I'm sure it'll stabilize and go back down again in the coming weeks. I think that attaching drama to stressful times and the subsequent changes in eating habits only makes it harder to recover.

Interestingly, people worry horribly if they overeat when stressed, but not when they don't eat enough when stressed. They know that, eventually, their appetite will return and they'll eat enough again. I know that, eventually, my appetite will abate and I'll eat "enough" again. Having confidence that normal will return is having already won most of the battle.

Food, the addiction

I read a study today which supported something I have contended for quite some time, but is often doubted by many. The study compared responses in the brain to food to responses to addictive substances. It was a small study of only 48 women, and not constructed with impeccable validity, but the brain scans suggested that the brains of those who are addicted to drugs and those potentially addicted to food are having the same sorts of responses.

This isn't an "a-ha" moment for me in which I am asserting triumphantly that I was "right" because one little study lends credence to the notion that people actually can be addicted to food. Frankly, brain scans are of little interest to me in "proving" what I believe. I have always seen addiction as a psychological issue. The fact that physiological analysis can be done to back that up is gravy. It's behavior that matters, and behavior that must be changed if people want to change their lives in the directions they'd prefer to go.

I knew I was addicted to food. I say "was" but recent events make me wonder if I still am and always will be. As my last several posts indicate, I've been in a state of enormous difficulty in my life as of late. It's the result of ongoing issues which, as of about 3 days ago, are starting to be resolved. It's important to note that, for the last 5 months as things have gotten worse emotionally, I have been hungrier than ever. This could be mere coincidence, but as of the breaking point after which things started to clear up and solutions looked like they may be at hand, that constant hunger has vanished.

I've written before that we are programmed to eat when stressed, but I'd gotten past the point where normal everyday stress drove me to eat. It was only the oppressive and psychologically damaging weight of long-term emotional difficulty that set off that hunger. Even in the face of it, I wasn't overeating, but I was having to battle wanting to eat all of the time regardless of my sense of actual physical satiety (that is, there was food in my stomach and sugar in my blood stream). I was starting to feel as if I'd jumped back to the point where I'd have to spend all day thinking about food and trying not to overeat, but now I realize that was not what it was.

The bottom line was that, while I consciously do not have a food addiction and do not think about having a pint of ice cream to comfort me, unconsciously and/or biochemically, I still have the same stress responses that compel me to eat when I am under prolonged difficulty and intense stress. I didn't act on the impulses to my detriment, but it was adding another layer of emotional wear and tear to my life as I struggled with a plethora of other problems.

This reminded me all too clearly that much of my weight loss to date has occurred under relatively ideal circumstances. Those who are in far less positive circumstances than me are going to struggle more as they respond both biologically and psychologically to overwhelming urges to eat when stressed. While I didn't need this reminder to empathize with others who are trying to lose weight, I was given it nonetheless. 

Tension

This morning I was doing some preparation for work later in the day and tomorrow and I was thinking about the tension associated with the task that needed to be done. I always feel the burden of the pressure to accomplish the work before the appointed time and complete the work well in advance. When the preparation is done, I feel satisfied and I'm relieved when the tension dissipates.

I was thinking about my tendency to grow more tense than my husband when there is preparation or work to be completed and how I can't really relax and settle into my routine work or enjoy myself as long as the need to be prepared is hanging over my head. Many people procrastinate and are unfettered by the need to prepare or accomplish certain tasks lurking in the background. For me, it almost spoils my ability to enjoy the moments that come before and it certainly interferes with relaxation.

This tendency to act when there is this sense of tension that something needs to be done has served me quite well throughout much of my life. It encouraged good study habits in school. It means my housework rarely remains undone. It ensures that I am ready early and am never late barring some unforeseen and uncontrollable situation. It helps me regularly prepare healthy food and make sure it is always on hand. This tension helps me overcome inertia and consistently accomplish tasks that many would put off.

