bearing blog

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.

+ + +

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.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Book review, part 1: Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.

This past week I finished reading Willpower:  Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney.  I recommend it.  

As nonfiction goes, it's a fairly light and quick read, and interesting:  I would rank it with Brian Wansink's Mindless Eating in the pop psychology genre.  Like those Wansink describes, some of the psychological experiments that Tierney and Baumeister recount (most of which were designed and executed by others) are interesting and creative.  Interesting, creative, and cruel:  I really, really felt bad for some of the experimental subjects, who had to do things like

1. first, fast for many hours
2. then, hungry, be ushered into a waiting room filled with the smell of baking cookies
3. sit next to a bowl of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and be told "Those aren't for you, here, have one of these nice crunchy radishes instead"
4. finally be given "intelligence tests" which consisted of puzzles that, in fact, had no solution, the point being to measure how long the subjects sweated over them before they gave up trying.

The book also includes material gleaned from a handful of celebrities, either from interviews or from excerpts from memoirs.  Not sure why they had to be celebrities, but they do make for interesting stories.  How Drew Carey looked at his messy desk, said "Shit, man, I'm rich," and hired David Allen (of Getting Things Done) to work with him as a personal organizer for a year.  How Eric Clapton stopped drinking, and speculations as to how AA's "abandon yourself to a higher power" thing can work even for atheists.  How performance artist Amanda Palmer maintained composure as a living statue, standing perfectly still for three hours a day even in the face of people trying to anger or amuse her, and how it affected her for hours afterward.  There's also a historical discussion of Henry Stanley (he of "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?") and how his memoirs hint that he could maintain discipline -- both of himself and of the men under his command -- through truly horrific conditions.

But the real gem of Willpower is the insights it suggests from research, some of which are surprising -- but which explain a lot.  I hinted at this in a blog post I wrote  about sticking to your resolutions, which drew on an article written by Tierney, and also you can see a New York Times review of the book here which summarizes it pretty well.

Before getting into the specific insights, though, let's talk about the problem posed by the very idea of "willpower" itself.   Some people, to be blunt, believe there is no such thing, pointing to various research findings that convincingly show that we are so often driven by forces of which we are not conscious.  Others are wary of bringing up the possibility because it smacks so much of blaming people for the situation they find themselves in, which may largely be because of forces outside their control.  

In the obesity research world, there is a lot of evidence out there that "lack of willpower" is not the root reason for much of the obesity problem.  Take Gary Taubes's two books, Good Calories, Bad Calories (I reviewed it here) and Why We Get Fat (I reviewed it here, here, here).  Both of them make a very convincing case that intractable obesity is caused by a biochemical vicious cycle that is triggered by exposure -- maybe even as early as in utero! -- to a diet of sugars and other refined carbohydrates.   The cravings and the difficulty resisting them are both products of broken hormonal signals, according to this model, and so you simply cannot say that obesity can be "fixed" through application of willpower alone to resist the temptation to overeat.  From Good Calories, Bad Calories:  "Though the traditional response to the failure of semi-starvation diets to produce long-term weight loss has been to blame the fat person for a lack of willpower... [some] have argued that this failure is precisely the evidence that tells us positive caloric balance or overeating is not the underlying disorder in obesity."

So let's stipulate for the purposes that this is true:  our decisions to give in, or not to give in, very often come from unconscious processes, or biochemical urges, or explicable impulses.  How do Tierney and Baumeister deal with that?  And the answer is that they  do it through a careful -- and useful -- definition of the terms "will" and "willpower."

The will is to be found in connecting units across time.... Will involves treating the current situation as part of a general pattern... You must treat (almost) every episode [of temptation] as a reflection of a general need to resist these temptations.

That's where conscious self-control comes in, and that's why it makes the difference between success and failure in just about every aspect of life.

The way I read it is this:  We may have no conscious and immediate control over the impulses that overtake us, the urges and cravings and temptations.  They may come from our environment or from chemical signals inside us.  And we may have little conscious and immediate control over the strength of our resistance against those impulses:  once the impulse has begun, if we are "caught out," there may be little we can do to fight against them.  

 

But we do have power to predict the impulses that may overtake us in the future, and we can take steps to prepare.  We can shape our environment so that they meet us on a battleground we have chosen, or we can avoid meeting them at all.  We can also whip ourselves into shape so that we have a better chance at resisting even if we are surprised by our impulses.

That is where the "will" part of "willpower" comes in.

+ + +

In a future post, I'll list some of the insights from the book that resonated with me.  Some of them, I met with a sense of recognition, as a general form of the specific insights that I discovered for myself during my weight loss and subsequent struggles with maintenance.  Finally, I'll discuss how I think people can harness these insights to hammer out a plan of action for personal change.

(I think I can write with some conviction and experience about how to harness willpower to overcome the specific fault of gluttony.  What I'd really like to do, though, is figure out how to harness it to overcome faults I'm still mired in.  Maybe, through continued writing about gluttony, I can see a way to draw analogies that will create a map to escape from those other faults as well.)

