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Semiannual maintenance post, May 2013.

Five years ago this week, I woke up one day and decided to try being hungry for a change.  Those of you who've been through my archives know that this decision eventually led to my dropping 40 pounds and 6 pants sizes, and returning myself from BMI-obese to BMI normal.

I guess it's sticking for now.  I guess it's real.

I try to remain detached from the number if I can.  For instance, I always keep in mind that if I have another pregnancy, or when I go through menopause, I could wind up at another weight.  Mostly I think I've learned to manage that detachment, but from time to time I forget.

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Last month I forgot for a while.  

From time to time I think back to the months while the number on the scale was dropping.  During those months -- May to November of 2008 -- I was, frankly, obsessed and controlling and fearful (that whatever magic was working would stop working).   I was developing good habits, but at the same time I felt very driven by the numbers.  And yet I look back at that time with amazement at my power and self-control.  

Sometimes I start worrying, "What if I gain weight and I need to lose it again?  Will I ever be able to do what I did then?  Maybe I'll never recapture it, if I ever need it."

And I say to myself, "I know how I can make myself feel better.  I'll prove I can still do it.  I'll lose 1 pound, starting right now.  Even though I don't objectively need to lose any pounds, I'll just lose 1.  If I still have what it takes, it won't take long, just a couple of weeks, a month at most once I get back in the groove again.  I'll crack down really hard on myself and I'll lose 1 pound, and I'll prove to myself that I could still lose weight again any time I want to."

And then I can't "crack down on myself" as hard as I think I should, and the little line I still plot on a chart most days goes down a little and up a little and down a little just like it always does, and I fret some more.  Maybe I'll never get that groove back, even if I need it.  If I can't make it happen whenever I want to, whether I need it or not, will I be able to make it happen someday if I do need it?

And then I imagine a future where everyone makes fun of me because I blogged about overcoming gluttony but then I got fat again.  Seriously?  This is what I worry about?  Becoming a data point on the nobody can lose weight and keep it off side?  Or is it being proven wrong?  Am I a thin-person impostor?  Are the size 2's only a disguise?

This is not a healthy mental space to be in.

+ + +

So, last month I confessed to Mark that I was trying to lose ONE POUND and I couldn't manage to do it.  

(I mean, obviously my weight fluctuates day to day, but I wasn't seeing a permanent shift downward that would stick.)

And he reminded me:  

You are getting it backwards again.  

If you are worried about putting the weight back on, look at your behavior, not at the numbers.

Look at your habits.  Are you developing habits you don't want to develop?  Are you losing good habits you wanted to keep?

Because if you are slipping back into old patterns that you associate with the time when you were heavy and when you ate constantly, then that is a problem.  And it's a problem you can do something about.

But if all your habits are good, then you don't need to try to force the numbers to do ANYTHING.

+ + +

He's right.  He's absolutely right.  And I know this.  I don't know why I keep forgetting it.

But I do forget it from time to time.

I cannot directly control the number on the scale.  

I can directly control the choices that I make.

And I want to make choices every day that are compatible with living out the rest of my life in a healthy relationship to food and physical activity.

That's what I want.  To make choices now that are good for the rest of my life.

I can't really go wrong doing that, no matter what the numbers do.

+ + +

Fretting about the numbers often accompanies feelings of loss of control over those good habits.  And I usually find that, if I can remember to examine the habits instead of the numbers, I find that I have some places I should re-commit to.

The "diet mentality" has always been a mistake for me.  The idea that I can or should deprive myself strictly for some temporary period and then return to "normal" eating once I've acheived some number.   This has only been destructive.

(The only exception:  On occasion, I've found it helpful to cut out sugar and cut back on carbs for a few days, just to break a spiraling descent into a carb-craving cycle.   I don't think of it as dieting.  I call it detox even though I know that's a stupid word for it.)

Instead, I need to look at each behavior I engage in, and ask:  

Do I feel confident that repeating this behavior, regularly, for the rest of my life, would be good for me?  

If I made it to the end of a long life and looked back, what habits would I be telling everyone were my secret?

+ + +

Here are some of them, I think:

• Eat just enough at meals so that I have a real appetite when I sit down at the next one.  Pay attention to how much that takes, and learn.
• Have sweets and desserts at any meal time that I wish, but keep them small.  
• Go to bed a little bit hungry.  Have a drink in the evening instead of a snack. 
• Keep alcohol portions modest at dinner--or at least put off the drinking until the food's cleared away.
• Sugarless gum after meals -- good for teeth, and good for reminding me not to nibble as I clean up.
• Prefer dressed vegetables to carbs.  Use carbs judiciously to extract the maximum textural experience from each portion.
• I only typically need one snack, in midafternoon:  make it small, balanced, pleasant, and on a plate.
• Share my food with people who ask.
• Half sandwiches.    Most sandwiches are too damn big, at least for me. 
• Graciously accept some of whatever I'm offered, but I don't have to eat all of it.
• Refuse to think of an occasional, deliberate choice to enjoy food for pure pleasure as a "failure." 

These are not difficult to live by and don't represent deprivation, but they do take a little bit of attention.  And when my attention slips, I make choices that aren't as good.  It's as simple as that.  I need to pay a little attention to make good choices regularly, but the choices I want to make are choices I can feel happy about for the rest of my life.

Choosing the right habits.

I just saw a single out-of-context quote that caught my eye today, and I wanted to share.

Lawblogger Ann Althouse was responding to a personal-finance-blogger's post about developing daily "effortless" habits to save money so you could retire early. She wrote,

I think the key is to be selective... Where are the places where you can change the habits and actually improve your life? The $4 latte may be worth it to you if that's how you get yourself out of the house and into a public place where you encounter other people and moderate loneliness into manageable solitude. A month of daily lattes might correspond to one item of clothing that gives you a moment of manic elation but then gets lost in your closet amongst scarcely dissimilar items.