This sense of tension is something which used to be much stronger for me in the past. I've actively made an effort to mellow out about such things, but not with complete success. I have wanted to blunt it to some extent because this sense of immediacy does not always serve me well. When there is a problem, I want it resolved. I want to act now to make the tension go away, and sometimes there is nothing I can do to change the circumstances. I just need to be patient. This tension also causes me to push myself sometimes when I really should relax. I can be exhausted, but still force myself to do what is necessary because of this coiled spring in me that will not release its energy and take the pressure off until I perform the tasks.

This great sense of urgency about everything and the feeling that all things had to be handled immediately may be a core character trait of mine. It could be something wired into my code that was inevitable, but I'm not certain of that. The fact that I have settled down a lot after years with an exceptionally calm and mellow husband would seem to show that it is something I was role-modeled rather than something which is in my genes. At the very least, it is a tendency that can be sharpened or blunted by environmental circumstances.

I grew up with a mother who wanted what she wanted yesterday, if not sooner. She was very demanding and quick to emotional outbursts and verbal abuse any time the smallest thing didn't go her way. I'm sure that she meant no harm and was lacking the self-awareness to even realize what she was doing, but I'm also certain that she fueled this tension in me. I may have inherited a desire for immediacy and resolution from her in a quantity that was equivalent to a small sapling, but she ensured that it grew into a Sequoia-size tree in my character. Her punishing responses when things were not done ensured that I would feel stress about not getting those things accomplished as quickly as possible.

I was thinking about this today and it occurred to me that this need to act on this tension may have been something which fed into my issues with food. Instead of having patience when I was hungry, it was just another form of internal tension to be acted upon so that I could move on. The discomfort of hunger can be quite acute and stressful. I was so accustomed to acting to purge tension immediately that I can see a character parallel between my need to get work done and get that physical discomfort I feel from a pending task out of my body and the need to eat when hungry to get the uncomfortable feeling out of me.

In the case of food, it was just another need, another pull, another source of stress and tension that I wanted to just be gone. Every time I felt a little hungry, I ate. I did this just as every time I had a little job to do, I did it. In years past, I often felt I was not "ready" to deal with dieting or losing weight, and I think this aspect is a huge part of that though I didn't realize it at the time. Not eating when I was hungry would mean living with that tension everyday, multiple times a day and not acting on it. I couldn't do it when my life was too stressful otherwise. I simply did not have the emotional strength to endure it. I couldn't do it, but only now do I understand why.

In gaining this understanding, I think I have insight to work with the core issue. It isn't the food. It's this need to act on the tension. Learning to endure internal tension and not act on it will have the effect of making me eat less overall as I won't eat when marginally hungry. Doing hunger conditioning has "repaired" this to some extent, but understanding the root will help ensure that it doesn't get re-broken.

This sort of intolerance of tension or stress is something which I think I didn't really recognize for what it was until today when I was relieved to get my work out of the way and be able to do other things. In the past, I saw this behavior mainly as a positive thing because of the way it propelled me to get things done. Now, I think it may have had a negative side where it has propelled me to also overeat. It's by no means the entire puzzle of my disordered relationship with food, but it is another missing piece that I have found.

The Stress Loop

I don't think I have ever met a person who is at a weight which does not satisfy them who has not said, "I eat when I'm stressed." In fact, it's one of those things that people commonly say they have to conquer in order to succeed in their weight loss goals. Well, I have bad news for everyone who has felt that way; it is in your nature, your very biology, to eat when you feel stress.

All animals react to stress by consuming energy if they have access to it. Bees will gorge on honey when stressed. Coral gorges itself when subjected to the bleaching effects it experiences due to global warming. Humans may indulge in a pint of ice cream. Stress causes the body to dive down to glycogen storage in the liver and muscle to get more glucose and to get more glucose from substances in the body other than carbohydrates. The body wants to replenish the stores from these effects. It wants you to eat if you can because the expectation is that experiencing stress means you will soon have to act, and you will need energy to act.

