ANOTHER STEP OUT OF THE CLOSET

A friend started a closed Facebook group to discuss health and diet. She added me to the group. I knew my experiences as a food addict weren't quite the subject matter she was expecting. I don't know any of the other people in the group, but my friend is a passionate vegan and very much into exercise. Early posts in this very new group tended to be along the lines of best smoothie recipes.

Please understand there's no criticism or scorn or anything but complete admiration in what I'm writing. Everyone's on a journey, after all. I'm just setting the stage here, saying that my own experiences are probably outside the norm for her and her other friends.

So it wasn't a foregone conclusion that I'd participate. But, I thought, maybe it's time to shed a little bit more light on my own mess. Maybe this is a good next step. On the other hand, maybe it could backfire in some way. What if there's a former student in that group, and I don't know her married name? What if this leads to someone talking about how bad my problem is? What if someone snickers in the coffeeshop?

Posting on this forum is anonymous. I've probably posted enough information, and I'm using my own picture, that someone could probably actually track me down. But there is still the comforting anonymity of being able to post embarrassing, confessional things and then forget about having done so for the rest of the day. I'm not going to see any of you in the line at the grocery store. I don't care if you gossip about me. (That sounds loaded, and I genuinely don't mean for it to be so. What I mean is that it's a total non-issue.)

And thus I had a few moments of deliberation about posting. Not much. It was just a passing thought, really. But it was enough to help me understand people's reluctance to post their stories here.

If you keep it a secret, then you can pretend it is one. Some of us, like me, carry the excess weight that's a clue to our addictive behavior, but there are many overweight people who aren't food addicts, so that's not a given. As a group, we're pretty darn good at hiding our behaviors.

My husband is not a control freak sort of person, but he did go through a phase of thinking we should spend less on groceries (because he had, like, 1970's prices in his head thirty some years later.) I decided I'd show him the receipt from the grocery store for a little reality check (it worked) but then realized he'd actually LOOK at it - so that day, I went through the line a second time for 'my' things and paid cash, and kept that bag of food in the car until he went to work the next morning, and smuggled it in the house.

See.....that's embarrassing stuff. That's what we do, when we have addictions. My friend who struggles with alcohol invited me to dinner tonight, and I'm willing to bet that all the liquor bottles are being stashed away right now, because I know that problem is not really resolved. This is just what addicts DO.

We can get away with keeping our secret, except, of course, for the fact that it's destroying our bodies, self respect, finances, and relationships.

But should we? I mean, consider what our addiction is doing to us - my list of what it's destroying is not inaccurate.

One of my major breakthroughs on this journey was understanding the relationship that guilt had to my overeating.

I think that guilt is exacerbated by secrecy. I think removing the secrecy won't make all the guilt go away, but I think - no, i know, from my own experience now - that guilt does not thrive in direct sunlight.

Guilt is a mushroom, friends. It does best in the dark when there's a lot of manure covering it up. It might still grow in direct sunlight, but not nearly as powerfully.

Sunlight is not without its side effects. It sure shows up all the imperfections, doesn't it? I have sometimes seen photos of myself taken in direct sun and thought, ugh, I wish that light would have been a little more flattering.

Flattering light is okay for the family photograph. But it's not okay for an addiction.

I think I need to move toward more public admissions, personally. Ithink I need - personally - to let go of the last bits of secrecy. I don't think it's helping me. I'm not saying this is what you should do. The only thing I know for sure for YOU is that you need to be honest with yourself. The rest of it is a personal decision.

But mine was to post in that group. And now someone who lives near me could know some embarrassing things about me. But I think I'm okay with that.

Let's go out there and have a good day.

JUST ANOTHER MONDAY MORNING

All of the income-producing jobs I've ever held have been cyclical in nature, I've literally never held a job that's the same-old same-old every day. Bands and orchestras have concert cycles, theaters have a few shows a year, teachers get new kids every September, farmers start over every season. With everything i've done, you get to give it your best, then assess it, and start the next round.

Our commitment to dealing with our food addiction is the same way. We can't do the cold turkey thing that a drug or alcohol addict can do (and God love them if they can pull that off). We can't say we'll never eat food again. Ours is a more subtle dance. We have to learn to live with it in a healthy way.

And thankfully, we have Mondays. We have mornings. We have opportunities to say okay - THAT'S over with, I did this well, and this not so well yesterday, or last week, or whatever, and now it's time to look at this week, or this day.

We have reset buttons, people! And I'm grateful for that. This healing process is not linear. We zig-zag; we 'sailboat'. We correct the course every now and then.

If you woke up this morning, then you're obviously not dead. If you're not dead, then your story isn't completely written yet. You get a chance to add a new bit today. Today might even be the day that it all turns around for you. You might look back in three years and say yes, yes, April 23 2018, that was the day that things really came together for me.

You're laughing. But I might be right, you know.

HERE'S SOMETHING ELSE I'VE BEEN DOING ALL WRONG

I love it, LOVE it, when I figure out another piece of this puzzle, and one just slid into place today.

Think about vacations for a minute. I know someone, in fact I'm married to him, who looks forward to vacations, but then, when we're actually embarking on one, his worry-level starts rising. What if our plane is delayed? What if we forget something important? Is Sneezing Man at the next table contagious? Is the car making a funny noise? Etc. Once we're there, he starts worrying about the work that's piling up on his desk at the office, or how much traffic there will be on the way home. Or, is it sunny? He might get sunburn. Is it cloudy? Sucks to go on vacation and have clouds. Wow, this restaurant is expensive. Yep. That's my guy.