As you know, I am a big proponent of life-change through habit. I thought this quote was good for emphasizing how the "right" habits are not one-size-fits-all, and how "good" choices can have hidden costs.

It's pretty fashionable to mock people who have a $4 daily coffeeshop habit, but what Ann says is true -- for some people, the daily $4 may be staving off a much bigger problem! On the other hand, we have a bad habit of misidentifying luxuries as "needs." Maybe the question to ask is, exactly how does this thing I say I need fill a hole?

"I really need my daily latte" might mean, "I am addicted to caffeine and a latte is a tasty way to get my fix." It might mean, "I have established a ritual of stopping at the coffee shop each day, and doing the same thing every day makes me feel peaceful while changing my routine makes me feel upset." It might mean, as Ann suggested, "I need to encounter other people so I don't feel so lonely, and the latte gives me an excuse and a motivation to go do it." It might mean, "I can afford so few luxuries, and the latte is a petty luxury that makes me feel less poor -- for a few minutes out of the day, I can live like a person who doesn't have to pinch pennies."

I thought that the lesson could perhaps be extended to other types of "good" habits besides budgetary ones.

 

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Understanding the mechanism.

I think by now everybody's heard the canard:  "It takes 20 minutes to feel full after eating, so wait that long before you serve up a second helping."  I saw it again today, but with a twist on it I've rarely seen.

As far as I can tell, the advice to eat slowly and wait between servings in order to prevent eating until overfull is backed up by research --- I don't think anyone disputes that it probably helps and won't hurt.  What I think is interesting is the rationale.

  Usually, this advice is accompanied by a folk-theory explanation of why it supposedly takes 20 minutes to feel full after eating.    Here are a few I managed to scrape up from Google:

 

"It takes your stomach about 20 minutes to produce the hormones that tell your brain that you are full. This process doesn’t start until your stomach begins to stretch."

"Eating quickly doesn’t give the stomach enough time to communicate with the brain to send up the “I’m full” message, and missing that cue can cause overeating. Waiting 20 minutes gives the brain enough time to register the “full” or “still hungry” signal."

"Remember that it takes about 20 minutes for your stomach to tell your brain that you're full."

 

There's more like that out there.  The details vary but the gist of it is commonly "stomach talks to brain, 20 minutes required."

Today, for the first time, I saw deviation from this folk tale in a soundbite-type article --- the kind that takes you through a slideshow of stock images, one per "tip".  Tip number 6  in a WaPo slide show that starts here:  

Wait 20 minutes for seconds:   Food must move 22 feet through your intestines from your stomach to peptide YY cells — the switch that says you are sated. 

What's this?  Peptide YY cells?  The intestines are involved in the conversation?  How novel!

The mechanism is apparently a bit more complex, though you wouldn't know it from the folktales.  I'm always particularly annoyed when the advice columnist, or whoever, suggests that satiety is primarily the feeling of your stomach "stretching" or some such thing, and that hunger is the feeling of the walls of the stomach touching each other or some such thing.   That's a theory from the early 1900s that's been well disproven.   (Have your stomach surgically removed and you'll still feel hunger and satiety.)

Mostly, hunger and satiety are brought on by hormonal signals (even that is a vast oversimplification!), and if your stomach is straining to contain the food you've gobbled, chances are you've overshot it.  

Peptide YY hormones (abbreviated PYY) are just one of several factors implicated in appetite regulation.  I'll borrow this brief explanation of PYY action in one set of mouse experiments from an abstract:  

In response to food ingestion plasma [PYY] concentrations rise within 15 min and plateau by approximately 90 min. The peak [PYY] level achieved is proportional to the calories ingested, suggesting that [PYY] may signal food ingestion from the gut to appetite-regulating circuits within the brain.

(I caution against taking single statements in reports of experiments, wherever published, as gospel.  I'm just quoting this here in order to borrow the wording, and emphasize that active research has moved beyond the "stomach walls rubbing together" thing.)

+ + +

So why does it matter?  If the advice is good, who cares whether we understand the real mechanism or not?

Maybe you can chalk it up to different types of people.  I for one find it easier to adhere to suggested behaviors if I have a mental model of what's really going on.

Here's one example.  Like many folks, I get cravings for carbohydrates when I've had a busy morning dealing with the kids or a long shopping trip or a stressful afternoon.   I have had an easier time riding them out and solving them in better ways now that I understand a few things (the following does not apply to diabetics and prediabetics):  

    (1) they are physiological, not a sign of mental weakness;

    (2) they really do signal low blood glucose, and I really will be sluggish if I don't get fed;

    (3) eating carbs will feel great and deliver immediate relief, but might not last long;

    (4) eating protein-and-fat will deliver the same relief from the craving, because a protein snack really will raise your blood glucose; but the relief won't show up for 30 minutes or so, and sadly it will not deliver the rush of "oh thank God this cookie is the best thing I ever ate."  Still, it will solve the problem.

How does this help with the carb cravings?

    (1) I know better than to try to ignore this signal.  It's a real message saying, "Either eat something, or quit doing anything mentally taxing until your next meal."

   (2) Even if the idea of a Coke and french fries and pie  is making me go yes yes yes, and the thought of a hardboiled egg or a handful of  almonds is making me go meh, I know that --- in the end --- the egg or the almonds will fix this problem.   

  (3) If I know this, I cannot fool myself into thinking, "But I really need a hit of sugar."  I don't.  But before I really understood the slower response to protein, I easily tricked myself into thinking that I did need the Coke or the cookies.

  (4)  If I can't stop what I'm doing and wait for the slower protein response, having a little bit of each might be a good compromise.  

