Life has been Busy

Sorry for the lack of Posts.  I have been busy & tired, but I want to at least share this article with you guys:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/01/26/133243471/a-psychoanalyst-calls-for-eating-with-culinary-mindfulness

Christmas Vacation

Christmas Vacation

I apologize for the lack of blogs, but apparently a vacation was very necessary-free of all types of work.  There is a lot to share about Christmas.  Let’s start with Charleston.  Charleston is a beautiful, quaint town in South Carolina that serves a lot of seafood.  I am neutral towards seafood- I like crustaceans better than fish, but I don’t eat much.  The food here, though, was amazing!!  I loved every bite.  I definitely reaching full multiple times during the trip-but never stuffed.  I also managed to stop half way through almost every time.  Here is just a few things I ate: shrimp corn dogs, fried green tomatoes, mushroom risotto, mussels, clams, scallops, shrimp, shrimp & grits, and fried clams.  We also went out for dessert one night at a dessert, coffee, and beverage restaurant-which was wonderful.  I had half my latte, three bites of cheesecake and two of the berry cobbler.   Everything was amazing.  I will not be interested in seafood in central Texas for quite a while after indulging in the food here-it won’t compare.

At home over Christmas and New Year’s was more like what I eat here-but less meat.  I’ve experimented with different types of food and here is what I notice: the more processed, the more sugar and carbs, the less it fills me.  Am I the only one who’s eaten a slimfast bar or quaker oats bar and felt like I might as well have not eaten ANYTHING?  I CAN eat the stuff-I had two bites of cake, a few bites of chocolate, and five bites of the desserts in Charleston.  It just doesn’t fill me up-with may be the exception of the dessert in Charleston (which may have been more fat!)  It is when I try to have a meal consisting on mostly carbohydrates that I can’t get rid of my hunger.  Here is what else I notice-fat fills me up quickly.  I eat it & end up eating ridiculously small portions.  It does seem to be similar to the French diet.  I was talking to my parents & my heritage is mostly from Luxemburg and Scotland.   People in Luxemburg eat diets very similar to the French.  The Scottish apparently eat a lot of mutton.  I haven’t tried the mutton yet, but the diet similar to the French seems to be working.  I am curious if other traditional diets that do not reflect my heritage would also fill me.  Does a traditional Mediterranean diet work for everyone or just people in the Mediterranean?  Does each culture evolve to eat just what their culture eats, or can we ea t a variety of diets and be satisfied, so long as it is not the Western diet?  I have definitively ruled out processed food as a way to satisfy hunger-I’ll continue to explore different cultures to see how they affect me.

There have been some exceptions to the carb rule though: the grits and shrimp and the mushroom risotto.  Both are evil carbs-yet I found both amazingly satisfying and filling.  I only ate half of each & was full without much food for the rest of the day.  Probably the best correlation I’ve found between lacking hunger and food choice is taste.  The foods that taste amazing fill me up the most.  Not the foods that taste pretty good.  Not the foods that I thought I really liked, but once I started paying attention, really didn’t taste that good after all-the foods that taste AMAZING!!  There are about twenty-five reasons this could be: fat content, type of fat, psychological response-who knows.  Is it the food content itself-something that makes it taste good that also fills me up? Or is it my response to it?  It feels like I have died and gone to heaven; like I feel when I’m in love.  The first week when I was eating all that good food I was in a state of euphoria.  I found myself less angry in traffic-doing really well.  May be this response shuts down my hunger response?  There have been some exceptions though: the fried oysters filled me up at first, but I was agitated and hungry by mid-afternoon. 

One more thing: I weighed myself this afternoon and I weigh two pounds LESS then I did before my trip when I weighed myself in the morning.  I lost weight without trying at all.  I probably will weigh even less tomorrow morning when I weigh myself.  So far I have lost about 4 pounds in 22 days!

