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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.

All those weight loss posts: Bathwater or baby?

Anyone who has been reading this blog for more than a few years knows that starting in 2008, I wrote a long series chronicling a number of lifestyle changes:  learning to run and swim, ending some destructive food behaviors, and dealing with the mental and physical fallout of the significant weight loss that followed.  

 

And anyone who has been reading this blog for the past few years knows that I have not been adding to the series very much recently.  Let’s talk a little bit about why.

 

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I have a bit of a compulsive personality, and it’s hard for me to live in the wide, slippery gray area between two extremes:   habitual, mindless grazing, self-soothing with food; and anxious, obsessive dieting, self-soothing with control.  All that writing helped me detach from the emotional content, put it into something that was more cerebral and philosophical, and less fear- and shame-based.  As a Catholic I tried to grapple with the connotations of loaded words like “gluttony,” paring away dehumanizing associations and finding useful definitions that honored the body and its theology.  And I tried to be honest about how my mental health fared (hint: not always well) as I went along.

 

All the writing helped me.  It did.  But as the years went on I have begun to feel less confident about its being good for readers in general.

 

Oh, taken all together, I know it is a good thing.  It is my true story, for one thing, as much as I felt comfortable sharing.  And as a whole, I think it is balanced.  I try out ideas, some of them don’t stick, others do.  My general approach was to perform experiments on myself, keep good records, and report back.  I still think this is a good approach to all kinds of life changes.  What worries me is the taking out of context:  that one post all by itself might encourage extreme behavior, or fat-shaming, or trigger someone who has struggled with serious eating disorders.  I can’t say with confidence (unless I embark on a long project of combing through all the posts, considering them as individual posts, and annotating them) that I haven’t written something problematic. 

 

And I have thought to myself:  Maybe I shouldn’t create any new blog posts about my weight maintenance until I have done that comb-through, and come up with some principles of harm reduction, and perhaps put in content warnings or updates to how my thinking has changed.  This thought has given me pause lately, whenever I have thought about writing anything related to food.

 

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A second obstacle, probably related to the first, has been the nature of the work I have been doing on myself in the past few years.  To put it bluntly, I have been trying to get off the diet train completely, in hopes I might ditch the constant, low-level anxiety and shame that I still carry around.   I still have this idea that if I get rid of the anxiety and shame, I will gain weight again (so far, evidence bears this out), and so I am in a somewhat ridiculously fraught state of mind about it, in which I am not entirely convinced that the anxiety and shame is wholly unhelpful.  So it’s been very difficult to write honestly about, because I can’t quite commit to being ready to let go of all that anxiety, and I am not yet sure that I can’t harness it somehow instead, and channel it into a healthier kind of motivation.   It seems sort of irresponsible to be honest about all this, lest anyone take it as an endorsement of, well, anxiety.

 

At the same time, I have clearly (well, to myself) made some progress on the shame and self-hatred front.  And who knows, it could maybe be good to write more openly about dealing with a very real decision to find the place I want to live, the unsteady compromise where I am choosing behaviors I can feel confident are good for me, and that don’t activate a cycle of destructive thought patterns.  

 

It seems that the destructive thought patterns have been doing much of the maintenance lifting for me, so I have that to work through.  On the other hand, there are some other things that have changed over the same time period; for example, I'm now no longer breastfeeding, a situation that is entirely new to me as a post-lifestyle-changed person.   Surely I'm also adapting to that as well, and other changes that come with the journey through middle age.

 

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So, what brings on today's post?  Well, just before the holiday season really started to take off I received an incredibly kind email.  I'll not quote it directly here because I haven't the author's permission, but she described a yearlong journey of significant transformation informed by much of my writing---not just an improvement in health and fitness, she said, but also in self-image.  It made me feel a little bit better about what I've wrought, at least about the work as a whole.

 

I still suspect that I could improve some of the language in individual posts, and reduce the chances that the material could encourage fat-shaming and general body negativity.  I'd like to do that work now, sooner rather than later.   Maybe I won't toss the baby out with the bathwater after all.

The belated twice-yearly post on weight maintenance.

Usually I write this post in May (around the anniversary of the "click" in my head that changed things) and November (around the anniversary of reaching my goal weight, around six months later).   I'm writing the November post late this year, in January, not because I want to cash in on all the New Year's resolution stuff, but just because I've been a delinquent blogger.

