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The new ground rules.

For a couple of years, 2008 or so, I wrote frequently about exercise and eating strategies.   Sometimes I wrote about how those intersect with theology of the body, or Thomist morality.  I returned to the topic sporadically, but not steadily, since then.  It's been a while since I've written much.

I wrote all that because I was in the midst of two major life changes.

• First, that year when my third child was a toddler, I was prioritizing regular exercise for me for the first time.  Having taken lessons before that pregnancy, afterwards I started swimming twice a week, later adding running.   In order to keep it up, I thought, I had to be obsessive and inflexible; for better or worse, I was obsessive and inflexible, and I did keep it up.  Still am doing it today.

 

• Later, after the shock of having sustained this new habit for several months, I began restricting calories, and over the course of about six months I lost 27 percent of my initial body weight.    Having thought of myself as perpetually dumpy and sedentary since childhood, I found myself now active, and also, not fat.

Note the causality:  My writing about this didn't bring it about.  I wrote because I was having what I called success, and I was desperately trying to make sense of it.  I needed to understand why it was happening, was because I was afraid that if I didn't figure out why it was happening, I would not be able to keep from going back to "the way I was before."

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Ha.  As if I could slip back accidentally to "the way I was before."   Back to my early thirties?  I am older!  Human beings are not reversible.  For one thing, my windows of possibility have shifted.  For another, I understand more.

I've learned that the effort required to track calories closely enough to override the body's own cues is seriously intensive, tends to push out other satisfying activities, and requires a constant input of motivation.   And I've learned that I don't want to live in that kind of monomaniacal relationship with myself.

It may seem odd, but motivation itself is part of the problem.  I do lift myself up with messages that are true and encouraging, and celebrate with rewards that are both pleasant and good.    That's great when they work.  But if those don't do the job, I've often been tempted to use any mental means to the end of self-control:  shame, fear, dwelling on bad memories, threats of self-punishment; contempt for my body, contempt for other bodies.    Those thoughts still pop up, even though I understand better the damage they can do.

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Sometimes I betrayed those thoughts in my writing.

Writing has been a way to motivate myself, maybe spread a little motivation to others who might enjoy it.  I think this is, in principle, a worthy endeavor.   I've always used writing to to see if my ideas make sense and to improve them, and the promise (threat) of a small audience raises the stakes enough to make it meaningful.    I feel reward when a reader comments that something clicked, gave them an idea, helped.   

But when you write, in part, as a tool to root out error.... a corollary is that frequently, the error spends some time noodling around on the page.  And one might not catch them all.    It's not inherently wrong to try to work out ideas in public that way.  But there are limits. 

First of all, I have to be clear about what I'm doing (sometimes, literally, making it up as I go along).

Second:  when the topic is one that has been as historically fraught as exercise and diet and body image and fat loss, one about which many people carry a great deal of internalized harm... I need to be selective about setting down those first drafts of my thoughts. 

Because I also carry internalized messages that have power, and maybe not just over me.  Some of my thoughts are not great, especially some that in the intervening years I've learned to recognize as intrusive thoughts.  It might help me to exorcise them by giving voice to their content, but will it help anyone else?  If I'm going to straighten myself out by writing about those, best to write them longhand on one of the yellow pads I buy by the case, at least in first draft.  And maybe just keep them to myself, or share with a therapist instead.

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It's hard for me to precisely sort my previous writing about this stuff into "definitely okay, maybe even good" and "definitely problematic."  I've considered going back and editing, but the task is too overwhelming.  I've considered deleting stuff, but I think there are kernels of insight there worth rescuing.   For now it's still all there, waiting for me to decide what to do about it.

Meanwhile:  I'm changing up my lifestyle once again.  I'm committing myself to strengthen patterns of thinking that are much more compatible with good mental health and body care.   I would very much like to clarify them by setting them out on the blog. 

But:  when I blogged about fitness and nutrition before, expressing what I was going through 10-12 years ago, I wanted to write conversationally and frankly but that really amounted to being careless:  careless about language, careless about the words I used relative to the philosophy of the human person; careless about how pouring all my unfiltered thoughts out on the page might affect people who have a history of eating disorders, or of scrupulosity, or of difficulty caring for themselves.   I don't want to make the same mistakes again.

Would it be better just to... not write about this sort of thing at all?  I'm open to that possibility.  I'm not sure I can find out unless I give it a try.

What if I could write about it without making those mistakes?  What would it look like?  

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Ground rules.

 

1.  I will not conflate weight, fatness, or appearance with health.   

It's not just that these, as indicators of health, are poor and incomplete—though they are.   

It also means no more blithe writing about "desire for health" as a nobler-sounding euphemism for desires to look better, be less fat, or weigh less.  Pretended concern for "health" has justified many rude and abusive people.   Let me call things what they are.

A crucial reason to carefully acknowledge the difference:  Fat people frequently report that health care providers become fixated on fatness as the primary indicator of their health, the sole probable cause of pain or other symptoms, and the first problem that must be "fixed" before they are allowed to access other levels of care.  (See this recent commentary by Aubrey Gordon.)

 

2.  I will acknowledge other biomarkers of general health that are better-supported by evidence.  

Anyone can self-assess the time they spend physically active, the number of alcoholic drinks they have per week, the hours they sleep, the number of fruit/vegetable portions they are able to serve themselves each day.   These behavior-based markers are much more often under an individual's direct control (although the range of available choice varies).  Hydration can be assessed by checking if the urine is consistently a pale yellow color.  Blood pressure,  lipid panels, and blood glucose testing are accessible to those who can afford at least annual basic preventive care.   

As for body-size-related markers of general health, my understanding is that neither body-fat percentage, nor weight, nor BMI work well at all as a predictor of eventual development of cardiovascular or metabolic disease.  The one exception may be waist circumference.   If I find myself casting about for a NUMBER, perhaps that one will work; otherwise, maybe I need to write something else.

(Two examples of papers with this finding; two examples don't substitute for a careful literature review, of course.  Note that adjusting the results for BMI does appear to improve the correlation.  This is possibly because it brings in a dependence of height; naturally short stature is itself an attribute that raises the risk of developing these diseases.)    

 

3.  I am not a fitness professional.  I am not a health care provider.  I am not a registered dietician.

I have my own experience.  I have scientific training; it is not in this field, but I have good scientific literacy and am able to assess the general usefulness of papers and applicability of research.   I know where to go for more information, and I know how to identify the difference between a broad scientific consensus and a matter with competing viable theories.   I also know how to take a piece of popular science writing and pick it apart, if I want to, or use it for entertainment purposes, if I want to do that instead.  All these mean that I can form an educated and reasonable opinion (you will not catch me scoffing about "Dr. Google," any more than I would scoff at public access to medical libraries), and I can write commentary about it if I like.  These are not, however, substitutes for authority.  I'm an educated amateur, not an expert in any of these areas, and I have an academic responsibility to remain clear about that to anyone who stumbles across my blog.