So, when we get back home from our very rare vacations, do you think he's rested? Of course not.

He's stressed, he needed the vacation, but he undermines all the good it can do by fussing and worrying his way through it. He can't enjoy it because of all the worry, and since he can't enjoy it. It does him no good. We come home, and he's still every bit as stressed. (Usually, the first thing out of his mouth when we pull in the driveway is to point out how badly the grass needs to be mowed. Well, dude, yeah. Duh.)

He'll sometimes even say the vacation wasn't long enough, because he's recognizing that he doesn't feel rested at the end of it. And I always think honey, there's not a vacation long enough for you if you don't calm yourself down and learn to relax. And if you could learn that, then a ten-minute break at lunch time could help you revitalize.

I've just realized that my relationship with food - and I suspects yours as well - is much like this. We need food. I mean, we need it in a purely scientific way; we need the nutrients and calories and so on or we'd die. For an addict, it also fills other needs, though, right? It's comfort, it's affirmation, it's something else entirely.

Normal people get things other than the sciency bits out of food consumption too, of course. Tney'll bliss out over the sensuality of flavors, the visual display on a creatively plated meal, the textures, nuances. They'll celebrate the communal aspect of a family eating together, and recognize the importance of food in our cultural and family traditions, and all of those other things that make food so wonderful.

We addicts just take that a step too far, of course.

But here's what I've just realized, friends: in our efforts to combat this, we might be going too far in the other direction. Once we reach a point where ALL food is associated with guilt, then NO food is bringing us comfort. If NO food is bringing us comfort, then we keep looking for that comfort in more food, don't we?

Just like my type A spouse coming back from vacation feeling unrested and thinking the vacation wasn't long enough, I've been feeling hungry for more food much of my life because I haven't let myself enjoy food when i'm eating it.

WE NEED TO LET OURSELVES ENJOY FOOD. If we don't, it's not meeting a basic need for us, and that need is NOT symptomatic of our addiction, it's a very basic, human thing.

I'm realizing that there are occasions when I don't overeat, and those are very often ones in which I'm permitting myself the enjoyment that absolutely should be part of the experience of eating. They are those times when I'm with someone important to me and sharing a meal, or when I'm in a particularly beautiful setting, or sometimes, yes, even when things are crazy and it's just a simple workday lunch but I take an extra moment to go sit on the front porch, or I put some music on and give myself the duration of it to truly relax. Or it might be that the food itself is sublime. That's what put this in my mind, actually. This morning I picked the first asparagus of the year. It is exquisite.

Contrast that the experience of eating with Guilt as the main course, no matter what's actually on the plate. You know what I mean. It's when you sit down (or stand at the kitchen counter or fridge door or you're driving) and every freaking bite comes with that 'sportscaster' voice in your head doing the analysis, telling you what you're doing wrong. ("She should have gone for the smaller size, Phil, who, will you look at how much she just crammed in her mouth at once!") Whenever I've done that - which I believe is much of the last few decades - then I'm not relaxing, not enjoying it, not getting any comfort or non-caloric sustenance from it at all.

Food's a lot like that vacation. If we don't enjoy it, then it's not doing us all the good it can, even if we technically take part in it. We'll be left wanting more - not because we didn't have enough, but because we didn't make the most of what we had.

Our bodies truly only need x number of calories to survive. For an addict, our brains seem to think they need so, so much more, just like my husband thinks he needs more vacation time. But maybe it's because, psychologically, we aren't relaxing and letting the food we eat do what it's supposed to do for us.

Figure out what you're going to eat for your next meal, and resolve to enjoy it. Savor it, revel in it, relax with it. See if it makes a difference.

Like all of my other puzzle pieces, this one only fills a small hole in the total picture. And of course we all have a different final picture to put together, so it may not be helpful to you. But I suspect this one's more common among us than you'd think.

WHO CARES WHAT I WANT? (subtitle: POOPY DIAPERS)

It's a two-post day, because the next job on my list today is a particularly icky job, and I'm stalling.

I so very often find myself saying "but, I don't want to eat that kale", or I don't want to walk for twenty minutes". or whatever. I don't want to eat salad, do any exercises, drink more water, skip having a bedtime snack,.........you know the script here.

And then I hear this voice from the universe responding: "Who cares what you want?"

I am reminded of the day I brought my elder son home from the hospital as a newborn. My husband had to go back to his office for a bit, and I gazed at my little one and thought of what lay before us: the first steps, the stories, the songs, the walks, the talks, the moments, and I was feeling all warm and mother-ish and so on.

And he promptly, explosively, thoroughly loaded up his diaper. All the foulness in the universe. the worst you can possibly imagine. Right there, right then.

I didn't want to clean it up. But, of course, I recognized that what I wanted was not remotely relevant in that moment. There was a need there; there was a right thing to do. This was my responsibility, this was someone I loved who needed something that only I, in that exact moment, could do, and it needed to be done right then.

We all have those stories, those moments where we realize that just because we want of don't want something doesn't actually matter in the least, not in terms of what's appropriate to actually DO.

Addicts get some part of that mixed up. We seem to have a direct line between what we want / don't want and our actions, without that intermediate step, where we say wait, what's actually appropriate here?

I am taking a few moments today to mentally list all the stupid things I've wanted to do but haven't done, or all the things I haven't wanted to do but did because I should, just to remind myself that 'wanting' and 'not wanting' may be valid feelings, and may have a factor in making some decisions - but not all of them. I wanted to wear my blue shirt today. That's cool. I want to eat cookies right now. That's not. I don't want to go clean the bathroom right this second, and it's okay to switch my afternoon around a bit and sit here at the 'puter for a bit first - but it's NOT okay to just not do it at all, because it needs to get done.