Let's grab something as it flies by and slap it up on the page to make things look current.  Here's a year-old article that has been going around on FB the last few days, it being January:  Diet and exercise alone are no cure for obesity, experts say.  Here is an extended excerpt from the  newspaper's summary of the information:

Take note, glib-talking doctors and legislators, rail-thin commentators, and fat-haters of all stripes: For most of the nation's 79 million adults and 13 million kids who are obese, the "eat less, move more" treatment, as currently practiced, is a prescription for failure, these experts say.

In a commentary published  [ed: in the May 2015 issue] in the journal Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, four weight-loss specialists set out to correct what they view as the widespread misimpression that people who have become and stayed obese for more than a couple of years can, by diet and exercise alone, return to a normal, healthy weight and stay that way.

"Once obesity is established, however, body weight seems to become biologically 'stamped in' and defended," wrote Mt. Sinai Hospital weight management expert Christopher N. Ochner and colleagues from the medical faculties of the University of Colorado, Northwestern University and the University of Pennsylvania.  

The human body, evolved to endure through periods of food scarcity, has adapted a host of methods to ensure that lost weight will be restored, the authors say. It will respond to weight loss by powering down its use of calories as fuel, pumping out hormones to increase hunger, boosting fat storage capacity, and tricking the brain to demand overconsumption.

"Few individuals ever truly recover from obesity," the authors wrote. Those that do, they add, "still have 'obesity in remission,' and are biologically very different from individuals of the same age, sex and body weight who never had obesity." They are constantly at war with their bodies' efforts to return to their highest sustained weight.

...Why would an influential foursome see the value in recapitulating these ideas in a respected medical journal?

"It's not just that most people still stigmatize obesity--as they say, it's the last acceptable form of stigma," said Ochner. "What really bothers me working around and with clinicians, is that some of them--a disturbing percentage--still believe it's all about personal choice: that if the patient just tries hard enough, and if we can just figure out how to get them a little more motivated, then we'd be successful. And that's just not right."

Lifestyle changes are undoubtedly a necessary condition for enduring weight loss, Ochner said. But they're far from sufficient, and when physicians believe they are--when they say "you already know what to do, I told you what to do," he said--"that's certainly cruel, and it's harmful: It prevents them getting the care they need."

Physicians, he said, should be doing more than exhort patients to eat less and move more. They should[:]

• "intervene more quickly to encourage weight loss in overweight patients before they become obese."
•  "discuss with obese patients ... medications, surgery and device-based treatments...to supplement diet and exercise..."
• "make weight-loss maintenance--an aspect of obesity treatment that is neglected--a part of their treatment plan."

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I'm one of the odd people that did manage to correct long-term obesity through diet and exercise.  It required a level of focus that bordered on the obsessive; I paid a price in mental health.  I'm not saying it was the wrong choice to make; the sacrifice was temporary, and it worked.  

 I think I'm mentally more balanced now, but it's also been harder to maintain the habits that seem to correspond with keeping my weight off.  It could just be because I'm under a lot of demands in this season of my life; but sometimes I wonder if I will always have to choose between staying thin and staying relatively sane.

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Maintenance?

It really is very difficult.  I understand intimately what they mean by "obesity in remission."  I was obese for about 25 years, and I've only been not-obese for 7.5 years, and I feel -- deeply -- that the lifestyle which maintains it is something I put on, not something that's really sunk in fully.  

For a while, between my last two pregnancies, I thought it really had sunk in.  Post-weight-loss, I'd maintained for several months, gotten pregnant, had an amazingly healthy pregnancy and an easy delivery, and then I picked up my old, good habits where I left off.  I returned to my desired weight range and maintained that for three years or so before my fifth pregnancy.  

But after my youngest child was born I was much more sluggish.  He is two now, and I have never quite gotten back to where I was.  I'm about ten pounds and one clothing size over my desired weight.  I'd be okay with it, I think, if it weren't for the frustration and fear that's all wrapped around the knowledge that I've simply not been able to hold myself tightly enough to a plan.

Again, I have a lot of demands on me right now, and I well remember the level of obsession that it required for me to lose the weight the first time.  Maybe there simply isn't enough of my attention to go around, and maybe I could do it if I could only clear my schedule and clear my head.  But it's all hypothetical.  I can't seem to stick to anything very long.  And that "can't" is very scary to me.  

