changing habits

It’s really stupid that guilt is a major part of the “eating experience” for many women. Every time, I tell a woman that I lose weight ‘though I’m eating three square meals and three snacks per day, with fat and carbs and everthing, including cake, greek yoghurt, and candy, they think I’m lying. Everybody thinks that losing weight means mortification. And that 1000 calories are a day’s ration for a grown woman. So everybody’s thinking when you’re just eating you’ll be getting fatter and fatter.

So here’s the choice: eat when you’re hungry and with pleasure – that would be leading to growing weight – or you take the advice of an aquaintane of mine, who’s counting calories with every bite, and when she reaches her calory count for the day, she stops. Even right after breakfast.

I still believe that food is good when you’re hungry, for pleasure and the soul, and that I can trust my feelings. Those feelings just have to get a chance of getting through almost forty years of habitually overeating.

To spend my life counting calories, or hysterically avoiding certain food groups would be perverse. To stuff myself because of every mood known to man would be too.

When your bathing suit doesn’t fit, throw it away and buy a new one. Bigger or smaller, who cares. I started losing weight after I threw all clothes away that didn’t fit anymore. (Apart from a cashmere turtleneck, three Tees, and hot red undies). I ordered “happy size” clothes by the dozens, after two years of hoping to lose the fat soon. Then I started using my brain again: if I lost weight immediately and lost about two pounds per month, I’d have to lose weight for about one year and a half. My beloved clothes from 1996, which I found real cool, would be outdated by then. I thought if ever I lose weight it’s worth new clothes.

And if not, at least I look good now.

P.S.: Thank you for your patience. When I started writing about dieting I didn’t know it would take so long. You know – I tried to keep this real short.

Last year in September I started weighing myself again. I wanted to know whether my weight changed or not. Flylady advised us to weigh in order to know where we are. With the addition of “You are not your weight”. Like in buddhism. By the way, I started meditating in 2005 too. To get rid of “Unwise efforts and unexamined habit patterns“.

Then my weight started dropping.
I put my thinking cap on and realized that maybe, hungry or not, I didn’t need a second breakfast or snack at eleven, when twelve is ouur designated lunch hour. Against my habit I could maybe stay hungry for about thirty minutes.
Further I found that I’m not having one snack in the afternoon (unless you count continious grazing between two and six as one snack only). And I had to count my usual bedtime treat of one beer or some chocolate as a snack in itself. So maybe two afternoon snacks are enough. In November I thought that maybe I don’t really need to drink wine or beer to lunch and dinner every day. Since I don’t live in Italy, and am not napping, my lunchtime glass of wine made me a tiny bit drowsy.
I reduced drinking alcohol to two times a week, and one or two glasses. (Gave myself stickers for this too!)

Wow! I lost about two pounds per month. In spite of eating everything. Chocolate and sweets everday, and real food too, of course. Greek yoghurt with ten percent of fat, cake, cookies and alcohol. Even christmas was a breeze!

I thought I had it. This time I’ll stick with it. Lose a little more, then slow down, and then there’ll be a weight where it’ll stop. I’ll call taht my designated comfort weight and live happily ever after.

At first I didn’t even tell anybody about it. I’m such a motor mouth, but I didn’t want to talk about weight loss or eating any more. And I wanted to keep it to myself. My mother still doesn’t know.
(She’ll probably notice it when we’ll be meeting next time. “Have you lost weight?” “Whatever.”) If I talk about it, she’ll shower me with so much tips, I’ll probably be heading straight for the candy drawer again.
A propos, potato chips had to be rationed. Only one bag per month, because I just can’t stop eating my favorite junk food. Even ‘though they’re without mono sodium glutamat.

So now I’m really happy, because I’m eating like a healthy person.
Even if I’m still needing rules to do it. I hope it’ll get automatic behavior someday, and I’ll leave compulsive eating behind.

(to be continued – but not for long. promised)

Then, everytime I found myself thinking about food or feeling fat, I thought about making music instead. I started using my breaks between students for composing instead of eating. I lost nine pounds, and was happy. Even christmas didn’t diminish my euphoria, even if I didn’t lose weight, I didn’t gain either.
I could buy jeans in a regular shop. No more catalogs for “happy sizes“.
I stopped weighing myself and thought I got it. Life would continue to be great.

In spring 2005 I was almost back at my starting point. Frustration hit.
Then there was the time when I thought about joining weight watchers. For the first time in my life I really doubted that I’d be able to eat like a sane person.

Digging deeper I realized this wasn’t about losing weight. This was about gaining control over compulsion. I was so fed up with being fat and losing weight.

Since flylady‘s system (and my husband) helped me to gain control over housework with minimal effort, I decided to apply the flylady-system to the change of my eating habits.

