Food Pix

Just a quick note - I'm mulling many posts, but haven't taken the time to sit and write. But weight is up, health not so good, mindfulness not so much, and I decided the one thing I can do is track my food. But only by taking a picture. I'm trying to take the picture of very single thing I eat - and boy, is that not so easy to remember to do.

I spent a little bit of time looking at apps designed for meal pictures, and thought about instagram, but I ended up going with a tumblr. Easy to do on my phone - I even created it in the first place on my phone, and I'll bundle a day's worth of eating into a single post. So my tumblr, Every Bite, is at the link. I will also add it to the blog list on the right side of the blog.

Eating While Travelling

Sometimes travelling, much as I love it, trips me up for eating. I get hungry, I don't plan, I don't scout places, I end up making bad choices. Not just things that are bad for me, but unsatisfying wrong ideas because I just want to settle. In particular, unless I pick up grab-and-go pre-made the day before salads at the airport, it seems it's hard to get good vegetables when travelling. I recently went on a trip to Seattle for a few days, and actually some things worked out well.

The interminably long flight on Alaska Airlines had food for sale, and I went for a hot egg scramble that had vegetables and potatoes and was actually quite good. But I got dehydrated - I didn't bring water and they didn't come around with it often enough, and that kind of put me off.

The big learning for me from this trip is to go ahead and bring along a little bit of chocolate to have in my room for a bed time snack. I am often feeling the need for a sweet snack in the evening. But I have also had aspirations of eating really well on the road, and therefore haven't planned to indulge this craving. I have seen myself get obsessed and go on a bakery hunt or ice cream search through a strange city at night to scratch this itch. This time, instead, I brought along some Dove squares in my suitcase, and it seemed to do the trick. I was able to avert all thoughts of spontaneous indulgence by remembering I had something for later.  This doesn't always work, and I don't always need it to work (life is too short to never change your mind) but this time it was fine.

I had time to scout the Pike's Place market and grab a nice bowl of chowder. The place is both a working farmer's / fisherman's market and a tourist mecca, so in between the fresh and raw ingredients are bakeries and chocolatiers. Nothing that looked out of the ordinary to me (and no special ice cream, which would have probably have pushed me over the edge).  I ended up at a very nice and hugely expensive Thai restaurant for dinner with colleagues, and it was fabulous, but I should have skipped the less than spectacular cocktail. 

I knew I'd be up very early due to jet lag, so I made a plan before bed for a nice breakfast. I found a 24-hour place - not a working person's breakfast cafe, more of an after-hours late night bar - and had a magnificent frittatta with broccoli, cauliflower, and zucchini and cheese. It was too much food, I left a big chunk, but it set me up for the day.  For lunch, I found a place with hawaiian tacos - they made a distinctive slaw with an asian inspired peanut sauce, and I had ginger chicken with it. Fabulous, and just right, plenty more chewy vegetables.

Dinner again with colleagues was at my suggestion, an Italian restaurant near the hotel. I had hoped for the bar and happy hour small plates, but we ended up in the restaurant. So a terrific pasta dish it was, no complaints, and since I felt responsible it was great everyone else was happy as well.

Breakfast at the airport was an issue - if at the mercy of airport food, hard to find a breakfast that is not carb-heavy. But I figured better to eat eggs on a bagel than just a bagel.  And I had plenty of time to buy my own big bottle of water for the return, somewhat quicker (thank you, jet stream!) flight. Again, food for sale - I got a "tapas" box. All shelf-stable food, chips, hummus, olives, dried fruit, almonds. It was adequate given the limitations. It suited me more than the cheese plate, though that also looked good.

So no chance at weight loss on a trip like this, but it was not a disaster food-wise. In fact, it was tasty without being reckless.

My Looks

Let's face it, I care what I look like. All this talk about health, and doing stuff, and feeling good, is true, but I want to look good.  Because I like data, and I try to be objective, I have been doing a fair number of selfies, and looking at them for clues how to look better. Here is what I look (and looked) like this year:

I have had a hard time getting this video to play, so here is a link as well.

My analysis:  posture and smiling are more important than what I'm wearing, except for when I dressed up for a cold long scooter trip and ended up looking like a cross between the Michelin Man and an astronaut - nothing could save that look!

Just FYI, my niece uses this app, "1 Second Everyday" with videos of her kids - really fun! I may try to remember to do this during my next vacation as well.  It can also be used with still pictures, which is mostly what this is. Since I took all these pictures on my phone, and haven't deleted them yet, I was able to put this together during a too-long wait in a doctor's office this week.

How vain of me is it that not only do I have a big mirror in my bedroom, but I put in a new light so I can take these pictures better?

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.