I wonder all the time:  Am I out of remission?

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Let's take a look at these words again:

The human body, evolved to endure through periods of food scarcity, has adapted a host of methods to ensure that lost weight will be restored, the authors say. It will respond to weight loss by powering down its use of calories as fuel, pumping out hormones to increase hunger, boosting fat storage capacity, and tricking the brain to demand overconsumption.

 

I don't know if the three other response mechanisms are active, but the last one?  Tricking the brain to demand overconsumption?

It is so very, very real.

My brain is a traitor.  It has completely gone over to the side of the body in this one.  How to explain it?  My brain doesn't try to get me to break my resolutions, to foil my plans, anymore.  It's learned that this does not work.  

I don't do the emotional-eating thing.  I don't get tempted to break my resolutions.  If I am conscious of a plan I have made (say "Don't eat dessert tonight") you can wave a chocolate cake in front of me all evening and I will not take that first fatal bite.   My brain has given up trying to tempt me away from my plans.

Instead my brain has learned a better way:  it causes me to forget I had a plan in the first place.  "Ha ha!" the brain says.  "If I refuse to do my job of remembering important things, there's nothing that the rest of you can do about it!" And when dinnertime comes it's all like "Plan?  What plan?  Pass the potatoes."

I realize that this sounds absolutely insane.

I can't think of a better way to describe it.

I make plans.  I literally forget them, or at least forget that they matter, when I sit down at the table.  And then immediately after we are all done eating, I seem to remember them again.  Shit.  And then the remorse.

This is not a good mental situation.  I really have to do something about it, because it is the kind of mental situation that eating disorders are made of:  a cycle of self-recrimination that begins immediately after a meal.  It's bad.

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There are definitely things I could do about this.   I think that the best course is probably to pick one good habit, one tried and proven one from my old life, and concentrate on that until it's second nature again.   But panic overtakes me.  "Just one habit" is too scary; I fear I'll let all the others go.   For example:  If I concentrate only on not snacking between meals (a worthy goal, part of the way I want to live my life), I fear, I'll destroy all the practice I've made at having reasonably-sized meals.  And so on.  I keep starting off with single habits, but eventually I try to do all the habits at once, get overwhelmed, and start forgetting them again.  

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And make no mistake:  while I might be able to develop and reinforce habits that maintain my weight where it is, I really have to be conscious at every meal if I am going to run a calorie deficit and live off my stores even for a few weeks.  I am under five feet tall.  Maintaining my weight as it is  requires, roughly, only 1850 calories per day.   Losing it at a noticeable pace means going down to something like 1400-1500.  This is not that much food, people!  Unless you are the sort of person who forgets to eat under stress, it takes attention to maintain that for more than a couple of days, and it is shockingly easy to make up several days' deficit in only one meal.  

Example.  If I am trying to stay at 1500 cal/day, chances are good I'll really manage closer to 1650.  Let's say I do that for 4 days in a row.  Great! I'm running an 800-calorie deficit.  Then on day 5 I go to a restaurant for lunch and in a fit of forgetfulness I order a cheeseburger and a fountain Coke with a vinaigrette side salad (no fries, please).   That's all it takes!  The deficit is gone, and I'm back to square one.  Without ever really departing from reasonable, moderate eating!  We're talking a single, culturally normal-sized meal (too big for my body size, but it isn't an amount of food anyone would call "overeating") after 13 carefully-restricted meals in a row.  If I kept up that pattern (13 restricted meals, one culturally normal meal) over and over, I would never change.  The only thing that would be different is that I would feel very frustrated.  Would you be able to keep that up without going slowly insane or developing an eating disorder?

It requires attention.  I have found that it requires counting.

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Still, I can point to areas of relatively easy improvement.  Someday I will have the attention available to make a final push through those two-year-old postpartum pounds, and I could concentrate on developing the habits that support the drive, make it a little easier.  Cutting back on alcohol, making easy-to-remember resolutions like eliminating snacking and seconds, making rules like "half sandwiches only," splitting things with Mark at restaurants (and NOT using that as an excuse to go ahead and have dessert).  

I could do these things.  The question is, will I?