(This isn't a ground rule about which I really needed a reminder.  I try hard to live by it anyway.  But I thought it worth mentioning for completeness.)

 

4.  No biomarker, and few health-related behaviors, imply a specific moral conclusion.

Yeah, I know myself (imperfectly).   I might be able to tell you when I've made a poor choice, or developed a poor habit, or experienced a consequence, for lack of some virtue.   I know where I have agency, and I have some ideas where my agency has been damaged by circumstances.  I don't know that about others.  I can't speak for everyone else.

Assumptions about real people are tricky at best, and at worst they are outright bad and harmful.

Moreover, the following ought to go without saying:  there are no bad foods, there are no bad bodies, there is no such thing as cheating.  There is room for rest, and room for feasting, and room for fun, and no one else gets to tell you how much; there is room for you.

 

5.  Nevertheless, I'll stand by this:  morality, theology, charity, the philosophy of the human person, the demands of justice, aren't off limits here.

Nothing that human beings do or decide is untouched by the disciplines and philosophy of my faith tradition, and there aren't many traditions that pretend otherwise for themselves.    I hope to explore them in a way that doesn't violate the very principles I'm seeking to understand.  I'm not certain that I can, but I hope to.  

It is good to use appropriate self-discipline to strengthen virtue.  It is good to consider how to use resources prudently.  It is good to exercise detachment from outcomes.  At the same time, discipline is personal, resources are personal, outcomes are definitely personal.  So I need to take care:  if I write about my discipline and my resources, I need to make clear that they are mine and no one else's.

 

6.  I will be explicit about the limits of hypothetical situations and imaginary characters.  

Ah, the hypothetical situation.  Much maligned for good reason, sometimes useful for illustration, always a bit tricky in their execution.

I love hypotheticals, but I must be more careful with them.  It is tempting to think that if I think up a hypothetical situation, decorate it with only those details that seem to me significant, and imagining human-like actors, I can treat it as my very own creature of pure reason.   Since it is mine, I can manipulate as I please and  judge with omniscience. 

In one sense it's true, I can do that.  But real human readers have a tendency to see in these hypothetical characters someone "like" themselves, or perhaps real people they know.  And I am not allowed to manipulate or to judge the real person based on my fan-fic. 

Even if I think up a hypothetical, and along comes a real person who embodies the imaginary one in every detail I created, I can't use my reason to reach deductive conclusions about the real person.   Why not?  After all, the hypothetical (in this hypothesis) is perfectly matched!  Well, the real human may possess every detail of my hypothetical, but the hypothetical on which I exercised my reason could not possibly possess every detail of the human.   Humans possess an infinite detail and and an infinite worth, far beyond the scope of any model problem.   So watch it.

Once again.  Watch out when you are tempted to make assumptions about real people.

 

7.  If I write about specific activities, I'll make room for modifications for different bodies, variations that make training plans more enjoyable, and goals unrelated to weight reduction.

That short wish list appears in this commentary piece by Rebecca Scritchfield.

 

8.  Athletic performance metrics are useful, far preferable to body-size metrics, but highly individual and unrelated to either value or virtue.

It's probably a step in the right direction to go from "my body's value comes from its appearance" to "my body's value comes from what it can do."   But it's still wrong.

Training is experiment, and experiment requires observation and measurement.  I can use performance metrics to evaluate whether my training is having the effect I desire.  I don't have to be clinical about everything, either:  I can celebrate when I meet the metric goals I've set, and I can express disappointment when I don't.   It's crucial not to connect the results to my value or my "good"-ness.   People do not, in fact, get what they deserve.

 

9.  "Quality of life" is a universal goal, but an individual measure:  how closely reality matches a person's hopes and expectations.

There are multiple ways of going about working for one's quality of life, too.  Much fitness writing is aimed at improving quality of life through hard work; but I also want to honor the effort to maintain quality of life in situations of increasing difficulty.  There is also the tough mirror process of re-adjusting those hopes and expectations to match an unlooked-for reality, maybe in the face of injury or illness, maybe other changes in circumstance, maybe after learning more about oneself.

 

10.  The big picture of what I'm getting at:  an authentically human understanding of self-care.  

Maybe that sounds like an overly grandiose aim.  Especially since, if history is any guide I'll probably be putting up posts like "here's what's in my gym bag these days!" and "I've discovered that it's a mistake for me to forget to eat breakfast before swimming a mile!"  I mean, some of that stuff is really just minutiae.  I might put it up because it's on my mind.

But all the little pieces add up to a bigger picture.  

The ground rules are here as a kind of checklist for the construction of those little pieces, so they're all align-able with the sort of big picture I want to have.  At the same time, there are questions that feel very open to me, so that I'm constructing that picture as I go along without really knowing what it will look like.  What boundaries are essential?  If vocation is about self-gift, what is the type and extent of self-investment that is appropriate for each vocation?  How do we write sensitively about practices that are health-promoting for many but not for some?   How about writing about practices that are accessible only to a few but might be interesting  to many?  How does a family distribute resources (time, effort, assets) among its members with different needs?   Can self-discipline be taught or only discovered?  What are the signs that health, wellness, even discipline has become an idol, or an obsession, and how can a person get their priorities back in order?

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Well, this post has been many days in the making, so don't be surprised if it takes me a while to get around to the actual writing.  But it was a necessary step to unclog the  pipes, so to speak.  I hope to follow up on it soon.

Laudato Si': Finally finished it.

Sometimes, when we're on a long drive, I read to Mark while he drives.  We pick some nonfiction book that we think will spark an interesting discussion -- usually something we think we'll like, sometimes a work that we'll have more fun attacking and poking holes in.    On our recent trip to Ohio, our book for the way down was a 2013 book called The Righteous Mind:  Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt.  That was a really thought-provoking one, which emerged with only a few holes in it, and I hope to blog a review pretty soon.  On the way back up, we read Laudato Si' from start to finish.

As I read it, I "took notes" by posting little paraphrases on Facebook.  I mostly didn't quote, but tried to distill it down to my own takeaways from the document.  It wasn't by any means a comprehensive summary.

Mark and I are using the long drive to finally read Laudato Si', the ecological encyclical. Chapter 1 tl;dr: Humans can't just do anything they feel like doing. The consequences hit the poor hardest. There are many possible solutions, but only some respect human beings and put the poor first.

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Laudato Si' ch2.I tl;dr: So if this encyclical is for everybody, why am I writing about Christian doctrine? 1. Cultural diversity means our thoughts count! 2. Don't you think if I can call on faith to motivate millions of Christians to steward the earth, I should? (not mentioned: because I am the pope and it's totally in my wheelhouse)

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More Laudato Si' ch2 tl;dr: Actually, we *don't* steward the earth just for the benefit and use of all the peoples of the earth and future generations. The earth and its creatures are a good worth stewarding for its own sake as well as humans'. "Till it," AND "keep it."

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LS ch2: Neither absolute property rights, nor renunciation of them. "If we make something our own, it is only to administer it for the good of all."