Dat 8

Sunday, December 19. 2010

 I wake up & look in my frig.  There are not enough eggs for the rest of the week.  So I drink my latte and go to Whole Foods for their breakfast taco.  It is one of the tastiest and economical meals there: three toppings make a big taco for only $2.15.  I eat it.  I am still a little hungry-but satisfied for now, so I stop.  As I ride in the car I realize that I am not hungry after all.  For lunch, I decide to eat something I usually don’t let myself have.  I get a piece of pizza-also from Whole Foods.  It has veggies on it but not many.  I eat it-it is good.  I definitely don’t feel satisfied.  I decide to go home anyways.  I go home and have some sprouted cereal.  I am definitely not satisfied from the meal. I distract myself with television for a little while then have some wine and cheese.  It helps, but I ‘m still a little agitated.  For dinner, I cook some pasta and salsa cruda.  I still have wine left over from the afternoon, so I have it with dinner.  I’m still a little confused about whether or not I have hunger.  I eat it all.  It was probably somewhere in between not hungry and full but that’s okay. 

I don’t know if the agitation was due to the fact that I was eating more processed food than I usually do, or if I just was hungry.  I still hold on to the notion that our bodies really don’t know quite what to do with processed foods.  We have only been eating processed foods for under 100 years, & I don’t think our bodies know what to do with them yet.  On the other hand, I felt agitated.  Maybe it really was just that I still had some hunger.  Maybe I really just wasn’t listening to my body’s signals to eat a little more.  It seemed like it should have been enough food, so I didn’t want to listen to what my body was saying.  I’m going to commit for the next few days, to take a few more bites of food if I am feeling that agitation to see what happens.  It may work; it may not.

Day 7

Day 7, Saturday December 18, 2010

Today is farmer’s market day-this is my favorite day of the week.  Only, I do not have a lot of food to buy this week because o much of it was left over from last week.  I’m also going home on Wednesday so I won’t need much.  I first go to a coffee shop for coffee and a breakfast miga taco.  It has been a while since I have had one of these since it uses the oh so ever evil white tortilla.  Now, I can eat it.  I am starving today due to the decreased food intake yesterday.  I go into the shop and all of the sugary breakfast items look so amazing.  I AM CRAVING THEM!!  Oh no, this is Not the answer-I still crave sugar.  The effects are wearing off- I really am addicted to sugar.  I order my taco & latte & begin to eat.  For starters, the taco doesn’t taste as good as I remember it, but that’s okay.  I sip on the latte and start typing.  I look down a little bit later with about a 1/3 of the latte to go & realize I am satisfied.  I don’t want the pastries either.  It turns out that I didn’t want the pastries because I am addicted to sugar- I wanted them because I was hungry.  Apparently, it is this totally normal human reaction to be interesting in eating food when you are hungry-especially the good tasting ones. 

I AM NOT ADDICTED TO SUGAR!  I never have been.  I have been self diagnosing myself with different issues for the last 28 years, when in reality, there was nothing wrong with me.   I had just never been taught how to eat.  Once taught, it was perfectly natural for me to just eat until I didn’t have hunger.  I wonder if it can be that simple for everyone else too.  Maybe not.  Maybe all the focusing on my breath in yoga class helped me, or maybe all the time I have spent connecting with food through gardening, and farmer’s markets and cooking has connected me with food so when I asses in the last step-eating-it just clicked.  I kind of think it isn’t just me.  This way of eating is by far the easiest, most intuitive, most natural “diet” I have even done.  I think it is written in our DNA-that we are supposed to connect with food, enjoy it, share it with others, then, stop-just a little bit sooner.  Most other cultures seem to have some sort of cue about stopping.  We, in search for what nutrients to eat, lost sight of how much to eat.

The food industry has been using diet fades and nutrients to get us to eat more.  Since the seventies the incidence of chronic health diseases have sky rocketed, we’ve switched from low fat to low carb to only healthy types of fats, all still make us sick.  We finally figured out that the margarine that the nutritionists were telling us to eat was in fact less healthy.  How many fewer early deaths would have occurred if we had just kept using butter?  The food industry can package food based of the latest diet craze just shoving more of one nutrient and less of the other based on the latest study.  None of it has made us thinner.  We have, however, started eating an average of 300 calories a day more though.  Maybe that is what is making us fat?

