The thing no one (and I mean, no one) wants to do.

October 28, 2012

58.9 pounds to go

I better get away before she starts lecturing me.

I have had this conversation more times than I can count over the last 5 months.  As I've mentioned many many times in my blogs I count every calorie I eat and log it into an application called "MyFitnessPal" on my iPhone.  It is the easiest thing I've ever used - I can scan barcodes off food and it automatically logs them in.  I can look up a restaurant and the healthiest things on the menu come up first with their corresponding calories.  I can look up beers by brand and gawk at the caloric price I will have to pay.  If I'm going out for sushi I can look up "Rainbow Roll" and see if it's in my food budget.  When I first started incorporating this into my life I spend a lot of time on my couch looking up my favorite foods and realizing how little of it I could afford.  It was the class I had been longing to take for so many years to truly realize what it means to "pick the healthy choice."  Here is an app, here is the food, here is how much it costs. Here is the breakdown of how much of each food group you need every day.  Here is the tracking for how much weight you've lost.  Here is where you can enter your exercise.  Here are your friends who can say how awesome you're doing.  And here is how you're trending for the week.

 

I don't know why there is so much stigma attached to the word "calorie" and (godforbid) tracking it.  Before the invention of iPhones it was different because you needed to carry around a physical diary and food dictionary which screams "this bitch is on a diet, watch out she's going to lecture you!" I personally was always resistant to tracking my food.  Every time a dietician or friend would tell me to track what I ate I dug in my heels and said to myself "no fucking way."  There was a wall there and I was not going to climb it.  The diary seemed silly, it seemed stupid and most of all embarrassing.  I didn't want anyone to ever catch me with a retarded food log because I didn't want them to know that I couldn't figure out how to feed myself without it.  That I didn't have any education or control over what I put in my mouth.  That being healthy didn't come naturally to me.  Because once I started tracking and people started noticing, the truth was bound to come out.

The great thing about the app on my phone is that no one has to know.  Everyone is obsessed with their phones and constantly fiddling with them, so taking a few minutes at dinner to figure out the calories is easy to hide.

Holy shit, potato salad has 358 calories a cup?  The humanity!

Once I started getting used to logging everything I was kicking myself for never doing this before.  How could I have ever expected a crash diet to work when I wasn't thinking about what was going in my mouth?  I was still trapped in the "I want to eat as much as I want whenever I want" mindset so I was prepared to try any crash program in order to achieve it without using that goddamn tracker.  Slowly, I realized that this is so in tune to how I function as a human.  I am an extremely analytical person so dividing my food intake into caloric chunks (300 for breakfast, under 450 for lunch and the rest for dinner) became so easy.  It's like being able to analyze my own marketing, media buy and tracking analytics (what I do for a living) on my own body.  I do this with every other aspect of my life, why not apply it to a healthy lifestyle?  As it got to be more second nature to log my food I found myself referring to my diary a lot because by the time dinner rolled around I had already forgotten what I ate for breakfast.  When I wasn't tracking my food it was so easy to say "did I have one egg or two for breakfast?  Hmmm, just one I'm pretty sure.  I'm going to go for the cake."  When in reality I ate three eggs and was experiencing some serious denial.

And like any big change in my life, I won't be ready until I'm ready.  It's the same thing with the people around me.  Circling back to the cartoon in the opening of this entry, I can feel the "no fucking way" emanating off the people who learn that I'm logging my food.  If they are that resistant then nothing I say is going to get them to change their mind.  The next part of the conversation normally is a long justification as to why they eat the things they eat and whatever crash diet they anticipate trying.  Here's the thing when this conversation happens: I'm doing this for me, it is not a reflection or judgment on the people around me and their choices with food.  They can do whatever they want and I will love them just the same.  I am simply giving information as to the tools that work for me.  Oftentimes if I say, "believe me, I felt just like you about the food logging," it helps take the edge off a little.  (plus, it's true.)

The funny thing is I have now become "the influencer" on my family with the food diary.  The conversation from the beginning of this entry is now happening almost every day because I've reached a point where my weight loss is noticable.  It took me five months to get here and it's probably going to take me another year to get to my goal.  Now that others can see the results they want to get on the wagon too, which is great!  However, I won't deny it's a little unnerving when my whole family is asking how many calories are in my sandwich or what my caloric goal is for the day.  A.K.A  this is no longer a private journey. (Just don't start judging my sandwich or tell me what I should eat instead or I'm gonna smack ya!)  I feel touched and honored that they want to contribute to changing our ways and support me.  Having more positive support is one of the healthiest things I can have, so please feel free to friend me on MyFitnessPal: bonniehorvitz, and we can keep going on this path together.

It's not the heat but the humidity that'll kill you

October 20, 2012

60 pounds to go <-- 40 pounds lost bitches!!