 

Accepting the facts and deciding to act on them.

In the last post, I replaced the vague question of "should I accept myself as I am?" with a process of discernment of a decision to change.  

It occurred to me that these decisions have long-, medium-, and short-term manifestations, so I thought I'd work through an example.  Perhaps this will become a series.

Here's what I came up with in that post:

1.  Understand and believe the relevant facts.

2.  From those facts, judge whether a change offers benefits.

3.  If a change offers benefits,  judge from the facts whether they are possible to attain.

4.  If there are benefits that are possible to attain, determine from the facts how they could be attained. 

5.  Decide whether you want to expend the effort to attain them.

  

LONG-TERM LEVEL

Understand and believe the facts:  "I wear such-and-such a dress size, or I went to the doctor and he told me I risk diabetes if I stay at my current weight."

Judge if a change is desirable:  "Yes, I want to have a smaller dress size, or avoid developing diabetes."

Judge if a change is possible:  "Yes, it must be possible because other people have permanently dropped a dress size or lost weight or changed their risk of developing diabetes.  Many of them have done it by eating less or otherwise changing their diets.  I don't yet have evidence that this approach would not work if I made a similar change in my behavior.  So it's possible that if I permanently changed my behavior, I'd permanently drop a dress size or avoid diabetes."

Judge how such a change is possible:  "Well, I could sit down and figure out what behaviors I could change most easily.  Then I could develop some strategies to remind me of my motivation.  That would take some planning time.  I'd have to practice the new behaviors.  That means learning to do something that's hard, over and over again.  I'd also have to learn how to deal with negative comments from people who notice the changes I'm making.  And I'll have to be ready to respond to setbacks by making useful adjustments instead of just giving up."

Decide:  "Do I want to do this?"

 

MEDIUM-TERM LEVEL

Understand and believe the facts: "I figured out that I habitually take second and third helpings at meals.  I don't actually know whether I could be satisfied with only one helping."

Judge if a change is desirable:  "Yes, I don't want to be ignorant about whether I can be satisfied with only one helping.  If I knew the answer to that question, I'd know whether sticking to one helping would be an easy way for me to permanently change my habits in the direction I want to go."

Judge if a change is possible:  "Yes, I could find out the answer by trying out the behavior of stopping after one plateful, and then seeing if I feel satisfied after the food has been put away."

Judge how such a change is possible:  "I'd have to resist eating second helpings after I finished my plate, and then I'd have to pay attention to how I feel for a while after the meal, and maybe write down my observations.  I'll need several strategies to resist the temptation to take seconds -- I could try eating slowly so that I don't finish my plate until it's nearly time to clear the dishes, or I could have a stick of gum ready to pop into my mouth as soon as I finish, or I could have a cup of coffee after dinner, or I could get up and leave the table as soon as my plate is empty.   I'd have to eat this way at several meals -- say, five or six dinners -- before I could really come to a conclusion. "

Decide:  "Do I want to do this?"

   SHORT-TERM LEVEL

Understand and believe the facts: "I told myself I wanted to know whether I'd be satisfied with one helping.  Now I've finished my helping and I want to eat more food.  I won't know whether one helping satisfies me unless I can get to the end of the meal to find out how I feel after only having had one helping.  But I want to eat more food and it sucks."

Judge if a change is desirable:  "Yes, I don't want to sit here any more looking at the food and wanting it and knowing I could have it if I chose."

Judge if a change is possible:  "Yes, I don't have to sit here any longer looking at the food.  I could eat it.  Or I could escape this situation.  Or I could change the situation somehow so I wouldn't want the food anymore."

Judge how such a change is possible:  "I could get up from the table and walk away. "

Decide:  Do you want to do it?

 

See how small the changes can be?  Even the long-term example needn't be "do I want to lose fifty pounds" or "do I want to drop six dress sizes," but can be a much tinier goal: "do I want to lose some weight" or "do I want a smaller dress size."   It's long-term because the intent is for it to be long-lasting, not because it'll take a long time to achieve.  The medium-term example needn't be "do I want to eat fewer helpings at dinner," but "do I want to find out whether I would be satisfied with fewer helpings at dinner?"  The short-term example is the most immediate:  shall I resist this helping? 

+ + +

I made up those examples.  Tune in next time for a real-life, real-time example from my own frustrations with maintaining my current weight loss...

What do you mean, "acceptance?"

On the post about vanity and physical fitness, Delores asked a question about weight loss:

what do you think is the sequence for losing weight? Not accepting your body, so you change it; or accepting who you are and then from that acceptance just 'loving' yourself enough to change.

I replied that I didn't think body acceptance was all that relevant:

I would say that dressing properly requires accepting the truth about your body. You should dress the body you have, not the body you wish you had or the body you fear you might have.

But for me, losing weight required accepting the truth about my behavior, not my body. Accepting or not accepting my body was sort of irrelevant.

I read that over a few times, and I am pretty sure that it's true.  But, I had to think for a while to be sure that statement wasn't reading back the story I'd like to tell into the past.  