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LS ch3: The bad kind of technocratic paradigm is: all problems worth solving are solved by completely controlling material objects, and by the way, everything is a material object.

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LS ch3: The throwaway culture that wastes resources and pollutes the planet is the exact same throwaway culture that disposes of inconvenient human beings and buys and sells the bodies of the poor.

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LS ch3. Better laws aren't going to save you in a culture immersed in utilitarianism, because the powerful will always see the utility of subverting the law.

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LS ch3. Genetic modification techniques are to be judged case by case, depending on their impact on human relationships, labor, and well being.

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LS ch4. One problem with trying to solve problems via high-level regulations binding equally everywhere is that their inflexibility limits the flourishing of local institutions and cultures. Consumerism also levels differences instead of allowing them to flourish.

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LS ch4. Overcrowded cities might make people live in uprootedness and chaos, but if people weave strong networks of human bonds this can be transformed into belonging and closeness instead.

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LS ch5: proposals. Developing countries get to prioritize development and quality of life; let the rich countries bear the heavier burden of environmental restrictions.

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LS ch5: Somehow, we need both to respect national sovereignty and local conditions, while instituting a real global transnational political structure to make rules about global problems -- with the teeth to enforce them, somehow. Meanwhile, lots can be accomplished by local projects.

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LS ch5: The burden of proof should be on the proposers of a new project, that it will not cause serious irreversible damage to the human ecology of an area -- not on the local inhabitants to show incontrovertible evidence that it will.

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Cell phone coverage prevented me from liveblogging the sixth chapter of Laudato Si' as I read it, which is too bad, because that is where the advice is. Here goes: "Purchasing is always a moral, not simply an economic, act."

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LS ch6, my paraphrase: Environmental education needs to mean drawing out an *ethics* of ecology, instilling not just info, but habits of solidarity, responsibility, and compassion.

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LS ch6, my paraphrase. For those who can afford to consume a lot, it is meaningful to instead make small daily acts of conservation (turn down the thermostat, reduce food waste, turn off lights). It's a sort of "little way" of simplicity and self-control wth respect to resources that are not unlimited, and may pay off in ways we can't see immediately.

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LS ch6: "Christian spirituality proposes a growth marked by moderation and the capacity to be happy with little... That simplicity which allows us to stop and appreciate the small things, to be grateful for the opportunities which life affords us, to be spiritually detached from what we possess, and not to succumb to sadness for what we lack."

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LS ch6. One way to restore the right attitude, on several levels, towards resources is the traditional thanksgiving/blessing before and after meals.

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LS ch6, my paraphrase. Encouraging beauty locally, by joining together in groups to preserve a building, a landscape, etc., also is meaningful.

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LS ch6. My paraphrase. To do away with intentional rest is to do away with the most important thing about work: its meaning. In resting we enjoy the fruits of our labor, experience gratitude, and see that it (what we have made) is good.

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LS ch6. Interestingly enough, the encyclical ends with two prayers, one of which is a Christian prayer (i.e., a Trinitarian one) and one of which is suggested for non-Christian believers in God to use, a "prayer for the earth." They are long, so I recommend checking them out yourself.

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Then after I finished paraphrasing, I went back and recorded a few thoughts on the encyclical as a whole, and on our family.

 

LS thoughts (1): Utilitarianism is the wrong way to calculate which policy and personal decisions to make. You could read the whole encyclical as "the state of the planet is evidence that utilitarianism is wrong."

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LS thoughts (2). If I have a lot of resources, and can spend more of my resources (money, time) to reduce damage or impact, I should. E.g. If it costs me more to repair an item than to buy new, but I can afford it, maybe I pay for the repair instead of discarding the item and buying new.

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LS thoughts (3). We do the traditional blessing before meals, but maybe we ought to incorporate the blessing after meals, like before we excuse the children from the table so we can finish the wine and talk together.

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LS thoughts (4). Private property's purpose is the common good. I think this is a "parable of the talents" situation. You can have stuff to use it, to restore it, to share it, to protect it for later, to turn it into more stuff that can be spread around -- lots of possibilities. But if you can't use that item in some way that furthers the common good, why acquire it?

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LS thoughts (5). Be glad for what you have, that's an easy way to start.

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Yeah, I know, the last one is a quote from a Veggie Tales song.  It's from"Madame Blueberry," which I maintain is the most relevant Veggie Tales episode ever.  But I digress.

I have to say, and a couple of my FB friends also had this to say, that the repeated calls for transnational governing bodies to take up the problems of global environmental health and to enforce agreements make me a bit... uneasy.  Reckless, was the word that one of my FB friends used for it, and I think I actually agree with that designation.  We all know how willing powerful people are to take things out of context to justify doing things the way they want to do them.  

When we hear "transnational governing bodies" we think of the UN, and of the UN often the best thing that can be said of it is that its intentions were good, once.  It hasn't just been a corrupt body; it's been a body bent on calling evil good and good evil, off and on throughout its history.  

If you take the document as a whole, it is pretty clear that Pope Francis is not calling for organizations that operate the way the UN does, with the kinds of goals and governing principles that the UN has.  He is calling for massive conversion of heart at all levels of society including the transnational.  But:  the sound bites will never reflect that.  One can argue that the media will never stop taking Popes (and anyone else who is invested by enough people with moral authority) out of context, and that there are no words which cannot be twisted to suit someone else's purposes.  And Francis does seem to be more "reckless" than his last few predecessors, in a lot of ways.  He's not as precise.  He seems to be more easily taken out of context.  

This is a high-risk situation for a Pope to be in, to be sure, that's what "reckless" means, but high risk might also bring high reward, and I'm hopeful.  St. Francis was himself reckless in many ways and is still taken out of context all the time, and yet, those who look beyond the popular image and deeper at the ascetic, at the historical St. Francis, the holiness of the man himself (not either the pious legend or the impious legend) will find something that calls to conversion of heart and of life.

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Besides the bits that I summarized above, I took away from the encyclical some concrete advice at the level of family life.  We are squarely in the class of people who have plenty of resources to live a life that is in accord with human dignity, and then some, and so it's that advice for people who live in rich countries that speaks more to us.

We can afford not to externalize the costs of our lifestyle.  It is a false economy, for example, to buy cheap junk which breaks, can't be repaired, is landfilled and then must be replaced with more cheap junk.  Even if a thing costs more to be repaired than to be replaced, perhaps it is more fitting to pay a worker to fix it than to landfill it and cheaply replace it.  We should continue to use a thing until it becomes unusable, and then try to recycle it, rather than get a new version just because a new one is available.  This is frustrating with electronics, which are subject to a system in which they are designed to become functionally obsolete and to force us to replace them before they are "broken;" but we can use them longer than we might, if we are willing to put up with minor irritations for a while, and over a lifetime we might consume significantly fewer electronic devices than if we had listened to the culture of new-and-shiny.