A series of older pictures can be found here.

Put up or shut up (III): lunch edition.

I know this isn't the most fascinating of post series to read, but at least it isn't going to upset anyone. I guess.

So, a few days ago I mentioned that I'm about to make a six-week push to get back on maintenance habits, and started out by making a list of meals -- first dinners, then breakfasts. I really never do the whole-month-at-a-time meal planning, so this is kind of a first for me. Especially in the middle of all the preplanning I have to do for school, which starts right after the six weeks is up.

But... moving right along, in my six weeks of summer lunches I can expect

• 17 ordinary weekdays at home with the kids
• 10 lunches out with the kids on our way to or from somewhere
• 8 times I can expect to come home hungry at lunchtime and will need something quick
• 6 times I might host other families for lunch
• 5 times I will come home from the grocery store and need to have lunch ready soon.

I categorized the lunches at home with kids according to the kind of thing I typically have ready for the kids to eat. I'm afraid they are going to have to go without macaroni and cheese for a few weeks, though, except maybe on date night.

 

• When the kids have sandwiches, I'll have the same: 3 oz ham/0.5 oz cheese or 2 oz turkey/2 oz roast beef on whole wheat with mustard, lettuce, and tomato. Fruit on the side.
• When the kids have quesadillas, I'll have a roasted veggie wrap with 1 oz goat cheese and fresh fruit. (The roasted veggies are the kind of thing that you do ahead of time and freeze in portions. Eggplant, bell peppers, zucchini, mushrooms, onions. I have made this before, it is really easy to do about 6 portions at once.)
• When the kids have tuna salad, I will too, made with white beans and parsley and sun-dried tomatoes, packed in a whole wheat pita with fruit and baby carrots.
• When the kids have hot dogs on homemade wheat buns with corn, I will cook a frozen white fish fillet and have that on a bun with lettuce and pickles.
• When the kids have frozen pizza and fruit, so will I, but I'll choose a thin-crust vegetable pizza like Amy's roasted vegetable or Amy's pesto or DiGiorno thin and crispy.
• When the kids have spaghetti, so will I, with red bell peppers and a lean smoked sausage to flavor the sauce.
• A random emergency lunch is an entire bag of frozen vegetables with whatever protein is handy and a slice of bread.

Hosting another family calls for kid-friendly meals that scale up to a crowd. My ideas are:

 

• Mini bagels with turkey and cheese, lettuce and tomato, fresh snap peas and apples.
• Spaghetti and red sauce -- it stays warm in the crockpot -- with sliced smoked sausage and red bell peppers. Plenty of breadsticks and cheap grated Parmesan for the kids, but not for me.
• Poached chicken, brown rice, steamed broccoli, and pineapple chunks with assorted sauces. For me, soy sauce, rice vinegar, and sesame oil.

 

Expecting to arrive home hungry calls for some planned ready-to-eat meals. My ideas are:

 

• Half a cup of hummus, half a pita, and some red bell peppers, carrot, and celery.
• Veggie burger patty on a bun with lettuce and tomato and a scoop of avocado or guacamole.
• One of the Amy's vegetarian Indian food entrées with some Greek yogurt and cucumber.
• Half a package of a Birds-Eye Steamfresh Protein Blend.
• As a last resort, any ~400-calorie frozen entrée will do, or a combination like a frozen sandwich and a can of vegetable soup.

Coming home hungry right after grocery shopping is a bit less grim, since I can bring something nice from the store. The kids often opt for bagels and cream cheese or a rotisserie chicken. For me, how about

• A premium bag salad topped with a pouch of tuna or salmon, or maybe some of that rotisserie chicken, plus bread.
• A bowl of fresh berries and a hot container of some hearty take-out soup.

 

Lunches out with the kids -- there always seem to be a lot of these in the summer as we go back and forth to day camps and the like -- are a pretty important part of rebooting my habits, I have found, because they offer excellent opportunities to practice portion control.