In modern humans, we experience stress related to mental rather than physical threats. In fact, it's no exaggeration to say that we experience worse stress than our ancestors as the years go by. Part of the reason for this is that civilization takes a toll on us. We can't act on our frustration or aggression by murdering a competitor or running away from our problems. We have to sit there and take it for days, months, or years. We have to endure the stress without reacting to it. Our ancestors could escape and return to a less stressful state of being. We cannot.

Since each person responds to stress with a different intensity of reaction (based on their nervous systems and resulting sensitivity), one person may blithely go about their day feeling no suffering. Another, in the same circumstances, may be consumed with anxiety. We cannot choose to be oblivious. We can only choose how we respond, but even then, our biology is directing us to eat.

So, why isn't everyone who experiences stress on a continual basis overweight? Well, more and more people are becoming overweight in developed nations everyday. In addition, the aforementioned differences in sensitivity to stress play a part in whether or not you have a stress response. In order to want to gorge as a result of stress, you have to perceive the stress and we aren't all equal in that regard. Additionally, some people are better at ignoring those cues to eat due to stress or consciously pursue other outlets (such as exercise, sex, or emotional outbursts).

The thing that occurred to me today as I took a long walk for exercise and was gawked at, laughed at, pointed at and treated disrespectfully by far more people than one might imagine was that those of us who are already overweight are stuck in a stress loop. Being fat means you are subjected to stress that thin people are not. You may want to control your eating, but your body is responding to the stresses you feel every time you step out of the house by cuing you to eat. You eat because of that stress and stay fat or get fatter which in turn makes certain that you continue to suffer stress (either externally imposed by judgmental strangers or internally so from your own self-rejection or physical suffering as a consequence of your weight) which again makes it harder not to eat.

I feel anxiety every single time I leave my home, and varying degrees of stress depending on how the winds of fate treat me when it comes to the amount of abuse I suffer and my particular sensitivity on a given day. My life has been a barrage of stress every moment I'm not safely cocooned in my home.

In knowing the biological response to stress, I believe we can gain power. The first point about this from which we can draw strength is in knowing that wanting to eat when you are stressed is not a character flaw. It is nature. The bees aren't beating themselves up for gobbling down honey until they are so bloated they cannot move. You are smarter than a bee, so you can plan a mental response, but you shouldn't berate yourself up for a physiological cue to eat when stressed, nor castigate yourself for resisting and failing anymore than you should be angry at yourself for responding to a grumbling stomach by eating something.

The second way in which this benefits us is that we can control our responses when we can predict them. If you know you are going to endure a stressful situation (like a visit to the doctor or a job interview) and will want to eat, you can plan to eat something after the experience. You can even plan to offer yourself "comfort food" and you can know that there is no need to punish yourself for wanting to comfort yourself with food. If you diet, you can plan a day of maintenance level eating or find some sort of lower calorie "treat" to give yourself what you need. Control does not mean you resist every impulse and bodily cue, but rather that you deal with them in a healthy manner.

For me, this is going to mean some mental work. I'm a very sensitive person. Again, this is not by choice. It is merely my biology. I cannot become less sensitive because I want to anymore than someone with their ear pressed next to a speaker turned up to level 10 can decide to not experience the volume of the sound by will. I've long thought that I should practice meditation to make my overall resting state more relaxed, and I believe this realization about eating and stress makes the need rather more imperative. Though I can't change my nervous system, I can mentally prepare myself to disconnect more effectively from the world around me or at the very least learn to return to a state of mental and physical peace more rapidly through making myself familiar with relaxation techniques. The stress will still be there, but I hope to train myself to "calm down" from it or react differently to it. It may or may not be effective, but it is worth exploring the options.

I think that the link between stress and eating is one that people already understand on a basic level, but they tend not to go beyond the level of blaming themselves for eating in response to stress. In my opinion, lasting weight control needs to adopt an effective plan for dealing with the reality of the biology of stress rather than focusing on simply stopping the fact that we feel compelled to eat under stressful conditions. I have no confidence in "sheer force of will" when it comes to denying the body's basic urges, but I do have faith in our ability to adopt an effective plan to handle them once we become aware of the full scope of the issue.

