There was a lot of
learning to do. You know when you think you know about something and
it turns out you really know squat? That kind of happened to me. Part
of the program was to take some classes on nutrition and making
better food choices. Let me preface by saying, I (almost) always read
food labels, just not all of it. I read the fat and sugar (as my
mother taught me), then the carbs, as I learned from my first,
incomplete, foray with a dietician many years ago. I always skipped
over the calories, I had no idea what role they played in a healthy
diet. I knew they were a form of energy, and I knew all the skinny
girls on tv thought less was better, but I didn't know how much I
needed. The only time I didn't read the label was when I KNEW it was
bad for me. Why bother? I'm buying it because I want it, I'm an adult
now, I can have cookies for dinner and no one can stop me. So what
if I eat half a bag or oreos and a whole package of pistachio pudding
for supper? I'm good, I read food labels for everything else, right?
Wrong. I started attending the classes and keeping a food log. I
started to realise that maybe I wasn't getting all the suggested
servings of food groups in a day. Maybe I was eating at restraunts
too often, and maybe, just maybe, calories were important.
The classes were amusing
to me, as well as informative. I knew a lot of what they were
teaching, but some of the people there knew even less. I don't know
if it was ignorance or just plain stupidity, but I was amused. I
tried to steer clear of the brand names that had 'healthy' in them. I
knew there was trickery involved, (it was acutally salt). I just
didn't know how it could be good for you with that many ingredients,
most of which I couldn't pronounce. And the smell. I couldn't stand
the smell of a microwaved dinner. It induced my gag reflex to such a
degree, I almost couldn't eat my lunch. And it lingered, like an
annoying neighbour who doesn't have a phone and needs to call an
emergency dentist but makes you do it because 'I'm not from this
town, it would be weird.' (true story). I've always been a decent
cook, and it was easy, why couldn't they do it to? Then I realised,
just because I think it's easy, doesn't mean it's easy for everyone.
Just like everyone I know can type with out using the backspace key
at a 2:1 ratio of the other keys, doesn't mean I can. (trust me, the
word 'backspace' isn't even on the key anymore). Then I realised it
is also about perception. They precieve cooking to be hard and want
to be good at it right away. Doesn't work that way. Takes practice.
Know how many alfredo sauces I burned (a lot)? Or protiens I burnt or
had to put back in the oven because it was still oinking (even more)?
But people want easy, so thats what they get, and who can blame them.
I really felt for the
health care professionals teaching these classes. So few of us were
there to learn, all the rest looking for excuses and magic
treatments. I knew this was a long, hard, road and I was changing the
way I would be eating for the rest of my life. I knew I was going to
give my children a better relationship with food than I had, but it
was going to take work. They had no idea. The reason diets don't
work, is as soon as you lose the weight, no one maintains it. They go
back to eating the way they did before and gain it all back. 'Why am
I fat again? Weight doesn't come back after you lose it. Must be a
gladular problem...oh, hello, burger. om nom nom nom.' There is no
maintenance after the fact. They see it as 'being on a diet' rather
than changing your lifestyle. Changing your lifestyle is difficult, a
lifetime of bad habits and addictions to all the wrong sort of foods,
throw up many road blocks. Those foods were soooo good and hard to
give up. I missed cheese in large quantities, sweet, bread like
confections, and the large amount of bread I used to eat. I once ate
an entire loaf of sourdough bread with a spinach dip I made and
couldn't get enough of. In one sitting. While watching a movie.
Nearly went into a food coma while the dog cleaned up the crumbs
around my bloated, bready, corpse. But up until this point, I was
doing okay. Only eating out 2 times per week, making better choices
at the restraunts, and eating better at home was having an effect. I
was losing weight. 1-2 pounds per week, as promised. And I felt
better, had more energy. Life was looking better. Then came the class
that threatened to derail me.
Emotional eating is
something that I didn't want to face, but knew I needed to in order
for this lifestyle change to be sucessful. I always imagined emotional
eating as a fat person, sobbing uncontrolably, and shoveling food
into their mouth. It's not always like that, and for me it was
stress. Or my daydreams of being skinny interuppted by the sounds of
my own chewing. That was upsettingly ironic. So I learned a few things, one of
which was the 80/20 rule. They taught you not all your food had to be
good 100 percent of the time. You are allowed to have a bad food
choice once in a while. So I started adopting that, very losely and
not quite as stringent as I thought. I was using it so liberally,
that it hindered my weight loss for a while. See, I was using it for
individual meals (salad, no dressing, with my burger) and then for
all the meals that same day (pizza for supper, no veggies). So it
ended up being more like the 50/50 rule, or even the 40/60 rule. It
was getting bad, there was cheese on everything, pizza all the time,
and a not so uncommon addiction to toast with peanut butter and jam.
I was enjoying food again. All the time. What was happening to me? I
was doing so well, now I was derailing in a big way. I found an
excuse to eat the bad things I wanted again. It was bad, very bad.
And I needed to get back on track. I wasn't putting everything in my
food log. Flat out, I was cheating. But whom was I cheating? Not the
dietician or the nurse or the doctor. I was cheating myself, and my
future children that may never happen because I couldn't get my shit
together. No more 80/20 rule. Time to get real...again.
Keep it up Sis!
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