 

• The Chinese buffet -- a pretty good deal since they charge less for younger kids, and one of my kids' favorite places -- can be dealt with by measuring 1 8-ounce bowl of hot-and-sour soup and 1 equally-sized bowl of all other choices put together, as long as enough of the latter is vegetables.
• There are several workable choices at a Bruegger's Bagels: an egg/cheese or spinach-cheddar omelette bagel, any eight-ounce soup plus the "bagel bites" that come with it, any café salad, a "skinny" veggie bagel sandwich.
• Noodles and Company has some new bowls where they have swapped out the noodles for a pile of spinach. Highly recommended. Similarly, salads at Chipotle with no rice work well.
• At least one kids' meal choice at most fast food restaurants is within limits, e.g., hamburger Happy Meal with apple slices, fries, and a water bottle. Other places make it pretty easy to put together something under 400 calories -- Subway is a decent example, thanks to good menu labeling and a custom-order culture.
• It is even possible to navigate newfangled burger places such as Smashburger if I am willing to split the burger with someone, or have a small one with lettuce wrap instead of bun.

Here's hoping this is a start for a well-planned six weeks.

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Put up or shut up (II): Meal planning, breakfast edition.

A few days ago I explained my upcoming 6-week habit reboot, intended to put the last annoying pregnancy weight behind me for good. I started general meal planning by making a list of dinners that would work with the kind of schedule I will be keeping over those summer weeks. I didn't assign dinners to dates yet, though -- I will do specific meal planning week by week when I make my grocery lists.

Today I attacked the same problem, only for breakfast. Normally I do not plan breakfasts ahead of time. I usually just have whatever I feel like having, typically some combination of eggs or yogurt, toast, and fruit or V-8. I probably don't have to do this, because I rarely have an excessive breakfast, but I thought I would make a list anyway and then I would at least have portions all figured out.

I figured that I have four kinds of mornings coming up:

• Five breakfasts out by myself, early on a Saturday morning.


• Seven weekend breakfasts at home with the family. This calls for muffins, pancakes, or similar.


• Thirteen weekday breakfasts soon after shopping, when we still have fresh fruit around.


• Twenty weekday breakfasts after I can expect all the fresh fruit to be gone.

Breakfasts out by myself need a strategy, not a plan, and I already have such a strategy. At the Ordinary Breakfast Place I always have buttered pumpernickel toast, one egg, and a big glass of tomato juice. At the Fancy Breakfast Place I usually order the delicious breakfast quesadilla, on a house-made sprouted tortilla with black beans, spinach, and guacamole, and take half of it home for later.

I raided my cookbooks for some good weekend-morning breakfasts, around 400 calories, and came up with this list:

• Lemon-blueberry muffin (150 cal), scrambled egg + eggwhite + onions + mushrooms, 2/3 c whole milk


• Coffee cake muffin (220 cal), 1/2 c plain yogurt, 1 c berries


• Chocolate-chip scone (160 cal), 1 c strawberries, 1/2 c yogurt or cottage cheese, 1 Tbsp sliced almonds


• 1 waffle with blueberries and 1 Tbsp maple syrup, 2/3 c whole milk


• 2 cornmeal pancakes (1/4 c batter each) with 1 c blueberries and 6 oz blueberry yogurt

Why the 2/3 cup of whole milk everywhere? Well, published meal plans always call for 1 cup of skim milk. Bleah. I like whole milk, so I only pour 2/3 of a cup.

I think the best plan for weekday breakfasts is to eat the same breakfast a few days in a row; change it to something else when I run out of fresh fruit; then, change it again when I buy more fresh fruit a few days later.

 

My "there is fresh fruit in the house" weekday breakfasts might include

 

• Toasted whole wheat English muffin, 2 tsp whipped butter, 2/3 cup plain yogurt with a teaspoon of honey, and 1 cup sliced strawberries


• 1 egg scrambled with bell pepper, tomato, 1.5 oz turkey kielbasa, red onion, garlic; 1 slice wheat toast, 1 cup blueberries


• 2 eggs scrambled with cream and spinach or broccoli and bell pepper, half an English muffin, butter


• Ham, egg, and cheese (or bacon, egg, no cheese) sandwich on an English muffin with tomato and a cup of fruit salad


• 3/4 cup plain whole Greek yogurt, 3/4 cup chopped fruit or berries, 1/4 cup granola or other crunchy cereal, drizzle of honey

 

After the fresh berries run out, I could have one of these:

• 2-egg frittata with green pepper, onion, cheese, and salsa; 1 slice toast; half a grapefruit or some canned mandarin oranges