We are tempted to use climate control unnecessarily.  Mind you, climate control isn't evil; we are having a heat advisory right now, and I have the air conditioning on.  Climate control saves lives, in fact, especially in the case of the elderly and sick, and people who suffer from windborne allergies and can't function well with open windows.  But I have found myself over the past few winters slipping into a "doggone it, I can afford to turn the heat up" mentality, and stabbing the button to take it from 68 F to 73 F.  It's true, I could put on a sweater and a pair of fingerless gloves.  It's a small sacrifice, which means that the turning-up of the heat is a very petty luxury.

We can choose to maintain beautiful things no matter where we are, either as individuals or as communities.  One of the things that I really liked about this "ecological encyclical" -- it really isn't an "environmental" one so much as an "ecological" one -- is that it included manmade beauty as well as natural beauty as worthy of preservation.  Pope Francis mentioned buildings and fountains and city squares, along with landscapes and rivers, as worthy for human beings to rally around, form an identity of place around, and preserve.  I have a bias toward cities and the beautiful and useful things that people design and build, the way that we transform the earth into something new and the ways that we concentrate in urban areas and build social networks that have a sense of unity and identity despite a diverse population, and I was delighted to find that this human ecology has received plenty of attention.  So yes, we can join together in civic groups to preserve wetlands and forests, but it's also good to join Friends of the Library, a local historical association, or any number of other civic groups that strengthen human bonds and keep the city from becoming impersonal and ugly. 

We could all do with a little more gratitude for the good things we enjoy.  The Holy Father reminded us that the blessing before and after meals is a fitting way to pause and exercise that gratitude; we do, as a family, regularly give thanks before meals, but we haven't really done the after-meals thing.  We tried for a little while some years ago, but trailed off as we couldn't really find a good time that was the "end" of the meal, as kids asked to be excused one by one.  Mark and I talked about that and we decided we would try to bring that back.  I left it up to him to figure out exactly how it's going to work.  Maybe instead of excusing the kids one at a time as they finish, we'll excuse them all at once, say the after-meal blessing, and then they'll run away and we can finish the wine together.

We could be careful only to acquire the things that we can "administer for the good of all" -- where that might mean for the genuine benefit of our family (the education of the children, the care for each member's bodily needs) or might mean to care for it so it can be enjoyed by others.  (I'm struck by how this resonates to the same frequency as the Marie Kondo book that I read a couple of months ago.  It feels pretty wasteful to get rid of so much unused, non-joy-sparking stuff, but once you've done it, an a-ha! goes off in your head and there's a reluctance to allow any more non-joy-sparking stuff back in.)

We can do all those small things that, we are told, add up to making a difference:  reduce food waste, reuse and recycle containers, cut down on unnecessary car trips, live more simply.  Sure, it's annoying, and it seems to be a drop in the bucket, but in a spirit of sacrifice it may do some good; like fasting, it has worth beyond the value of the food not consumed, if the sacrifice is made as an offering.  Purely technological solutions that do not ask any sacrifice from us don't have the same dimension of value; self-gift is always effective somehow, even if only interiorly, but technical solutions might have unforeseen consequences and risk becoming just a signifier, a status symbol.  Also, small acts of self-sacrifice are available to everyone.  

In our family, one of those drop-in-the-bucket things might be to change our patterns of meal planning so that we don't waste so much food (I throw out SO MUCH RICE it's ridiculous) and consume a more sustainable mix of protein sources.  

• Meatless Fridays are just a starting point (and of course, there are lots of reasons to choose that as a starting point, here in the US where meatless Fridays are optional -- the primary reason one being to take up the penance that belongs to the rest of the Church as a matter of course).  
• We can recognize that in some countries the people must rely on ocean fish as a primary protein source, and it's a limited resource, and we can abstain from it to leave enough for them -- in economic terms, to keep its price low.   (Similar logic might need to be applied to some imported plant foods, such as quinoa, but the economics are complicated.)  
• We can think of poultry meat as more "expensive" than eggs and dairy protein, pork as more "expensive" than beef, and beef as the most "expensive" of all -- not just based on the dollar value at the supermarket, but based on the amount of agricultural land required to support it.  Maybe a three-pound chub of ground beef on sale is not actually as great a deal as it looks.  I'm not saying never eat beef -- if you're in need of dietary iron, for example, it's very hard to beat it -- but it seems a reasonable sacrifice to regularly abstain from it, save it for legitimate feasts.  Some of the costs of that sale beef have been externalized, and if we pay more for less (as we would if we restricted ourselves to, say, grass-fed small-farmed animals) maybe we can take up more of the responsibility for the real costs as well as supporting family farms.

I think that we have a lot to think about here, as a family, and even more to do.  Fundamentally, though, Laudato Si' recommends a change in attitude.  I think that it's very compatible with the spiritualities I have become most interested in over the past few years:  for example, Elisabeth Leseur's ideas that our tiniest actions and words may affect others in ways that we could never fathom, spreading outward like ripples through time and from person to person, which means that we never have the luxury of apathy.   If Elisabeth Leseur's special gift was to integrate her married life with her spirituality, then I think what Pope Francis is calling here is to integrate our economic lives with our spirituality.  Too often we separate them, but in fact we must integrate all of ourselves into Christ, and that means every decision we make is a moral decision.  Yes, even a choice of taste, like whether your ice cream is chocolate or vanilla or strawberry -- or maybe that's a bit extreme; how about, whether your tacos are  carne asada or pollo or frijoles. 

Put up or shut up: early meal planning.

The baby turned 18 months old yesterday.  His babbling is peppered with "Mine!" and "'Elp-bee! 'Elp-bee!" and "DOG DOG DOG DOG DOG."  He answers Yes and No, tells us when he needs a new diaper, uses forks and spoons and regular cups like an expert.  He is coming right along.

It is time for me to stop making off-hand remarks to Mark and other people about how frustrated I am that I have not yet gotten back to my pre-pregnancy weight.  I think it is happening kind of on its own, but very slowly.   The number of pounds left to lose is not terribly large -- about eight pounds -- and honestly, it isn't a bad place to be; I think I look fairly normal.  But I'm longing to get back into my old clothes, which are tantalizingly, only one size away.  I've held off buying a new wardrobe in the larger size that I've been wearing for most of a year.  

But these yoga pants are not going to last forever.  Eventually I either have to get back to the old size, or buy clothes that fit me now.

+ + +

It isn't so much the need to go on a crash diet as it is the need to refocus on my lifetime maintenance habits, with strict enough attention to calories that I can't fool myself.  I never really have emerged from the "eating for two" mindset, and if I want to eat for one in the future, I need to remind myself exactly what it looks like and feels like.

I know what this takes:  single-minded attention that prioritizes the Calorie Project above all else.  (See this category if you don't believe me.)  Mark knows what it takes too:  a lot of support from him.  For example, I'm going to cut out alcohol with dinner for six weeks, and he will help by not opening bottles of wine or offering me a beer with dinner.

So together we looked at the calendar and picked out a roughly six-week period this summer:  July 21 through September 3.   There's not a whole lot going on for us in there, and it seems like a good time to try.  