Stress.  It is a mother-fucker.  The worthless platitude goes "you have to find a way to manage your stress or it will kill you."  Then the details on how to do this are shady.  Deep breaths, exercise, etc -- it all seems like advice that is given in broad terms but never details to figure out how to deal with it on a real level.  First, it is helpful to know that there are three different types of stress: 

1) Hypo-stress - doing nothing.  Gee, I slept 15 hours last night, I think I'll get a monster burrito, take a nap and worry about 'what-if's.'

2) Eustress - good stress, like getting nervous for a presentation, and

3) Hyper-stress - OMG! I have 7 to do lists and another list prioritizing my to-do lists.  Did the JC Penney ad print right this weekend? Did I feed the cats this morning? I need to sleep.  Where is my lunch? Where are my pants?? Where is my brain??? 

The "bad stress" that all the studies and articles talk about concern 1 & 3 but not only is it the stress, but the negativity associated with it it evolves into the disease-causing monster.

This is bad.

For me, I have one thing that cures my stress every time: a sauna.  This seems weird and wacky at first glance, but getting in a small wood-scented room and sweating my guts out makes me stop and slow down.  If I've had a bad day I can get in the sauna and sweat out the stress that's pent up in my body.  It is also helpful on a meditative level where I can "work things out."  I can also take my time and let my mind wander to the real thing that is bothering me.  Oftentimes it doesn't happen right away but by the end of it I'll have a clearer idea of why I'm so upset and how I can handle it.  Sometimes I'm just in a bad mood and it snowballs, so not only is there the thing that triggered my anger / stress (i.e. I can't believe you went behind my back, you bitch!) but then I start thinking of everything that person ever did that made me mad and by the end of it I'm ready to explode.

I am an elephant.  I remember everything.  

The other thing with the sauna is that I have a childhood comfort-association with heat.  When my brother and I were young my Mom was constantly dragging us to the desert for hiking, camping and flying trips.  She flew an ultralight (think of a hang glider with a motor and a double bucket seat) which she could only really do in the desert with her buddies.  Since she had kids, we always went with her.  I spent a lot of time playing in dry dirt, eating melty sandwiches and wailing on my brother.  (I also remember spending an Easter out there and getting a basket entirely filled with melted chocolate - it was awesome.)  Whenever I was getting stressed out in the last few years I found myself driving out to the desert and not really knowing why until I made the obvious connection.

As a last plug for saunas, any salesperson will go on and on about the health benefits.  It improves circulation, your skin, removes toxins, reduces chronic pain and burns calories.  I've heard some of them make claims that one half-hour session can burn up to 1,000 calories which is a sham.  The truth is when you get in a sauna your body works harder to regulate it's temperature so your heart rate goes up (similar to exercise).  However, to get your heart rate up to the level of burning 1,000 calories in 30 minutes it would have to be in the 90 - 100% + of your target heart rate range which is impossible (or possible if you're ok with being dead).  I once brought my heart rate monitor into the sauna to test how many calories I was actually burning.  It got up to 90 beats a minute when I was really sweating my guts out at the end or 48% of my target heart rate.  In 20 minutes I probably burned about 70 calories over and above my resting metabolism.  Whereas with normal exercise I need to be at 55% - 85% of my target heart rate (103 - 159 beats per minute) to get the maximum health benefits and best calorie burn. (500-1000 calories in an hour depending on how hard you work.)

However, no one has the time to jump in a sauna and de-stress in the midst of a hectic day.  Not only do I need a cure-all for when I have time to let it go, but I need a fast way to slow down (besides drinking folks!).  I think think this plays a major part in controlling stress and is what the doctors have no real solution for as it is different for everyone.  The most important thing is to find the one mechanism that will de-rail you from the train to insanity so you can start over fresh.  Here is a list of quick de-stressers that consistently work for me in order of effectiveness:

1) Find a way to laugh.  For reals, no faking here.  It will give you a clean slate.  (Yesterday I spontaneously started singing to my new boss over the phone and then realized I was on speaker.  Want.to.die.  The website damnyouautocorrect.com is also a favorite.)

2) Rock out to dorky music that you would never admit you listen to but makes you happy.  (Bad 80's music is my go-to.  Footloose!  Footloose! Kick off your Sunday shoes!  Please, Louise, pull me offa my knees!)

3) Call someone who is a positive influence who can talk you off the ledge. (No whiners, they'll just spin you further into the void.)

4) Exercise (groan). 

5) Come up with a mantra you actually believe.  Me: "Is this something I can control or can't control?"  Figure it out and then act accordingly.  With weight I say "I can't lose 100 pounds but I can lose 10 pounds 10 times."

6) Cruise travel sites for 10 minutes for cheap vacations.

7) Find an isolated place where you can scream and punch something with no judgement. (Go for a drive and let 'er rip and smack the steering wheel.)

8) Weekend de-stresser: go for along drive or a hike to somewhere that makes you calm.

9) Deep breaths / 5 minutes of quiet time.  (This never works for me.)