• Toasted English muffin with 4 tsp peanut butter, half a banana, and 2/3 c whole milk


• Toasted English muffin half, spread with a wedge of Laughing Cow cheese; hard boiled egg; fruited yogurt cup; tomato juice or V-8


• 3 ounces of bagel (e.g., mini or half), 2 Tbsp hummus, cucumber and tomato, 1/2 c canned fruit


• 2 soft-boiled eggs, (six minutes for me), 1 slice of toast with plenty of butter, glass of V-8 or tomato juice


• 2 scrambled eggs with cream and butter, half an English muffin with a bit of honey, glass of V-8

You might notice the total absence of bowls of cereal in this breakfast plan. This is because once I start eating bowls of cereal, I usually fall into an iterative loop of "Oops, I ate all the cereal but there is still milk in the bowl; add cereal" followed by "Oops, there is no more milk in the bowl but I still have cereal; add milk." I do better with oatmeal, but I don't really want that in the summer.

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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.

   

 

Fourteen-hour fasting.

Every May and November I try to write about the long-term maintenance of the significant weight loss I achieved in 2008.

(Care about numbers? I am 4'11" tall. From lifelong obesity, having had an all-time nonpregnant high of 160 lbs, I went in 6 months from 148 lbs to 108 lbs. After my subsequent pregnancy, I ended up at 113 and felt better there then I had at 108, so stayed. Since then I have had an additional pregnancy.)

Longtime readers will remember that while that was going on, I blogged about almost nothing else, to the point that, for example, wildly popular paleo websites linked to me and called me a "weight loss blogger." I probably overdid it, but I can't be too sorry because the hyper-focus probably helped.

May is disappearing fast, so here I am with my update.

+ + +

My youngest is now nearly seventeen months old, still happily breastfeeding, and generally keeping us on our toes. I am feeling really good overall. I haven't run a 5K in a while, and have been swimming more often than running, mostly because swimming feels better and is easier to convince myself to do; but I am getting to the gym at a fairly reliable pace of twice per week.

However: I am really, really frustrated by the non-budging of my postpartum bathroom scale.

Is it just the difference of being four years older in this last pregnancy than I was in the pregnancy before that? Or is it from being four years farther removed from the felt experience of constant, successful self-denial in my 2008 weight loss, so that I forgot how to work hard? Or is it from having 25% more children vying for my limited attention than the last time around? Whatever: After my last pregnancy, the weight came off with very little effort, and fairly quickly. This time -- it appears to be happening, but verrrrrrrry sloooooowly.

Seventeen months postpartum, I am still 7-10 pounds above my prepregnancy weight, which (on my 4'11" frame) means I am still one full clothing size larger, which means that I have a bunch of clothes that I would really like to wear that I can't. The conflict: I am still, unnecessarily it would seem, living in the yoga pants that I bought at the beginning of pregnancy to bridge the gap until maternity clothes. Should I accept life in my current size, buy more clothes that fit me, and get rid of the ones that don't? Or should I keep on working at it, in the hope that little by little, enough flesh will slip away to allow me to wear my "real clothes" again?

I don't look bad. I don't feel bad. But I don't want to buy a whole new wardrobe either. It feels like giving up.

+ + +

One factor is certainly attention. The self-denial that I have found necessary to drop pounds -- mostly, from sticking to small portions -- is not difficult to endure; I am quite used to it by now. But the body has tricks to play. As odd as it may sound, I seem simply to forget my intentions, forget to account for food I have already eaten, forget that I meant not to snack or to have seconds, forget to arrange plates full of vegetables and to limit rice and tortillas and bread. To combat this, I should make a meal plan for each day, but it is hard to find the time; family life is so distracting right now. The only time I have ever had rapid success is when I prioritized eating self-control over all other family priorities, and I am unwilling to do that now.

The best I've been able to do at this attention level, it seems, is to work on it when I remember, and hope that my efforts pay off over time.

+ + +

I am trying a new experiment on myself right now, though, to shake things up a bit: what is called Intermittent Fasting, of the "14/10" variety. That is, I'm spending at least 14 hours of every day (including my sleeping hours, of course) not eating at all.