First I gave myself a sticker each evening that I got to bed before half past ten. This took two months. Because I’m prone to eat when tired.
Second, I made up the rule that I’m not allowed to sit in the kitchen and read at night. Because I never eat only a little chocolate, when more’s in reach.
There’s a sub-rule to this rule, saying that I’m not allowed to go back into the kitchen at night for any other purpose than putting a sticker on the calendar at half past ten.

A little later there was an amendment to this rule: Only one beer or a certain amount of chocolate. Not both.
At first I didn’t lose weight at all, or only very little. I didn’t use the scale anyway. But I was so disgusted by my never-ending whining. About being tired, about eating too much candy. Who wants to hear this every day? 25 years was enough.

We planned going on a bike tour during summer vacation. One has to train for something like this. In June and July we rode our bikes a lot, and in August we went on tour with tent and child and stuff for a week. I looked like a complete idiot in my biking shorts, but at the end of the week my legs looked better than before.

Lose weight I didn’t, but I grew a little firmer. If I find it, I’ll show you the most embarassing picture anybody ever has taken of me. I’m really glad that I don’t see myself from behind every day.

(still to be continued)

P.S.: I found it:

I’m totally finished with exercise. In the course of the last fifteen years I have changed from a couch potato girl to somebody who has to move at least three times a week in order not to get really cranky.

In the beginning I hated every single minute of it. Later I liked the feeling of power, strength, and muscle-tone. When I was pregnant and a friend told me to be glad that I didn’t need to exercise anymore, I just could stare at her. I wasn’t even allowed to to my regular walking routine! Much less dancing or strength training. Now, as a mother, I have switched to walking and yoga. My regular walking routine consists of putting my three-year-old into the stroller and pushing him through the neighborhood for 35 minutes. When I have a babysitter I’m turning into one of those ridiculous nordic walkers.
Yoga, I’m doing in front of my computer with a dvd, while my son clings to my leg, not knowing whether he wants join me or not. Mostly he wants both at the same time, throwing a fit while I’m trying to follow the soothing voice of the yogi on screen, and to breathe in and out in synch with the people on dvd.
So, working out is something I’m capable of doing. Even in not quite ideal circumstances.

But back to my subject: diet. I’m a big fan of the anti-diet-movement. My heroines are Debra Waterhouse, Susan Powter (with growing reservation), most of all (without reservation whatsoever) Geneen Roth. Geneen Roth’s books have helped me tremendously in unearthing the cause of my eating disorder. I kept journals, did the homework, and wrote down what I ate when, and how I felt, for weeks.

For most people that act of writing it down is enough to change their eating habits. They find having to write: “I ate two bags of potato chips, because I was bored.” so embarassing that they stop eating the chips. Not so easy for me. My eating journal contained things like:

2 pm: ate two plates of spaghetti bolognese, salad, had three glasses of wine. afterwards half a bag of jelly beans for dessert. feeling good, a little stuffed. food was delicious, felt satisfied before the jelly beans but wanted something sweet.

3.30 pm: one bag of potato chips, still stuffed from lunch but bored. procrastinated folding laundry

So I already knew when I ate more than I needed. And why. But that didn’t stop me from eating all that junk anyway.

Some time in the fall of 2004 I had enough of me whining the hole day:

“My God, look at my stomach, how fat I am!”

“I know, I shouldn’t be eating this, oh, only one bite, and another, and another, tomorrow I’ll eat no sweets at all, oops, all gone!”

“What, dinner time already, I’m still stuffed, but I have to eat real food once in a while…”

Ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

I woke up, and asked myself: “Is my weight, food, and the way I look really the single most important thing in the world?” “Why do I spend every waking moment thinking about it, instead of being glad about my marvellous family, and spending my energy on my
music?”

(to be continued)

Captures your attention, doesn’t it? Now’s the time to do your traditional diet to fit into your bathing suit in summer. Anybody talking about bikinis?

So, why do you have a bathing suit that doesn’t fit? What good is that? Oh, it’s helping you to eat less. So why didn’t you? And did it fit last year but not this year? And if we’re talking about fitting yourself into the bathing suit, I’d have to hurry and gain twenty pounds in order to fit into the bikini that I bought the year before last. Then I had been at the point where I wrapped myself into a pareo when watching my son playing in the lake.

Never would I have thought that I’d come this far. I thought that if I ever turned so immensely fat, I’d at least not try to hide it.

So my relationship to this whole diet-loose weight-eat healthy-subject is ambigous at best. Because of my mother, myself, because of me being as tall as now when I was thirteen, and only growing bigger since then. And it has to do with the fact that I’m a compulsive overeater. A term that I like way better than “addicted to eating”, that would be “esssüchtig” in German.

I have been a skinny child by the way. I was told continously to eat something, to eat more, because my bones were sticking out. This hasn’t been true for the last decades.

This month I’m proud to announce, my BMI is less than 25, so now I’m officially normal weight and not over weight.

What’s this, you say? First a rant against diets, and then I’m proud to have lost weight?

(to be continued)