+ + +

I can't say for sure whether I'll be more or less likely to wait that 20 minutes if I know that one of the "you've eaten enough" signals is triggered by caloric food reaching the ileum.  (Or if I know that gastrointestinal transit is not simple either:  "Materials do not leave segments of the digestive tube in the same order that they arrive."

One thing that does help me is knowing from experience how I've accidentally become overfull.  Can't count the times where "hm, I think I've got room for dessert!" has turned into "ooof, I guess I didn't really have room..." after, oh, twenty minutes or so.   I really have to almost feel like I've undereaten for a whole dessert not to make me all stuffed.

We have a locally owned, family-style restaurant near our house that charges only a dollar for pie after 7 p.m.  I am a great fan of pie, and so this restaurant (kid's meals under $3 that include drinks and dessert!  No kidding!) has been a good training ground for "saving room for dessert."  I almost always take the kids there after swimming lessons when Mark goes out of town for a few days, and I almost always arrive thinking "At the end of this meal, I will have pie."  

Keeping in mind the feeling of having eaten too much before the pie, and then added the pie onto that, really does help me remember not to order something big and then polish it off.   It's entirely mental -- another kind of knowledge that makes a real difference.

The semiannual gluttony retrospective, part IV: sticking to it through the ups and downs. ALSO comparison to nicotine.

Intro to this series. Part I. Part II. Part III.

Sometimes I forget, but most mornings I still weigh myself. I keep a homemade Excel chart on the bathroom counter (next to the other chart); I pencil in a little dot. Each graph lasts a calendar month. At the end of each month I file away each graph in a three-ring binder.

It is hard for me to let go of data.

Despite that, I try to maintain a certain distance from the numbers. The numbers aren't my target; behaviors that keep me mentally and physically healthy, and non-gluttonous, are my target. The numbers only serve as a signal that my habits and behaviors are working -- and only in one particular way. I know this intellectually, but I have to work at it to believe it.

+ + +

So let's say that I have observed my weight creeping up. (Hypothetically, ahem.) That's the wake-up call to deal with habits that I already know have been slipping. Gluttony creeping back in:

• second servings just because I can,
• eating the children's leavings,
• joining in on bedtime snacks just because everyone else is,
• feeling full and still going because there's still some pleasure to be had on the plate.

I start paying attention to all these, keeping a pack of gum in my pocket and leaving the serving dishes in the kitchen and so forth, and invariably the weight dips back down the first couple of days while I am focused.

What happens next is kind of funny.

If I stay focused, and the weight keeps going down, a little voice in my head urges me to make an Akron U-turn. "Look how great I am doing! I guess I don't really have to change my habits after all! My numbers are lovely! I can go back to big portions and extra chocolate at bedtime!"

(As I wrote on the Akron U-Turn post, this is certifiably insane. X causes Y, therefore Y is inevitable.)

If I don't stay quite as focused, and the weight pops back up -- maybe not as far up as it had been, but not dropping quite so fast -- a little voice in my head urges me to give up since "it isn't working anyway." This is also certifiably insane, and is in fact the exact opposite argument being made by the Akron U-Turn voice.

Picture on my shoulders -- not the angel and the demon, but a skinny demon and a fat demon. They take turns. The skinny demon's line is "You're doing great! You can afford to be a little gluttonous!" The fat demon's line is "Give it up! You might as well be a glutton for all the good this is doing you!"

I am telling you, there is part of my brain that will try anything, including the complete suspension of logic, in order to get more cake.

+ + +

I guess there are two counter-thoughts I could be having here.

When the number on the scale makes me happy, I can think: "What I am doing is working well. Keep it up."

When the number on the scale makes me worried, I can think: "I know what I need to do. I have done it before."

So I am working on that.

One thing that is definitely getting better is the long-term view. I keep coming back to that. Because this is a rest-of-my-life thing, it is okay if the trends are really, really slow and slight. I don't really care about getting quickly back to my target. I only care about not getting farther away and making course corrections that nudge me back to where I am going.

+ + +

As an almost but not entirely unrelated matter: there was a thread on the front page of reddit today about smoking cessation. The question went like this:

Ex-smokers of reddit, what was your motivation and/or technique for giving up?

First, I think this person was right to post the question to /r/askreddit (which is a general-interest subreddit) and specifically asking "ex-smokers," rather than posting to /r/stopsmoking and getting answers from a lot of people who are still struggling with their addiction.

And I thought to myself -- where would people struggling with nicotine addiction be if mostly they just turned for advice to people who haven't (yet) successfully quit, or to people who never had an addiction in the first place? It seems pretty obvious that while they are not the only source of useful advice for would-be quitters (the medical profession probably has at least some), those who've been addicted and managed to quit would be a good population to turn to. Learn from the proven.

The same thing could be said for the battle against gluttony and sloth (and by extension, excess adiposity). It is really surprising how much of the popular narrative is devoted to pointing out that few people succeed permanently, without rounding up a bunch of successful losers and trying to learn from them.

That being said, I noticed as I was lurking on the reddit "how did you quit?" question that there was a great deal of variety in the answers. One swore by antidepressants, another warned against them. Many said that cold-turkey was the only way, others thought that cold-turkey approaches were doomed to fail and advised keeping a pack of cigarettes around to ease the really bad cravings. E-cigarettes and patches were common tools, but some didn't find them helpful at all. For some, a "wake-up call" was all they needed (becoming a father, coughing up a wad of black stuff, counting up the yearly cost) and for others, mental effort alone wasn't enough.

I have never been addicted to nicotine (never smoked a cigarette in my life, in fact), so I can't directly compare the two experiences of kicking nicotine and kicking gluttony. However, I was struck by the similarities evident in the list. Highly personalized approach; the necessity of learning to deal with physical suffering; the way it gets slowly better with time, even though relapse is always a sobering possibility; the knowledge that even though it is hard, some people do succeed, every year.