Think of all the things you do that you don't really want to. You file your taxes, you make the bed, you call your weird aunt on her birthday - whatever. You KNOW that grownupping requires that you override the 'dont' want' voice sometimes. You KNOW that the consequences aren't worth it.

Conversely, there's plenty of things you don't do that you'd think might be fun / enjoyable / whatever. You don't take a sledgehammer to the car of the moron who took two parking places in a crowded lot. Right? You want to, just like I do, right? But you don't, because you understand the consequences aren't worth the momentary glee you'd take from the action.

We addicts give ourselves a lot of shit because we think we're powerless and totally out of control. Just read the initial posts of most of us, myself included.

And we clearly do have issues in the self-control area with food. We have trouble understanding that the momentary glee isn't worth the repercussions.

But we're forgetting that it is not a defining characteristic of ourselves as total human beings. It's just in this one area, mostly. I could hate myself for having no self control over Oreos, and it could easily slip into thinking I have no self control at all, do you see what i mean? And it's a short step from there to thinking I'm just a total failure. And whenever I think i'm a total failure, I head for food.

But wait. I can practice my horn for three hours without a potty break. I can hold a killer poker hand and not let on. I have never yet told a certain extremely offensive relative to just STFU. I can listen to my elderly neighbor tell me about the time he caught a record size trout without letting on that I've heard the story at least fifty times. I clearly have plenty of self control. I'm just struggling to aim it where it's needed, with this food thing.

You see the difference? We're not failures. We're failing, at the moment, to do one pretty important thing, i.e. controlling the food situation. But we are, at the exact same time, exhibiting tremendous self control in many other areas of our lives.

We do know that what we 'want' or 'don't want' is not the total reason for our decision making. We just have to take this superpower that we already have and apply it to cake. We can do this.

And now I'm going to go take care of the icky thing I don't want to clean up.

IT'S GOING TO HIT THE FAN IN A BIG WAY

(Note: some serious ADD rambling going on here, and probably very little helpful substance today, sorry)

The calendar for the next three weeks is a truly frightening thing. I can't look at it directly or I'll hyperventilate. It's sort of like the eclipse. I can only steal short glances at it and then try to process what I've seen without still looking, or I'll burn my retinas. The totality is overwhelming.

(Remember that I"m never, ever speaking comparatively here. Your shit is undoubtedly hitting the fan too, perhaps more so than mine. We're in this together.)

All The Things happen at once in the next three weeks. Two weekly markets kick off for the year which means producing a ton of product (I do a value-added product in a commercial kitchen here on the farm), and I have a symphony concert with a scary wonderful solo for which I must practice very, very carefully on every single day leading up to it. There's a two-day plant sale that I sell at over Mother's Day weekend that's a big deal, like, hotel overnight in between, six truck / vans taking plants down, a full day of set up, tons of details. The CSA (vegetable subscription service) starts in mid May and it's a terribly late spring, so I'm concerned about what I'll have available for the first few bags. And I got an email asking me to audition for something that might be kind of awesome, but naturally it's right in the middle of all of this. There are animals here that need care, and the plants in the greenhouse require close monitoring so I don't lose them.........and a lot of them need signs and labels and so on before sales,,,,,,,,and there's a plant sale here this weekend, and the kids are coming from Pittsburgh for a few days to work on my daughter-in-law's late father's house some more, so the grandloveys will be tearing around.

(I fully recognize that someone's reading this and thinking dear God in heaven this woman is self-entered, she's only talking about herself. Well, that's why I'm keeping all my shit on this one page, so it can easily be avoided.)

The last time that things got this hectic was the stretch when my son's family came for two weeks to do the funeral arrangements and so on, and I was playing a show every night during that period. And I made some really bad food choices and slipped up then. I want to prevent that from happening again.

My point in writing all this is two-fold: one, I'm practically reciting it out loud three times a day just so I keep priorities straight (because I'm so easily distracted. This morning while feeding the sheep it occurred to me that I could take that weird round table that's stored in the barn and strip it and paint an intricate mandala on it and put it on the deck, but this is the wrong time to think about that). I need to focus on the things that need to happen here, and not get sidetracked. And my organization has to be immaculate: if I forget the start up change at market, or forget the evening watering in the greenhouse, or something like that, I'm screwed. I have to focus.

(I actually really thrive on this kind of adrenaline. But i'm managing an auto-immune disease too, and that means I really need to monitor my energy levels carefully.)

And secondly, I need a plan, or this is going to end up being a total foodapalooza.

Now, here's where I often screw up royally. Because when I start thinking hey, let's plan our way through this crunch time, I often go too far in the other direction, and decide that I'll make some frozen soup and cut up a lot of raw veggies and so on. It all sounds very noble. This is all fine and dandy except that I don't want to actually live on soup and raw vegetables, you see, so I end up looking at the fifth container of chicken rice soup and I start craving Bad Things.

So this time, my plan is to prepare and purchase food ahead of time, but I'm ramping it up a bit from bone broth and broccoli, you know? This is a time to make good choices, but it's too much to ask that I go too far afield.

I'm trying to think of things that will be convenient and healthy and relatively affordable (I can go above my usual budget a bit for these two or three weeks.) I don't want a lot of processed food, so the things like frozen Healthy Choice dinners and that sort of thing won't work, or should only be a one time thing. (That's another mistake I make, thinking I'll eat the same thing for several days. It never works.)

