Major Life Changes and Shaking things Off

It has been a rough few months.

Photo courtesy Lucius Beebe Memorial Library, CC-BY-NC-SA

In previous blog posts I mentioned that I have been succumbing to emotional eating recently due to stress with work.  Well, the stress has finally been resolved - - I have, at long last, found a new job.  I will be leaving the private practice of law and moving in-house with a leading packaged goods company next week.  My last day at the firm is Wednesday, and my first day at the new company is Thursday.  I know, what a slacker, taking an entire 8 hours off.  (!)

It has been a tough slog - - there is nothing worse than working at a place where you no longer want to be.  Once you decide that you want to work somewhere else, you want to go there immediately.  Not to mention that job hunting is super stressful, what with all the research and preparation, emotional ups and downs, and constant rejection.  And let us not forget the joy that is sending in resumes only to have them disappear into a black hole, without ever hearing a response.

Anyways, I was finally able to hand in my notice last week, and I now only have 3 days left to work at the old place.  It seemed initially like my last two weeks would take forever, but in reality, the time has just flown by.  Which is not so good because I have a bunch of files to finish off before I go.  Ah, the joys of responsible transitioning.

The biggest challenge for me from a health and fitness perspective this past week is the fact that I have been going out to goodbye lunches with coworkers every day.  It's tough to stay on track with my food plan when exposed to the sodium festival that is food service.

As if that were not enough, I have been hit with a flu and a cold in quick succession.  I am now in the stage of coughing whenever I try and exert myself, and general constant exhaustion.  Not fun.

But things are going to get better now that I am set up for the new job.  I am really looking forward to the new challenge, and cannot wait.  Only 5 more sleeps! 

In the spirit of moving forward and renewing my focus on my fitness, I am changing my weight loss tracker to reflect the weight left to go, rather than the weight lost.  It has been too easy for me to  rest on my laurels with that big number in the "pounds lost" column.  Now with my emotional eating backsliding I am back to having 48.5 pounds left to lose.  Now I just need to go back to first principles and stick to my plan that I know works.  I still have 3 more days of goodbye lunches to get through, but I am hoping that I will feel better tomorrow so that I can get back to my workouts.

"Grief Bacon" ... The Germans have a word for Everything

Photo courtesy Bunchofpants, licensed CC BY-NC-SA

 Kummerspeck = Excess weight gained from emotional overeating.

"Kummerspeck" translates to "grief bacon" in German, and is a word that finally acknowledges that when we are under a crushing weight of sadness or stress, many of us skip booze or drugs in favor of delicious fried foods.  In my case it was nachos, chicken nuggets, hamburgers, french fries, donuts, popcorn, chips...well, you get the idea.  If it was bad for me, I ate it, and if it was really bad for me, I ate it twice. 

I've been going through a period of great uncertainty and very high stress for the past month or so (no health scare or relationship issues, don't worry!).  Combine this with the usual stress at work, and it is a recipe for disaster.  Assuming that disaster is breaded and fried, and also that I just can't stop eating it. 

Photo courtesy xandoru1 licensed CC-BY

In a moment of weakness a couple of weeks ago I broke down and gave myself permission to let go of my usual iron(ish) discipline and just binge.  Then I gave myself permission to take an unplanned rest day, then two...and before you know it, I have gone completely off the rails. 

The work stress is still there (and as stressful as ever), and the other stuff in my life is still going on, but I can't sit back as I have been doing and letting emotions distract me and take over my life.  Sitting by the phone waiting for news is no excuse to go completely off the reservation.  Nope. Now is the time to get things back on track and to stop making excuses, and to keep focused and just do what I need to do.  That's how I was successful before, and that is how I will be successful again.

Because there's no time like the present, this morning began with more-or-less of the usual workout - 30 minutes of weights followed by 45 minutes on the elliptical and 15 minutes on the treadmill.  Not the hardest of workouts, but a good first step back into the pool after not working out for 3 days.  It felt like I had not worked out in forever, though.  Not fun.

