The Incident of Ice Cream in the Night

I continue to manage my eating, and I continue to lose a small amount of weight. At the same time, I've really upped my exercise because I'm planning on a walking vacation and I will have a lot more fun if I am in better shape. I'm very mindful of what I'm eating, logging it all, and thinking through my approach to mindful eating, asking myself "Do I want this now?" (ask twice, once with the emphasis on this, once with the emphasis on now).

One night this past week the positive answer to that question led me to consume two four-ounce cups of mint chocolate chip ice cream that just happened to be in my freezer. I did pause and ask myself about it, and I owned the moment. It was not hurried, mindless consumption. I slowly savored each and every spoonful, noticing the uneven distribution of chocolate through the ice cream, enjoying the way the cream melted in my mouth, leaving a last chew of chocolate before swallowing. But I don't know what happened to drive me to a "yes" answer. I tried to talk myself out of it, but I kept coming back to "yes" and so I chose to go for it. Asked again, harder, before the second cup went down the hatch, and came up with the same answer.

So about 360 calories and 60 grams of sugar. So what? I was surprised at the immediate consequences on the scale the next day. After steady though small progress, the scale jumped up two whole pounds overnight and stayed there for three days before coming back down to where I was the morning of the ice cream incident. So I conclude that 60 grams of sugar led to my re-absorbing water throughout my body, because only water retention can explain that big a gain (or loss for that matter) overnight. My weekly trend, and Trendweight.com's more complex calculation, so a small loss for the week, but knowing specifically the consequences of a sugar incident may give me pause before my next chosen indulgence.

Energy

I am feeling better and more energetic and optimistic and productive than I have in a long time.  I am conscious of this, and grateful and trying to ride the wave and get a lot done, but I really don't know why I feel like this, so my Scandinavian pessimism is telling me not to get used to this. A piece of me is waiting for the bubble to burst.

Is it the spring weather in February? Shouldn't I feel guilty for enjoying it so, when it's a symptom of the ill-health of the planet? Is it something I'm doing physically, my diet, my vitamins, my sleep, my exercise? Is it something I'm doing mentally/emotionally, meditating, connecting with family, connecting with friends, planning a fun vacation, rationing my media consumption, listening to great music and reading only fun books? If it is driven by my actions, which ones? How do I keep this up? If driven by externals, it's surely not the state of the country, which is in dire peril and makes me feel helpless when I allow myself to dwell on it, which I don't. Clearly the absence of any major immediate family crisis is part of it. My work is probably at least partly responsible, where it is urgent and busy and feels important and as if my personal contribution makes a difference to the part of our nation's commerce I work in (at least). And I'm making plans, and science says we sometimes gain more satisfaction from planning and deciding to act, rather than actually acting.

Not every thing nor every moment is coming up roses, of course, but when I pause and check in with myself, I have an underlying happiness that is burbling along. Sure wish I knew the formula for this, and could reproduce it at will. If I could bottle this and distribute to everyone I know, I would!

Me and My Devices

Aaron Carroll, a health blogger and NY Times columnist I follow, wrote an article covering a study that looked at how a tracking device helped (or not) with weight loss and increasing activity.  The study results were negative.  I had already tracked back and read the original publication some time ago, and so I commented on it in the NY Times on-line.  This morning I looked, and my comment had risen to the top of the "readers picks" in comments. How about that? (Internet fame is so fleeting that it maybe won't be at the top anymore if you go look.)  Here is the article - if you have a subscription you can get to the comments.

https://nyti.ms/2lZULns

Steady as She Goes

It has been a good week. No flu. No migraine. I cooked enough that I carried my meal to work every day. I am mindful as I eat, and conscious of the tastes, slower, and enjoying it as I go. The weight loss I see is real, though less than the initial woosh.

Total Calorie Burn.
Big one-time drop was switch in technology.

My real focus is on upping my activity, though. If I can manage the food the way I did this week - not the main focus of my week, but good and easy due to planning, then I have more time and energy to work on the activity. I spent some time going back and looking at my activity statistics.  I've definitely got scope in improve my activity levels.

Steps from fitbit

I've tracked my calorie burn since I first started wearing a device.  The big drop shows that different devices calculate it differently.  I think the more recent data is probably more "true". The absolute scale is actually not that important - it's the trend. So the calorie count shows that the past few months I've definitely upped my game from last year.