I have been thinking of it as the "put up or shut up" block.  It isn't good for me to be constantly fretting about still carrying around extra weight, but not making the commitment to do something about it.  At the same time, I'm not ready just to say "oh well, I guess this is my size now" until I've achieved some closure by taking a real stab at it.  

So, I keep saying:  "I'll work on it for six weeks, and then I'll stop complaining about the extra weight."

And Mark keeps reminding me:  "You know, if you really do work on it, you might actually lose the weight."

And I reply:  "Well, then, I hope I do stop complaining about it."

+ + +

I must prepare for this.

 I have so much less disposable time than I did the last time I focused.  I need a strategy that does not rely on me laboriously counting each day's worth of calories the night before.  Hence, I am going to try for meal-at-a-time counting, which I can do pretty well on the fly, and shooting for 400 calories at each meal.

And I need serious meal planning, ideally of all six weeks at once.  I started by sitting down with a calendar and methodically working out the following information:  there will be

• 11 evenings that we have to eat quickly and then go to the gym
• 6 Sunday cheese-and-cracker suppers
• 5 date nights
• 5 ordinary Saturday evenings
• 4 ordinary Friday evenings (similar to Saturdays, but meatless)
• 4 consecutive evenings with Mark out of town
• 4 weeknights after busy days
• 3 dinners I take to H's house
• 3 dinners provided by H

Then I considered family favorite meals and consulted a couple of 400-calorie-meal-plans to come up with ideas.  I rejected all meals that I usually compulsively eat more of (e.g., homemade garlic-bread-crumb-topped macaroni and cheese).  

 Repeats are okay, and some things can't be planned, so I came up with something less than the corresponding number of dinners for each type.   

Gym nights:

• Chile cheese egg bake, salad, and a cooked green vegetable
• Sweet and sour cabbage salad, kielbasa, and mashed potato
• Skillet gyros (it's just ground beef and oregano), pita bread, and Greek salad
• Turkey BLTs (that is, deli turkey plus real bacon -- no turkey bacon), broccoli, and apples
• Slow cooker tortilla soup, limited chips, and fruit salad
• Southwest corn and bean chowder with ham, limited cornbread

Ordinary Saturday evenings:

• Yogurt-marinated chicken on the grill, sliced cucumber salad, pita bread, cooked greens
• Grilled steak, corn on the cob, tomato salad, melon
• Moroccan-spiced grilled chicken, couscous, salad of sliced radishes and oranges
• Hamburger patties, on buns for everyone else, cooked green vegetable, carrot salad

Ordinary Friday evenings:

• Minestrone soup, fruit salad, and a limited supply of parmesan pita toasts.  
• Cheese tortellini with red/yellow/green peppers.
• Tilapia fish tacos with pineapple chunks, cabbage slaw, and guacamole.

Mark out of town:

• Grilled cheese sandwiches and homemade tomato soup for kids.  Soup, cheese, crackers for me.
• Roasted chicken legs, fruit salad, bread and butter, and cooked green vegetable.

Busy-day weeknights:

• Baked teriyaki chicken breasts, white rice, kale, oranges.
• Rotisserie chicken from the grocery store, sweet potatoes, broccoli.
• Deli turkey sandwiches with asiago cheese, apples, almonds, and chips.

Meals taken to H's:

• Crockpot hili over whole wheat spaghetti with shredded cheddar, french-cut frozen green beans
• Crockpot salsa chicken in brown rice bowl with cheddar, cilantro, beans, corn, lettuce.

Date nights and cheese-and-cracker suppers don't need a plan as much as a strategy:

• For the date nights, it has always worked well to split everything with Mark in about a 2-to-1 ratio.  
• For cheese-and-cracker suppers, I'll make sure I have my own little three-ounce portion of some nice blue cheese, a couple tablespoons of fig preserves, and some Triscuits, and not touch any of the other stuff.  I know my blue cheese is safe from everyone else at the table, so that should work.  Or I'll have my own three ounces of lox and a couple tablespoons of cream cheese.   A pot of decaf coffee already brewed will help, too, for the end.

I'll plan each week in more detail when I sit down to make the grocery list, but at least I have already done the work of identifying meals.  For breakfast and lunch I will probably employ the same-thing-every-day-for-a-week strategy.  I guess I'll check in on that later.  For now, it's business as usual.

   

 

Cooperating, not competing, priorities.

That put-on-your-swimsuit-for-your-kids'-sake post that I wrote about has spread its influence throughout the feminine half of the blogosphere, at least the sector* populated by mothering mothers. Elizabeth Duffy, writing at Patheos, had a good post the other day:

One of the swim coaches stood on the side of the pool in a handsome black tank, and she was as plump and dimply as the rest of us, but she stood up straight, shoulders back, making bold demonstrations of each stroke for her pupils. I remember thinking that her confidence paired with an obvious tendency not to take herself too seriously was very appealing, and not just to the eyes.

She was not slouching out of sight, and it wasn’t just because she found the right suit for her body type, or because she had memories to make. She had a job to do, an important one, and she clearly found her work fulfilling enough that she could be at peace with herself and delight in her body’s ability to do its job well.

This is really the way that I prefer to think about it; indeed, though getting in the water and splashing with your kids is important, this it's the reason behind that reason. We're raising kids, and so everything we do teaches them how to be. If we want to teach them what their bodies are good for -- doing and being, as part of their human wholeness; not just appearing and seeming, and certainly not merely things to be used and abused; well, being ashamed of the appearance of our own is only going to teach the wrong lessons.

Too, being focused on the jobs you have to do and the joys you want to have is better than being hyperfocused on What People Will Think When They See Me.

More from Elizabeth:

The irony is, that when a woman of a certain body type or a certain age decides to get thin–I count myself here–you really do end up giving everything else up as your mental energy goes into counting calories, planning meals, and incorporating strategies to prevent yourself from eating. There are many hours spent in the gym, many hours spent working on self-image rather doing things of interest to yourself or of import to other people.

Not every woman who decides to get fit loses their perspective this way, but I certainly have, and I have corroborated my experiences with female friends. When I decide to be thin, I become a very boring person, a stressed out person, someone who only thinks about food and mentally scourges herself for mistakes made when eating.

You don’t usually get to have it both ways–you don’t get to be a skinny woman, and at the same time, a woman who’s happy to sit at a bar and drink pints with her husband. You don’t get to be someone who is fully invested in being thin, and at the same time finds herself interesting enough in her own right to forget occasionally her body and its tendency to grow fat when it’s having fun.

I can also corroborate this. The year that I achieved my big weight loss was a year of absolute concentration and obsession. It consumed almost all my attention. I don't regret it, and I have found the effort to be fruitful in more ways than one -- it was an achievement I had never thought possible, and it opened up all sorts of possibilities for me as well as leading to a lot of reflection on my identity. But it was so costly. Also, I was a very boring person for a whole year except to other people who were trying to lose weight. I feel a little bad for having sucked other people into my vortex of gluttony-shaming.