I don’t have the research to back up my next claim.  I do, however, have very strong subjective evidence from the past week.  It isn’t the fat or the sugar or the saturated fats or the gluten that is making us crave food.  It is that we have just been eating a little too much of it.  Try it.  Try being truly conscious for one day while you eat.  Stop when you no longer have hunger.  How does it make you feel during your binge part of the day (mine is the afternoon)?  After only one day, my afternoon felt completely different- I felt lighter.  I didn’t want food.  I was emotionally satisfied from eating it earlier.  I kind of don’t know what to think about now that I am not craving food.  I’m going to have to get a new hobby.  I feel like I have been given my life back.   We have been stressing, and spending money on diet products, and feeling guilty, deprived, obsessed, for absolutely no reason.  The cure to our American addiction to food has never been a new diet, a new piece of scientific data.  The cure was so simple we couldn’t see it.   We Americans pride ourselves on our hard work.  It is how we get stuff done, live the American dream.  We have to work to be thin, deprive ourselves of certain types of food so that we are noble and worthy enough of a thin body.  We were wrong.  It is easy.  Eat until you don’t have hunger.

I go to the farmer’s market.  I run into some friends I know and chat for a little while.  This is what I love about the farmer’s market: human interaction.  I get some squash to make soup to freeze and some bratwurst to freeze for when I get home from vacation.  I also buy some persimmon cake.  We’ll see how this goes.   I also buy bratwurst and soft pretzel they are serving fresh.  I’m not hungry yet so I head home.  When I finally am hungry I eat the bratwurst and pretzel-this feels very ball park and unhealthy.  I am still hungry though from not eating much yesterday.  I eat all but one bite, and through the last bite away.  This has become incredibly easy for me now.  I cannot believe how hard I thought something like putting food back in the frig was.

Midday, I snack on some home made hot chocolate and a medium piece of persimmon cake.  I eat most of the cake, but only half of the hot chocolate before stopping.  The rest goes in the disposal.  I cook the squash soup & add some dessert wine for flavoring.  The wine smells really good.  I go to the store to have some for dinner.  For dinner, I’m still working on the cranberry sauce and gravy-tempeh.  I get half way through the meal, including the wine before I am full.  I pour the wine back in the bottle-I won’t waste that, & the food down the disposal.  Thirty minutes later, I am hungry again.  This seems to happen to me with tempeh.  Which isn’t necessarily bad-it is just how my body reacts to it.   I am annoyed at myself for being hungry this time though.  I eat a small piece of the cake, but I need something more substantive.  I have a piece of cheese.  I’m still hungry!  I’m tired & afraid that this isn’t going to end up working, that I will go back to having all those negative emotions about food.  I go to bed.  The next morning I wake up perfectly content.  I never needed to worry-I wanted to eat because I was hungry.  I don’t really like the reaction my body seems to have to soy & probably won’t cook with it anymore.  I’ll still eat it with others when they prepare it.  It is okay that I will need to eat a little later in the day. 

Day 6

Day 6 Friday, December 18, 2010

Okay, anyone uncomfortable with the discussed of monthly cycles should just skip to Day 7.  I woke up this morning & mine had started.  I sit down for my latte & can only take two sips.  I can’t eat breakfast either.  Usually I would have shoved it down, but today-I just can’t eat it.  Usually I know when my period is coming because the day before I have cramps.: not today.  It turns out that the reason I has cramps is because with all the food I was shoving down there was no room for monthly cycles.  Who would have thought that eating less would cure PMS.   It is still a little tight down there, but it’s not-cramped, if you know what I mean.  Eventually, at 11:00, I eat breakfast.  Dinner is at five, and there is no lunch.  It’s just too much today.

