nutrimetry

NYT article on toxic parents

It’s a couple of days old now, but I couldn’t help but mention NYT’’s article on toxic parents.   Parents are a thorny issue.  The moment you complain about your parents, you sound like that lame person that blames all your problems other people.   Yet, as the article points out, hurt coming from your parents can cut deep and destroy your self esteem… and to be blunt, while most people tend to think that you have to love your parents and that they would never hurt you, quite frankly, they can.  I’ve always thought, “there’s nothing that keeps really awful people from giving birth.”  And while this doesn’t mean that your parent is a childbeater or something awful, sometimes they are liars, sometimes they are having personal problems that they take out on you.

I have already blogged about parents’ roles in pushing unhealthy dieting in their kids and how it can lead to a disordered relationship with food that can take years, or the time when my mother asked me not to come home for Christmas because I was too fat and my uncles and aunts would think they were bad parents (I spent that Christmas alone and cried a lot).  I have recently had to deal with an issue where I found out that one of my parents had lied to me about a something — I had gone through something horrible years ago, and for years one parents had blamed it on the other and comforted me … until I found out that the other parent was lying, and when that parent was confronted, the parent refused to apologize and instead flipped out.  I did not talk to them for months. I was in shock.  It was like seeing a parent completely differently when you know they have been lying to you expertly about something that cost you a lot.  In the book Authentic Happiness, Martin Seligman says forgive past trespasses in order to overcome them, and perhaps seek reconciliation.  When it comes to parents, forgiveness is possible, but what if reconciliation isn’t (because the person won’t apologize), and it’s someone you’ll have to see at every family function, so you just keep being reminded?

The therapist who authors the NYT article suggested to a patient that they cut the parents off. While many therapists encourage you to salvage the relationship at all costs, he got to the point where he was like, “Cut it off.”  That was once suggested to me and I thought it impossible.  I still can’t picture it because it will lead to tension with my siblings as well, one of whom will defend one of my parents in all things because of the perceived difficult life they have had… even if they’re wrong, it’s like you’re not allowed to be mad at them whether they apologize or not, because that makes you weak and whiny, and you might lose the rest of your family, too.

Model re-gains weight, finds happiness and success

Book:Hungry: A Young Model’s Story of Appetite, Ambition and the Ultimate Embrace of Curves

So I’ve been seeing Renn making the TV rounds recently and have given in and ordered the book.  What convinced me to give this book a try was the reviewer blurb “debunks the modern-day Cinderella story of the fat girl who loses weight to get happy. This is a new fairy tale, one in which a young woman embraces the size she’s supposed to be and the world opens up for her.”

Crystal Renn lost 70 pounds as a teenager in order to pursue a modeling career. She felt she developed an eating disorder and felt her confidence about her body was destroyed. Oddly, it was after she gave up dieting and re-gained the weight that her modeling career took off, and she made it to the cover of Vogue. She is now the best-paid plus-size model in the world.

I think the combination of the real food movement (Pollan etc) and voices like Renn’s or Monica Seles’s in her book Getting a Grip: On My Body, My Mind, My Self will begin to convince more and more people that dieting is part of the problem, not the solution.  My weight loss progress might be seriously slow but my mind has never been so clear. I still find myself watching shows like Biggest Loser for entertainment value, yet I feel no need to run out and diet. In the strangest way, I found myself hitting on a guy in a bar recently, almost forgetting that I still weigh well over 200 pounds … it is just so bloody good to be able to be yourself again, as Renn emphasizes over and over.

It is stunning that so much wisdom comes out of the memoir of a 23 year old.  I started dieting at age 15 and quit at age 25.  Renn started dieting at age 14.  If anything, the fact that so many girls start dieting so early might mean they realize before their entire lives pass them by that it doesn’t work.  I can’t believe I wasted a decade hating myself like that.

Will it take 10 years?

Will it take 10 years for me to be completely free of my dieting mentality?

I was reading user comments for a book called “Diets Don’t Work: Stop Dieting Become Naturally Thin Live a Diet-Free Life” on Amazon.com and noting with some trepidation how some women said it took them 10 years to return to normal eating.  I had already been panicking about losing only 15 pounds in 6 months… am I patient enough to let a decade pass?
I guess I might have to be if I really want to beat this thing.