Zooming in on steps in the past couple of years, you can see there is a lot of variability in how much I walk.  In June of 2015 and 2016 I took vacations with a lot of walking. But generally, 2016 had fewer steps than 2015. This last January, I took a work trip that required being on my feet a lot. I've got another walking vacation coming up, so I'm strongly motivated to get these step counts up!

Speaking of that, it's warm and sunny and the dog is restless.  Catch you later.

Cooking

Cooking at home is the key to controlling what I eat (and also to keeping it reasonably priced).  But I have years and years of a habit of not cooking on week nights.  Am I too old a dog to learn this new trick?

Two days a week I go to the gym, which totally shoots the evening.  I should definitely get a pass those nights.  But other nights - I get home between 6 and 7, depending on work and traffic.  I'm generally in bed before 10 (and sorry if I'm not - a post on sleep and how I crave it will be coming). There is still time in that evening window to cook.  And yet, I rarely do.

What do I eat if I don't cook?  Leftovers, mostly.  I try to have a surplus from when I do cook so I have them. Gym nights, I don't want to eat much if at all before going. Afterwards, I either grab leftovers (as I did last night) or else stop at Whole Foods hot food table.  Often, on gym nights, I end up not eating much at all - sometimes, it's just pistachios. On work nights without the gym, its almost always leftovers. There are also a very few frozen dinners I like and often have on hand.  I don't go out, unless its with one of the kids to a place like Chipotle.

Tuesday, I actually cooked.  I have an internal debate about what constitutes truly cooking. Heating up something from the freezer or fridge that was already cooked does not count.  But tonight, I had all the ingredients at home because I'd intended to cook Sunday night, and instead went out to a restaurant with the family.  So tuesday night I made italian sausages, spaghetti squash, and a fresh tomato sauce from raw ingredients, and by almost anyone's definition that was cooking.  I thought about it on the way home, and one thing I did differently tonight from most nights is that I went right to the kitchen.  I did not first flop down on the couch with the ipad to check up on facebook.  Instead, the dog went out back, I changed my clothes, and then grabbed all the ingredients out of the fridge and got right to work.  I had also walked through the steps in my mind while driving, so I didn't in the moment have to decide if (for example) the sausages were going under the broiler or on the stovetop. Decision-making is not my forte after a long work day, and that kind of indecision can drive me to the couch with the ipad while all my energy and good intentions leak away.  I also had a clean kitchen to work in.  Definitely a messy kitchen is often a barrier.

I know that for most women of my age cooking dinner is not that remarkable.  I did go through a stint where I made dinner for the family every night, but it wasn't for twenty plus years like most of us, only about five years.  Now I'm back on my own, and pistachios in lieu of dinner is actually just fine some nights.  No-one to please but myself.  But I'd like to get the inspiration and energy to cook more often than just on weekends.

So I guess the main points of my cooking success are:  clean kitchen, all ingredients already on hand, a clear plan of how it's going to go, and don't flop down on the couch first. Another key point is home before seven.  I'll see if this is repeatable more often.

Stress Reducers

We all have stress.  By any objective standard, I've had a fair amount of personal stress in the last ten years.  Right now, there is a great deal of stress coming from the wider world, accompanied by a strong sense of helplessness.

Cortisol is known as the "stress hormone". Chronic elevated levels of cortisol cause inflammation, affect insulin, and drive hunger. Through these means, stress leads to belly fat.  Stress disrupts your sleep, which also leads to belly fat. Stress makes us fat!

Stress isn't going to go away, not any time soon.  Sometimes, the stress cannot be reduced, only absorbed.  These are my go-to ways to avoid sinking into carbohydrate bliss when bathed in an internal cortisol bath:

1. Take Action

Whatever the source of stress, it is compounded by feelings of helplessness (especially true for me, who wants badly to feel competent and in control).  So figure out, "what is the one thing I can actually do to impact the source of the stress?" Figure it out, and do it.  This is the fundamental approach to resilience - shit happens, and how you respond is your business.  Find an employment lawyer for job stress, call your elected representatives for civic stress, find a nanny or a therapist for stress from your kids, read on the internet to get smart about the reasons the stress exists and so find other things you can do.  I've done all these things.  It may not fix the problem, at least not at once, but I think of it as starting to chip away at it. Control the things you can, which is what you do.  And as you fall asleep, think "at least I did something".