The semiannual gluttony retrospective, part III: Keeping motivated in the face of okayness.

MrsDarwin kindly obliged me with a question on my introductory post:

I really appreciate your maintenance/reminder posts, since I'm kind of at the same stage you are (though with less exercise). I'm at a basically acceptable weight which I maintain without much trouble -- I could stand to lose five pounds and tone up, but on the other hand, my clothes fit in a mostly flattering fashion. But I need the constant reminder not to be complacent. You should write about "keeping motivated in the face of okayness." 

This is really the crux of maintenance, and it can even be the crux of initial weight loss, too.  Remember the Akron U-Turn?  I think it's common to use "hey, I'm doing pretty well!" as an excuse to undermine ourselves by going back to undesirable behaviors.

Some good habits have persisted in the face of my okayness, and some have drifted away.   What's the difference?  I think a lot of it has to do with having created "bright lines" around some behaviors:  some rule I've stated to myself, even gone public with here on the blog or in my family. Something that It's not okay to eat a whole pizza.  A normal breakfast can contain one egg, but not two.  The right dessert size for me is about as big as two Oreos.  I don't go through a drive-through to get a snack.    I go to the gym at least twice a week.   

You have to strike the right balance when it comes to these:

• they have to be something that you really want to adopt permanently, with few exceptions.  
• They have to be something where it doesn't matter if you're doing "okay" -- for the rest of your life you want to live with these bright-line boundaries, no matter what your dress size.   
• And you have to know when to define your bright line around a "never" (in my case, "never eat a whole pizza") and when to define it around a "normal" that can be excepted on special occasions (like the two-egg thing; if I'm starving, I'll order a big fat omelette at a restaurant, but I think of it as a splurge, a deviation).

The hard part is creating the bright line in the first place.  I may think I want to stop doing a certain behavior, but often I find that I don't really want to.  I've tried to establish "I never nibble off the kids' plates after lunch" and it hasn't worked very well.  On the other hand I might well be able to establish "I make the kids scrape their own plates into the trash after lunch," now that I think about it.   So maybe part of it is carefully choosing which behavior to enclose in those bright lines.

Right now the "okayness" I struggle with is in the physical activity.  I'm in pretty good shape compared to the average woman my age; training at a higher level is not feasible right now because of my other responsibilities, so I have no reason to set a stringent goal; even Mark can't run faster or longer than I can because he's recovering from an injury, so I haven't got the motivation to keep up with him.   I still go to the gym twice a week, and try for three times, but I haven't been pushing myself very hard lately; I've told myself "I only have to run for twenty minutes and then I can quit," and pretty often when I get to the end of the twenty minutes I do quit.  For a while there I was running at a peak speed of 7.2 mph at intervals, and these days I go "meh" and set the treadmill at 6.0 and try not to think about it till I'm done.  Well, I didn't draw the bright line around a certain number of minutes or a certain speed; I drew it around showing up twice a week.  And I faithfully show up twice a week, but I don't work very hard right now.  

Why the backsliding?  I think I feel a little bit overwhelmed with things right now -- look how badly my blogging has fallen off -- and so it's harder to say "no" to the voice that says, "You're sick of this treadmill and you could just get off and go take an extra-long, extra hot shower."   My solution to this has been to run less and swim more, since I hate to run and love to swim.  It works.  At minimum, I want to keep running enough that I don't hurt myself when I do run, and one run every week or two seems to do that.  

Anyway, I still have to take a good hard look at my habits and clean them up now and again, because where I didn't draw a bright line they occasionally veer into "old bad habit" territory.  One way I'm doing that right now is by keeping a food diary and counting up the calories -- it's not a permanent habit, it's a diagnostic tool to find the places where I can improve.  Mostly it reminds me of things I already learned:  I don't need a snack between breakfast and lunch.  An afternoon snack with a little protein in it is generally a good idea, but it doesn't have to be big.  Second servings at dinner is something I have to be careful about.  All these things I know, but it's really easy -- when things have been going well -- to trick myself into thinking I'm in pretty good shape -- I can afford to splurge often enough that the "splurge" creeps back into becoming an everyday thing. 

Anyway, I think the best defense against the "okayness" problem are bright lines -- boundaries which are meant to stand no matter how "okay" you feel.  They can be somewhat porous and can have exceptions -- but the point is that they define a lifelong norm.  I find that wherever I've managed to establish them, they have remained.

Semiannual gluttony retrospective, part II. The numbers.

So I haven't been doing that "weight control chart" for a long time now. I still weigh myself most mornings, and every few days I write it down because I want to keep a long-term record (and if nothing else, there's a height and weight check-in on the NFP charts, so I will at least have one data point per month). I stopped doing that thing where I would start following more rules when I had so many data points (weight readings) that were in such-and-such a range, etc. It was worth a try, but it was really too involved to keep up with.

I have been thinking more and more about the most useful attitude to have toward the numbers: the weight on the scale, the dress size, and even the calorie count (or WW points or carb grams---whatever countable food metric you might be considering).

Coming into the start of my fifth year of weight control, I am even more strongly convinced of a particular way of thinking about these numbers. I have pointed out before that "the numbers" are not under your direct control. Behavior and habit development are under your direct control; the numbers aren't. If weight/size control for health is your desire. the numbers are useful -- not as goals or targets, because you cannot really aim at them -- but as diagnostics to evaluate existing habits and behaviors.

The sequence goes like this:

• Check the numbers
• Decide to develop a particular habit that seems it might be helpful
• Set goal to "hit" the habit by repeatedly practicing the behavior until habit is established
• Once habit is established, check the numbers again
• If the numbers are good (or at least not worse) and the habit is pleasant or tolerable, keep the habit; if the numbers are worse or the habit is intolerable, choose a different habit.