I need to find the balance between having this be relatively mindless - there will be zero energy for preparation and decision-making - and so boring that I'll snap and head for fast food.

All this rambling today is pretty much for my own benefit, but let's look at the larger picture. How much effort are you putting in to offense as opposed to defense, with this addiction? Are you being pro-active, or just reactive? I think this is key.

Too often I find myself having the debate - you know what I mean - because I'm out on the road running errands and hungry, or I think I'm hungry, I'm probably just dehydrated. I haven't remembered a water bottle, I don't know when I drank water last. I didn't eat a smart breakfast before leaving the house, and hey, look, there's a ten dollar bill in the glove compartment, I could just run through this drive through. Then, of course, I have to sit in the freaking parking lot of the fast food place arguing with myself like a lunatic. In the bad times, which are mostly over, I would sometimes 'win' the argument, drive away in triumph, and end up pulling into the NEXT fast food place a mile or two away from that one and doing it all over again. Friends, when i said I needed to get my shit together, I was not kidding.

I'm better now, but these next few weeks will be a big challenge, and I can see how I could easily slip up. Having the debate is one thing - it will surely happen again - but planning ahead of of time could eliminate the need for it the majority of the time.

So. I need a plan. We all have times when we need a plan.

I'm going to do a CostCo run and then hit the chain grocery store for a few things. I'm going to thaw a turkey and roast that on the weekend. (I raise turkeys and even though a lot of people think it's a big deal and only for holidays, cooking a whole turkey is something I do once a month or so).

I'm going to make sure there's enough 'treats' that i don't feel deprived, and I'm going to make sure the farm van is stocked with things like small bags of almonds, and bottled water (sorry planet, I promise I'll do better soon). I will actually do the cut up veg - no, wait, I'm going to go all crazy here and actually BUY cut up veg and fruit, whoa, that will work. I will make a list of a few safe things to buy at local restaurants or take out places.....the local sub place has some good salad choices......

Yes. I can do this. A stressy few weeks does NOT mean automatically slipping up. The key is preparing for it, and making sure those preparations are not so Spartan that they become onerous and end up backfiring.

I've got this. I've got this. I've got this.

SO FAR SO GOOD, OR AT LEAST, NOTHING's ACTUALLY BLOWN UP YET

I've bought the food, I've made the lists, I'm tackling the house mess today. My RA is starting to flare, so i've got to listen to that and make sure I get some rest today, too. I'm pre-emptively taking the meds for flare-ups in the hopes of heading that off. I know I make bad food choices when i'm exhausted, so i'm going to be extra careful.

The grandchildren and their parents arrive today at about 4. I have reminded myself that I do not need to eat every time they eat. I have reminded myself that as they get older it is more and more appropriate to ask them to clean up after themselves. I have reminded myself that if my son grabs a beer from the fridge, that doesn't mean I automatically should have one too. (I'll have one tonight and one tomorrow night, and then that's it until next weekend.)

I've decided what I'm making for dinner. I've reminded myself that if they show up, as they often do, with generous contributions of food, that doesn't mean I have to personally eat it all.

CostCo had some nice stainless steel water bottle / thermos thingies on sale, so I've got those, washed them out, and filled them both with water and put them on the door of the fridge. I made a big container of cold green tea. I made sure to have a decent breakfast, so i don't go crazy because I'm too hungry.

This time will be better than last time. It's sixteen very stressy days. But I can do this.

BUT I DON'T FEEL LIKE IT

Can't get motivated to make the changes you know you need to make?

Stop and think about this for a second: maybe you ought to make them anyway.

Maybe waiting until we 'feel like' doing the right thing is actually not the best template to be using here.

I can see waiting until you feel like going to see a new movie, or waiting until you feel like breaking out the summer clothes.

But think about this for just a minute: do you wait until you feel like filing your taxes, getting your teeth cleaned, taking out the stinky kitchen garbage?

Some of us are actually in a life-or-death kind of struggle with this food thing - so think about this: if you were lying on the floor bleeding, would you wait until you 'felt like it' to apply a tourniquet? If you were a diabetic in crisis and needed an insulin shot, would you wait until you felt like administering it?

Friends, we're making a huge mistake if we're allowing our feelings to call the shots here.

Just do the right things anyway. Your feelings will probably actually catch up. But just start doing them.

PLAYING THE PART

When I was nine I read Harriet the Spy, and I spent most of a summer being Harriet. There was a Nancy Drew phase, and Jane Eyre, and honestly, I'm still doing it to some degree. It's more subtle now, but I still find myself thinking that I respect the way a fictional character handled a situation, perhaps, and I try to be more like that. Much the same way, I suppose, as we might look at a photo of an actress and think hmmm, maybe I could wear a dress like that. Or whatever.

I think we form our adult selves by looking at our DNA and our upbringing, which we can't change, and then finding role models in real people or in the arts, and taking bits from each of them as we muddle along, trying to fashion a person out of all the bits and pieces, integrated into the parts we can't change.

And I do strongly believe that when we act a certain way it will become part of our own selves at some point.

So I'm trying an experiment today. For the two hours between the time the husband leaves for work and my farm help arrives, I'm going to pretend I'm a totally cured, totally healthy person. I'm going to stretch, take a long walk, come back in and shower, and have a healthy, normal-sized breakfast.

I'm not making any sweeping promises about the remainder of the day. I can do anything for two hours. I need a success, so I'm setting the bar kind of low. Two hours.

See, here's my secret plan. I can go for two hours. I can by my healthy alter ego, or my true inner self, or whoever this is, for two hours. For sure.