As for the food, in one way the past two weeks of eating like a dog have been useful.  I tried some of the foods I was really craving, and while they were tasty in their own way, they were not quite as good as my memory had made them out to be.  This has worked to dramatically reduce my cravings for bad food, and I suspect that it will be easier to stay on track for a while.  At least keeping the decreasing marginal utility of junk food in mind (namely, that the next bite will never be as tasty as the last bite) will help keep me on the straight and narrow until the urge to go off plan disappears.

In the spirit of not getting completely demoralized I am not going to weigh myself until the end of March - - no point in making myself depressed so that I want to emotionally overeat again, after all!

My objectives for this weekend are just to track my food, stick to my plan, and get back into my workout habit.  Baby steps.  Most of all, though, I will try and stay away from the kummerspeck - I've had enough.

Emotional Eating

Photo courtesy Vic [hang in there], licensed CC BY SA

I had dinner this evening at my favourite Indian restaurant with one of my dear university buddies, and the talk came around, as it is wont to do, to food and eating habits.

This friend is an amazing, smart, beautiful woman, with cheekbones to die for, and huge eyes - - your typical nightmare.  Even worse, she's an accomplished and talented entrepreneur, a woman who has taken control of her own destiny.  She is wonderful, a genuinely warm and giving person, and she's one my my oldest and dearest friends.

However, as we discussed food it came out that she is an emotional eater, who is prone to binging on ice cream when she feels low.  We did not have dessert (our usual routine) because she was concerned that the gulab jamun would serve as a trigger food that would push her to eat more ice cream when she got home.

Of course, I am also an emotional eater, or at least I was before I began tracking my food.  As we talked, I discussed some of my past binges with food, including my notorious "nights o' popcorn", or the ever popular Ruffles + onion dip + Joe Louis cakes.  I used to be able to eat a lot of these foods in one sitting - - for example, an entire bag of Ruffles and container of dip plus 3 or more Joe Louis cakes, or a huge bowl of popcorn with 1/2 cup of melted butter and at least 2 cups of shredded cheese.  When I was feeling low I would head for the popcorn ... or when I was stressed ... or bored ... or sad ... well, you get the picture.  I was the queen of emotional eating, and my stomach was big enough that I could only fill it with a truly monumental quantity of food.  A North American quantity of food, if you will.

But to be honest, I haven't binged on food in quite a while.  I haven't even had cravings for popcorn or potato chips in a long time.  Months, in fact.  I was even at a party a few weeks ago where chips were the primary snack, and I didn't have a single chip.  I just didn't feel like eating chips, so I did not eat any.  Knowing that I was tracking my food intake meant that I would have to trade 1/4 of chips for other, healthier, more satisfying foods, and I was simply unwilling to make that trade-off. That is a very new feeling for me, because in the past I would have spent most of the afternoon surreptitiously trying to eat more chips until I was full (which of course seldom happened).

Since I have started working out, and more profoundly since I began tracking my food intake, I have noticed that my cravings have stopped.  Well, not to much stopped, as become more predictable and manageable.  I no longer feel at the mercy of my cravings.  I know I am weaker at night, so sometimes, when I feel particularly vulnerable, I stay at the office and work a little later so that I can go immediately to bed when I get home (on these nights I eat dinner at the office).  I know I have an oral fixation, so I chew gum rather than eat when I am feeling vulnerable.  I drink water, keeping myself well hydrated.  It all helps.  My relationship with food is much less emotional, and much more cerebral nowdays.  And taking the emotion out of it has significantly reduced my cravings and binges. 

My friend really wanted me to tell her that her occasional binges were ok, that her behaviour was normal.  I told her what she wanted to hear, even though I was not completely honest with her.  I told her that I binged, and ate multiple ice cream sandwiches at a sitting, which is the god's honest truth.  What I did not mention is that I have not done that for a very long time. 

This does not make me a better person than my friend, or a more enlightened eater.  I am just more aware of what I am putting in my mouth, and why, and I am using that knowledge to make different choices.