The important thing here is that if you're going to freak out and feel like a failure, don't do it because the numbers are bad. Focus all concern about failure, all motivation to succeed, on the behavior. Not on the numbers. The behavior is what you can control. The numbers are an indirect effect.

 

One of the things I am even more sure about is that even the number of calories you consume counts as a metric, not a behavior. I know it seems wrong, because theoretically you ought to be able to directly control the number of calories you put in your mouth. But it is so foreign to human relationships with food to calculate calories before eating them, and it is such an intrusion into normal eating behavior to do it, and it is so difficult to keep up long-term (not to mention being pretty inaccurate) that I really think it needs to be considered a metric, something that is indirectly affected by the choices you make throughout the day.

 

Even if you take the step of counting calories before you eat them, using a calorie counter to make a plan and then trying to stick to it all day, you still need to employ direct behavior strategies, and whether you consume the number of calories you planned or not is an indirect result of all the choices you made that day. One of them was the choice to count up the calories and put together the meal plan, of course. But there were many others: did you measure your food every time? did you take steps to avoid temptations? what did you do when you had to make an unexpected substitution? At the end of the day when you count up all the calories, the number you actually ate is a measure of whether your decisions were useful or not.

 

In other words: don't berate yourself for eating 1,972 calories instead of 1,300 calories. Measure it, write it down, work on the habits, and then some day in the future try measuring again and see if, with a similar effort, you manage to get closer to the 1,300.

 

I find that periodically spending a week or so pre-planning my portions in order to hit a certain calorie range is a good way to remind myself of the portion sizes I actually need, so I do this from time to time. (I am doing it this week; the semi-annual gluttony retrospective is here for a reason, after all). But I try really hard to think of the behavior goal as "I will sit down every evening for a week and pre-plan my portions and foods to the best of my ability to predict them, and at each meal I will measure portions and make corrections to the plan to reflect reality." I don't think of it as "I will eat no more than 1700 calories each day." Because ultimately, unless I moved into a locked laboratory, I can't just make that happen. I don't eat calories; I eat food, things like strawberries and cheddar cheese and turkey sandwiches and Twix and margaritas. The calories are an abstraction, and they are not worth getting upset about. I just use them, from time to time, to tell me if my habits are helpful or harmful.

Semiannual gluttony retrospective, part I.

First of all, here is my maintenance cred.

This is me in 2008, near the end of my weight loss...

...and this is me a couple of weeks ago, wearing the same clothes and attempting to reproduce the pose (no belt, though):

I think I weighed about 109 pounds in the 2008 photo.  I probably weighed 114 in the 2012 photo.  Truth is, I like myself better at 114 than at 109.  The giddiness has been replaced by a quieter and more long-lasting satisfaction.

+ + +

Let's talk first about whether maintenance is getting "easier" as time goes on.

The challenges change, that's for sure.  My mental health has improved.  When I first changed my way of eating (WOE as they call it on the various boards -- not my favorite acronym the Internet has produced), I had done little but exchange one kind of disordered eating and disordered movement for another:  I'd gone from slothful gluttony to hyper-control-freaky rigidity.

 I'm not saying I regret that, because the second set of disorders got me where I wanted to be.  But they took a while to fade.  

The improvement is here:  When my weight is within limits, well under control, I can just... live.  No counting, no stressing.  Eat when I am hungry, etcetera.  I do normal things like occasionally nibble on the kids' leftovers, but I don't feel compelled to clean their plates for them.  I sometimes have seconds of something tasty, without guilt, but I don't eat six helpings.  I might eat that extra slice of pizza now and then.  Sometimes, when I'm busy, I skip going to the gym and I don't worry that it means I will never go again.

Nowadays, I only get that panicky must-count-all-my-calories, guilt-over-the-sensation-of-fullness, must-get-to-the-gym-before-all-else, lie-awake-fretting-about-whether-I-can-still-control-myself-sufficiently feeling when my weight goes up to 115 or if I wear a pair of pants that feels tight as I go about my day.

I am unsure as to whether I should consider its persistence a feature or a bug.

Probably it causes me to do the right thing, i.e., moderate my eating and maintain my healthy weight, for the wrong reason, i.e. PANIC PANIC PANIC PLEASE DON'T LET ME HAVE TO BUY BIGGER PANTS AND PLEASE DON'T LET ME SEE "TIL that smartypants bearing is fat again" ON THE FRONT PAGE OF REDDIT OR EVEN /r/catholicism PLEASE.

Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons has always been my specialty.  Never could quite figure out how to make the wrong reasons go away.

+ + +

Despite how I really feel and behave, I know the attitude I aspire to have.  Even if I pruned away the vanity and the fear of shame that largely keeps me in line, these thoughts --- if they remained --- might be enough:

• I want to keep my body strong and healthy as I grow older, in the context of unpredictable twists and turns of life and genetics, so that I can keep doing what needs to be done.  "Living out my state of life, the best I can under the circumstances," you might say.
• I don't want to be a glutton.

The longer I keep this up, the more obvious it becomes that my "wrong" reasons for working hard to stay at a low weight actually fight against these better desires.  The more I focus on the number on the scale and the fit of my clothes, the more tempted I am to slide back into bulimia -- not conducive to the long-term health I say I value -- and to a different sort of gluttony, the kind where I worry constantly about food, get all high-maintenance in restaurants, and snap at children because they ate my special yogurt that I was saving for my 3:30 p.m. snack.

Because one thing I've learned through the past four years is that there are eating disorders that keep you fat and eating disorders that keep you thin, but they're still disorders.  There are gluttonies that keep you fat and gluttonies that keep you thin, but both are no good way to live.