2. Run or Walk

Not just any kind of exercise, but moving through the world helps me a lot.  Running gets the heart rate up higher than anything I do and creates a cascade of good effects through the body.  I listen to music when I'm running, but running is so hard I cannot run and ruminate at the same time. Afterwards, the stress hormones are presumably lower (says the science) and good hormones and good tiredness fill your body.

Walking takes longer, but can also absorb me.  Walking has probably saved my life several times over.  It's sometimes the one thing I can do to take action  (as in #1 above), when my problem is me. I can walk to exhaustion, thinking, just being present, or lost in a good book through headphones.  The main thing is to get outside and get tired.  Not just tired, exhausted.

3. Write

I'm not a "writer", in that I'm not a professional, nor is it how I describe myself, nor is it part of my interior definition of who I am and what I do.  And yet, I find at times, that writing is my way out of a stressful dilemma.  When I'm ruminating, turning things over and over in my mind, writing can help. This is private writing, not blogging like this, though sometimes blog posts have been drafted or thought of in private writing first. I have been a journal-keeper in the past, starting in high school, but I am far from regular now. However, I have shelf of blank books in my bedroom, most of them filled with my scrawlings, some of them yet blank and awaiting my thoughts.  I believe that morning pages - the practice of daily writing at least three pages first thing each day - combined with the walking to save my life back when I lived in Chicago.

These days my writing is generally at a keyboard.  I can type faster than I hand-write.  When I'm using writing as a stress absorber, often the words come tumbling out and have to be captured as quickly as I can think them.  Some times, that isn't the case, and I want the sensation of my hand gliding over the page, using a lovely pen on quality paper.  Not often, these days, though.  In fact, sometimes when I want the handwriting feeling, I use longhand - but on my ipad.  (That is how I move through my work day, handwriting free-form notes with different colors and pen widths, then being able to refer back to them weeks and months later, because they are filed neatly in my pretty Notability app.)

These days, my version of morning pages will be done on 750words.  This minimalist site is inspired by morning pages, but captures your words in a private session. It's slightly social, in that it posts who has written.  Of course one of the things I like is it counts words for your, and even does some elementary sentiment analysis on your words.  You make badges for consistency (number of days in a row) which everyone can see. Every month is a "write daily for the entire month" challenge with its own badges and encouragement. Having un-interrupted streaks is not so very important to me (though I've done the one-month challenge successfully a few times).  But when I use the site, the length is about right for me.  

Writing gets me out of repetitive cycles of ruminating thoughts, able to build on one thing written down, and move forward, instead of simply repeating over and over again.

4.  Meditate

I took a class called "Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction".  MBSR is an 8-week class structure developed at Boston University by Jon Kabat-Zinn specifically to help patients coping with chronic, severe, or fatal illness.  I am neither religious nor spiritual, but this is very practical and doesn't go far into the woo-woo stuff that puts me off.  Later, my friend Kim introduced me to 10% Happier, by Dan Harris, who makes a skeptic's journey through the land of meditation.  Harris has developed a meditation app, which I now use regularly.  

An app for meditation, you say? Huh?  This particular app features brief (2-8 minute) video lectures or discussions on aspects of meditation, followed by guided meditations.  I find it helpful, and of course I love that it logs my minutes of meditation and gives me a record of how much I'm actually doing it.

I got into the meditation game persuaded by science that meditation "works". I believe it has helped me reduce self-imposed stress, by cutting my ruminations, and also helps me better handle the stress I can't reduce but have to live with. For me, that is working. 

5. Escape

Allow a book or movie to transport you out of yourself and your own problems.  Look at someone else's for a change.  However (and this is key) do NOT allow yourself to eat during this transportation. Eating doesn't have to be totally mindful all the time, but there is huge danger combining stress, food, and the silver screen.

6. Run Away

I do this from time to time.  Get in my car and go away. Sometimes for days. I have a couple of places that are my special places of power.  I gain strength by being outdoors and alone.  I don't want to talk to anyone, I disconnect, I go away.

I did this on election day.  I took the day off and took the dog for a long hike / rock scramble.  We were gone for six hours. I went home and dropped off the happy but tired old dog and walked to downtown to eat alone in a restaurant wearing earbuds for isolation, and then walked home - about a 3 mile round trip.  I was still jangly anxious, unable to sit down, and the dog was game for more travels around the neighborhood.  I went to sleep very early, woke up just after midnight, and only then broke my self-imposed isolation to check the phone. (Sadly, of course, the stress has only mounted since then.)

