Breaking Free

Quotes

I'm rather worn out today so I'm going to be lazy and just bring together some great quotes instead of generating any myself ;

Are you hungry from your heart or from your stomach ?

"Food is not a substitute for love (although preparing a tasty, nourishing meal for someone can be a way of demonstrating your love for them.) Let me explain that a little further. Maybe you have noticed feeling "empty" sometimes. When you examine that feeling a little more closely, you will be able to tell whether the "empty" feeling comes from your heart or your stomach. If it comes from your heart, then it's love that will fill the gap, not food. That's the time to do something to nourish your heart, such as reading an inspiring book, watching an uplifting film, or spending time with loved ones. If you want to nurture yourself, then only eat when it's your stomach that's hungry."

http://www.sallylever.co.uk/

What is normal eating?

"...a healthy relationship with food means eating in response to physical hunger most of the time.   However, normal eating can also include experiences such as eating occasionally because something looks good, eating past fullness at a special meal, eating in response to an emotion once in a while or choosing foods based on nutritional content because this feels care taking.   Attuned eating means that eating for satisfaction is predominant, and experiencing deprivation is virtually non-existent.   Attuned eating is a natural skill.   It can be relearned by people who have lost touch with their hunger and can be reinforced and nurtured in children so that they maintain this healthy relationship with food throughout their lives."

Matz, J. and Frankel, E. (2004).   Beyond a shadow of a diet: The therapist's guide to treating compulsive eating.   New York: Brunner-Routledge

Time

One of my main "excuses" that I use to myself about why I haven't yet broken free from what's holding me back is Time.  Not enough time.  Time pressured.  Cash rich, time poor. 

Sometimes this is true : there are days when I can't get to my gym because I am either in the office all day and out in the evening, or else because the gym is shut (Sundays and Bank holidays, annoyingly).  In that sense, the logistics of time mean that I cannot achieve a specific task - exercise at the gym.  However is that excuse really good enough to hold water ?  Surely I could get up earlier, go for a walk, do a home exercise DVD?  Some of this is more to do with priorities rather than time.

The truth is that I find it easier to take the cheap, lazy, comforting and easy path - which involves (perhaps) staying in bed an hour longer in the morning and not exercising;  eating a takeaway pizza rather than cooking a more healthy meal; buying sweets or chocolate when I'm bored. 

The alternative path - to cook more at home; to plan meals a week in advance; to read about nutrition and understand my body's needs; to get up early for exercise or to go out for exercise in the evenings instead of slumping on the sofa - takes a lot more time, energy and effort.  And yet this is the path that I have to take.  It's hard.  Breaking free from any addiction is hard - and my addiction, to comfort eating, is socially encouraged in some ways.  Still I'm determined to do it.

Falling off the wagon..

So it's been a while since I updated my own blog.  This is mainly because I was so fed up with myself.  Somehow I just lost my focus over the last month and failed to lose any weight at all - I also did very little exercise and didn't focus on healthy eating, so maybe it's surprising I didn't gain more weight !

I did have a series of minor things that went wrong and that distracted me - some health-related, some at work, some personal.  Although these were annoying and at times, tiring, I've had a lot worse in my time to deal with.  So why did I fall off the wagon so much ? or why did I allow myself to be distracted ?

I need to get back my focus and drive, to get in touch with my determination.  I can be clear, determined and focussed in relation to work and to many other parts of my life.  It's a case of prioritising my focus on breaking free from what holds me back.

plans temporarily on hold...

Even with all my plans set for healthier eating, higher-protein, lower-carbohydrate, and exercise slots written in to my diary......   sometimes plans just don't work out. Having damaged some muscles and joints in an accident 2 weeks ago, exercise has been off the agenda.  For the first time that I can recall, I've actually missed doing exercise and wanted to do some !  Not sure if this is the start of a new attitude in me, or just some of the usual "grass is always greener" perspective.  However I'm encouraged by this - even while at the same time being discouraged that I of course haven't lost any weight during this time (as I've been effectively immobile).

So even if plans have come to a slight halt..  I'm still absolutely determined to lose this weight, and I always knew it was going to be a long, slow process.

eating and celebration

For every celebration on the calendar, food (and often also drink, e.g. alcohol) is linked right in there.  Christmas lunch..... Easter chocolate eggs...... birthday cake......champagne and wedding cake......having a restaurant meal out when you first get it together as a new couple. You get the idea.  Eating is a profound form of celebration, in any culture that I know about.