+ + +

So it's still hard to keep mentally and spiritually healthy with respect to food.  Still very hard.  I think I have the right target -- I know what is right -- and maybe it will go on being hard to hit that target, but at least I can see it and I can keep aiming for it every day.  I accept this cross.

+ + +

I noticed that certain old bad habits are easy to slide back into, and other old bad habits I have still never touched.

The ones that are easiest are the ones that are common to lots of people, especially the ones that aren't necessarily bad for other people who maintain their healthy weight without difficulty.

I have the misfortune of being a small person.  I calculate my maintenance calorie target to be something like 1800 calories per day.  This is not a lot.  The average American caloric intake in 2003 was 2,757 calories, according to the USDA.  And I live with a man who needs roughly 2,800 calories per day to maintain his weight, according to the roughest calculator that takes gender, height, weight, and activity level into account (here, scroll down to Method #2).

If I take my cues from people around me, I'm basically sunk.  And it's really easy to take cues from people around me.  The weight-gaining habits that I find easiest to slip into don't sound like bad behavior, they sound like normal-people behavior.  That's because they are normal-people behavior:

• Filling up my plate
• "Hey, can I have a few of your fries?"
• Pouring a full glass of beer or wine with my dinner
• Taking a second serving at lunch or dinner 
• Sharing a bedtime snack with the family
• Building meals on a foundation of whole grains
• Letting the number of vegetable/fruit servings per day slip below six

These are normal things for people to do and I cannot do them regularly without gaining weight.  Because I am a small person and I can only burn 1800 calories a day.  But because they are normal things for people to do, and because my kids and husband do all of them without trouble, it is really easy to slip into the habits.  Heck, it barely even counts as gluttony except that I know better.

The kinds of things that I don't ever slip into, that I find easy to avoid now, are the things that I firmly think of as gluttonous for the average person.

• I still don't eat meals between meals.  If I have a snack, I'm good about keeping it small.
• I still don't go through drive-throughs to get a snack.  I keep almonds and granola bars in my car.  I stick to those, and most days I never touch them, but if I need them they are there.
• When Mark goes out of town for four days, I still don't order an entire medium pizza and eat it sadly in front of the computer after the kids go to bed. 
• I still don't eat two or three eggs for breakfast.  (Unless I have just come from the gym and am in a breakfast restaurant on a Saturday morning after 8 AM and they have eggs Benedict and they won't sell me a half order.  I have found that in this circumstance it is useless to resist; better just to compensate with a lighter lunch.)
•  I still don't devour an entire box of cereal or sleeve of saltine crackers at one sitting. 
• I still cut small servings of desserts, doughnuts, etcetera.   (Taking seconds is an easy habit to fall into.  Cutting big pieces is not a habit I have a problem with.)
• I can't remember the last time I have gone on a binge through the pantry.  I may be cured of lonely binge eating.

There's nobody around me who regularly does any of these things (except that Mark eats big snacks, but I can mostly deal with that one).  I think of a drive-through as a Bad Place To Get A Snack.  I have internalized the idea that eating a whole pizza by yourself is bad.  I believe that desserts are best enjoyed in small portions.   These are hard to slide into without noticing.

I still eat shredded cheese out of the bag, though.  There's just a lot of shredded cheese around here.

I'll write more later.

The semi-annual gluttony retrospective.

Well, it's that time of year again.

In May and November of every year --

yeah, I'm a little late this holiday season, but at least I made it to the crucial "between Thanksgiving and Christmas" metric --

I write a few posts about the maintenance of my 2008 weight loss.  

I do this for a couple of reasons.

First, it gives me the opportunity to clean up the links to old posts about gluttony, weight loss, and weight maintenance.  Taken all together, the posts about gluttony and weight loss and such form a lengthy and growing series, and it's one that gets a lot of hits.  I can see from the stats that often someone comes to read through the whole thing.  I like to keep it maintained if I can.  (Right now it's a little ragged.  I'll let you know when I get it all fixed up.)

Second, it gives me a needed semi-annual accountability fix.  It always seems that right about every six months, I've started to slide a bit, and writing publicly about my lazy bad habits generally shames me into paying attention to them again long enough to do me some good.  This is a long-term project and it needs regular upkeep, even as the frequency of upkeep has dropped quite low.

Third, time has refined and tested many of my theories and ideas about how to defeat gluttony and, secondarily, how to resist gaining the weight back; also, how to maintain mental health and raise children with healthy attitudes toward bodies, food, and fitness.  As I stumbled along, I got a lot of things wrong or at least not quite right, and as I get older and learn things, I like to go back and see what I used to think and write, and ask myself if I have learned anything new.  I want to find places where I was wrong, and point them out here in this space, maybe go back and update old posts.

Readers:  

• what would you like to see here in the next few posts?  
• any stories from the trenches you'd like to share?
• recommendations of articles or books?  (A few people have sent me some already that I've saved for this)
• any questions?

The combox is yours.

 EDITED TO ADD:   Really, only one comment or question?  Maybe I've finally exhausted the topic!

Exercise can make you fat. So what?

This Daily Mail article has been getting around -- it's a popular-press take on the theme "exercise can make you fat."

I am always kind of interested in how this particular idea gets reported in the popular press, because it strikes me that the tone is very important. Too much emphasis on the difficulty of losing weight through exercise alone, and the article can come across as saying "Why even bother increasing your activity when it is going to make weight loss harder?"

And if the article suggests tips for encouraging weight loss while exercising, it runs the risk of making exercise seem even more complicated by introducing extra "rules" to worry about. The Daily Mail article, for example, suggests

• Choosing "fairly vigorous aerobic exercise, such as running or cycling," over weight training
• Fasting for two to four hours before a workout
• Instead of energy bars or energy drinks, consume "a bowl of porridge a couple of hours before a workout" and drink a half-liter (think two glasses, folks) of water with a tiny pinch of salt an hour before and during exercise. (Well, being Brits, the Mail also suggested drinking "squash" as an alternative to water. This confused me momentarily, but Wikipedia is here to help you.)
• Choose intense, 20- to 30-minute workouts over longer, more leisurely ones.