Around 10:30, I start to question whether it is okay that I’m not eating.  Aren’t I lowering my metabolism?  Aren’t I starving myself?  Am I going to eat today?  Is it okay if I don’t?  Then, at 11:00, a little bit of hunger was present.  Once again, my body knew what it needed better than I did, better then the nutritionists telling me to eat five small meals a day.  It knew.  It also understands food better than we do.  We are still discovering new nutrients and changing our minds about which ones are bad for you.  Apparently, a study came out showing that our glorified fiber is not so good for you after all.  Saturated fat is making a come back.  Some claim the medium-chain fatty acids are the “healthy” type of saturated fat.  Others claim that all saturated fats have been given a bad name all together.  Apparently the research on saturated fat and heart disease is not as strong as the public has been lead to believe.  They find correlations between saturated fat and high cholesterol and high cholesterol and heart disease but not saturated fat and heart disease.  Some believe, that high cholesterol is present during heart disease to heal the damage, not cause it.   I am not promoting a high saturated fat diet.  I’m not promoting any diet.  I’m just saying the nutritionists don’t really know yet, what the diet we should be eating is.  My body does.  It takes all those chemicals, breaks them down, and puts them exactly where they are supposed to go.  They travel through the body moving in and out of our cells doing exactly what they are supposed to do.  I don’t know every process that occurs, the scientists don’t know yet either.  My body does.  This means I do not have to worry about what or how much I eat; I just have to listen, pay attention, the answer is already there.

Today, my body is saying not to eat a lot-there is already enough inside me.  I listen.

DAY 5

Day 5 Thursday, December 16, 2010

If I could describe in one word: ease.  Last night I went to bed almost sick of food.  I really didn’t even want to think about food anymore.  I don’t know if that has ever happened to me.  Today, though, there is just an ease with food.  Through breakfast, lunch and dinner I just sit down, eat, then I stop when it is time.  It’s that simple.  I might have gone a bite or two over at dinner, but there was still plenty of food left on my plate.  I still find it harder to eat consciously on weekdays.  Lunch being the hardest-since it is at my desk.  Even breakfast is hard to slow down as I’m getting ready for the day.  Dinner, I definitely developed the most presence.  I taste the squash soup; I feel how I have to press down with my spoon at little harder when it touches the soup; I see the reflections of the light in the soup.  I taste and enjoy the fat of the cheese as I eat it.  I stop leaving 1/3 of the soup and some bread and cheese.  The bread I throw out & the cheese and soup go back in the frig.  I’m going to have to start cutting my recipes in half.

I’ve been debating the concept of eating emotionally.  The problem isn’t that we eat emotionally: it is that the emotions we experience with food are all negative.  Let me know if you have even experienced: guilt, deprivation, lust, desire, disgust, anxiety, stress, isolation, compulsion, even elitism, or self righteousness?  The first seven are self explanatory in our culture.  The last two are what you experience when you eliminate that evil food group and are now superior to others still eating: sugar, gluten, dairy.   The emotions are all negative.  What about joy, satisfaction, connectedness, self awareness, pleasure, comfort, peace, ease?  Food is all of the things.  When you allow yourself to experience these emotions while you are eating, all the other negative feelings fall to the sidelines.  There is no need for deprivation, because you eat when you are hungry.  There is no need for guilt because you should eat when you are hungry.   There’s no lust because there is no deprivation.  When you eat for pleasure, joy and satisfaction there is no stress and anxiety.  You don’t have to worry about how to lose weight, be healthy, when to eat, how much to eat.  Your body tells you.  Your body is an amazingly complex organism: more complex than the science behind it.  It knows exactly what & how much to eat.  All we have to do is listen.  It doesn’t worry so much whether the calories are from carbohydrates, fat or protein; it can convert them all into glucose.  It can tell you how much to eat, and if you really listen, what to eat.