But I wasn't bored.

I wasn't bored because, to put it bluntly, I am a geek, and I can really get into that which bores other people. Whatever my project, I must love it and dig deeply into it, understand it and analyze it, take it apart and put it together in different ways. This is how I cook, how I gestate and give birth and care for babies, how I educate my kids, how I approach faith. My life is a little laboratory, and it's okay if the results are not repeatable by others because they're highly tailored to my own surroundings. The year that I lost all that damn extra weight and learned to be an athlete was the first year that my own body became the laboratory for the sake of itself.

(And I do call it "becoming an athlete" for a reason. I won't call it just "fitness," it was more than that, an identity crisis was involved. I wanted not just to appear thin, but to feel like Elizabeth's swim instructor, strong and capable.)

So I wasn't bored. And if my spouse was bored, he did a good job of hiding it. We sat at the bar and drank pints together -- only we split them, and he drank more deeply than I did, for that year.

We still share pints that way. And that's emblematic of the difference.

Some friends speculated that it was possible for me to temporarily prioritize becoming an athlete in a way that it might not have been for me today, had I put it off. I was six years younger, I had only three children. And maybe that's so.

But staying an athlete, even an amateur one only competitive against herself, is a priority -- not in competition with the priorities of raising my family and accompanying my husband, but in union with them.

I am married to a person who aspires to be always training for the next goal. His sports are downhill skiing and climbing (both rock and ice); seeing as how we live in the northern plains instead of the western mountains, he's never going to be able to find the time to do either of them frequently enough to excel at either, but he can always be training for his next trip so he can have more options and have more fun. And so he tries to get to the gym three times a week if he can. And so it's something we do together -- not so much the climbing (I have an old wrist injury) but the training. Neither of us has the time to train very well or thoroughly, but it's something we can talk about over those single shared pints.

And since he's a geek too, and also since training involves chemistry and physics that neither of us has ever mastered, we can talk about it over and over and over again. That's a lot of pints.

Athleticism of a certain individualistic type is a family value for us. (It runs in Mark's family of origin; his siblings and their spouses have been runners, mountain-bike and road-cycling racers, equestrians, and collegiate-level wrestlers, along with the occasional dabbling in climbing and downhill skiing.) We are working to pass it on to our kids. That priority meshes with our other family and marriage priorities, so it isn't in competition with them (although it has to be balanced with them: I have to teach and feed the children, and Mark has to go to work). I think this more than anything else is why the changes I made six years ago have remained permanent. They reinforce, and are reinforced by, the other good things I have in my life and want to keep.

_______

*Yeah, I couldn't stop myself from googling just to double check that "sector" was the correct geometrical term with respect to a piece of a sphere, as I knew it was for a circle. Although it isn't quite as satisfying because the arcs that define the sectors of a circle, being one-dimensional, perfectly tessellate the "surface" (i.e., the circumference) of the circle -- cf. pie charts -- but the domed spherical sectors by necessity have gaps between. Unless, of course, there are an infinite number of them in just the right distribution of volumes, much as you can fill a rectangular box perfectly with an infinite assortment of differently-sized spheres.**

 

**Yeah, I finished writing the footnote before I went on to write the rest of this post.

 

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Count your bites: a super-simple measure to check overeating?

From the annals of simple anti-gluttony systems:

Remember the No-S diet? It isn't what I do, but it has always impressed me with its simplicity, and it makes a great starting point for anyone who wants to learn to eat less.

(Its rules are: no snacks, no sweets, no seconds, except on days that start with S. There is also a caveat along the lines of don't be an idiot on S days, but it only comes up in hard cases.)

I know I have mentioned No-S as a viable, simple way of checking one's overeating, but I may have just found something simpler. I came across a testimonial post at the Everyday Systems website, home of No-S, where the writer mentioned that she had modified her No-S approach by including "bite counting."

Curious, I followed a link to the testimonial writer's blog. Yep, she means what she says: count your bites.

What was needed was a simple, less stressful method to enable the patient to reduce his intake of food, and give him short term goals that would mark his progress visibly and also offer encouragement....Count bites, not calories.

It consists simple of using a tally register... to check off every bite or swallow you take, keeping a register of your weight and the number of bites taken every day, and establishing a baseline for the number of bites that lets you lose weight at the rate you find comfortable.

Some measure was necessary to control the quantity of food intake, not necessarily the type of food intake, which is more controlled by the individuals lifelong eating habits. A simple convenient method was to measure actual intake, not by portion, but by bites, as people will always revert to their standard size bite, no matter how much they might attempt to take extra large or extra small bites at the beginning. Attempts to cheat are inevitable, but not lasting. The individual relapses quickly enough to his normal bite pattern...

No Matter what you eat, if your chart shows no weight loss, you simply have to take fewer bites.

 

Here's what about this that strikes me, the data addict, as genius: it's one easily-measured number. So anyone can do the experiment on themselves: can count bites, and observe weight patterns, and see if there is a correlation between the two. It would be straightforward to use as the x-axis of a plot.

Here's what about this that strikes me, the foodie, as genius: you wouldn't have to consciously change what you eat unless you find you want to.

Here's what about this that strikes me, the slacker, as genius: no preplanning or measuring required. There is a little work involved: tallying bites (the author suggests keeping one of those handhed push-button counters discreetly in your lap as you eat), keeping track of the daily number, and evaluating the results to see if the number of bites should be adjusted up or down.

I'm not going to be trying this one out, but I did think it interesting enough to note.

 

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Here we go again.

The baby is eight weeks old, and that is how long I promised I would wait before buckling down to trying to lose the weight I put on to support my pregnancy.

Some people advise waiting six months. That does make sense -- often the work of mothering a baby takes the extra weight off without conscious effort, so why not enjoy that while it lasts? And self-starvation is not good for milk supply, itself doubleplusungood for newborns. I am not planning on self-starvation. I am planning on being intentional instead of mindless, and on attention to portion sizes, and room for ice cream after dinner and a beer with Mark after the kids go to bed, and on a great deal of roasted Brussels sprouts. Also on adapting as I go along.

One thing I have already figured out and adapted: the daily rhythm that felt best and most sustainable before I got pregnant (light breakfast, medium lunch, afternoon snack, hearty dinner) now makes my blood sugar go haywire. Distributing my calories more evenly throughout the day keeps me from falling over. I need medium breakfasts and medium lunches and medium dinners now.

And so -- I resisted it for a while -- I have had to hang up my good old mantra "one egg is enough eggs for breakfast." Two-egg veggie and cheese omelet, please. (Technically I hung that up while I was pregnant and eating a lot of steak and eggs specials. But I really thought I would be dusting it off again after the birth. Not quite yet, I guess.)

+ + +

I put on about 40 pounds while pregnant, and about 25 remain. Here at the outset, I feel fairly confident I can deal with the problem; already I am practicing waiting till mealtime, and hitting that happy spot where I feel confortably satisfied after a meal, but still reliably feel good and hungry a little while before the next one.