So I’ve been hiding in shame

So, I’ve been hiding in shame. In my last post I promised to take a more dedicated, formal approach to make sure I ate normally, refrained from dieting, and prevented binge eating. I was to formally follow the program from “Overcoming Binge Eating” by Christopher Fairburn (Amazon). Well, I stuck to it for about a week and a half then it fell to the wayside.  Monitoring, for me, is strongly associated with dieting; how do you monitor not dieting?  The first week of the program was easy enough: write down what you do normally and analyze it.  The second stage, however, consisted of noting, the night before, what times of the day you were going to eat or snack and sticking to those times no matter what.   If you binge-ate, you were absolutely not to skip your next prescribed meal in an attempt to compensate calories.  You were supposed to eat whatever you wanted; just eat them at prescribed mealtimes. After a couple of days of messing this up, I couldn’t even look at my records — the exact same way often I reacted after blowing diets.

Days of neglecting my records turned into weeks.  Then I got upset that I was starting at a new job soon and didn’t want to show up fat, and purchased protein shakes.  It was the first time I’d eaten artificial food in over a year.  I hated myself.

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Lose 5 pounds, regain 3 … something must change.

I have decided to embark on actually following the program laid out in the second half of Christopher Fairburn’s Overcoming Binge Eating, because I am frustrated at myself and my two-steps-forward one-step-back rate of progress.

Late last year, I decided to dump dieting once and for all, and instead adopt eating three, beautiful delicious meals of traditional foods each day.

The satisfaction and joy of these filling meals would prevent me from the binge-eating episodes I could experience almost every night of the week when out ouf control, and which I believed were responsible for most of my weight gain.

With the binge-eating handled, my weight would decline — all without dieting. That was the plan.

It’s not that the plan doesn’t work — it works perfectly when I stick to it, and has led, at times, to 5 to 7 pounds lost a month, effortlessly by just being normal.

The problem is that I haven’t stuck to the plan consistently.

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2 weeks in Germany = 10 pounds off.

I spent 2 weeks in Germany and lost 10 pounds. Insane.

In my friend’s household, you apparently only eat 2 meals a day.

On my first night, I worried anxiously about when dinner was going to be, but was too uncomfortable to ask. It was only by the second day that I realized that there was never going to be any “dinner” as I knew it.

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Snippets of wisdom: Dieting is often the root of eating disorders

…. Bulimia is a natural consequence of self-starvation to lose weight in the midst of abundant food… 80% of bulimics are on diets immediately before bulimia start … in one study, bulimics were put on a nutritionally adequate diet with at least 1400 calories; they all stopped binging… this suggests that dieting is a cause of bulimia and suggests and major strategy for therapy. Patients must be convinced that their binge eating is caused by the body’s reaction to diets. [emphasis mine]

… Dieting theory cannot fully explain bulimia. Many of those who have little weight to lose — i.e. their ideal weight is close to their natural weight — can diet and stay there, because their diet will not starve them. Depression may worsen bulimia and make it easier to give in to temptation. Dieting [far] below your natural weight is a necessary condition. [empahsis mine]

… There is a new and disheatening development in “eating disorders.” …”Binge eating disorder”… they binge occasionally, they don’t purge, so they gain weight. … Their bodies, like bulimics, are screaming for food. Perhaps their disorder is not binge eating but inappropriate dieting.

In fact, we should consider a new category for DSM-4, “dieting disorder”, defined as being within 20 percent of your “ideal” weight and ruining your life and healthy by dieting. [emphasis mine]

- From What You Can Change and What You Can’t by Martin Seligman, University of Pennsylvania.

In France, I couldn’t have binged if I wanted to

I was just wondering why my binge-eating episodes were so few and far between during the semester I spent in Paris. The episodes had been in full-swing before I left, but in France they numbered 2 episodes on Saturday afternoons during a period when my host family had gone to visit relatives and I was left alone.

Was it simply because I wasn’t alone most of the time? No, I don’t think so; I managed to binge like crazy under my parent’s roof. Secrecy is part of the binge-eater’s skillset.

Perhaps it was my unwillingness to raid the someone else’s fridge. But in my own family I never raid the fridge because my mom counts every potato chip I eat and my parents suspect me first if something is missing. (It became a particularly nasty habit of my brother’s to eat, say, half a cake, and blame it on me, and be believed, until one day he was caught, and everyone was appalled, and I was vindicated.)

