One Week of Good Eating

Last week I ate well. I cooked on Sunday and Monday, and then I ate the remnants all week.  I cooked sausages and hotdogs on the grill. I made lentils (in my new Instant Pot!) and brown rice. I roasted brussels sprouts, sweet potatoes, and bacon together. I sauteed cabbage and onions and scrambled eggs into it - that was breakfast most days.

I tried to take pictures of everything but it sure was hard to remember to do so. This is part of my mindfulness - take the picture before eating - to ensure I'm very conscious of the fact I am about to eat something. I got a picture of almost everything through Friday night, when I fell off a bit. There is one obvious re-creation. But even at the very beginning, I circled back to get some of the pictures. I had some treats, duly documented, but no sweet binges. Lunches were mostly sausages, my salad dressing, and greens from the work cafeteria, but I bought some fancy salads too.  The nuts are my afternoon snack. I find I want my bedtime snack - it fulfills some psychological need, more than any sweet tooth craving - and that's when the Doves appear.

So, zero new cooking during the work week, but not bad mix-and-match leftover creations.

So here, without any more commentary, is a week's worth of everything I ate last week (well, until Friday night, anyway.)

My Weight

I pretty much only report on my weight here when it's gone down for at least a week or two. This hasn't been conscious on my part.  It turns out I only take the trouble to make the graph when I expect to see some relatively good news. I continue to weigh myself every day and see that number. In addition, there is an app that automatically gets that number and I often go look at that graph. So I'm not unaware of what is happening. I just haven't felt like showing it to the world in it's multi-colored awkward trend. I think this is a flaw - it's when things are going badly I should reach out for help.

Anyway, here is what has happened:

I reached my goal for a little while at the end of 2015, and it has been a classic rebound since then. While it's safe to say I've arrested the climb, I am not comfortable at this weight and would like to be about ten pounds less.

Looking at the rebound is humbling. I was pretty cocky a couple of years ago. "I've got this. I've cracked this problem. Conventional wisdom, on how diets don't work because you always gain it back, doesn't apply to me. Not anymore, I've got this."

So yeah, I guess I'm a little more average than I thought. But I still think diets do work - it's all a matter of definition. I really enjoyed being 10-20 pounds less than I am today, even if it was only for a year and a half. (I could do a whole post about what I liked about it - maybe later.) Besides, I've got the longer perspective to reflect on. I've kept the bulk of my weight off for much longer than a couple of years, so I still have beat the odds overall.

This weight gain is certainly not ruining my life, but I see advantages to being slightly smaller. (Easier to buy clothes is just one quick example.) So I'm keyed to the mindfulness and cooking thing, and I'm pretty content at the way it's going at this moment.

Stress

My 90-year-old mother goes in for a shoulder joint replacement operation tomorrow. This is elective surgery. She is in a great deal of pain that is not relieved by less drastic measures, and so she has chosen this surgery after a serious discussion of risks. Any major surgery is dangerous; any such surgery on a 90-year-old doubly so. Besides the relatively straightforward risk of dying from the surgery itself are increased risks of later complications. But most worrying to her and to me are the very real risks of decline in mental ability that come from anesthesia, pain, and pain medications.

My mother's mother had Alzheimer's. So did my mother's paternal grandfather. So she has it coming from both sides. At her 90th birthday, as she directed everyone around to do her bidding, I declared her to have won the Alzheimer's lottery, to be this old and this competent. I should be so lucky. Besides my mother's genes, I carry my father's, and he had significant Alzheimer's by the time he was in his late sixties, so I've got it from both sides too.

Last year, my mother fell and hurt her back badly, while we were traveling in Europe. Think about the end of that sentence - won the lottery indeed, to be on such an adventure while celebrating her eighty-ninth birthday and surrounded by family. But the pain, the pain medications, and the disorientation combined to make her incompetent and pathetically dependent on me. She has bounced back well, but in the last month she lost her best friend from her past (Eileen Sears, for home town readers) and her new best friend and daily dinner companion at her residence. So she goes into this surgery sad and run-down by the increasing shoulder pain.