And having done it for two hours, I'll be able to say later today, or perhaps tomorrow, okay, let's try two and a half hours, or three.

There are only so many hours in a day, people. Sooner or later I could be at a full day.

The point here is that no matter how screwed up you are, you can hold out for an amount of time. It might be an hour. It might be less. I actually started doing this at five minutes. Five awful minutes looking at the kitchen timer, staring at it, and crying, knowing that when the bell rang I was going to overeat something I didn't really want that would make me feel worse and I didn't not understand why.

I increased my time by one minute and did it a few times a day. Now, I had no illusions. I wasn't going to drop pounds because I held out for eight minutes. I was only postponing at that point, not actually changing. But the point here is that I was proving to myself that I could do it, because years of living with the addiction had convinced me that I couldn't. And I needed a low goal at first.

Once the time periods got longer, I was able to walk away from the timer, and I was able to stop the terrible narrative in my head that haunts every food addict. You know that script - you hear it too. But by pretending I was already cured, I could stop it for a little while. And it felt great.

Understand, I'm not saying this is a time period in which you do not eat at all. Maybe it is at first, but as you extend your time to multiple hours, you need to think about eating something. This isn't about fasting, and it isn't even just about food. It's about adopting an entirely different mindset for a short period of time. It's about acting like the person you know you really can be.

Five minutes. You can do that. And as soon as it's over, no matter what you do next, you tell yourself hey, I had control for five minutes. I let my 'real self' shine for five minutes.

So this morning I'm shining for two hours. Try it with me.

The SECRET TO HAPPINESS

Before I was married, my mother managed one piece of advice: the secret to happiness is low expectations.

I've been unpacking that damn comment for almost forty years now. It's terrible advice, and it's incredibly wonderful, all at once.

There's so much in it, so many ways to look at it, that I'm not even going to take the time now to start - you're on your own until I have more time. It's market day, and I've got to go pack the truck.

But I will discuss it in one limited context. Remember the cycle we talked about, the cycle of failing, being upset and depressed and angry, hating yourself more, and then overeating to console yourself.......thus 'failing' and starting it all over again?

There's a much happier cycle at the other end, and I've learned how to tweak it.

When it starts getting better for you - and it will, it will - you learn that each success bring a feeling of elation that is not unlike the food rush, really. I think the same endorphins are probably activated. Each success makes you want the next one, and each success bolsters your self confidence in your ability to get there.

But, there's a secret. Two, really.

First, you're not experiencing that rush now when you have a small success, because you're not allowing yourself to trust it. You're craving a pizza. You distract yourself somehow and later that night you're getting into bed and you think oh hey, I didn't get a pizza! But instead of doing the happy dance, you start thinking "I'll probably eat twice as much tomorrow" or ""it won't matter anyway because i'm just a fat pig." So every success you have is tainted by your bad attitude towards it. It's similar to what you did before, only backwards: when you pretended that the bad things weren't so bad. It's only one bag of chips. It's only one trip to McDonald's. It's only one more piece of pizza.

Ask me how I know this. Ask me how many times I did it to myself.

I think we can experience good things but be so messed up with guilt that we don't enjoy them. (Sex can certainly fall into this category.) For us, food is now in that category too, right? We don't genuinely enjoy it anymore. that's another day's topic. But we also have gotten to the point, some of us, where we can no longer feel happiness in success; we repress that glee because we don't trust it yet.

So, point one: when something goes well, celebrate it! (Just not with food). Give yourself credit where it's due. This is HARD WORK.

Secondly, let's take a peek at Mom's terrible and simultaneously wonderful advice.

What do you think 'success' actually is? Is it being totally cured of the food addiction? Or losing all the weight? Then honey.........you're going to be a sad puppy for a long time.

Lower your expectations. Define your next success in an attainable way. You're still on the path to the total picture. But you've got to give yourself some breathing room here, and some reasons to celebrate.

That's why I suggest using the kitchen timer and just going for a period of time pretending to be healthy. That's why I want you to celebrate the half-pound loss, or the dinner without five desserts, or the grocery trip that does not leave you embarrassed at the checkout line, muttering things about needing to buy junk food for visiting teenagers.

When I see a post here that reads something like this "I went for five weeks eating good food and last night I slipped up and ate a bag of cookies and I hate myself I'm a failure I'll never get this right I'm doomed wahhhh" honestly, all I can see is......honey, you had five good weeks? That's freaking amazing!

It's good to be vigilant. It's good to have high standards. It's good to reach for impossible things and dream impossible dreams.

It's also a surefire way to be unhappy all the time, because if the goal's that high, you'll never be happy.

Allow yourself happiness on this journey. The happiness will, happily, help you to heal, and bring you more of it. Set a goal or two for today that you can reach with a little effort. Don't judge your goal's worthiness: if it's 3 percent above where you are now, it's a good one. And if you're having a stressful day, maybe 1 percent higher. You can do this.

PAPER CUTS, or, WHY A STINKBUG IS MAKING ME LOSE MY SHIT TODAY

Much of my nine month journey thus far has been spent dealing with big issues. I looked for big traumas that might have sparked my eating disorder. I went so far as to employ a hypnotherapist to see if any light could be shed on my past.

And as I've been working toward recovery, I've focused on some big challenges, like particularly stressful stretches of time here on the farm, or personal losses that throw me, and my family, into grief mode.

But I think we do ourselves a disservice if we overlook the trivial.