But did you notice my vocabulary sleight-of-hand there? 

I'm not really happy with the vocabulary surrounding the debate about "acceptance."  Should people accept their bodies as they are?  Is the fat-acceptance movement healthy or not?    The reason I don't like it is that the words "accept" and "acceptance" are kind of weaselly -- they are chosen and used because they have positive connotations (who will come out against "acceptance?") but more information is needed before you can pin down the meaning precisely.   

First of all, "to accept" needs an object to make any sense at all.  One doesn't merely "accept," one accepts a thing -- or a person, or a place, or an idea.  A writer who understands this property of the verb "to accept"  won't make the error of describing a person as "very accepting."  It says nothing of substance, only imparts a glow of positivity, until the writer specifies:  Exactly what does she accept?

Second, the verb morphs its meaning depending on what the object is.  Watch this:

"I accepted the job" = "I agreed to the terms of the offer of employment."

"I accepted the gift" = "I agreed to receive the gift and I received it."

"The college accepted me" = "The college permitted me to enroll as a student."

"I accepted that fact" = "I acknowledged that fact as true."

"The restaurant accepts credit cards" = "The restaurant will receive payment in the form of credit cards"

"The employees accepted the poor working conditions" = "The employees endured the poor working conditions without complaining"

What all these threads of meaning have in common is the notion of receiving willingly or agreeably.   A thing which is "accepted" is received, along with all its consequences, whether they be good or bad, with the assent of the will in some way.   But notice the necessity of the concept of "receiving" -- something is grasped, or taken, or taken on, that was not grasped before. 

So when you're talking about "accepting a person" the meaning is perfectly clear if that person has undergone a sort of a change, has been "received."  When a college accepts a student or a team accepts an athlete, the meaning is that a person has newly become a member of a group because the group has agreed to admit him.  When a son's new bride is accepted as part of the family, that means that -- even though the other family members didn't get to choose her -- the family nevertheless willingly extends "membership privileges," treating her as they would a family member.  When we Catholics in our wedding vows agree that we "will accept children lovingly from God" we mean that we promise to welcome children that we don't yet have.  All of these cases involve an act of will, but also an act of receiving.  Even if the receiving isn't our choice (as in the case of the in-laws, or sometimes in the case of the children!), the act of will that turns it from merely "receiving" to "receiving willingly" -- to "accepting" -- is a choice.  That act of will may happen much later than the act of receiving (perhaps the in-laws take some time to "accept" the bride) but the receiving is still implied.

So -- here's a question -- how can one "accept one's body?"   "I receive my body willingly?"  That doesn't really work, unless personhood and will precede embodiment, a belief that I'm betting few or none of my readers subscribe to.    I have been embodied since my beginning.  I cannot "accept" it in any literal sense, because I never "received" it.   I can accept someone else's body (as a woman, I do, repeatedly in marriage and temporarily in pregnancy; as a Catholic, I do, repeatedly, in the Eucharist) but it's nonsense to say I accept my own.

So when we say something like "body acceptance," meaning one's own body, we must be using "body" as a euphemism or as shorthand for the real object of acceptance.  

One possibility is that we accept a physical condition that our body is in.    This has a connotation of "endure without complaining" -- in the way one might accept a privation, or a punishment, or the "poor working conditions" mentioned above, or a disease.  

But even this isn't really specific enough to say whether such "acceptance" is healthy or unhealthy.  What's going on inside?  The term doesn't specify whether the attitude is one of I'll-prove-I-can-withstand-this, or looking-on-the-bright-side, or uniting-my-suffering-to-the-suffering-of-Christ, or complaining-won't-help-so-why-bother.  Any of these will do to be described as "accepting the conditions."    But I think you'll agree that which one is meant makes a very big difference to the spirit.

Another possibility is that we accept some idea or truth or statement about our body.   This means, simply, "we believe" that idea or truth.  In that case, whether it's healthy to "accept" the truth or idea hinges on whether the truth is true!    "I accept that this morning I weighed 205 pounds" is a lot different from "I accept that I will always weigh more than 200 pounds."   "I accept that my physical condition increases my risk of developing diabetes" is a lot different from "I accept that I will develop diabetes."  "I accept that I wear a size 16" is a lot different from "I accept that I have to wear big baggy clothes to hide my ugly hips."   "I accept that it's very difficult to exercise" is a lot different from "I accept that I am not able to exercise."

So, to return to Delores's question,

what do you think is the sequence for losing weight? Not accepting your body, so you change it; or accepting who you are and then from that acceptance just 'loving' yourself enough to change.

Does she mean "enduring" a body-condition, or does she mean "believing" a body-truth?  I think the question becomes logical if we frame it as follows:

"What do you think is the sequence for losing weight? 

• First, not accepting the proposition  "Changing your body is impossible or undesirable."   (In other words, accepting the  proposition "Changing your body is possible and desirable.")  Then, you change your body.
• Or accepting the relevant facts about yourself:  that your body is in a certain condition, and that you live under certain constraints, and that you have certain tendencies and desires; and then with the power that comes from that knowledge, just willingly making sacrifices or acts of will that create good changes."