I've called out all my stress coping mechanisms.  I'm physically exhausting myself. I'm meditating, and mindfully eating, and when I'm done writing here I'm going to cook so there will be easy good food to grab over the next week.

The surgery isn't scheduled until the late afternoon tomorrow (Monday). I'm planning to post an update to this post at some point after the surgery, so the reader will not be left hanging.

Mindful Eating

I continue to strive for mindful eating. To me, this means paying attention to what (and how much) I'm eating, how I eat it, and trying to be fully aware of eating while I'm doing it.  I assume everyone who reads this knows about the raisin mindfulness experience.  If you don't, I strongly suggest you give it a try.  Here is a decent, 3 minute youtube version. It is ubiquitous - not just as a way into mindful eating, but mindfulness in general. Allow yourself to be fully engaged in every aspect of a single experience at a time.

I would submit that food logs, food tracking, is one aspect of mindfulness, the first one. It is so easy to eat and not think of it. I now almost always pause, either before or, too often, just after grabbing something, and saying to myself, "I am choosing to eat this." But the pause and the noting is not enough. It needs to be thought of in the context of everything else I've eaten for the day. My memory is faulty and too generous to myself. So tracking is vital.

Tracking is also incredibly tedious. I've used Weight Watchers and I've used My Fitness Pal.  The latter requires more detailed input, but gives more detailed accounting, by traditional measures of calories and macro-nutrients (carbs, fats, protein). While the apps are designed to simplify the flow (two taps to get to the screen for one swipe to say "same as yesterday") it's still simply tedious. My latest hack is not to get to detailed stats, but simply a stark and clear accounting of what I am eating. I am doing this because I am not eating well. So my hack is a picture of everything that goes in my mouth.

Even this is hard to remember to do. My first two days, and I forgot two meals and a snack. However, I'm moving forward to turn it into a habit. I'm considering posting to instagram if it doesn't make it more onerous, but not certain if I want to bollux up the feed.

To focus on the how and being fully present, I've tried, and am re-trying, a number of mindfulness support aids.  I did a week-long group "challenge" conducted by my favorite Summer Tomato.  I got a daily email, encouraging choosing in advance one solo meal to be the mindfulness meal of the day, and then suggesting a certain aspect related to eating to focus on during that meal. It was coupled with a facebook group, and I followed through for the five days of the course, and found it made me slow way down, and focus on the food, which I enjoyed more. No noticeable impact on what I chose to eat nor how much, which is probably not to be expected after five days.  The idea, of course, is to incorporate the noticing what and how you are eating into all of your eating. It has bled through to other meals, though it takes reminding myself not to gobble.

From there, I went to a course offered by my mindfulness app, 10% Happier.  This is a subscription site I am using to keep plugging away at inner peace, where I found a 12-episode course by Dr. Judson Brewer on Mindful Eating. Brewer has had a lot of success using mindfulness training to address addiction and smoking cessation, so I'm guessing he realized how much more money is to be made in the diet industry. (This cynical comment in no way is meant to disparage the scholarly expertise and usefulness behind this program, and the genuine desire to help.) The episodes consisted of video interviews between Dan Harris (the 10% happier guy) and Brewer, each one followed by a guided meditation by Brewer.  Much much focus on body scan, body awareness, in the meditations.

This led me to Brewer's own app, Eat Right Now.  This is a 30-day course, based on his successful addiction treatment course. It consists of videos of him explaining and giving exercises, daily body scan meditation, daily mindful meal approaches, a mindful approach to ride out a craving, and a couple of amusing phone tools (the Want-O-Meter and the Stress Test) to help you analyze whether you are really hungry and why you might be eating what you eat. I did this, way back in April, and wrote about it here. Now, six months later, I'm on day 4 of repeating the whole 30 days. The problems I noted back in April are still problems. But I continue to feel this is the key, this is one of the master hacks, that will make a difference.