Intermittent fasting (IF) is popular in a few circles right now -- paleo and bodybuilding, for instance. I guess the idea is that dividing your day into a (longer) period of fasting and a (shorter) period of eating is somehow better for your blood sugar, even if you eat the same stuff in your eating window as you would have if you had spread it out over the whole day. As a practical matter, it presents a clear-cut rule that should reduce one's exposure to snacking opportunities, simply because there is a biggish block of the day where you have pre-decided that you won't eat. Besides the daily block of fasting that I am trying out, another flavor of IF is to periodically, perhaps twice a week, go 24 hours without eating (generally skipping dinner-lunch-breakfast so that every calendar day does have some food), and a third is to follow a more-frequent modified fast (very-low-calorie days intermixed with high-calorie days).

I started by attempting 16-hour fasts, but very quickly switched to 14-hour ones -- which some say is more appropriate for women, anyway. A typical fasting period would begin sometime after dinner -- so, perhaps I would have my last bite around 8:30 p.m. -- and last until a late breakfast, around 10:30. But sometimes, because I chose to have a snack around 10 p.m., I would not eat until lunchtime.

As a lifelong believer in light but early breakfasts, I expected to have trouble getting used to the long delay before the break-fast. Indeed, I find I am pretty hungry when that first mealtime rolls around. But it isn't as bad as I feared. I typically drink coffee all morning anyway, and that hasn't changed, so my routine isn't all that different. It is the kind of thing that would happen to me sometimes when, interrupted by children or intent on the preparation for the day, I would forget to eat until later. That never caused me any great distress, other than a little light-headedness, and I find that doing it on purpose is no worse and often easier because of having planned for it.

I find that each day naturally seems to fall into one of two patterns, depending on whether I can set my own meal schedule or whether I am around other people who are eating normally.

If I set my own schedule, I eat a late breakfast at, say, 10:30 a.m.; a somewhat late lunch at about 2 p.m.; and dinner at the normal time or a bit later. Because the meals are closer together, it is not terribly hard to keep to a fairly light lunch and dinner (though I am still getting used to not inhaling a huge breakfast after the long fast).

If I am around other people, it works better to break the fast with a small snack as soon as the 14 hours are up. Then it's a normal lunch and a normal dinner at the normal times.

+ + +

Trying this out was a bit of a philosophical departure for me. Most of the time I try to focus on dietary disciplines that seem as if I'd like to adopt them as lifelong, or at least long-term, habits. And before I tried this, I definitely thought it would be something for the short-term. I just like breakfast too much to take it seriously! I justified the uncharacteristic "crash diet" approach by thinking that I just needed to shake things up for a few weeks, maybe break through the plateau that's dogging me.

But now that I have tried it for several weeks, I find it ... appealing, actually. I think I will keep going for a while and see what happens if I tweak it a bit here and there.

Some reasons why I like it:

• Bright-line clarity. I don't risk overthinking it. It is very simple: Notice what time I last eat before going to bed, and don't eat again for 14 hours.
• No food restrictions. Except, of course, that it's easier to fast if you've eaten something that is not empty junk.
• Flexibility: On average, of course, the eating window is 10 hours long. But in any given day, I can go ahead and have more food later into the evening; the tradeoff is a later breakfast. (How bad can it be? I doubt I will ever eat past 11 p.m., so the worst it can be is 1.) Sometimes that seems like a good tradeoff and sometimes it doesn't. I get to decide. Similarly, I get to decide when to have meals during the day. If for some reason I want to have an early breakfast -- say 8 a.m. -- all I have to do is stop eating at 6 p.m. after an early dinner the night before.
• Less time to wait between daytime meals. This means -- I hope -- that I could be satisfied with a smaller portion size. When I decide to try that.
• I am practicing a useful skill. Fasting for 14 hours is occasionally necessary. I am slowly learning that it will not kill me or make me crazy or unbearably irritable, but that I can do it without difficulty if I plan well (and carry that fast-breaking snack if I have to leave the house in the morning).

I think I will keep this up for six weeks or so, and then maybe -- if I can sustain the effort required to pay attention -- start watching the total calorie count as well. I am not ready to give up on those non-yoga pants yet.

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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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Patterns of behavior: exploiting what you've learned.

The notion that there are "competing versions of the self" is a recurring theme in my thinking and writing here at bearing blog.

You know, when you say, "Part of me wants to eat that doughnut, but part of me knows it's bad for me."

