I spent the weekend with Kim (in IA) and her husband and children, and did most of the cooking since they are busy enjoying a brand new baby. We arrived with Ohio-style sloppy joes and fruit salad; there was the coconut French toast with Polish sausage; we had beef short ribs in a barbecue sauce, served over slow-cooked polenta, served with a simple green salad, and Never Fail Gingerbread. I put chicken cacciatore in their crockpot before I left.
With all that comfort food -- and I know very well how to make comfort food that I like! -- I ate a lot. Even though I began the weekend still working on dropping a couple of pounds. Which spurred some more reflection on my "failure-free" weight control plan. Can it really be failure free? If so, what about this weekend? I didn't stick to my plan -- isn't that a "failure?"
It's instructive to compare my intentions now with my intentions in the past. Over the years I've been moderately successful as a low-carb eater. I'm still convinced that low-carb is a workable weight loss strategy for many people. Of course, "low-carb" covers a wide range, from mild restriction of refined carbs and emphasis on whole grains, all the way to strict ketosis-inducing diets of under 20 grams carbohydrate per day. I spent a lot of time inducing ketosis, not without success.
But ketosis-inducing diets have one peculiarity that work on a special kind of craziness. Simplified greatly, ketogenic diets -- more than any other I know of -- only work if they are adhered to meticulously. It takes a few weeks of perfect very-low-carb eating to flip the biochemical switch to "burn body fat" mode. It takes only a single meal or snack to flip it back to "conserve body fat" mode.
In other words, several days of hard work can be undone in a single snack. A slice of bread or two will knock you out of ketosis, and it might take you days or weeks to trudge back in.
This messes with your head, if you're a certain sort of person. You're focused on failure. Episodes of unplanned eating, or even just nibbles, loom in importance; days and days of careful success fade into the background. And then there's the recovering-bulimic thing. You just ate something that will ruin the whole last week's effort! Let's just say it creates a difficult-to-resist temptation to purge.
This unforgiving nature of ketogenic diets makes them really ill-suited for some of us, including me (because of the recovering bulimic thing) and probably people who are inclined to depression and despair in general, as well as people with poor impulse control. It's really easy to despair when every string of successes is followed by a failure which you believe (scientifically!) eclipses all the successes that came before.
But that's in my past. No more ketogenic diets.
So having eaten a lot over the weekend, I was struck by how much I don't feel like a failure, and how intellectually certain I am that I haven't "failed." I'm not glowing with success either -- I'm in no denial, I know that I didn't eat the way I planned. But it's not a step BACK. More like I took a break for a couple of days, and I'll pick up where I left off.
This thought helps me distinguish a little better what I mean by "failure" and why I say that I lose weight (when I need to) "failure free" now. I don't mean I never eat food I planned not to eat: unplanned eating happens. What's the difference?
I think it's this: I no longer believe that unplanned eating in the present or past has any power over my future behavior. I never live in failure's shadow.
I made Never-Fail Gingerbread this weekend, too! It was destined for a potluck as a vegan-friendly dessert. My Tupperware (actual, orange T-ware from the 1970's) came home empty!
Posted by: Christy P. | 18 May 2009 at 11:07 AM
Really, how could you feel like a failure after climbing to the top of the climbing pole (that I estimate was about 3X your height!) at the playground on Saturday? That was impressive.
Hope your upcoming days of planned eating go well.
Thanks again for the comfort food.
Posted by: Kim (in IA) | 18 May 2009 at 12:29 PM