These are the things that keep me going in the face of stress.  I fight the impulse to succumb, to lie under the covers and ruminate, by some combination of the above things.  I imagine I can feel the cortisol coursing through my veins and I use these things to absorb it and move forward.

Restaurants

Restaurants are hard, especially in the early days of a diet, when food choices are most restricted but habits are not well formed.  I always want to opt to being social, but my somewhat unconventional understanding of what is "healthy" makes it hard sometimes.  For our family, it is incredibly hard to pick a  place, since one of us is vegan, and so the only foods we overlap on are salads!

Almost all Thai food is cooked with sugar. A lot of Chinese food is as well.  What doesn't have sugar has corn starch, often. Coatings on meet and vegetables are starch based. So at a Chinese place, I'll opt for simple - beef with broccoli, or else moo shi without a pancake or sweet hoisin sauce.  I simply try to avoid Thai places.

Waffle Houses and IHop - did you know they put pancake batter in their omelettes?

Sauces most places are extremely suspicious.

The family went to Red Lobster Sunday night, which all things considered was the least-bad choice in terms of what I wanted to eat.  I got grilled shrimp, steamed broccoli, and a side salad.  The problem was it just wasn't terribly tasty.  So the reason I was there was not primarily the food, but the company.  It's just important to shape your mind around that.

Because I'm tracking every bite right now, another problem with restaurants is simply understanding what the food is and how to count it. My crowd-sourced app has a lot of the chain restaurant menus already included, but you have to study the entry to decide if it's correct.

Much easier to eat at home.

Back to the Gym

My illness last week was a period of enormous inactivity.  I'm not sure I've had that prolonged a fever for a few years.  It really took a lot out of me. My energy levels, never very high, are still even lower than normal.  But I know at my age, it's very much "use it or lose it".  So Sunday morning I dragged myself back into the gym.

I actually had had hopes of a more active Saturday. I felt pretty good in the morning, and it was supposed to be really warm.  I took the dog to the park (just over a mile) first thing, in what turned out to be the last few moments of sun.  It clouded up, and stayed that way the rest of the day.  It turned into a pooky day for me, no energy, no big projects, just hanging out and dissipating myself on trivial things.  I would hate to see the count of how many times I checked facebook. No naps, but not a lot of accomplishments to point to.

So Sunday, not as warm, and with the cloudiness ripened into rain, I took myself off to the gym for a short session.  Weights and TRX, arms and legs and back.  I was very quickly out of breath, and yet it felt so good to move.  Lots of stretching was worked into the mix.  Range of motion is also something that would be quickly lost if not specifically used often.

Oddly, my knees, a perennial source of pain, were not sore at all.  I think that may be a function of their finally having a chance to really rest up and recover.  My arthritic knees are always slightly irritated from use.  Ice and NSAIDs keep it manageable, but they probably never recover completely, since I use them all the time.  Except when I have a whole week of being sick.  How about that for finding a silver lining!

Recovery will take a while.  I'm just really glad I like going to the gym, so I'm willing to put in the work to get back to strong.

Weight Checkin

In spite of the flu, I was successful at sticking to Atkins induction eating, and so had the typical Atkins dramatic drop in weight.  On this graph, a keen-eyed viewer would notice the individual weight points just before the drop, higher than anything else in over two years. This is what caused the alarm bells to go off.

This impressive one-week plunge in weight is typical when narrowing the diet from including sweets and starches to only vegetables and protein on Atkins. It's water. But, of course, the high reading on the scale also included water, so both the gain and the loss have the same components.

My pants feel slightly better, but I haven't worked out in over a week and I had all-time lows on fitbit steps while I dozed through my fever. The way my clothes fit should be further improved just by getting moving again.

Clearly what actually counts as weight loss success is seeing a trend that lasts longer than a week. But let's admit seeing the plunge is motivating!

Where I felt my best, in terms of how strong I was, how I looked, and what I was eating, was the first half of last year.  I wasn't blogging then.  I wasn't tracking my food. My weight had gone up from achieving my goal - but I always figured that goal wasn't sustainable, so I wasn't sad about that. It seemed I had some stability, at a new and better set point.  But, eventually, whatever precarious balance I had went kerflooey.  So now I need to figure out how to get back to that range, and how to keep it there in a sustainable way.