What the Rat Taught Me

Lately, I've been feeling anxious and depressed during the day for no discernible reason. Nothing has really changed, except my weight, and presumably that is all for the good. I go about my business during the day, and just feel empty, anxious, and at loose ends.

Initially, I attributed these feelings to hormonal fluctuations. I'm aware that weight loss often brings changes in such things, but I don't think that is what the problem has been. It could simply be a tendency to feel sad or depressed coming through, but I don't necessarily embrace that explanation either. I think it's something deeper and harder to put my finger on.

I thought about how I used to spend my days before I changed my eating habits. During the day, I would punctuate my day by eating food for pleasure, or simply because I was vaguely hungry and didn't want to endure more intense hunger. A lot of people attribute this type of eating to "boredom". Frankly, I think that is an oversimplification of what is going on.

In my post on insisting on complexity when considering weight problems, I talked about the rat I trained in a Skinner box. In a nutshell, I trained a rat to press a lever to receive a food pellet, but the rat coincidentally turned around before successfully connecting pushing of the lever and receiving the reward. Because of this, the rat always turned around in a circle before pressing the bar even though that action had no meaning (this is superstitious behavior).

I noted in the post on complexity that it would have been very difficult to break the rat of its superstitious behavior and that in the process of doing so, the rat would have felt stressed and anxious. In fact, I would have had to physically restrain the rat to stop it because it had paired the circling and the lever so completely. If I had held the rat in place, it would have struggled greatly and tried to perform its superstitious action prior to pressing the bar.

Humans and animals have many things about the way they learn in common. Humans, like animals, grow accustomed to certain patterns of behavior and feel anxious when they cannot follow the same habits. People like novelty, but only in small doses. Very few people get up every morning and do something different every day. We derive comfort from the sameness of our lives up to the point where we are bored and then we seek some novelty, but return to our routine soon thereafter.

In terms of changing your diet, the routine for many people who have habitually over-eaten is to eat whenever they want and whatever they want. I'm not saying they stuff themselves like pigs all of the time, but I know that I had a glass of milk if I wanted one before. If I wanted a banana, I ate one. Throughout the day, punctuating your time with food adds up calories. When you're on a diet, you lose the capacity to freely consume food, healthy or otherwise. The diet represents a serious disruption in routine as well as a loss of total freedom to act on your impulses. Both of these losses cause stress.

My feeling now is that I have anxiety because I no longer spend my time carrying out the same routine in regards to food. When I first changed my eating patterns, I wanted to eat because I was famished and the reduction in calories was a shock to my body. After I adjusted to that aspect (after a considerable amount of time), I didn't want to eat because I was bored. I wanted to eat because I was stressed due to the disruption in lifestyle patterns. Just like it would be stressful for the rat to stop circling pointlessly before pressing the bar, it's stressful for me to not do what I used to do to see me successfully through each day. Any change, even a positive one which includes discarding destructive habits can cause anxiety.

Now, I don't even have the impulse to eat, but I still have an acute sense that something is wrong. There is something missing in my day and I feel anxiety because of that. I'm in a state which is equivalent to my holding the rat and not allowing it to circle around and forcing it to just face the bar without turning around. I know that I don't need to "circle around" (eat), but I still feel stress at not being able to do so.

Many people who binge think they do it out of boredom, but I believe that it is more than that. I think that the reason we want to give in to urges created by the stress that results from behavior pattern changes. Though we want the food and the enjoyment of it, it is also the fact that there is an intense feeling of satisfaction and relief at merely acting on our desire to eat. If you eat without pleasure, but still want to eat nonetheless, you are likely acting on the need to relieve anxiety from your change in lifestyle. If you binge and feel a profound sense of relief from the act, you are almost certainly also acting out of the resulting stress. This is particularly so if you eat a lot and not out of hunger or obsess over having a certain meal in a certain quantity regardless of your actual hunger.