I know that I am one serious binge away from undoing weeks of work, so I try and avoid that disaster by not bringing my favourite trigger foods into the house.  I am not made of stone, nor do I have the iron discipline of ... well, someone with iron discipline.

I am just trying to get into some positive habits, and positive habits take time to become entrenched.  My attitude is that if I take care of each day, the weeks (and months) take care of themselves.

Sometimes we all need a little help.  Tonight I made my friend feel better by acknowledging that her food cravings were normal.  And I tried to help her by shunning dessert.  Hopefully she will feel better tomorrow.

Please Talk to Someone

I am a very lucky person, in many ways.  Among the most important is my amazingly supportive partner, the Nerd.  He cooks delicious and nutritious meals on the weekends when we are together, and has been nothing but supportive of my quest to become more healthy, even to the point of encouraging me to go on walks with him on weekends.  Even more positive - - he is enjoying the trickle down benefits of cooking healthy meals, because he has begun to lose weight as well!

But not everyone has it so lucky, I know.  In fact, many people have it much, much worse. 

Take my mom, for example.  She is diabetic and is also working out to lose weight and become more healthy.  No matter what she can eat, however, she still makes gourmet meals for my stepfather.  When she makes extra so she can eat with my stepfather, things can happen.  Last week my mom and my stepfather were going to enjoy a dinner of black cod together, and mom got an extra big piece just for the occasion.  Being an insulin dependent diabetic, my mom needs to eat at certain times to cover her insulin, or else risk having a reaction.  7pm turned to 8pm turned to 9pm...by the time my stepfather arrived home for dinner, my mother had been forced to eat (something other than black cod) hours earlier.  So they put aside one of the pieces of black cod for her to enjoy later.  That is, until the next evening when my stepfather ate it.  And I don't think it even occurred to him that my mom may have been saving that piece of fish for her own consumption.  She had been looking forward to eating it, and he ate her dinner without even thinking.

My mother is also in the unenviable position of having to cook delicious, non-diet foods for her spouse, yet not being able to eat the same food herself.  My stepfather will order pizza or pasta on Fridays (food my mother has not been able to eat for years because of the carbs), and then eat it in front of her.  Anyone who has been in that situation knows that it is torture.

But I have also met other women on my travels who have partners who are less than supportive.  Like the man who says he is not attracted to his wife because she was heavy (and it's not only husbands who are guilty of this lack of empathy - - I had that happen to me, with a previous ex-boyfriend). 

Or the man who demands that his wife cook fattening food for him and who buys junk food and brings it into the house because "he's not fat", and can eat such food without repercussion, while knowing that his wife is struggling to keep her healthy eating habits when surrounded by junk food. 

Or the husband who does not want his wife to exercise after work because "that's his time".   

Or the husband who tells his wife that he doesn't know why she is going to all that effort to work out, since "you're not going to succeed anyway, you never do". 

Do any of these sound familiar?  If so, and if they form part of a pattern of behaviour of control, you may be experiencing a form of emotional abuse.  32% of all callers to the Assaulted Women's Helpline last year identified as experiencing some form of emotional abuse - - that's 1 in 3 callers. The examples I mentioned above can qualify as emotional abuse in some circumstances, especially when combined with a pattern of behaviour suggestive of abuse.

Many people will say "my husband is not abusive - - he never hits me".  But they are afraid to make their husband angry because it may prompt an explosive argument.  Or they are limited in their options during the day because their husband controls all the money and gives them only a small spending allowance each week.  Or they may be unable to say no to their husband when it comes to sex, whether or not they are interested.  Guess what - - those are all patterns of abuse. 

Emotional abuse in particular is insidious, and it eats away at our self esteem and ability to take ownership of our lives.  If you think that you or someone you love may be a victim of emotional abuse, or even physical abuse, sexual abuse, or economic abuse (such as having funds withheld by a partner), please talk to someone. 

In Ontario, women can access the Assaulted Women's Helpline at <awhl.org> or 1-866-863-0511.  See your local yellow pages or check the internet for resources near you if you live outside of Ontario.