Wow!  When you phrase it that way, it's stunningly obvious that this is not an either-or choice! 

1.  Understand and believe the relevant facts.

2.  From those facts, judge whether a change offers benefits.

3.  If a change offers benefits,  judge from the facts whether they are possible to attain.

4.  If there are benefits that are possible to attain, determine from the facts how they could be attained. 

5.  Decide whether you want to expend the effort to attain them.

That's the order of operations, without using the word "acceptance."

Low-carb, low-impact.

Mark sent me a .pdf of a very interesting paper the other day:  "Nitrogen and Food Production:  Proteins for Human Diets," V. Smil,  Ambio vol 31 no 2, March 2002. It got me thinking about lower-carb living and sustainability.  

One way to think about farming:  "[A]griculture's principal objective is the production of digestible [nitrogen]."  Nitrogen is a proxy for protein, and its availability in the soil limits how much protein can be produced from the land.  That's why the advent of ammonia fertilizer led to such an explosion in land productivity.  But nitrogen fertilizers have environmental costs, and so we want to use them efficiently. 

-----

Back when I was trying to live low-carb, Atkins-style, one of the things that troubled me about it was that it seemed so... gratuitously meaty.    The Atkins folks are now recommending "at least 4 to 6 ounces of protein foods per meal," "8 ounces... if you're a tall guy," but five or six years ago I had gotten the distinct impression that you were supposed to eat "as much as you want" of bacon and beef and the like.  

Basically, the impression was:  Replace your bread, rice, and pasta with meat, eggs, and cheese.  Right?   And of course, even now, six ounces of protein-based foods per meal is more than a pound a day.   You've got to eat something, right?  And you don't want to be hungry?  And carbs are out?  So high-protein must be in.

But of course this is far more protein than individuals need.  Protein can't be stored,* so eating extra is wasted.   It's greedy, too, on a societal and environmental level; Americans overeat it, and pour nitrogen fertilizers into the soil in order to overproduce it, while in other parts of the world demand outstrips supply.

So why is the Atkins recommendation so high?  I think it's because the Atkins diet sells itself with that "you can eat as much as you want" theory.  The extra meat will fill your plate and your stomach, be satisfying to chew, and taste good; it is made of "normal" stuff that you're used to eating; and if the research on insulin resistance is to be believed, it won't contribute to your fatness.  You can, indeed, lose weight while eating lots of Atkins hamburger salads.

But it's still wasteful, if you're eating more protein than your body needs.  And the more people in affluent nations who try to fix their fatness by following Atkins-style high-meat low-carb, the more overall global demand for meat rises -- and for already-overnourished nations like us, that's shameful.

* * *

This is one reason why, even if we concede that high-refined-carb diets cause obesity and low-carb diets can cure it, we still have a gluttony problem.  A pound and a half of meat every day is a ridiculous amount of meat to eat, even for a "tall guy."  

Let's concede that a small number of obese, insulin-resistant people will not respond to a diet unless it contains virtually no carbohydrates at all.  These few folks will need a diet that's almost all protein and fat, of necessity based mostly on animal products.  They want to eat reasonably-sized meals with enough calories in them that they don't suffer terribly.  Okay, let those few people subsist on mostly meat, and more meat than their protein requirements call for.   Chalk it up as an expensive medical treatment.  But it's terribly wasteful to start there as a first resort for weight loss, or worse, for a lifelong way of eating.

* * *

Here are some things to keep in mind when designing a lower-carb, but more-sustainable way of eating.

1.  Too much protein and too little fat is an important cause of the famous constellation of side effects that accompany "Atkins-style" low-carb eating.

From Gary Taubes, Why We Get Fat, pg 214-216:

This shift [from running on carbohydrates to running on fat] can come with side effects.  These can include weakness, fatigue, nausea, dehydration, diarrhea, constipation, [postural hypotension], and the exacerbation of pre-existing gout.  ... This reaction is why some who try carbohydrate restriction give it up quickly. 

...The reason for the side effects now appears to be clear, and physicians who prescribe carbohydrate restriction say they can be treated and prevented.  These symptoms have nothing to do with the high fat content of the diet.  Rather, they appear to be a consequence of either eating too much protein and too little fat, of attempting strenuous exercise without taking the time to adapt to the diet, or... a web of compensatory responses [from the beneficial drop in insulin levels] that can lead to water retention and what are called electrolyte imbalances.

So too much protein is one cause of the unpleasant side effects.  Eat more fat and less protein -- which means you can eat less animal product and more vegetable oils like coconut, avocado, olive -- and the lower-carb adventure might feel a whole lot better.  (Meanwhile, make sure you get enough salt and don't overdo the exercise).

 2.  Don't overestimate your daily protein requirements.  Three grams for every ten pounds of body weight is slightly more than you probably need -- a number I get from using the recommendation of (0.6 g protein)/(kg body weight)*.  Another way to think about it is one gram per ten pounds of body weight at each of your three meals.  