I feel like I say this a lot but there is no magic-bullet-miracle-cure.  Like with emotional food issues there are a lot of little things that add up to one big problem.  With stress there isn't one answer on how to abate it.  You have to recognize when you're participating and then find something that brings you back reality.  In the end there are a lot of tools at your disposal, but I wanted to at least give several prompts on how I've found my different paths back to sanity.  I've also opened the question to others and heard a plethora of other answers including: meditating, yoga, prayer, thinking about their children, looking at a picture of a tropical island, petting the cat, laying down in a dark room, taking a bath, journaling, getting a massage, reading, playing an instrument, flying, window shopping, and dancing.  You never know which one is going to work for you, but the next time you're stressed pick one and see if it works.  If it doesn't work then try something else until you find your calm.  It may be trial and error or a combination of tools to get you to your happy place, but it's there to be found.

There is no spoon

October 7, 2012

63.3 pounds to go

From the Matrix: 

Neo:  Are you saying that I can dodge bullets?

Morpheus:  I'm saying that when you're ready, you won't have to.

Trying to relate this concept to food is very difficult to explain.  I've been spending the last 24 hours almost grasping how to put this into words, and every time I think too hard and then lose it in the pit of over-explanation.  Charts always work best:

Over these past few months I have been trying to uncover why food is so important to me.  Why does it have to matter so much?  I was planning all of my events around what food I would eat, thinking about what I would eat next while I was eating, etc.  By putting the emphasis solely on taste and comfort I was inserting myself into a circle of misery.  (I still go for a run around that loop sometimes)  Then I realized that food will never be able to give me what I want it to give me: family connection, love, comfort, a party or a listening ear.  Throughout my whole life, food has always been present during all those things - family connection, love, etc - so it's as if I was tricked that food should facilitate them.  Or that food was only way I could participate  

However, in the literal sense, food is power.  When we track what we eat we measure in calories which is also, quite literally, a unit of energy.  So I need 1400 calories of energy daily to live.  If I take in too much energy it goes into the backup stores.  If I expend more energy than I take in, I will use up the stores.  It is that simple.  

So when I get sucked into the black hole of expecting an emotional connection with food, I have to say to myself that it doesn't exist.  I have to adjust my perception on why food is important to me and what kind of role it should play in my life.  Do not try to bend the spoon, that is impossible.  Instead, only try to realize the truth … there is no spoon.  Then you'll see that it is not the spoon that bends.  Only yourself. 

I can't control what people do around me and their expectations with food.  I can realize there is no emotional connection with food, it is only a unit of energy.  I can do whatever I want and everyone else can continue to do what they want.  What this whole weight problem stems from is my emotional problems.  Once I realize food and my emotional issues go in two totally separate buckets, then I can tackle them individually, not together like I always have.

Let me explain one example how I created an emotional connection to food where it doesn't exist.  When I was little my Dad always kept Werthers hard candies stashed in the glove box of his car.  If I was good (I realize there are so many things now that my parents did when my brother and I were little simply to get us to be quiet for a few minutes) for the car ride, I would get a Werthers during or after the trip was done.  Can I have one now Dad?  Please please please? Now, in adulthood I've been in fight or flight mode at work for the last 4 weeks with the merger and one of the first things I did was get a huge package of Werthers to stick in our collective candy jar.  When the uncertainty of my future started weighing on me to heavily I was running for the candy jar.  It's not an accident that I created that safety net for myself, but ultimately that butterscotchy goodness is not going to save my job.  It's not going to make me smarter, more clever, more savvy in a meeting or calm me down before I have to impress someone.  I fabricated that connection.  In the end, proving myself is all going to fall on my own brain not the food I stick in my mouth.

Now let me explain how others dump an emotional connection onto food and want me to participate.  It was really the first time I realized I don't care about the food, I care about my family.  I was at our fourth of July family gathering this year and I had prepped for it by taking a monster walk around a lake with Mike because I knew I would be around a lot of temptation.  We got there and I ate and drank and was merry along with being uncomfortably full.  We sat around the living room table, beached and gossipy when one member of my family burst out "where are the shrimp?  Are they done yet?"  And he kept asking "where are the shrimp?  Shrimp!"  And I thought to myself, "who cares?  Why is the shrimp so important?"  It's not the shrimp I care about, it's taking the time to be around my family.   We've always joked around that "food is love" but on some level we're making it literal because every time we get together there is enough chow to feed an army and everyone is expected to eat to the point of discomfort.  I haven't quite figured out why we do that, all I know is that it exists and I don't have to participate to keep earning my family's love.

In the end, just because I had this epiphany doesn't mean that I live on a heightened plane of existence 24/7.  I still get sucked into "big food" events and start fantasizing about lunch when I get stressed out at work.  But I do know "there is no spoon" is the goal, and I'm spending more days treating food as the power to my battery rather than using it as an unhealthy crutch.