Getting hungry several times a day seems to be the key. Not "eat when you're hungry," as if hunger is a serious problem that must be immediately corrected; nor "hungry all the time," which probably isn't good for me or the baby; but periodically hungry for a little while before each meal.

I find that going to bed just a little bit hungry is effective, too, but it is possible to overshoot; if I am lying awake at 2 a.m. listening to my stomach growl, I probably need some peanut butter toast, and that is okay.

+ + +

So, what are the habits I am concentrating on right now?

• Watching portion size and sticking to one helping
• Vegetables or at least fruit at each meal
• A scoop of ice cream for dessert after dinner (instead of second and third helpings)
• A beer or a cocktail right before bed (instead of an endless Bedtime Snack Binge)
• Weighing in every five days or so "officially," but also weighing in the evening to strengthen my resolve against the Bedtime Snack Binge
• Preferring fruit, cheese, and nuts over bread- or cracker-based afternoon snacks
• Asking Mark to select snacks for the children that don't leave behind a quarter of a package of leftovers

I am generally aiming for 450-calorie meals, plus a smaller afternoon snack and the aforementioned ice cream and cocktails, but I am not really counting the calories up just yet. That is something to save for if I hit a plateau later on.

Here's a handy resource with 400-calorie meal plans in it. I ignore the word "low-fat" wherever it appears, so my meals are typically more than 400 calories, but they won't be crazy off the charts. It's 400 Calorie Fix by Liz Vacciarello and Mindy Hermann. It contains a refresher on estimating portion sizes, numerous recipes, a two-week meal plan, and suggested side dishes. This is particularly useful for a household that, like mine right now, is relying on shortcuts like packaged meals and takeout, because it rather nonjudgmentally makes suggestions for how to eat 400 calories' worth of movie theater junk or vending machine snacks or fast food burgers, right alongside 400-calorie homemade meals like Couscous and Vegetable Salad (with a side of tuna and mayo) or Speedy Fish Tacos or Lentils with Zesty Tomatoes (with a side of pita bread).

Not that I am saying one ought to substitute vending machine snacks (e.g., Wheat Thins and a Snapple) for a meal, but at least this particular book is light on the Good Food/Evil Food dichotomy, which I appreciate right now. And it's good for practicing the habit of learning to have reasonable portions of things, and for accepting tradeoffs like, "if I want extra meat, I will get more calories unless I take less rice." Which I am rusty on after the ravages* of pregnancy.

*ravages (n. pl.): state of having to eat cheeseburgers or steak-and-eggs whenever one wants, because iron.

+ + +

The psyche rebelled at first, but I am already remembering what it's like to have self-control, and that peculiar satisfaction of being able to notice that I am kind of hungry, while also knowing that Disaster will not befall me if I wait till lunchtime. It is satisfying because I know I did not always have that ability, and I learned it, and I still have it now when I wish to call on it.

I get hungry. I think to myself what I know from experience: "This is my body telling me it's about to switch over to burning the stored calories. In a little while the sensation will go away, and then after a while it will be time to eat again." And this message works, I find, as long as the things that I eat are generally real food with a decent amount of protein, fat, and fiber.

So, for example, today for breakfast I had

• Fresh-baked berry muffin
• A half cup of plain yogurt with a sliced banana and a bit of toasted coconut
• Coffee coffee coffee

And for lunch I had

• Homemade Niçoise salad with half a can of oil-packed tuna, a boiled egg, a potato, green beans, olives, tomato, and lemon-mustard dressing
• Another one of those muffins

And for dinner I plan to have

• Fajitas with chicken (3 oz) and peppers and onions and a bit of guacamole on 1 whole wheat tortilla and lettuce
• Some good pilsner

Hopefully we'll start to see some results before long, but for the time being I am going to try to simply enjoy having some control and predictability to my sensations of hunger and satiety again, and relax and feed myself (as well as the baby!) well and intentionally.

And try not to think about how in October I need to get a new drivers license.

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Temptation at home.

It's been a long time since I was writing a great deal about weight loss and gluttony....

(believe me, I will probably need to write more about it sometime after I have this baby... maybe even sooner, because while trying to lose weight isn't appropriate right now, dealing with old impulses always is...)

... and it's been an even longer time since someone emailed me with a question inspired by those old posts!

(Excuse me for my enthusiasm.  I'm a little thrilled to have someone give me a reason to add a blog post.  Lately, what with the homeschooling, the pregnancy, and the head lice, it's been hard to get to the computer with enough energy left to write.)

So, anyway, reader Katherine emails:

I...  have been following for the last few months.  Since May when I read your semiannual maintenance post. I began reading more of your posts about weight loss.

A nice amount resonated with me. I'm a food addict and I've been trying to make lifestyle changes to improve that. But there is one area that does undermine me and I just wondered if you had any tips or suggestions on how to deal with it.

I struggle to not eat when I'm making meals for my kids, even if I'm not hungry. It can smell good, look good and sometimes I even need to taste it to make sure it is cooked or seasoned or the right temperature. And it can be hard for me then not to, "Oh I'll just have a little bit."

I know you said you chew gum cleaning up after meals, but what about when making meals for others? Do you chew gum then too? Is there a better snack you keep on hand for that? Some other trick I'm not thinking of? I enjoy a piece of gum now and then, but chewing all day would give me a headache. 

Chewing gum all day would give me a headache too.  I resort to the gum-after-meals because I personally have a bigger problem with cleaning up afterwards -- with ending my meals -- and because there's a plausible socially acceptable excuse to do it for other reasons: an after-meal stick of sugarless gum, especially kinds that contain xylitol, reduces cavities.  So, hey, good all around. 

So, what to do about eating during food preparation for others.   I guess it would depend on (a) why you perceive that it's a problem and (b) why you think you do it anyway.

I can think of at least two different published systems that are effective for many and that recommend going cold-turkey on eating outside times when you have deliberately chosen to have a "meal" (where we allow that some meals are small and happen between breakfast, lunch, and dinner).   One of these, quite simple, is No-S and the other, more complicated, is the Beck approach.  

No-S is summed up as "no snacks, no sweets, no seconds except on days that start with S."  It emphatically does NOT define liquids as snacks, even rich and caloric ones like milkshakes or beer, because it's a behavior modification technique rather than a calorie-counting one.  Chewing gum -- unless it tended to exacerbate cravings for sweets and is problematic for that reason -- would be compatible with that system.   But taking a bite of foods  you're cooking (except, I suppose, liquids like broths or sauces) would be incompatible with the system -- yes, even in order to find out if there's enough salt.   And it would also be incompatible with the system to eat other snacks while cooking, even something like celery sticks.  The whole point is to condition you not to eat when it isn't mealtime.