In the case of triggers for the development of my addiction, I've decided that it was the result of a thousand paper cuts, as opposed to one enormous incident. And I've also come to realize that while understanding that is critical, it's even more important to forgive it and let it go, or it will just drag you down forever. What was done to us is not something we can control. How we allow what was done to us to define our lives is very much something we can influence, with work.

But, back to those papercuts.

In considering Big Picture Things - I might overeat due to stress about a concert, or because I've overbooked today - I've sort of forgotten small irritants.

I suffer from misophonia. I was so, so thrilled to find out it has a name. The sound of someone close to me crunching food is torture. I cannot block it out. I cannot concentrate on anything else. That sound reaches into my head and scrapes my brain raw.

What I didn't realize until recently was that when I'm exposed to that situation, I think about eating to help calm me down. (I used to just automatically eat. Now I think about it, and recognize that this is happening, and work around it. This, friends, is what progress looks like, and it's great. It's still crazy hard work, but it's great.)

This made me realize something that's pretty key: I actually DON'T eat when there's a massive Thing going on. I eat when there's a smaller, persistently annoying Thing.

Right now it's a stinkbug. If you live in a part of the world where you do not experience stinkbugs, get down on your knees right now and say a prayer of thanks. They are not life threatening. but they are the epitome of being annoying. They are large, cumbersome insects that fly slowly and sound like B-52's. When stressed, they emit a foul odor.

There is always one in my house. Always. I'll catch it, flush it, know for certain that this particular one is dead, and within an hour there's another one. Only one. I am convinced that there is a queue somewhere. There is an elderly major domo stinkbug named Alfred, and he's holding out a stinky little leg to restrain some eager young thing, saying "No, no, Maurice - you don't launch until 16:45!"

I don't obsess about catching the stinkbug of the moment, sometimes I just shrug and try to ignore it. I'm not freaked out by bugs. But............I realized that the irritation of having this awkward thing buzzing around was driving me to minor acts of snackage. Not a full blown binge. But my brain, I think, would register the irritation, and it would send me a message: placate me with food, please. And so I'd reach for a few crackers, and then think oh, there's that good cheddar, and suddenly I've eaten a half day's worth of calories.

Whoa.

I need to rewire my brain to stop sending that message. Now that I see it, i realize how often that's occurring. Traffic? Pull off the highway and get a coffee, and maybe a Danish. Brain numbing paperwork? A bowl of peanut M&M's will help. Something in my body aching? Cake will take care of that.

I knew I was self-medicating larger emotions like low self-confidence with food, and I've been working on that. I've learned to address the issues themselves, and to heal them appropriately, which as it turns out is not with tacos. Who knew. But I'd overlooked the power of the small irritations, which I've also been feeding.

And I can fight that battle on both fronts. When my brain sends me the 'feed me!" message, I can resist, distract, circumvent. But I'm also looking at the messaging at its source.

My challenge today is to think of ways to stop the message before it starts, and I'm going to do that by teaching myself new ways to deal with small irritations.

i've come up with three points, which isn't much, but it's only 8:20 am. First I've got to identify the small irritants in my life. Second, i've got to eliminate them if I can. I'm talking, here, about things like the pile of shoes that I trip over every time I come in the back door. Things that I could take a moment or two and actually literally straighten out.

But I also need to get a little bit Zenny about this and start working on calm, on acceptance, on understanding scale. The stinkbug has a right to exist too. Preferably not in my house flying into my hair (they have zero navigational skills) but the mere existence of the thing itself is not a personal affront. There is no need for alarm or immediate action. My reaction should be appropriate to the situation. It's appropriate to shrug and say oh, great, there's another one, at the end of this chapter I'll catch it and toss it outside.

It is inappropriate to say oh God, why me? Why must I suffer so? I need a cookie.

i've been doing a good job dealing with the big shit. Now it's time to start learning new ways to handle the small shit.

As I prepare to hit the 'send' button, a stinkbug has just landed on the computer monitor. He is raising one small leg, like a middle finger. But I am the stronger life form. I will not get irritated, and I will not eat to placate my feelings. (I am giving him the middle finger, though, just without rancor.)

Have a good, healing day, friends.

ACCIDENTAL FASTING

I had one of those days yesterday where if I'd been able to clone myself, and all the clones were smarter and stronger than I am, I might - might - have managed to pull off everything that was going on. It was wonderful and awful, all at once, just hectic from the moment I woke up.

It was my first day at a new market, which is always stressful because you're not sure where to set up, or how far you'll need to carry things. (I haul over a ton of product. This matters.) The van was coughing and snorting, and the dog had barfed on the hardwood floor and I didn't know why, and the cats had piled up four chipmunk carcasses on the back porch. Everything needed fed or watered, and in the middle of all of this, I get an email from someone I'd like to work for who said hey, I'll drive down and audition you tomorrow. Couple other things too, but you get the drift.

When I went to bed last night, I realized that I had not eaten all day. How ridiculous is that? It wasn't on purpose. It was just that kind of day. I meant to. I'd planned to. I certainly should have.

Now, I do not offer this because I think it was a good thing, or I expect praise. This is actually a sign of pretty poor planning on my part, although the day was in all fairness rather extreme. I planned to stop en route to market at a deli, but I was worried about the van's obvious gastrointestinal distress. I thought I could eat at market, but it was so busy that I poured myself a glass of tea at 2:45, before it started, and actually could not drink it until the market closed at 7. I thought I'd stop on the way home, but the deli, which has 'safe' food, was closed. I thought there was leftover chicken in the fridge, but the husband ate it. So.