I weigh 113, so it's doubtful I really  need more than 34 grams of protein per day.  Let's be generous and call it 36:  12 grams of protein at each of breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  So at each meal I can get enough protein from:

• 2 eggs; or
• 0ne-third of a small (5 oz) can of tuna; or
• one smallish chicken thigh; or 
• less than 3 ounces of not-particularly-lean ground beef; or
• almost two ounces of cheddar cheese; or
• a cup and a half of whole milk or yogurt.

Now, if I got most of my protein from plant sources like beans and grains, I might need to eat more, because the body uses the protein in these less efficiently.  And mind you, I don't weigh very much.  If you weigh 250 pounds, you might need twice what I need.  Oh, and growing children and pregnant women will need more than this.  So will someone who does a lot of heavy lifting.  But the point is, if low-carb living means you're going to eat globally-scarce animal protein at most meals, you don't have to consume more than your "fair" share (unless it turns out you have a medical need for it).

3.  Fill the rest of the plate with nutritious vegetables.  Flavor them with enough butter, sauce, oil, or cream to give you plenty of energy.    If you want a low-carb, moderate-protein diet, logically you must eat a good deal of fat.  There is nothing wrong with this.   And the thing that will give it to you, along with a nice lengthy eating experience and a sensation of fullness, is the dressed vegetable side dish.  Eat your veggies, and eat them with plenty of tasty, tasty fat -- not an excess, but enough to give you your daily calories.  This fat need not come from animal products.  The bulk of your calories can thereby come from veggies.

Atkins-style low-carb set an initial upper limit on even salad vegetables, which naturally means the dieters felt they had to eat more meat just to fill up their plates.  Some people might need such drastic limits, but I'm betting that most people will do fine eating as much broccoli, okra, cabbage, spinach, collards, cucumbers, cauliflower, asparagus, and the like as they want.   Might as well give it a try.  

4.  Don't waste so damn much food, especially protein.    Here is a sad statistic:  Somewhere between 25 and 55 percent of the food available to people living in North America, Oceania and Europe is simply wasted.*  Thirty-six hundred calories* are available to every American every day; that doesn't count exports.  We eat too much to begin with, and what we don't eat we waste.  

• A lot of these calories are wasted by retail sellers, who have to throw out expired meat and the like.  
• A huge amount is wasted by the restaurant industry; I don't know this, but I suspect that the fancier they are (i.e. the more operating expense they can pass on to the clientele), the more wasteful.  
• But we also waste a lot of food at the household level, by buying too much and cooking too much in the first place, by over-trimming, and generally by being too picky.   

 I've made this point before:  The first place you can reduce your carbon footprint is by wasting less so you can buy less.   What's more, unlike many other ways to go green, you'll actually spend less money (and maybe even time) on the effort.  (A somewhat frightening implication here is that every time we eat in a nice restaurant, we necessarily contribute to the problem.   Don't really want to go there....)

5.  Choose animal products that make efficient use of protein.  One way to compare protein sources is by feed protein to food protein conversion efficiency.    We could get protein by eating cereals and legumes; or we could feed some of the cereals and legumes to animals, and then eat the animals.  How much of the protein in those cereals and legumes can you get back?  We can accept a less-than-100-percent conversion because animal proteins are more bioavailable to us, and also because they come with valuable fats, nutrients, and iron (not to mention that most of us like to eat animals).  But how good can it get?

According to Smil, the best you can do is dairy products, which give you back 40 percent of the nitrogen (a proxy for protein) you fed to your cow.  Aquacultured fish are next, tied with eggs at 30 percent efficiency.  Eating chickens gives you back about 25 percent of what you "spent" in feed protein.  Pork:  only 13 percent.  And when you get to beef cattle, it's pretty abysmal:  five percent.

It does depend quite a bit on how your beef is raised:

Beef production is inherently the least efficient way of supplying dietary protein through animal feeding. ... This inefficiency is irrelevant in broader [nitrogen] terms as long as the animals are totally grass-fed, or raised primarily on crop and food processing residues (ranging from straw to bran, and from oilseed cakes to grapefruit rinds) that are indigestible or unpalatable by nonruminant species. Such cattle feeding calls for no, or minimal—because some pastures are fertilized—additional inputs of fertilizer-[nitrogen]. Any society that would put a premium on reducing [nitrogen] losses in agroecosystems would thus produce only those 2 kinds of beef. In contrast, beef production has the greatest impact on overall [nitrogen] use when the animals are fed only concentrates, now typically mixtures of cereal grains (mostly corn) and soybeans.

Switching from conventionally raised beef to grass-fed beef is expensive, and not even practically possible depending on the grocery options where you live.    But switching some of your conventional pork and beef consumption even to ordinary eggs and dairy is a cheap change, available to anyone anywhere, that can halve your meal's nitrogen footprint while still providing you high-quality protein, enough to support even a quite low-carb diet.

------

*Asterisked information comes from the Smil paper.