The Beck approach is based on cognitive-behavioral therapy.  It's quite different from No-S, as it's a controlled-calorie system that writes "snacks" and "sweets" into the budget, while teaching techniques to help people discontinue unhelpful behaviors.  One of the pieces of advice I remember about it -- a piece that I didn't end up following -- was not to rely on a crutch like gum or sugarless candy to keep your mouth busy so you wouldn't eat things.  Beck thought that in her system, it was preferable to learn to cope with cravings and temptations some other way besides putting something in your mouth.   

I mention these not as diet-book recommendations (though you could certainly investigate them) but to point out that each system hangs together in its own way, and what makes sense in one doesn't make sense in another.  Ultimately, of course, everyone who needs a system, needs a personalized one.  

One person can't touch chips without eating every chip in sight, so it makes more sense (at least temporarily) to expose herself to chps with caution; another person reacts to food restriction with binging, so it makes more sense for him (at least temporarily) to give himself permission to have some of whatever he wants, until "forbidden" foods lose their power over him.

+ + +

So, let's examine some of what you wrote.  Starting with this one.

...sometimes I even need to taste it to make sure it is cooked or seasoned or the right temperature. 

I challenge this assumption.  When you're ferreting out unnecessary eating, I have found it helpful to question every instance of "I need to put this in my mouth because..."   Often they aren't really "need tos."  And this one sounds like a false "need to."  

• If you're unsure whether something is cooked through, tasting it isn't safe.  Make sure it is cooked by cutting into meat and observing the color and texture, by using a thermometer to find out if it has come up to the prescribed doneness temperature, or by paying attention to how long it has been cooking.
• Whether something is correctly seasoned or not is subjective, especially if you're talking about salt or hot pepper.  Even if it tastes the right amount of "salty" to you, it might not to others.  So there's no need to taste food for that reason.  Follow the recipe for herbs and garlic, err on the side of under-salting and under-spicing food, and pass the salt and pepper at the table.
• Temperature can be tested with a thermometer or a fingertip, or you can touch a spoon to the outside of your lip.

If you are the sort of person who generally struggles with "just one taste" turning into "just one more bite" and then into a whole serving's worth of bites --- and let me say that I am one of those people too, so believe me, I get it --- it will help you avoid the second, third, and nth tastes if you steer clear of that first "just one taste."  That holds true even if you are tempted to think that this "just one taste" will be different somehow because you have a  "good" reason to take a bite of the food.  But it will not affect you any differently just because it can be defined as "good."

I struggle to not eat when I'm making meals for my kids, even if I'm not hungry.

I think to figure out what about your situation is especially tempting, you need to ask yourself... what's actually wrong with eating the food you are preparing for your children?   Is it because you've already had your own meal?  Is it because you think the kid food is not good for you and you should eat something better for you?  Is it the "I'm not hungry so I shouldn't eat" thing?  

Because what jumps out at me is the "when I'm making meals for my kids" part -- not "for me and for my kids," or "for my family," but "for my kids."  Are you eating at a different time from your children?  Different stuff, because of different tastes or dietary needs?  Or are you doing something like packing lunches for them for the future, or making things to go in the freezer?

Is part of the problem that you're making two sets of meals -- one for yourself and one for your kids -- and that gives you two opportunities to eat a meal?

In any case, you are unhappy with this situation and it is probably time to shake it up a bit -- experiment with trying different things.

Would it help if you made meals for your kids at the same time that you are typically making a meal or a snack for yourself?  So that you have in your pocket the ability to tell yourself:  "I deserve to have a real meal on a plate.  I'm not a dog who gets fed on table scraps.  I'm going to have my lunch in just a moment, when the children are eating their lunch, and my lunch will be just as good or better than what these guys are having."

Or... you could decide that you DO want to have the food you are making "for the children."  And then you could commit to it.  There's no shame in eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch, with a glass of milk (or chocolate milk!) and an apple on the side.  Just commit to it!  Put it on a plate, say "This is my lunch," eat it, and be done with it.

After all, if the food you are making for your children looks good and smells good and you want to eat it, why not... plan on eating it?

I think if it were me, I might try an experiment of just eating the same food I'm making for my kids for a couple of weeks (but on a plate, not standing at the stove).   "After all," I would reason, "here I am eating bits these pepperoni pizzas and grilled cheese sandwiches day after day, even when I've already had a lunch.  Clearly I must WANT them on some level, and telling myself not to eat them isn't working.  So I'll just eat them.  Not in addition to my 'real' lunch, but AS my 'real' lunch."

If you know I am going to have a full serving of the meal I am preparing, on a plate, like a grownup, I find it is easier to tell myself, "hey, I don't want to eat this standing next to the stove.  I want to sit down and enjoy it like a human being. "  

A sociable person might say, "I want to sit down with my kids and reconnect with them over a meal!  Or with family and friends!"  

A person like me in the middle of the school day might say, "I can't wait to send the kids away for Break Time and take this grilled cheese sandwich and bowl of soup and sit down with it in front of the computer in peace and quiet and enjoy it while I check my email and then have a cup of coffee and really relax for half an hour before going back to work."

+ + +

As a side note, I admit that feel a little at sea when trying to answer reader questions.

The context in which I have chosen to interpret my food issues is "gluttony."   I had a great deal of personal success framing them in that way.  There were elements of addiction over which I had little control, but interacting with those were also elements over which I did have control.  I tried to tease them apart and, where appropriate, accuse myself.

I'm loath to tell anyone else where addiction (the disability) ends and gluttony (the weakness) begins.  That (besides lacking details) is why I didn't use the word "gluttony" while writing about Katherine's question.

But it is possible to step back and, without naming the cause as either addiction or gluttony-the-personal-weakness, identify acts that are objectively gluttonous.  There is no self-shaming to be implied in this.  Only "hey, here is something I do, and I am identifying it as a problem that I want to work on."  To see your activities with clear eyes.

Aquinas says that gluttony is the act of eating too soon, too expensively, too much, too eagerly, too daintily, not counting when you "think it necessary" for yourself.  One of the reasons I have found that definition less than useful is that it's shockingly easy for me to convince myself that eating some thing "is necessary."

 ("Needing" to taste food repeatedly to make sure it's seasoned properly is only one example.  I would tell myself things like "I only had pastries for breakfast, now I 'need' to eat my second breakfast which will provide me with protein and necessary minerals," or "I don't know if there will be food where I'm going and I might get hungry, so I 'need' to eat a full meal before I get there" followed by "I 'need' to eat because it's what everybody else is doing." Now I'm pregnant and I still struggle with what I "need" to eat because I'm pregnant and I "need" more food and better food.)

Dissatisfied with the way that this "necessary" loophole keeps undermining my resolve, plus the vagueness of the "too"'s in that discussion, I proposed an alternate categorization here.   I found it a lot more helpful in accusing myself and in changing my behavior.  

But that's me.  It's not necessarily you, or the reader, or anyone else.

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Anyone else have some ideas for experiments to try, in order to break the habit of eating while preparing children's meals?  My suggestion -- to plan on eating the apparently desirable children's meal as one's own meal -- can't be the only one.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.  

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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.