Therefore some of the difficulty with "diets" is that I'm effectively saying to myself- No ! you don't deserve any celebration, you can't take part in our culture, you have no place in fun and pleasure.

Where we seem to be getting it slightly wrong these days is that every day has elements of food or drink in it which would, once, have been for celebrations only.  Therefore our expectations, and our calorie intake, increase.  The original idea of midwinter / Christmas celebrations, and Easter/ Ostara feasts, was to eat and drink a LOT - to make up for several weeks when people were on a naturally restricted diet due to eating seasonally grown food.  Now we have "celebration" food available to us every day, all year round.

I've been thinking about celebration following a family party last weekend in which (guess what) I ate more than usual, and drank a lot more wine than usual.  Do I regret this ? Hell no.  But what are my ways in which I can celebrate, praise, rejoice, have a good time - which are NON-food related ?  This is part of my quest to break free from other people's or society's expectations of how I should control my food and drink intake.

measuring up..

One of the things I've really struggled with in the past is the concept of having to weigh every item I might eat, or else to measure its volume, or else to look up how many "carb units" it contains, or else to write down its calorie content and deduct that from my total.......   this just seems WRONG to me. 

Now it may well be that part of the reason I got fat in the first place was a breezy indifference to carbs, weights and precise calculations of food's calorific value.  Certainly I am trying to be well informed at present about what I eat - and am trying to make the best choices available to me.

However the obsessional focus on counting, measuring (and maybe also entering the details into a website which calculates your intake) just doesn't do it for me. I have tried these methods, for a few weeks each, and I felt constrained and panicky.  How much did that cheese roll weigh ?  If I had a coffee but someone bumped into me and I spilled half of it, how many ounces of milk were left in the coffee cup?   Surely this is not the point of food.

Therefore I'm breaking free from obsessional measuring, calculating and worrying.  I'm going to eat what I believe is a healthy option, and I'm going to buy food based on good choices for me.

I already have a list of criteria which, for me, are important when choosing food : some of these are -

1. vegetarian
2. good protein source
3. locally grown or low food miles
4. organic
5. sourced from a small shop, local people or a co-operative as opposed to a supermarket
6. free-range if eggs are involved
7. seasonally grown
8. a reasonable variety or change, e.g. if I had apples last week, I'd like pears today.
9. avoiding artificial colouring, flavouring, sweetening, etc etc
10. no doubt there are more but this is enough for now......

day 1 - the manifesto

So this is it.  Day 1 on my first-ever blog.  Inspired somewhat by the fabulous Pasta Queen blog which I've been reading for a while now, I felt it's time to make my own efforts.

So how fat am I ?  See the About page for ongoing details. I'll be hoping to update that fairly regularly.  Let's just say, fat enough that it bothers me. Really bothers me.  Not just "oh she's a little plump" but quite a lot more.

And why do I want to lose weight ? Well for one thing I'm never going to aspire to be particularly fashionable or stick-thin.  A size 14 would be wonderful.  So I'm not doing this for purely cosmetic reasons (though I would have to say, there's a whole load of nicer clothes available for people less than a size 16..  obviously above that size there is an assumption by clothes retailers that you lost your brain cells with the increase in your fat cells, consequently all the clothes are nasty. With a frill down the front if you're lucky).

I'm doing this because there's a whole load of misery and unhappiness to do with compulsive over-eating and eating for the suppression of emotions, which I want to be able to process and then let go of.  If I'm upset, then I'll let myself BE upset - rather than eating a packet of Jaffa Cakes and then feeling even more upset with myself.

I'm doing this because I want to feel happy with my body and the way it looks.

I'm doing this because I don't want to waste any more of my thoughts and energy on negative self-blaming comments in my head.  It's just food - so I want to remove the emotional link that's been there in the past.

So my plan is very simple - to exercise more, and to eat better quality food, ideally higher in protein and lower in carbohydrate.  As I'm a vegetarian, this does mean I have to think fairly hard at present about what I can eat.  However I'll be adding some new options to my cooking as I've just acquired Rose Elliot's book :   The Vegetarian Low-Carb Cookbook.

This is going to take some time - perhaps 24 weeks if I stay on target, in practice perhaps 6 - 8 months as no doubt there'll be times when life gets in the way of healthy eating and exercising.  My challenge to myself (using this blog to spur me on) is to make sure I stick with it.