A deliberate cliff hanger.

Surf the Catholic mom blogs and it doesn't take long to gather a lot of angsty I'm-a-bad-mom links.

(I was going to post some, but I decided I don't want the mombloggers in question to think I am picking on them.)

 And what do you see? 

I spend too much time on the internet.  I spend too much time on the phone.  I need to take more time out for prayer in my day.  I need to stop reading about other people's lives.  I need to be fully present to my children.  I need to be more fully present to my spouse.  I probably should be taking the kids to daily Mass.  Maybe I should take a break from blogging.  Maybe I should go on a diet.  I should really re-subscribe to Flylady because my house is a mess.  I should really unsubscribe from Flylady because I can't keep up.  I need to bake more cookies.  I need to celebrate more feast days.   I need to sign up for a holy hour. 

I need to be more loving.  I need to be more devout.  I need to be more motherly.  I need to be more devoted.  I need to be more available.  I need to be more organized.  I need to be ...

... more...

... everything.

Everything at once.

Stop the madness, people.  Stop it now.

  * * *

I've been hinting for a long time that I want to explore the possibility that what I learned about gluttony through my weight loss could be applied in other areas of my life.  

Here:   

Is the "answer" to overcoming temptations of all kinds really for the "inner self" -- the one who "takes delight" in moral or correct or healthy or Godly behavior -- to set up the kind of structure around the "members" that cajoles them to behave?  To offer to the weak flesh, in return for good behavior, the short-term goodies it craves?

And here:

What do you really want to change about yourself?  I mean -- among the things that you could change.  Really.

I know I have a long list.  I wish I reflexively, automatically, responded to my children by strengthening connections, not rupturing them.   I wish that desire for the Lord, rather than duty, would draw me to prayer several times a day.  I wish that my irritation at an untidy house didn't get in the way of welcoming people into my home;  I wish I was more generous to my friends.  I wish I had a better grasp on how much money I spend.  I wish I knew how to teach my children love for Jesus as well as I think I know how to teach them theology and logic.  I wish I didn't waste any time sitting in front of the computer each day.   The list goes on.

Once I would have said "I wish I wasn't so heavy and out of shape."  I don't say that anymore.  So:  hope.

And skill.  I have a theory -- still untested -- that I can apply something I learned with the heavy/out of shape thing, to all those other wishes and longings. 

And here:

I didn't gain willpower overnight.  But I did, it seems, gain a will.  And the will to live differently was enough to drive me to find a way around the obstacles, the impulses.  It was suddenly so obvious to me that to follow these urges would still feel good, but would be the opposite of what I desired -- those paths would not just take me the opposite direction from what I desired, they would BE the opposite of what I desired.  I wanted to feel the steeper trail beneath my feet, not just the smooth downward grade.  I wanted more than the view from the top.  Though the effort would hurt, I wanted to climb. 

That desire is something that seems to have come out of nowhere, a pure gift; the closest thing I have ever come to understanding what grace is.  I believe there is more yet I can learn from it.  I believe I know what I am to do with it next. 

Will I?

And here:

I keep hinting about wanting to use what I've learned to defeat gluttony, to combat my next most besetting vice, which is letting this leisure-time activity of mine (and it's really not just internet use -- reading in general is part of it too) consume my attention.  It's possible that part of the problem is overconsumption, devoting too much time to it, and I guess I haven't exhausted the possibilities of self-limitation of total hours.  But honestly, I don't think it is "total time" that is the trouble.  It's the totality with which I get absorbed, even in taking a very short break to check e-mail or to dash off a quick blog post.  It's the reluctance to be interrupted.  I think Jen may have put her finger on it a bit in her post. 

Part of my vocation as mother demands that I make myself available to be interrupted when my children need something from me.  I am terrible at this.  Yes, I also need to train my children not to interrupt me for trivial matters, but you know, I want to be a mom who says "Sure, I'll read you a story" or "Yes, I'll help you settle that argument" or "Okay, I'll feed you breakfast."  I don't want the first thing I say to my kids in the morning to be "Aaaargh!  What are you doing up already?  It's not even seven o'clock yet!"  Even if I'm not done with my blog post.

I am struggling with how to put the pieces together for a strategy to change myself.  If I can do what I've already done, what can't I do?  But I still am not sure how to go about it.  I feel like I need a plan.

It wasn't just a plan I needed.  I needed a unifying theme.  I couldn't quite wrap my mind around exactly HOW the things I wanted to change could be analogous to the thing I DID change.  I know I don't want my children to remember me constantly staring at the computer screen, I know I need to say "Yes" more often, I know I need to be cheerfully interruptible.  And I had an inkling that the gluttony thing, what I've learned there, is meant to serve that higher purpose.  But I couldn't quite see how.  I have been thinking and praying about it for a many weeks, hoping that something would come clear to me.  Something that would show me how to get started, as clearly as that long-ago epiphany (May 13, 2008) when I woke up and decided to try being hungry for a change.