There is not a whole lot here, but I think the article could have been a little more helpful by repackaging it to counteract some of the most-often-perceived barriers to exercise.

 

• You need less time than you might think for a good workout. A 20-minute, vigorous workout might be as effective as a much longer one.
  
• You don't need to have eaten anything just before a workout.
• Skip the energy bars and energy drinks. Drink water.

 

Anyway, it seems a good enough time for me to reiterate my personal advice regarding the interaction of exercise with nutritional behavior.

 

• Don't start an exercise program and a food-restriction program at the same time. Pick one and spend a few months on it before adding the other.
• I recommend starting with exercise. If you're starting from sedentary, begin with either two 20-minute sessions a week, or 5 minutes every day -- whichever makes more sense depending on what you are doing and what fits into your schedule. Work up gradually from there. "Gradually" means "slowly enough to give your life a chance to remold around the exercise sessions as a permanent feature of your schedule."
• Evaluate your progress in the fitness program based on performance, not loss of weight or inches. You are not allowed to quit or change your fitness program because of any observations whatsoever about weight gain/loss.
• The first metric of performance is "Did I show up for my scheduled session or not?" Once you have "showing up" pretty well down pat, you can move on to the second metric, which is "Did I finish my session?" After that is established, then you can work on lengthening the sessions, up to some sustainable, schedule-able level that allows enough time to work on performance. (Say, 45 minutes twice a week, or 20 minutes 5 days a week.) Then you can start increasing intensity.
• Expect that adding exercise to your life will disrupt your appetite, but don't worry about it -- except, maybe, to repeat to yourself affirmations like "Energy bars are just expensive candy, and energy drinks are just expensive soda."
• A few months of showing up to your sessions and finishing your sessions, maybe even having worked them up to longer sessions and started to improve your performance, will have put you in a very different frame of mind. You don't anymore regard exercise as a bizarre anomaly of the schedule that gives you license to have a bunch of extra snacks just because you exercised today. When you get to that point -- when exercising really feels normal, whether you do it every day or only a few days a week -- that is a good time to add in some kind of attentive nutrition program. Hold steady on the exercise habit, and begin.
• If your exercise habit slips, back off on the food restriction. Also vice versa. Change one thing at a time.

It isn't terribly scientific, but I can't see how it can hurt, considering that exercise has so many known benefits going for it even without weight loss, and (unlike diet-induced weight loss) exercise-induced performance improvement is something much closer to your direct control.

Securing the food supply.

A phrase in my last gluttony post fairly jumped out at me today as I re-read it over my eggs Benedict.

...[I]t is possible to become, out of habit, so psychologically deranged with respect to food that one begins unnecessarily violating social norms and the demands of duty and charity in order to secure one's food supply (when in fact the food necessary to support health is not at risk).  

The phrase is "to secure one's food supply."

It jumped out at me because it so perfectly encapsulates the constant feeling of need I used to have, all the fretting about my next snack or my next meal, before I got better, before the weight came off.  It sums up perfectly the remnants, almost like flashbacks, that I still have once in a while -- the sudden urges that I've learned to dismiss (most of the time), the odd tendencies I still have to fret about whether I've bought enough for the dinner guests.  

Back when I was heavy, I was always trying to secure my food supply.

Never mind that my food supply was not at risk; I had a constant feeling that I had to secure my food supply.

+ + +

Once I remember feeling faint at school and being taken to the cafeteria -- I remember sitting there with my saltine crackers and paper cup of juice, feeling naughty and special for being out of class.

That used to happen a lot:  the bottom would fall out of my brain and I couldn't think until I got something to eat.  A strange panic would rise, and I would go looking for food.   Within a few bites of, say, a cheeseburger, I would feel oddly soothed, relieved; but the panicky feeling wouldn't go away until I no longer felt the slightest twinge of anything that resembled hunger.  I would have to eat until I literally felt full before I felt safe.

This would happen between meals.

At meals there was never any question of stopping before I was stuffed. I hated that feeling of "head-hungry," not being able to concentrate; it always hit long before I felt "stomach-hungry."  I tried to prevent it by eating in advance.

+ + +

Though this is the first time I've lit upon this phrase, I've known about this problem for a long time.   One of my very first gluttony/weight loss posts on this blog, "What's wrong with me," identified the problem as "an  irrational fear of getting hungry:"

Consider the evidence: 

• I tend to "stock up" at meals by eating extra.  I catch myself explicitly thinking, "I'd better eat more now so I won't get hungry later."  
• There are certain foods that I eat compulsively if they are just sitting around as leftovers, even if they don't taste very good to me. Never sweets, always carbohydrates, great for packing in as many calories as possible in a short period of time.  White rice; plain pasta; tortilla chips; dry cereal; white bread; pizza; saltine crackers.  I can still eat a whole sleeve of saltine crackers, no problem.  (No wonder going low carb helped me.  Eliminating these things from my house was a good thing.)  
• I rely on external cues to tell me how much to eat.  If people around me are eating, I do too.  If there's still food on the table, I have another helping.  If something will be thrown out if I don't eat it, I eat some.
• I get very antsy on road trips as mealtime approaches, if we haven't yet planned when and where we're going to stop for the next meal. 
• I get irrationally irritated when I'm over at someone's house for dinner and dinner is delayed for some reason.  I have to squelch the urge to keep asking, "So, when's dinner going to be ready?"   I mean, I know it makes me a terrible guest, so I do my best, but it's really hard!
• My friends who dine with me regularly will tell you that whenever I am responsible for feeding a crowd, I am very preoccupied with there being "enough" food. Either I make too much, or I start apologizing for it the minute people arrive. "Erin!  Chill out!  If we get hungry we'll make some sandwiches!"  Doesn't matter.  Hostess anxiety is my lot in life.
• Oh, and then there's this recurring dream I keep having where someone gives me piles and piles of food and I know that I have to eat it.  The menu, the reason I have to eat the stuff, and the setting varies (buffet restaurant; friend's house; interview luncheon), but the theme is always there.  I have had this dream for as long as I can remember, maybe five or six times a year. 