Dog Walking

Walking is nearly a religion for me.  It has saved my life, I'm sure.  One of the best things to motivate me to get out there and walk is my dog.

I've had a dog most of my life and find it hard to conceive of ever living dogless.  Bad days or good, the dogs always want to go see (and more importantly, smell) the world.  It makes me happy to make my dog happy.  What an incredible beneficial evolutionary adaptation for both species!  Our happiness and well-being are mutually reinforcing - and for very low investment, because all we need is each other.

My dog heads out the front door and turns right on the street, the direction of the park.  This is the dog's perennial optimism, even though we never go that way at night.  The park is way more interesting to him than the neighborhood (though clearly there is no such thing as a boring walk).  He turns right, and if I follow, his ears swing up and his tail reaches a higher angle.  He sets off on a ground-covering trot, ears bouncing with every stride and the tail swinging gently back and forth in time to his stride.  I look at those ears and tail, and it makes me smile, because I've made him happy.

I want to move more, and having a happy-to-go-anywhere dog is very helpful!

Things I don't eat

Whether I'm focused on weight loss or just livin' my life, there are certain foods that are staples for many folks that I go months, sometimes years, without eating.  Since the mid-1990's, my thoughts about food have been away from the mainstream. There are no bad foods, and many folks consider these things I don't eat as healthy choices.  These are not foods I dislike because of how they taste or their texture. These are foods that I have learned are not worth it for me in terms of pleasure I get from eating them versus the way they make me feel shortly thereafter. I'm pleased I've been able to connect the delayed bad feelings with the immediate decision, so I'm making what feels to my gut check like the right choice, rather than an enforced restriction.

I eat these things sometimes, mostly when socializing, traveling, or eating out. They are not on my shopping list, unless I'll be having guests.

• Orange juice, apple juice, grape juice, cranberry juice, lemonade.
• Soda and diet soda.
• Potato chips, corn chips, tortilla chips.
• Crackers.
• Doughnuts, danish, coffee cake, scones, muffins, bagels.
• Oatmeal, breakfast cereal, granola.
• White wine and red wine.
• Sandwich bread, dinner rolls, baguettes, wraps, tortillas, naan.
• French fries, baked potatoes, mashed potatoes, boiled potatoes.
• Pasta, macaroni, ravioli, noodles.
• White rice, sushi, rice pudding.
• Pizza (I've never tried a cauliflower crust - doesn't that sound horrible?)
• Any candy that isn't good chocolate.

Giving these things up has not felt like a sacrifice of good things I really want.  I actually like them fine, I just don't eat them, because I am likely to feel bad not too long after eating them. Not sick, but hungry and out of control and maybe a bit nauseous.  I have eaten all these things and not felt bad, but more often than not it leads to bad things. Among other things, they can lead to out of control eating - I've been a 3-slice pizza girl when my intentions were pure to stop after just one.

You will notice that chocolate candy and cookies are NOT on this list.  Nor, of course, ice cream, that best of all possible foods.  I buy these sometimes, eat them out of the house more often, and sometimes that is a problem in terms of how they make me feel and my ability to control my weight.  But I feel if I restrict the other types of indulgences I have, it just takes off my plate whole areas of decision-making I don't need to even think about, and probably leads to better choices overall. So let's set aside my issues about my special treat foods and think about the every day choices above. 

Wiping these things off the list of possible food choices in some ways makes life easier, but in others makes it much harder.  Travelling, for example. Sandwiches are unbeatable for convenience.  On a narrow little tray table on an airplane, to get out my bagged salad in a plastic bowl, fork, knife, napkin, maybe add the salad dressing and try to toss it in an already full bowl without annoying my neighbors is very difficult. Lunches served in conjunction with meetings are often sandwiches. I watched a colleague take his pre-made sandwiches, and methodically set aside the bread, and eat the insides with a knife and fork.  Brilliant! I can do that! Eating out at a Thai or Indian restaurant, presents fabulous choices, all of which involve rice, noodles, naan, or potatoes as integral parts of the dishes. These can't be "forbidden" foods, but I do try to find alternatives most of the time.  I feel better, and my weight is easier to manage, when I minimize them, so the hassle is worth some inconvenience.

