It Turns Out I Need Rules

My long struggle for mindful eating resulting in gaining a significant amount of weight!  Eating mindfully cannot mean eating impulsively. I need rules and planning or else the pounds pack on.

And yes, I care about those pounds packing on. I feel worse, I feel fat, my clothes don't fit, my knees and back go out. And yes, I can see it in the mirror or in photos.

So I'm back on a conscious plan to lose weight. This means a restricted set of food choices and lots of planning. My experiment with being an omnivore has not gone well. It's so much easier to eat what most of America eats, building a meal on bread, potatoes, pasta, or rice. Well, that really doesn't work well for me. I tried adding beans and more starchy vegetables such as sweet potatoes and winter squash into the mix, and that hasn't worked out so well either. The food tastes great! It's very filling. But, I'm hungry again too soon, and portion control goes out the window.

So back to basics on my menus. At least two meals a day have to be built around leafy greens, preferably all three. Meat in decent but not obscene portions (I just read - from Jane Brody, of all people - that older adults need much more protein than younger ones.) Cooking at home, and limited eating out.  This is the basics of Atkins. What I have found is when I actually do this, my appetite falls and so it becomes easier to stick to the plan. Less often do I have the cravings.

So it's been about a month, and I've arrested what is actually a three-year increase in my weight, since I hit my goal weight and allowed a bounce back up.  I can do a month; I've often done a big push for about a month. Then, I fall off the wagon and bounce back up. I'm at that falling off point now.

So that's where the mindfulness and other psychologically-based strategies come in. I still need to plan, I still need to focus on veggies and I still need to eschew starches. But I can't count on the diet to prevent all cravings. I also need to avoid an emotional feeling of being deprived, of feeling I'm missing out.

Here's some of what I'm doing:
I have a late afternoon slump in energy that has led to snacking on crappy chocolate candy at work in the afternoons. Physical problem: very real drop in energy, sometimes (but not always) genuinely hungry too. The mindful techniques I've learned include really checking in with my body to see if I'm hungry. Further, on days in the past when I've given in to the craving, staying in touch to find out, "what am I actually getting from this?". When I eat a bunch of candy, often it feels bad. However, when I eat one or two or three pieces, sometimes it just feels good- gives me energy. There is remorse, but no bodily bad feeling. After struggling with this for months, what has worked for the last couple of months are two new strategies: I bought a small Keurig coffeemaker for my office, and I'm careful to bring a really good, but appropriate, snack. I showed off a wide variety of snacks in a previous post, but that was when I was more omnivorous than I am now.  Now, it's usually macademia nuts, and sometimes guacamole. I've found that caffeine and fat and salt work. Cheese would also work, I bet.

In the month I've been back focused on actually dropping weight, I've had a few social engagements. I've been able to bend my rules, without throwing them completely out the window. I'm not one for more than one or two drinks, ever. So that's fine. When there is a dessert I want, I have some of it. Based on results so far, this limited indulgence has not derailed the actual weight loss.

Eight Dove squares last night

But last night was a problem. With all hatches battened down against a steady deluge, I was restless, bored, under exercised, and jazzed from reading a too exciting book too late into the night. I keep Dove chocolates in my refrigerator, and often have had one in the evening after supper. Sometimes, more than one, and that is a very slippery slope. I can't allow auto-pilot to just munch. I have to go get them one at a time, and ask myself, feel in my gut, each time: do I really want this? As I stayed awake to make sure our hero was going to come out ok, I kept making trips to the fridge and coming back with another Dove square. For accountability, I piled up all the wrappers. There were way too many this morning. I did in fact feel bad in my body before I went to bed - I knew I had messed up. But I was in the "I just don't care" mode. Sigh. What has gotten me in the past is sheer exhaustion, from thinking about this all the time.

I feel like I'm on the right track, but for how long? I beginning to think I'll never hit a weight balance where I can eat the diet I think is normally healthy, whole grains and beans and plenty of fruit as a regular part of my diet, unless I'm willing to weigh a lot more than I do now. I see lots of leafy greens in my future. Good thing I love salads.

Don't be a Cashew

I'm really obsessed with posture these days. I'm doing exercises to find and strengthen my neutral spine position. I walk, I sit, I ride my scooter, all with a mantra of "shoulders back and down, abs tight, chest proud". This is what I've learned from Back Forever, reinforced at the gym, and validated by how I feel as I do it. I learned this the first time I went through physical therapy for my back, more than a dozen years ago, and my sole yoga class had a session on mountain pose, with subtle points about my shoulders, my chest, my thighs, the crown of my head and my chin. A running clinic I took reinforced the posture further. Hold yourself right, and you can run all day.

Bending over is special. I heard back in February a piece on NPR about how Americans round our backs when bending over to the ground. Most other cultures around the world bend at the hips (hip hinge) and make their spine parallel to the ground, flat like a table. But, says the piece, Americans look like cashews when we bend over.  (My horrible back spasm in March happened when I bent over to tie my shoe. I'm certain I was a cashew then.)

"Shoulders back and down, hinge at the hips, brace that core..." was my mantra while working in the yard today. I spent a solid three hours pulling out English ivy from an area newly fenced and to be reclaimed as garden. "Don't be a cashew, don't be a cashew" was the short-cut.  Stand up, hip hinge, bend legs into a squat, grab and pull by straightening my legs while remaining bent at the hips but straight at the waist. Similar to some moves I do at the gym.

Now, the back clearly has been working hard today, but it's not terrible. I do my back exercises every single morning, just as Kim's friend Chris says to do, after the first cup of coffee but before the second. It starts with neutral spine march, not a lot of exhertion, but training my body to keep that core straight. Seven exercises in total, ten to twelve minutes depending on the reps. It's given me the strength to be able to bend over and stand up while pulling for three hours straight!