Ready to psychoanalyze me yet?  Look, you can call it "gluttony" if you want.  I won't shy away from that term.  It is a self-centered way to be, I'm tired of it, and I'd be a better person if I overcame it.

Obviously I long ago "named and claimed" it as gluttony.  But looking at it deeper, what I was trying to do -- the reason I behaved as a glutton -- was "securing my food supply."

Even though, as I said, my food supply was not. ever. at. risk.

It's a little bit crazy.

+ + +

I could quite readily believe that the need to secure my food supply originated in my brain or body chemistry, and that it had something to do with the hypoglycemia and the insulin resistance that I pretty clearly experienced.  It's the hormones that drive hunger and cravings, most notably insulin; maybe there are more yet to be discovered (after all, ghrelin and leptin were only discovered in the mid-1990s).  Maybe there's some hormone that drives food-supply-securing behavior, some kind of hunting and gathering and storing away.     Something that drives you to stab people with your salad fork when they try to steal your French fries.  Something that drives you to hide your favorite ice cream in the back of the freezer where no one else can get it.  Something that drives you to eat "so you won't get hungry later" even if you're not hungry.  Something that drives you to fret all the time about whether you made enough food for everyone.

(What should we call this hypothetical hormone?  I vote for "squirrelin.")

+ + +

This isn't the only body-brain mismatch I've experienced.  Here's a bit from (believe it or not) a 2009 meditation on Holy Thursday:

Have you ever had a genuine panic attack?  I have.  I had a string of maybe five panic attacks over a period of about six months when I was in college.  I never knew why they appeared, and I never knew why they went away again -- I've never had any since.    I remember it vividly though, one of the most surreal things ever to happen to me.

It was surreal because at every moment I knew exactly what was happening to me.  I recognized the sensation as a panic attack.  I knew I was, in fact, safe.  I knew there was no thing that could have triggered a legitimate fear response.  And yet my body was behaving as if I was in terrible danger.  My heart was pounding, my skin was sweating, the prickly hairs were standing up on my neck and arms, my blood was dumping adrenaline into my muscles, my breath came swift and panting, the lights brightened as my pupils dilated.  

I suffered.  Not because I knew fear but because I felt it in my body.  My physical response created an unbearable restlessness -- my very cells shrieked, Run! Fight!  And in a way that made it even worse, because I knew there was, in fact, no point in running and nothing to fight.  And yet my body urged me to do something -- I kept having this urge to leave the house I was in, to run away into the night.  But since I knew I was safe, I had to bring all the strength of my will to bear against the irrational urges of my body to flee.   I told myself "This is a panic attack, it will pass," but the one thing I did not know was how long it would last.   In the end I sought help, called a friend (to my embarrassment, waking up his parents in the middle of the night) and begged him to keep me company on the phone until the terrible sensations passed.  

 It wasn't very nice of me to wake up my friend's parents, because I knew perfectly well that I had no "real" reason to seek help.  I put it off and put it off and finally my will snapped and I couldn't bear to be alone anymore.

I wonder now if this is a little bit analogous to resisting the cravings for unhelpful food at the wrong times.  I wrote that gluttony comes in once you know when and what you're supposed to eat, and once you've put the plan in place to get rid of all the obvious external barriers to doing "the right thing" by your endocrine system.    Gluttony's what's you're up against when you know what you are supposed to eat and you know why and there's nothing stopping you except your own lack of will.  

But that's sort of like saying that I was up against uncharity, selfishness, that night that I was sweating by the phone, wanting to call, knowing that I wasn't in any true danger, knowing that I would wake my friend's parents up and ruin their sleep if I called.  I knew if I called I would inconvenience several people and if I didn't call until morning the only thing that would happen was I would suffer for a few hours.   Oh, but it was hard, and in the end selfishness won out; I rationalized that I needed to call, and that they would not be so inconvenienced, and that was the end of that.

Yes, I was selfish.  But in part it's because I managed to convince myself "What I'm about to do isn't nearly as bad as what I'm going through now."

+ + +

So I wonder about that.  

I can point to my panic attack and say, "Well, I had this ideopathic reaction in my sympathetic nervous system, and it created an illusion that I needed something, and that I could get that thing (another person's voice) only by inconveniencing another person.  Even though I knew rationally I had no real need, ultimately I rationalized that my perceived need superseded another person's real need, and that is why I behaved uncharitably."

Can I point to my bingeing and hoarding and say, "Well, something in my endocrine system created this constant, low-level illusion that my food supply was endangered.   Even though I knew rationally that I would never really go hungry or even miss a meal, I rationalized that this constant need to secure my personal food supply superseded my obligations to my health and to others, and that is why I developed my habit of gluttony."

It is not an excuse.  It is more of a diagnosis.  A "motivation" for gluttony.  And I think that understanding that motivation, understanding that I had a fear of hunger, was something that helped me, finally, tear it out (if incompletely) by the roots.

I think there can be other motivations in other people.  I'll speculate about some possibilities in another post.  

In the meantime, if you think you might be a glutton, but it has nothing to do with securing your food supply, tell your story in the combox.