No, I'm only mentioning it because I was so startled this morning to realize that I DID NOT DIE. See, when I'm in the midst of a food craving attack, I'm usually pretty sure that death is imminent, that the only thing standing between me and the Grim Reaper is a large order of fries. So this was something of a revelation, really. I did not die. How remarkable. I need to remember that in the future.

MY LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH the MYFITNESS APP

If you're not familiar with it, MyFitness is a relatively user friendly (i.e., I have figured it out) app that allows you to track your daily calories.

After a short learning curve I found it relatively easy to use, which is saying something, because - and I am not making this up - I cannot operate my television set. I can turn it on and off, but for reasons i can't comprehend there are three remotes and I never remember which one changes channels, and there's not one bloody thing anywhere that actually says 'volume'. So it is possible that education aside I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and my being able to use an app speaks well of its design.

The thing I love about it is that you can enter your current weight and your goal weight and the length of time in which you wish to lose that weight, and it will tell you how many calories you can consume a day. You can enter every bite you eat, and it will tell you how many calories you have consumed. You can enter a recipe you are considering trying, and it will break down the caloric count for you. It's pretty accurate, and it has a wide range. If you type in 'bagel' it will list several commercially available brands, plus bagels from different chains. It knows the calorie count of the frozen salmon at CostCo. It knows everything.

The thing I hate about it is every single thing I mentioned above. It's so damn smug. You think you've got a good breakfast in you, and you enter it and find out you've exceeded your calorie count for the day, if you wish to reach your goal.

And it's so easy to obsess over it. That's why I use it sporadically. I've got a friend who's lost 60 pounds in a year by just being aware of her calorie count. You'd think that would motivate me, as she and I are the same age and general fitness level, and that's pretty much my weight loss goal. But I do worry, as a food addict, that the pendulum could swing too far in the other direction and I could end up with a serious food disorder on the other side of the spectrum.

Nevertheless, the result of my accidental fasting day - the immediate weight loss - reminded me that humans are designed to run efficiently on far, far less food than I have been consuming, even now when I'm no longer binging or eating mindlessly. I still eat too much. It bothers me on a big-picture scale: if I'd eat 2/3 as much as I do now and donate the extra $ to a charity, someone else could eat who can't now. That's a pretty powerful motivator.

And it bothers me on a smaller scale. I wouldn't stand at the gas station and keep pumping gas after my tank is full. I don't overfeed my dog or my livestock because I don't want them to become ill.

Weight loss is the second stage of my long term journey here; the first was to get my head straightened out, and I can honestly say that I've come a long, long way on that. Now I've got some damage to undo with my body. The combination of age and my rheumatoid arthritis means that I'm getting stiff and awkward, but I'm finding a lot of forms of exercise to be taxing with the extra weight. So that's the summer priority. And eating less, without going to extremes, is part of it.

The friend who's lost the weight says you adjust your sense of what 'full' is and it does not feel like deprivation after an adjustment period.

We'll see.

I might not post for a few days. There's an out of town plant sale this Thu-Sat, and after today's market I'll come home and start loading trailers for that, Spring sales are going well, and I got the job I auditioned for yesterday. LIfe is good. I'm healing.

You're making progress, too, even if you can't see it yet. Simply coming back to this site and reading posts means that your know in your heart that you need to, and can, make changes. Taking in information, and figuring out if and how it relates to you, is re-wiring thought processes in your head. This is not a linear journey. You can't see a lot of the progress; it sort of ferments inside your brain for awhile and then BAM you're ready to make a small behavioral change. Or, you make the change even though you don't feel like it, and a few weeks later realize your brain's caught up with it, and now that's a good, new habit. You can do this.

CATCHING UP

Back home again after a three-day plant sale out of town. Whew. Here's what's relevant to our situation: I didn't binge because I was too damn busy. And then i was too damn tired.

I had constant customers and so I spent the actual sale hours, 9-5, snacking on carrots and grabbing a wrap when one of my staff could take over and I could take a quick break. I had a bagel with cream cheese each morning, but I started setting up things at seven each day, and my phone says I walked more than 12,000 steps each day - barely leaving my 40 X 40 sale area. After it closed each evening, I went out with some other vendors to a brew pub, had two beers and a good dinner, not necessarily a super healthy one. Then crashed at the hotel.

I may have eaten more calories than would be ideal, but I gave myself a pass considering everything else that was going on. The more important point is that I didn't binge, didn't overeat, and did NOT OBSESS about food - because so much else was going on.

So how much of our problem comes from boredom, from loneliness, from not being or feeling fully engaged? Is social isolation a factor for you? Where do you fit on the introvert- extrovert spectrum? Is there any connection?

I don't think anyone is all of one thing, ever - it's why I cannot answer questions with a yes or no, generally. I can be extremely outgoing but sometimes I just want to sit on the sofa with the dog and a glass of wine and read books and not speak to or have to be nice to anyone.

I know introverts who don't have food issues and extroverts who do, so it's obviously not a simple correlation.

But - for me - it does seem that when I'm busy, I'm not overeating, and not even really thinking about food. My dangerous food-thoughts tend to hit at times of solitude, but there's more to it than just that, and I'm having a hard time clarifying it in my own mind. I think it's times of solitude coupled with a sense of isolation, as opposed to the good kind of solitude. I think it's when I'm alone but feeling unloved, un-beautiful,, unworthy, unhappy, or a variety of other un's.

So - for me - that indicates that I need to be more aware of those feelings of 'un', and to take physical action at those times, when possible. And to also find ways to enrich my solitude time so that it doesn't devolve into the problem cycle. I work at home, and I have helpers some days but I'm alone some days. Those alone days are definitely more troublesome. But it may be that I allow my always-spiralling thoughts to get out of hand on those days.