I get my vegetables from the farmer’s market so I eat them in season.  It has been an interesting process.  In the summer in Texas it is too hot for lettuce, so I don’t eat it.  Instead I eat tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers & tomatoes.  I went this entire summer without missing lettuce at all.  Then, one day it hit me.  I wanted green leafy vegetables-badly.  The next day I went to the farmer’s market, & there they were, waiting for me to eat them.  I became a lettuce glutton for the next few weeks.  Eating them at almost every meal.   During the winter, when most of the vegetables are root vegetables, I love sauerkraut.  I have it everyday.  Then, when to

the summer comes & all the cucumbers and tomatoes come back into season, I barely eat any sauerkraut at all.   My point is that our bodies are in lined with the earth.  I believe that human beings are supposed to eat seasonally.  We are supposed to eat certain foods when it is hot, and others when it is cold.  The first winter that I ate seasonally I really wanted a tomato.  The second, I didn’t miss it at all.  All the soups that can be made with root vegetables and sauerkraut with my meat satisfy me.  I don’t need the fresh tomatoes.

Here is another thing that happens when you eat seasonally.  Absence makes the heart go founder.  I remember living up in Boston when the cucumbers came in season.  I was so excited.  I called up my mom and said, “Mom, Guess what! The cucumbers are in season!”  My mom, with a condescending tone said, “That’s . . .  great . . .  Carrie.”  Most people don’t get too excited about cucumbers, but when you go without, you learn to appreciate it when it is available.  Suddenly, fruits and vegetables become comfort foods.  You associate asparagus with Easter, strawberries with fourth of July, sweet potatoes with Thanksgiving.  Everything has its season.  When you eat in season, your experience with food becomes more gratifying, because you know it won’t always be there.  The thing is though, once it is gone, there is something new to eat, when the tomatoes fade away, the squash comes in.  When the squash fades, in comes the carrots and parsnips and celery root.  When those fade, in comes the asparagus and artichokes.  Most people don’t get too excited about parsnips and celery root.  Those people, though, have never turned them into soups.  I love cooking soups and making broths in the winter.  They usually have to cook for several hours, or even days.  The heat from the stove keeps me warm, & I can often turn of the heat & rely solely on the stove for my heat.  Not to mention-they are delicious!

The same way that paying attention to the seasons can tell us what to eat, paying attention to our bodies can tell us how much to eat.  Just as the earth already knows what we should be eating, our bodies know how much we should be eating.  The paradox is that letting go of control of our food is the only way to truly control it.  It was only after I let my body, not my brain dictate how much I eat, that I was able to control what I ate.  It was only after I let the earth decide what I eat, that I was able to find joy and pleasure in what I was eating.  

Day 4

Day 4- Wednesday, December 15. 2010

If I could some up today’s experience with food in one word it would be disinterest.  I’m not sure why.  This is particularly uncharacteristic of me.  This is the girl whose first word was cracker.  I always have to have some belief system about food.  In order to prevent myself from eating so much of it, instead I look up recipes, look at it at the farmer’s market, cook it-anything but eat it.  That is, of course, until I do eat it-where I go out of control.  Today though: no interest. 

It is possible the disinterest occurred because food & I got off to a bad start this morning.  It did, after all, catch on fire in my oven this morning, forcing me to break out the fire extinguisher.  This left a nice film of dust all over my kitchen, rending me breakfastless & late for work.  I do not function without breakfast.  Granted, if I had been smart, I would have just put a pot over the fire, but this did not occur to me until halfway through the day.  Anyways, I stopped at Panera for a latte (yes the one I made was ruined by the dust too) & an asiago bagel breakfast sandwich.  I ate it on the way to work – attempting presence with little success.  Eating in the car was a big breach of my contract with myself-but necessary given the circumstances.  I spent about an hour after I got home cleaning my kitchen & living room of the dust.

At lunch, I started with dessert.  I had some more of the dark chocolate, then one bite of the chocolate rum cake everyone was obsessing over.   Let me repeat this statement;  I ate ONE bite of the chocolate rum cake.  I do not think I have ever eaten one bite of anything with sugar in it in my ENTIRE LIFE.  The craziest part about it was that I didn’t even realize that this event was significant until my car ride home.  So not only did I only eat a bite-just to see what it tasted like- but I had so little craving for more afterwards that it didn’t occur to me that one bite was impressive.  All my life I have been jealous of girls who have a little bit of dessert then put it down.  Now, I AM that girl-it’s sort of a lot of pressure-I don’t know quite how to process it.