And a few nights ago, I think it did come to me.  I think I see where this has been going, all along.

More on this later.

Dietary laws.

Maybe it's because food choices have been on my mind again lately, but I've found myself thinking about religious dietary laws.

It's fashionable among the set known as the "New Atheists" these days to denigrate all forms of all religion as not only incorrect, but dangerous, something that ought to be purged from mankind.  My view is that we don't need to argue from any sort of religious principle to refute this notion; no appeals to apparent design or to authority are necessary.  Just look:  humans everywhere have always had an impulse to religion and spirituality.  It's clearly something that is an innate part of the human animal, wired into our sociobiology, as natural to us as mother's milk (another thing once viewed by the experts as suspiciously backward, distasteful and unscientific).  Getting rid of it entirely, for our own good, would be likely to backfire --- if it's even possible.

Dietary laws -- ritual avoidance of certain foods and ritual consumption of others -- are an example.  Aren't they pretty much found everywhere in every culture?

This goes beyond kosher and halal, all the way to people who don't think of themselves as religious at all.  For example, avoiding factory-farmed meat because of concerns about cruelty is a self-imposed religious dietary law.  So is carefully selecting your groceries for their carbon footprint.  You might prefer the connotations of "philosophical" or "ethical" versus religious, but there's not much practical difference. 

Since people can and do thrive on traditional diets that are heavy in meat and other animal products -- the Masai come to mind, as do Native Americans of the far north reaches of Canada -- it's pretty obvious that even healthism-based vegetarianism is a sort of religious dietary law.

Mainstream america has ritual dietary laws too.  When was the last time you saw tenderloin of dog or horse in your local supermarket?  And why, pray tell, not?

It seems to be part of human nature to attach an importance to food that goes beyond physical sustenance.  So even if we can't understand it, or see a practical reason for it, I would hope we can see it as, well, not utterly crazy when some culture or another follows a certain set of dietary restrictions -- just because.

Which takes me to the Garden of Eden.  How many times have you read or heard a non-Christian, non-Jewish person complaining of the arbitrariness of that whole "tree of the knowledge of good and evil" nonsense?  Why would God care if they ate this one fruit?  There's no good reason for it -- whoever wrote it down even made a point of mentioning that the stuff was good to eat, so what's the big deal?  Alternatively, you'll occasionally see a well-meaning believer defending the don't-eat-that rule on some practical ground of healthfulness or learning obedience or some such thing.

I think it's easier to understand the story -- and this works both if you take the story as something that really happened, or if you take it as a useful teaching story passed down by one of the world's most influential cultures -- as the story of the first dietary law.  The first "We eat this, not that.  Just because."

Pointing at the fruit of the tree while uttering "In the day you eat of it you shall surely die" is not, inherently, any nuttier than pointing at your tablemate's cheeseburger while muttering, "That shit'll kill you."  It doesn't matter that the modern health nut thinks that science is on his side -- it's still a prediction of religious significance -- because in reality the connection between any given cheeseburger and the untimely death of the cheeseburger-eater is practically zero, unless the eater chokes on it, I suppose.  And even if a lifetime diet of cheeseburgers will shorten your life, who's to say that's not a reasonable choice for someone who likes cheeseburgers?

But let's go back to dietary laws for a minute.  It's significant that the breaking of a dietary law should play such a crucial role in the stories I'm speaking of.  And it's not something that's alien to human nature either.  There are many layers to the story, but I can't help but think that it's in part a lesson that there are limits to our natural inclinations.  The tree's fruit was "good to eat," and there is no reason to assume the senses of the man and woman couldn't be trusted.  Yet, as the story goes, it was better, in that place and in that time, to choose not to eat it.  Resisting, if only on occasion, what we naturally want and can see is a good thing, must itself be something good.  And doesn't that fit with our ordinary experience?

In the moment.

A real-life friend of mine recently started blogging her journey towards healthier eating, and I've been enjoying following her entries. 

Something she wrote last night struck me as worthy of comment here:

So today I could have done worse, but I could have been much, much better.  It is getting easier to look back at the day and say "OK, I should have done it this way."  I am wanting to transition to thinking of it on the spot so I don't have to look back on the day and apply to tomorrow....  I know it'll come eventually.

I think it's actually really, really hard to learn the habit of "thinking of it on the spot" -- making careful food choices in the moment, in the face of hunger and possibly cravings, and sometimes in a less-than-healthful food environment.  I can make on-the-spot choices that match my goals now, in almost any environment, but this is something I had to learn.

And I did not learn to make good on-the-spot choices by making good on-the-spot choices, or by making bad on-the-spot choices, or in fact by making ANY on-the-spot choices at all.  What taught me to make on-the-spot choices was to make choices well in advance, and then stick to them.

Back in 2008, when I was learning, I would sit down in the evening and write out everything I planned to eat the next day, and when I would eat it.  Very quickly I realized why I had been unable to make good on-the-spot food decisions:  It takes time to figure out what to eat in advance!  Even more time when I expected my choices to be limited by circumstance. So why was I being so hard on myself for failing to make good choices on the fly?