Downline, there are foods I would like to eat more often (beans and sweet potatoes and intact whole grains). But those listed at the top of this post are not ever likely to find a regular presence in my house.

Trends

News Flash:  I've officially arrested my upward trend on weight!

This is not unexpected, since I've slashed the carbs mightily for several days. Typically, I'll see a quick drop of several pounds when I do that, and I know it's water.  It's still big news, however, as this trend has been underway for a while. And, it's water, but it's water throughout my body, and already there is a difference in how the clothes feel.  Because it's water, it can go back on just as quickly, but it's still very reinforcing to see.

Trendweight is an awesome free website for those of us who have automatic wi-fi connected scales and weigh ourselves daily (and who don't mind having a random individual who set up the website to amuse himself and benefit others have access to your data).  It uses an engineering formula for damping oscillations in readings to establish the underlying trend.  So presto, with my doing no work beyond stepping on the scale each morning, I get awesome graphs and a reading on the trend available to me.

The individual diamonds are the actual scale readings each day, and the line shows the computed underlying "true" weight. The formula weights the most recent measurements heavier than the older ones, but the older ones matter, so even though my scale and computed weight has been going down for a few days, the formula predicted each day that my weight would continue to increase in the future - until today.

Here is a screen shot of the past four weeks, that includes the trend line I see on the screen.  The dotted line showing the projection is absolutely flat, not going down, but until today it was going up.

The website also gives helpful stats automatically, good reminders.  It calculates how many calories I must be burning versus eating - the effective calorie imbalance - using the established formula of 3500 calories deficit equals one pound lost.  It doesn't measure calories in or calories out - but instead says "you must be in this imbalance or your weight change wouldn't be what it is".  This overcomes many objections to the "calorie is a calorie" debate - it just reports what is the outcome.

Then oh-so-helpfully it predicts when you'll achieve your goal weight at the current rate of progress.  You are all invited to my goal weight celebration on July 10, 2095.  Be there or be square. Ice cream will be served.

UGGH! The REAL Flu!

Did I have Atkins flu on Saturday?  Maybe, maybe not.  But I've got the real flu now, or else a bad cold.  (The internet is dodgy on defining how you can tell the difference. Without a swab, it's a matter of intensity and duration to base a guess on.)  I was exposed to a severe long-lasting crud both at home and at work, so germs did their thing.

I've been very lucky in not having colds or flu much for the past few years. It was getting to the point where I was starting to think my somewhat healthy lifestyle was making me less vulnerable.  In fact, I never got around to getting a flu shot this year - really really stupid of me, since they are free at the office.

So poor little me. Sunday and yesterday was a fever, and yesterday was fewest number of steps in 24 hours my fitbit has ever recorded.  The days have passed in a grey haze. I haven't totally lost my appetite, but certainly have no gumption for cooking. Luckily I had leftovers - including homemade turkey soup - in the fridge.

I am truly pathetic when I'm sick. I'm miserable and sorry for myself and don't care who knows it. You do not want to be around me when I'm sick because I'll just moan about how bad I feel.

I have not used it as an excuse to go to the chocolate reserves hidden in the back room. I'm sticking with Atkins, again proving I can stick to something for about a month without a problem.

I'm still eating my salt though, as an Atkins flu preventative. I imagine it as a streamlined version of popcorn, without the popcorn. I always just want the salt anyway.

Mindful Eating

I believe that one of the pieces of the puzzle that will help me finally stay at the weight I want to be is mindful eating. This is a belief, and it's not yet grounded in any firm evidence.  I'm trying, and I'm seeing hints it is helping, but it's not a slam dunk yet.  I have read a couple of books, Foodist and The Willpower Instinct, and they have helped shape my approach to this.

Mindful eating for me is three parts: Contemplating what I want to eat, paying attention to the taste and texture of what I'm eating, and slowing down by chewing thoroughly and setting the fork down.

The first is something I am seeing some success with.  I'm not eating whatever is lying around by habit, but by gut check.  (Except in the late evenings, when I turn into a voracious non-stop eater -- I will need to tackle this biggest problem area at some point, but not in today's post.)  During the day, when I have choices, I stop and think what I really want. What feels good to me now?  The flaw in this, of course, is often what feels good is ice cream or other sweets, but at least it stops me from opening the freezer and grabbing the ice cream automatically.  Do I really want these nuts I brought for the afternoon snack? Sometimes the answer is "no" and I'm better off for it.  I'm trying to bring hot drinks into the mix - I'm not actually hungry, but I really really want something to eat, so can I drink a pot of herb tea?  This is tied to the "body scan" I learned in my meditation class.  Not what I think it is (the feeling, the craving), but what it actually is.  Observe, don't assume or impose.  Inhabit the sensation, to figure out what it's really telling me.