Or, "Part of me wants to get up and get started on my day, but part of me wants to sleep in."

I've written about this before:

•  Here's an old post looking at an Atlantic article on the topic of the "multiplicity of the self" -- link still active -- and also to Romans 7 ("What I do, I do not understand.  For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate.")  
• Here's my review of the book Switch:  How to Change Things When Change is Hard, a book that divides the self into a metaphorical "elephant" and "rider."  (The elephant is the emotional, powerful, driven-by-desire part of the self; the rider is the intelligent part of the self that knows where he wants to go but has little power to get there on his own.  The challenge is for the rider to intelligently direct the elephant, channeling its strengths to achieve the desired outcome.)

Often, the best advice is to pre-plan:  at a time when you are detached from temptations and short-term gratifications (i.e. sometime when your stomach is not growling, when you are not lying in bed dreading the snooze alarm to go off), to consider how to set up your environment to reduce access to  "bad" choices and improve access to "good" choices in the moment, how to restructure your incentive system.  Putting fruit on your shopping list instead of doughnuts; moving your alarm clock across the room; preparing yourself a little treat to have ready as a reward for doing the right thing.

The concept is to schedule "choice-making" time at the time when you are strong and in control, thereby restricting the choices available to you when you are comparably vulnerable and weak.

+ + +

I've internalized this for a long time in some areas of my life; I mastered it with respect to food issues (probably aided by divine intervention) about six years ago.

Just yesterday, I noticed that it's quite similar to something else I do.

One evolutionary biology textbook was on my lap, another one propped open against the wall, and a third book -- this one on general biology -- was spread out between my keyboard and my computer screen.  I had a spreadsheet open and I was dividing up chapters among the thirty-two weeks that will be left in our school year after we deduct a month for our family trip.

Most of the readings will be from this introductory college text... a few supplemental readings from this more advanced text that has a truer philosophical attitude toward human evolution...  Week one it'll be the chapters about the development of evolutionary theory... week two, Mendelian genetics... somewhere in here I'll assign some readings from The Origin of Species... I think I'll assign some Richard Dawkins stuff, probably from The Ancestor's Tale, and we can discuss it... let's see, that should go later in the course...

My goal at the beginning of every year, for every subject in which there's a set amount of material I want to cover, is to have a week-by-week schedule completely fleshed out.

If the material is such that earlier concepts build on later concepts, so that you can't safely skip chapters, I schedule for fewer weeks than there are in the school year -- it leaves room for illnesses and emergencies and still staying on track.  If material is skippable or the order of assignments don't matter, I'll spread it out through the whole school year, and if you're sick we just skip that day, maybe to make it up when we have extra time another day.

I put a ton of work into this organization.  It's the primary work of my late-spring and early-summer school year.  It helps that I enjoy it:  it's solo work that reminds me of computer programming, an activity that I wasn't any damn good at but that I enjoyed immensely back when that was what I did every day.  I do it far ahead of time, and why?

So that when I get up in the morning and have to teach my kids, I don't have the excuse of "ummm what was I supposed to do today?" as a reason to pour another cup of coffee and sit down in front of the computer to find "something to do today."

I already have a Thing To Do Today.  And I don't actually have an excuse not to do it.

Planning down to the exact day ("on day 122 of the school year I will do this... on day 123 of the school year I will do this...") is too fine-grained.   Planning the month is too loose.  I plan week by week, and each week I have to figure out how to distribute the schoolwork and teaching, and that's just about right.

+ + +

But it strikes me that in an important way, it is very like the elephant-rider metaphor.  I set the boundaries of our school weeks in advance, when I can think about them clearly and when I have the overall philosophy of education, the big picture, before my attention.  Day to day I try to live by the rules I have set by myself.

This way of organizing the homeschool year and week was obvious to me as "the way that would feel right for me to do it" from the very beginning of homeschooling.  I wonder why I never noticed before how similar it is to a certain technique of practicing self-control in general?  I wonder why I had to independently discover it in other areas of my life?  

Like the Mandelbrot fractal, personality exhibits the same patterns wherever you look and on whatever scale, the deep and the superficial.  One of these days I will learn to generalize and to re-apply the lessons, and save myself a whole lot of trouble.  Maybe.

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.)

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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.

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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.

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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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