The good news is that, after many months of planning ahead, I found that I had gotten better at making choices on the fly. I'd gained a lot of experience in difficult situations, like fast food restaurants and buffets, and I'd internalized some good rules of thumb that I can call on "in the moment" -- like "Eat entrees as if I were half a person and vegetables as if I were two people."  

I'd also learned that in some situations, even if my kids needed to eat a meal right then, the best choice for me might be to wait, to stay hungry until I could get home and have a real meal.  In other situations, I could eat something very small with protein in it -- a handful of the almonds I keep in my car, for instance, or maybe a kid-size hamburger -- and complete the meal by having vegetables and fruit, by themselves, later in the day. 

And I had more knowledge.  I had learned that a homemade bran muffin has just about as much protein as an egg -- so I don't need to add the egg to the bran muffin if I eat the bran muffin first.  I had learned that certain "healthy" items have more calories than the "unhealthy" items.  I had learned that it was possible to ask to have the cheese and croutons left off, the dressing on the side.  Things like that.

Just yesterday I found myself at Sonic with the kids at lunchtime.  There are no "healthful" meal choices there, although to their credit you can get fresh bananas or apple slices on the side.  I could have stayed hungry till I got home, but instead I opted to order one ordinary (not double) hamburger with "the works," and skip the sides and drink. It's a reasonable portion size, really.  Adding a banana might have added a health halo, but I know darn well (by now) that the calories in the burger were enough to be my whole lunch.  In the past I might have ordered a superficially "healthier" sandwich (like the grilled chicken wrap) and let that convince me I should order fries and a soda too.   Which would have given me far more food that I needed -- a gluttonous amount -- even if the sandwich part was theoretically better (something I question anyway).

But the point is, I only got to this point by planning ahead, which forced me to learn the real content of my choices, and empowered me to make better ones.  Once I had plenty of practice, I knew what the best choices really looked like -- and they aren't necessarily the ones I thought was best before, with people in line behind me and my children whining for fries.  I know better now.

Confession.

I recently received a question from a reader who agreed to let me share the question and my response.  Here we go:

I am 42 and had our 5th child almost a year ago. Previous to that pregnancy, I had cleaned up my eating and dropped to 120 lbs. - my college weight! I never thought I could do it and it was such a victory.

Since then, I have been discouraged day after day because climbing back onto the healthy eating wagon is turning out to be so hard for me. I know what I need to do because I've done it before. Yet, I keep choosing to eat junk.

... You credit the Sacraments to your weight loss. PLEASE elaborate on that if you have the time.

About the Sacraments and weight loss. It's funny, I don't think I've ever confessed the "sin of gluttony." I consider myself to suffer from an eating disorder, and so I was never really aware that I was being gluttonous for a very long time. If one is not aware  that one is doing something wrong, one doesn't incur guilt or require confession.  And guilt is mitigated in the presence of compulsions or even strong habit. I'm positive my sin [of gluttony] was venial, if there was indeed any sin at all.

After I realized that my behavior was, objectively, gluttonous, and became convinced that I had to change, I asked Jesus for help in the Eucharist, and received that help. Specifically, I asked Him to remove my disordered attachment to  all food except Him. I don't think it's entirely removed, but I am much less disordered than I was before!

I have never been "convicted" (as the Protestants say) that I was committing a sin in most incidences of overeating. It has been more a case of trying to develop the virtue of temperance in myself. As such, it's entirely appropriate that I got that strength through the Real Presence... as Food. 

Also, one has to eat every day, and it's not helpful to work hard at trying to draw the line [between sinful gluttony and garden-variety overeating]. Eating ten gumdrops is okay, but the eleventh is a sin? Is it only a sin because I'm overweight? Does a normal person need to confess every time she eats a double helping of ice cream and cake at someone's birthday party?  Thinking that way is, I'm convinced, harmful to me.

What I did bring to the confessional was my backsliding into bulimia. 

Whereas I need to eat every day, and it's difficult to decide when moderate eating crosses into immoderate eating; I don't need anyone to tell me that it is immoderate to make myself throw up. It harms my health (I have damaged my larynx) directly, in a way that eating a bag of chips doesn't. 

What's more, I was very aware of my free choice in the matter. I would feel  that I had eaten too much. I would see before me two paths: 

(1) I could remember the uncomfortably-full feeling and use it as a lesson to eat less the next time, to  stay out of the near occasion of sin-by-purging;

(2) or I could go to the bathroom, stick my finger down my throat, and make the extra food go away, thus reinforcing the habit and allowing myself an easy way out that would  even promise I could overeat in the future, again and again and again.

Sometimes I chose #2. And that is what I brought to confession. And for a long time after each confession, I believe I had the grace to not be tempted to purge.   (It wore off eventually. I have backslid and reconfessed this sin numerous times in my life.  But not constantly. I can tell I am receiving real help in the confessional with  this temptation.)

It's not a problem for me right now, I should add.  But I don't think I'll ever be completely safe from it.