I eat the rest of my lunch-the left over lamb from yesterday & a piece of spouted bread.  I still have hunger but just don’t feel like eating.  Who is this person?  There was a little bit of temptation to eat the cornucopia of Christmas junk food in the coffee room that afternoon-mostly due to the fact that it is easier to prepare than the other food I have, & I did still have hunger.  I settle though, for my  macaroons and go the rest of the day with a little bit of hunger.  I should specify that these are the world’s healthiest macaroons.  They are raw, made of coconut, coconut oil, agave, and a few other ingredients.  There are 5 grams of sugar for a serving of two-which is what I ate.  This is less sugar than what is in most fruits.   I end up stopping at Chipolte for dinner on the justification that I won’t be able to cook or eat in my dirty kitchen.  I get the usual & a Shiner & eat it there.  I still seem distracted during dinner, though I enjoy the beer.  Thinking a little about whether I’m still hungry,  I reach a point where I just stop.  Then something miraculous happens.  I throw the rest away.  I throw food out all the time.  Cooking in bulk, the food I make usually doesn’t freeze well, so I have to eat it all in a week.  Often, I end up getting bored with it by the end of the week & eat out instead.  Then, I threw the rest away on the weekend.   For some reason, usually when food is on my plate, I can’t throw it out.  Tonight, though, I threw it out- I didn’t take it home for later-it wasn’t enough for a meal.  I threw it away.  I apologize for anyone offended by my wastefulness-I feel a little bit guilty myself (as I usually at least compost it).  This event, though, was significant on a symbolic level.  I was able to let go of my food.  Like a hoarder justifies the mess in their house with the waste of throwing it away, I justify eating or even saving food that I’m not hungry for as a waste of food.   I hoard food.  Throwing it in the trash was my way of releasing my obsession with food.

I also have been hoarding the definition of fullness.  Trying to understand it.  Thinking about it really hard so I would know just when I was no longer hungry-trying to have control over it.  The point of not having hunger, cannot be analyzed, it cannot be controlled.  You recognize the time to stop by letting go.  There is a feeling to it-but the more you try to find it, the less you feel it.  The point of no longer having hunger is like riding a bike, just hop on and you go; analyze your pattern & fall over.  It’s like when you hold something slippery in your hands and the harder you try to grasp it the more it falls out of your hands.  It isn’t until you relax your grasp that you can hold it.  We all have the ability to know when to stop eating.  It is hardwired within us.  We just need to let it be to find it.  Our culture creates an unnecessarily complex relationship with food.  We are shown commercials to make us crave it then made to feel guilty when we eat it.  We go nutrient by nutrient, trying to understand it.  We grab onto food trying to analyze to maximize our health.  Yet since we have started this campaign for health, out incidence of obesity and heart disease has sky rocketed.  We’ve been trying to control our food, shout nutrients in take out others.  Yet we remain fat.  It isn’t until we release food, let it BE food, instead of nutrients, that it can nurture us.  Until we release our control over food, it will control us: How much we eat, what we eat, how often we eat.

Jessica Prentice describes in Full Moon feast her determination to stop her obsession with food like this:

Did I ever develop a system? No.   Did I ever move beyond my preoccupation with food? No.  But that wasn’t what I really wanted, even at nineteen.  I just wanted to stop suffering in my relationship with food.  And that indeed happened.  I finally just stopped fighting food and dived into it headlong . . . It has opened me to a world of politics, of history, of art, of pleasure, of anger, of grief, of faith-all the profound things I thought food was keeping me from.  It has helped me to feel God’s healing presence in my life, and taught me how to be vulnerable, how to love, and how to let go.

It seems a little too good to be true that letting go is all there is to have a healthy relationship with food.  That being a little more present and stopping a little bit sooner is all it takes to stop cravings and addictions.  Is this really a sustainable method?  Is it really this easy?  Have I been over thinking this whole eating thing?  Have we all been over thinking it?  Only time will tell.  I will let you know in two years if I can still throw my food away, when I no longer have hunger.