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.