What I Ate the Last Two Days

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm trying just photos of everything I eat as my log. So here are the pix so far:

Apple Gouda sausage, grilled, and a gift garden tomato

Bedtime snack

Breakfast before running - forgot to take pix (for SECOND meal of this!) and so got it out of the fridge to take picture. I had about 1 1/2 ounces.

Second breakfast, out with running club. Forgot to take picture AGAIN so got off web.

Salad from Whole Foods salad bar - greens with bacon, artichoke hearts and olives.  This is the meal I ate totally mindfully - no phone, no ipad, no radio.

Dinner Saturday night - pre-made eggplant casserole from Whole Foods.

Bedtime snack. I have a habit of saving all my candy wrappers so I can look at them, count them, and be honest about what my behavior actually is. I don't know if mindfulness has allowed me to be comfortable with one-only for the last two bedtime snacks, but maybe.

So not so much on the cooking front, but not terrible sugar binges anyway, which the way things are going, is good.

Cooking: Not So Much

I've made only the tiniest bit of progress on the cooking front.

I followed my daily emails from the cooking program for a couple of weeks, and actually did some cooking on a weeknight. But work has sucked up way too much mental energy and physical time and space, so my weekday evenings are not so great.  I still, mostly, go to the gym twice a week, and I'll never do more than heat up a meal on those days - not realistic to expect otherwise.  But on days without the gym, my evenings go like this:

Come home, let the dog out of jail, change my clothes, take the dog out for very short walk. Come back, feed the dog, and grab pistachios and flop on the couch with the ipad to catch up on facebook, the 'gram, twitter, and feedly, my reader (I do not look at my personal social media during the day, though I do check my personal email.)  Besides seeing that my brother is visiting his grandchildren, I also really like the current-event oriented posts and often click through to read articles suggested by friends and folks I follow. This couch-flopping will last from 20 to 90 minutes, depending on how tired I am and how interesting the social buzz is.

The pistachios take the edge off my hunger, but by the time I stand up again its getting late and I'm hungry again.  Cooking anything that involves more than one step (insert in microwave) is unimaginable.  If I had the energy to cook, we're still looking at eating closer to 8 than 7, even for a quick meal.  I strive to be in bed by 9:30 (up at 5:30) and so that's pretty late. 

I've tried to change up the routine, by eating a snack at work before leaving. Still, I want that down time when I first walk in the door.  So in my never-ending quest for that one gadget that will fix my life, I've bought an Instant Pot, a combination pressure cooker / slow cooker (and it even makes yogurt but I don't eat yogurt). The Instant Pot isn't as instant as the hype ("cook chicken in seven minutes!") because it takes up to 20 minutes for the pot to pressurize, less than 10 to cook the contents, then another 5-30 minutes to cool.  But my thinking is, maybe I can throw contents in the pot while the dog has his dinner, and then the pressure cooking happens totally unattended while I do the couch flop. We'll see - I've done it once so far.  The food was good, and chopping before flopping isn't so terrible.

I've also realized pistachios are a poor choice for multi-tasking - takes two hands (and a good thumbnail) to open them. So if my snack is just already-shelled nuts, or celery with almond butter, or small or cut-up fruit, some other one-hand to toss in my mouth then get back to chopping snack, I could munch while chopping.

I'm also trying to up the weekend cooking volume so I have good leftovers during the week.  I've discovered I need at least two different main dishes - plus at least cooked meat for my lunches - to convince myself to stick with my own food and not go buy something. 

This kind of micro-analysis of my routine, in order to try to build better habits, is clearly going to be a never ending hack-a-thon in quest of the better me.  I predict it will cyclically be followed by coasting, not expending the effort to think things through, but theory says whatever habits I have, that's what I'll revert to when tired, so if the habits are good, they will carry me through those times.