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.