Was it because I was eating delicious balanced meals? Dont think so; I ate breakfast with the host family most days but ate dinner with them rarely ‘cos I was often at school until late, and would just pick up my own stuff or throw something together.

I think it was more about a lack of opportunities to respond to cravings.

My modus operandi with binge eating has always involved running to some corner store when cravings hit. I never actually have snacks in the house. That’s what chronic dieters do, right? They “clean up” their environment and get rid of all the bad foods, so there’s never really anything in the house.

So when my cravings hit — usually at night — I run out and buy the stuff. In the States or Canada, there’s always some cornershop, some Walgreens, some something, that’s open and waiting for me. There was a 24-hour McDonald’s and a whole lot of corner stores within 2 minutes of my first apartment; there is a corner store around the corner from my parent’s current place that’s open til midnight; in college, there were vending machines and Walgreen’s galore.

Well in France I couldn’t run out and buy the stuff because everything was just closed. I can’t remember what time they closed — 6 or 7 — but they were often 15 to 20 minutes away from closing by the time I was getting off the metro to go home.

In France, when cravings hit, I simply couldn’t respond to them, and that was that. To respond to my cravings, I’d have had to wander around dark streets with nowhere to go.

I sit here thinking about it, if I had wanted a chocolate bar at, say, 10 o’clock at night, I would definitely have had to walk a few blocks to the vending machine at the metro station, get on a train to a metro station that had a vending machine that sold chocolate (my closes metro didn’t; they only sold drinks), all the way down there beside the tracks where everyone would see you get off the train, buy nothing but candy without boarding the metro, and leave. And all this at nighttime when everything was closed and dark and creepy? No. No wonder I never binged. Too much effort.

Even the pharmacies were closed, and the pharmacies didn’t sell candy anyway. Nope, not a chocolate bar. They just sold, well, medicine.

I don’t know if this lack of places to buy snacks at night was peculiar to the area I was in, but my area was relatively metropolitan and closes to the largest thing resembling a mall I had seen in Paris. One would think there’d be a million corner stores in the area. There were. And they were all just closed.

I think the McDonald’s near my school, in a particularly commercial area with few residences, was open until 2, but it’s all I can think of, and it was many stations away.

The times I did binge, I did so on late Saturday afternoons, when corner stores were still open; particularly lazy Saturday afternoons when the family was away and I ware bored to death. But it was just those two weekends.

And so, in France, I did not binge. When I got back to the states, however, they came back in full force for a long time before I started tackling them directly with my current return-to-normal-eating philosophy.

I might have finally resisted the impulse to diet

While watching the “Biggest Loser” season finale the other day, I realized that, at some point a few episodes back, I had become capable of watching the show without wanting to run off and diet “for just a while”. I could never watch that show without developing the impulse to diet, I could not read a single diet or health book without being sucked in by their soaring promises and wanting to achieve them. Don’t quite know if I’m resistant to books yet — I don’t think I should read diet books at all, and am trying to transition to health/nutrition textbooks and books about the “real food” movement, although they romanticize even that movement a bit much.

I also watched “Biggest Loser” with another person for the first time. I’ve never been able to do this without feeling uncomfortable, because, you know, you’re watching a weight loss show with your family and it seems like they’re trying to drop hints to you like “Yes, it’s all about calories in calories out,” and their nodding in exaggerated ways as if they hope you’re listening because you must be too stupid to know such information?

I might have resisted the impulse to diet while watching “Biggest Loser,” and might have curbed the reading of diet books; but I am yet to see if I can resist dieting before embarking on a new phase of my life (i.e. the new job I start in June).

The Lucky Few

What does it take to be among the lucky few dieters who lose weight and manage to keep it off? A hell of a lot, it would seem.

In one study, the “lucky” 10 percent of formerly fat people who dieted and stayed thin ate an average of 1,298 calories a day to stay at their new weight, whereas normal controls at 1,950 calories to stay at that same weight. This demonstrates that dieters may never again be able to eat normal amounts of food if they want to stay thin… the second time obese patients go on a VLCD [very low calorie diet], they lose weight more slowly, yet they take in exactly the same number of calories as the first time.”

- From What You Can Change and What You Can’t by Martin Seligman, University of Pennsylvania.

I have come across similar themes in books by Gina Kolata, a New York Times science journalist , and Anne M. Fletcher, a nutritionist whose book Thin for Life examines habits of 160 individuals who had lost an average of 63 pounds and maintained that loss for over a decade.

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