There is also a technique called "surf the urge".  Rather than push away the idea of eating something you crave, go with it - mentally.  Imagine every detail of getting the item, serving it (unwrapping a candy bar, scooping ice cream) and each bite.  Allow this fantasy to exist, and also gut check if it is as satisfying as you thought at the start.  Apparently, evidence says a vivid imagining of what you are craving actually diminishes the craving.  I've tried this a couple of times, and it may work, I'm not sure. This may be especially effective for me coupled with "Yes, I'm going to have it, just not now.  Later."  If several "laters" get combined into one (brief) bout of indulgence, this would be a net gain.

Then there is the eating itself, with total attention paid.  There is a famous bit of mindfulness meditation training where you are instructed to select a single raisin, and then slowly, slowly, observe it in detail, place it in your mouth and feel it there, finally start chewing. Done right, it can take twenty minutes to eat the single raisin.  (This is done as training, an extreme situation, not as an example of how to always eat!)

Darya Rose, the Foodist with the Summer Tomato blog, ran a five-day mindfulness eating challenge I participated in.  Each day, she sent an email with a link to a short video containing that day's instructions for eating mindfully.  Each day, one meal was picked out to be the mindful one.  Feedback on how it went was shared on a Facebook group.  Through the magic of bots, she is now running this every Monday, and it's free - the link is from her blog.  I'd recommend it as a way to enhance your practice.

Through the video instructions, we separately focused on taste and flavor, texture, the mechanics of chewing and swallowing, and what was happening with our fork.  It certainly succeeded in slowing down my eating, though that never resulted in my eating less - I ate what was on my plate.  It was very very difficult for me to NOT read while eating - because I've lived alone so much, I have a forty-year habit of reading while eating.  But for one meal a day for five days, I stuck with it. 

Now, the after effects.  How to incorporate this into my life?  I am not going to not read while eating!  I enjoy that time.  But I am taking a moment at the beginning of a meal to pause and really appreciate it.  What does it look like? Smell like? Taste like?  Feel like?  

The third part I'm also building into a habit - eating more slowly.  This is fork management, and chewing thoroughly.  I used to scoop food up off my plate as quickly as I could - the second I got a mouthful, my fork was busy with the next bite. I rarely count my chews, except sometimes as a reminder, but I set my fork down, chew till I'm ready to swallow, and only then pick up the fork for the next bite. It takes me at least twice as long to eat now.

Many people say slowing down and thinking about each bite makes them eat less.  Not my experience.  I mindfully ate an entire pint of Talenti Sicilian Pistachio Gelato out of the container, savoring each exquisite bite.   And yes, I had surfed the urge first.  I kept thinking, "I could put this back in the freezer" but I didn't want to. I love this stuff - it is my kryptonite.  And no, I didn't feel sick afterwards.  A pint of this stuff only makes me feel good. 

I am working on portion control, however.  Since I seem to want to eat everything on my plate, I use smaller plates and try to avoid going for seconds. At least I've got laziness on my side when it comes to that.  

Probably a post for another day - engineering my environment to make it easier to make good choices.

Atkins Flu

One of the things that sometimes happens when I go to a severely carb-restricted diet is I get "Atkins flu".  This happens in the first week or so -- head ache, muscle cramps, nausea.  I remember one particularly problematic night in a hotel room in Salt Lake City, very miserable, without remedies available in the middle of the night.   Last night also wasn't so great, at least in the early morning.

Some variations of low carb diets say this is just a natural result of de-toxing.  "The worse you feel, the better it is, because it's all the bad things leaving your body."  This is horseshit.  Something that feels that bad is bound to be bad for you.  This is how we know there is something wrong that needs to be addressed.

I like grainy salt for roasted vegetables, so this has been a staple on my counter for a while.

I actually can't detect differences in taste between different salts, 

but the texture is important to how the dish turns out.