Imagine how my struggling rat would feel if I held it in place and refused to let it circle before pressing the bar for some time and I suddenly let it go and allowed it to turn around and just press the bar as it wanted to do. The stress would end. The anxiety would pass, and it would do what it had been straining to do. When people who have successfully dieted suddenly binge, they are "letting go" and relieving the anxiety they feel from the multitude of disruptions to routine and eating patterns. The relief you feel when you give in is palpable, but then is followed by remorse and regret. Part of the reason that we believe that we act mainly out of boredom is that we so frequently ate before for pleasure.

It isn't boredom, but rather not knowing what to do now that your life's habits are a blank slate. That emptiness causes stress, not boredom. That stress is relieved by embracing old habits. It takes a very long time to adopt new and effectively comforting habits, and it also takes an awareness that you aren't just bored and turning to food.

After years of eating throughout the day when I felt like it, it became a compulsion. I needed to eat because I always ate, and not doing so causes stress. This aspect of changing the way you live is obfuscated by the absolute multitude of other issues (hunger, boredom, using food as pain, fatigue or stress reliever, sugar and carb addictions, etc.) at play when you go on a diet. People think they want to eat for many reasons, but the stress of abandoning years of a lifestyle pattern is rarely one of them. We think we're too rational for that. We convince ourselves that we're capable of doing what is best because it is best and we get a reward (weight loss) for it.

I realize that though I have successfully divested myself of many of my destructive food-based behaviors and conditioned myself to endure hunger much more effectively, I have not escaped the stress and anxiety of the loss of my old lifestyle patterns. I don't think about food as much. I don't eat as much or as often. When I'm bored, I don't turn to food. When I'm sad, I don't turn to food or even think about it as an answer. However, I am the rat held in place and feeling stress. My whole life has changed and I feel anxious about it. I have to replace old patterns with new ones, but the new ones aren't going to necessarily remove the stress I feel at the loss of old and comforting routines.

I am gratified that the pattern has been so relatively effectively broken at this stage. I don't want to eat for the sake of eating, but I think that I have to remain aware and vigilant that any stress, sadness, or free-floating anxiety that I feel could compel me to eat if I don't keep in mind that it is the emptiness and loss of habits that compel me. I have to push very hard to fill that emptiness with something else, and be very patient about waiting for those new habits to become as comforting as the old ones.

Tuesday: October 13, 2009 (late posting)

Today, I finally got around to working on my ever-lengthening pants. I had to take them up 3 inches in order to get them to the proper length again. I don't know how much flab used to hold up those pants, but I do find it encouraging. That being said, I hate hemming pants, especially since I have to do it by hand.

My first restricted Tuesday went quite well. I ended the day around 1390 even though I allowed myself up to 1500. It just ended up being all the food I needed. That being said, I'm not doing particularly well today (Wednesday). I'm not feeling very well and a blood vessel burst in my left eye. This is the second time this has happened this year and I feel stressed by that. I know what it happens, and it's no danger. I've been to a doctor about it before and it happens as you get older. It tends to happen to me more often if I rub my eyes a lot, and I've been rubbing them lately. I need to stop doing that.

At any rate, the stress I felt about this sent me eating two small pieces of a breakfast pumpkin quick bread that I made for my husband. The bread isn't too bad for you as it has no frosting and is made with half sugar and half Splenda to reduce the calories, but I'm sure there are more than enough calories in it to send today's total a bit on the high side. I'm more annoyed that I spent the calories on something which wasn't healthy. I should have had some fruit or vegetables rather than something relatively nutritionally suspect. I don't think I'll end up overeating, but I won't have made much progress.

I'm not going to beat myself up over this as there's no point. Short of sticking my finger down my throat, it's not like I can undo what has happened. I'll just have to try and do better next time I feel stressed.