The Atkins folks make it very clear - during the first couple of weeks on their diet, there will be a lot of water loss.  The water is stored throughout your body.  The whoosh of losing water flushes out salt that is also in solution throughout your cells, almost as if you were losing it through sweat.  You have to drink a lot of water, and you have to replace the salt loss.

So when I decided I couldn't toss and turn any more, I got up and consumed very quickly: 2 extra-strength Tylenol, 10 ounces of water, a half cup of coffee, and not quite an eighth of a teaspoon of salt, put in the palm of my hand and licked off.

Now, an hour and a half later, I feel fine.  But the Atkins folks note it is much harder to cure this feeling than to prevent it.  They recommend adding an extra half-teaspoon of salt, or two tablespoons of soy sauce, or a couple of cups of regular-sodium broth, every day above how you would normally cook, for the first several weeks.  I love salt.  I may have learned to like roasted vegetables because they can be covered in grainy salt like french fries.  So I just have to remember to add salt to everything, and don't feel abashed or ashamed of doing it.

Hi Again

This past year has not been a great year for blogging, nor for weight management.  The last post foreshadowed the issues I am still facing, and things have not gone so well on the weight front.  Two days ago, the scale hit a weight twenty pounds over my goal weight, that I achieved slightly more than a year ago.

The Evidence

Clearly, I can't be trusted to make decisions in the moment, and equally clearly, I haven't developed habits that keep me from going too far off track.  So it's back to the tried and true techniques, that require effort and discipline and focus and work, in an effort to stop this trend and wrestle my weight back down to where I want it to be.

Why worry about my weight, when the world seems to be going to hell in a hand-basket around me? How First World of me, to care about how I look and how I feel when there are so many real problems I should be doing something about.  But you know what? While I feel bad, and feel that I look bad, and my clothes don't fit, I feel less effective in everything else I do.  A big portion of my self-image is that I am competent, and out-of-control eating and a sloppy body makes me feel incompetent.  The rest of my life goes better when I feel in control of my eating and thus my body.

Here are the tried-and-true techniques that science tells me should work to create weight loss, confirmed by my own records showing they have worked in the past:

TRACK FOOD

I'm back on board My Fitness Pal, tracking every morsel that passes my lips.

WEIGH DAILY

Of course, I have continued my coming-up-on twenty years of almost daily weighing. It's accountability. My weight will continue to bounce up and down 1-3 pounds a day, so for me daily weighing enables the assessment of trends while avoiding the disappointment that would come from a single weekly weigh-in that happened to be on an "up" day.

HAVE A BUDDY

That would be you, dear reader. Even though you are few, you are vital for my accountability.

CUT THE CARBS

Ultimately, calories matter.  My history tells me the way to cut calories is to cut the carbs. This is sugar, but also bread, rice, pasta, potatoes.  I am following rules:  I am on Atkins induction.  I am apparently a rule-follower, and it is more productive for me to arrest a bad trend by planning a specific length of time to follow a specific set of rules.  I can be 100% for a month, I know that.

COOK VEGETABLES

This morning's breakfast: fried eggs over cabbage and bacon

There are luscious wonderful vegetables.  I like salads, and eat them often, and my body even seeks them out when I'm not following rules.  But cooked vegetables satisfy my soul in a way most salads cannot.  And they bring what carbs I do eat.

MOVE

I continue to go to the gym twice a week (for mostly weight training), run about once a week, and track my steps on fitbit.  Science says you won't lose weight from exercise alone, but combined with a calorie reduction it is helpful, and it's vital for maintenance.  Also, it really helps with that self-image of being competent thing I mentioned above.

I've got a new technique I'm adding to the mix.  I'm not sure of its effectiveness, but my reading indicates it should be helpful:

MINDFUL EATING

I'm personally getting a little bit annoyed with the promotion of mindfulness in everything, and meditation is not the same thing as mindfulness.  I'm a big fan of abstract thinking, planning ahead, and being transported out of the moment by daydreaming.  But that's a rant for a different day. Evidence suggests mindful eating should help with curbing out of control eating both in terms of what I choose to eat and how much of it I eat. I'm thinking mindful eating as I practice it is worthy of a separate blog post.

So guys, I'm going to try to be more frequent and faithful on the writing as try to arrest my upward trend and return to the body I had just fifteen months ago.  I think there may not be so many lavishly illustrated carefully crafted essays as shorter notes about what I am doing and thinking.

Thanks for reading.