Much to consider. But for now, I have to unpack a trailer, truck, and van that are stuffed full of the post-sale detritus. Hope you're all hanging in there.....and hey, special love to anyone for whom Mother's Day is bittersweet.

WALL-E

How many of you saw the animated movie WALL-E? It really precipitated a crisis for me. As an environmentalist I loved the movie's message, and as a musician I loved the references to "Hello Dolly".

But as a food-addicted person, I felt an enormous surge of recognition, and shame. Those fat, sedentary people being wheeled about in their space craft sipping XXXL sodas? That shit hit too close to home for me.

I saw the movie shortly after it came out. I think my impetus to start this journey had several actual triggers, but I know that movie was one of them.

It wasn't just that the populace had become obese and unable to move. It's that they acted as if that were a natural state, and that they deserved the food in which they were overindulging. I knew that on some level, I'd become very much like that.

When those enormous people reached for their bag of chips, they thought they were hungry. But they no longer understood what normal hunger actually was.

I sat in the theater with tears coming down my cheeks, which did not alarm my family since I tend to do that, and they probably assumed it was the whole destroyed-Earth thing, which, hey, is certainly tear-worthy after all.

Now I'm returning to the thoughts that the movie triggered. I'm trying to figure out what real hunger is, and I'm trying to identify it, and to figure out what level of it is acceptable. If I imagine a range between starvation and over-saturation, I think I've personally been operating in a part of that spectrum that's unhealthy. When I get to to the bottom of my current personal comfort zone, i think I'm 'hungry'. But that's just because my zone is set in the wrong place.

I once read a hideously trashy novel about a young woman coming of age in Paris. When the story began, she was in duckling stage (pre-swan) and overweight. She was sent to live with an aunt or something like that, and was given fairly meager rations, and as happens in novels magically transformed into a lithe beauty in the course of several pages. It was a crappy novel. But there was this line..........there was this line about how she learned to push herself away from the table when she was still slightly hungry, and as a result she was never overweight again.

Now, I was sixteen at the time, and frankly far more interested in whether there would be any informative sex scenes in the book, being at the age when any sex scene at all was informative. I was possibly showing some addictive behaviors, but it hadn't yet hurt my body. I remember clearly reading that line and thinking "whoa, people DO that?" The idea that someone would stop eating before being totally full was as hard for me to fathom as the sex scene I eventually found later in the book.

I did not grow up with a lot of snacks in the house. But I suspect now that my Depression-era mother, who had absolutely known deprivation as a child and teen, made sure that there was plenty of food on our plates. My sister is thin. But I think we were encouraged to eat, as a rule.

I hear my wonderful daughter in law and my son tell the grandchildren that they need good food for energy for their bodies, and I hear them tell the kids that they needn't eat more when they are full. They're not offered snacks as rewards. Their whole attitude about food is healthy and sane. It's fuel for our bodies, but it's also delicious and something to enjoy and a time for family.

So now, I'm trying to shift my range on that sliding scale. i want to consider satiation as excessive, not as the goal. I want to consider gentle hunger as a normal part of the day, preceding lunch or dinner.

So often in my food-abusing days I would say to myself 'but I'm so hungry!" to justify whatever I was shoving into my face.

I wasn't hungry.

I was missing something, for sure. I was needing something, absolutely. But it was rarely food.

What brought this all up today is that I almost said to myself "there's nothing to eat!" when I looked in the fridge this morning. By 'nothing to eat", I meant there was no everything-bagel, and no cream cheese, because that's what I wanted. I felt the drama-tingle starting. You know what I mean. Woe is me! I will die! I will starve!

Please note that there are cinnamon bagels, which aren't my favorite. Sure, I've been away a few days, and I need a grocery trip for some fresh things fairly soon, but for crying out loud, there's a full pantry and two full freezers here. There's plenty of available calories. I am not going to die because there is no everything bagel in the house.

What I am is a privileged middle class person who, like the characters in WALL-E, has slowly morphed into someone who feels that eating exactly what I want, and as much as I want, is a right, and anything less is somehow a tragedy.

Time to get over myself. And eat a cinnamon bagel.

I THINK I KNOW WHAT I WAS ACTUALLY FEEDING

Had a pretty big slip up yesterday, the first real episode in a long time. I ate an entire bag of chips. In the car. Between the little store that's three miles from home, and my driveway. I sat in the car until I finished the whole bag.

But in a weird and encouraging twist, I was able to be very analytical about it while it was happening. Here's my thought process, as best as I can reconstruct it. It's going to read awkwardly, because when I talk to myself I switch pronouns a lot, Sorry about that. There's a reason I do it, and I haven't figured it out yet, so I'm leaving that as it happened and not editing it to make it read more smoothly.

"I'm stopping for chips. I shouldn't. I know better. But I want them. I wonder why.

These are good.

I seem to be unable to stop eating them. That hasn't happened for months. What's going on?

Am I hungry? No.
Am I dehydrated? No,
Am I unhappy? mmmmm....soemthing's going on here.
Am I anxious? yes........there's something.
Okay, what's going on?

It's that list.
What list?
The list you made before I left the house for rehearsal.
Oh, yeah. The list.
Let's think about the list.

The entire list is things that I need to fix that I've screwed up, isn't it?
Yes.
Every item on that list is something I dread doing.
Why exactly?
Because every item on it references a failure on my part.
LIke what?

Very late communication to customers who might be annoyed.
Finding a plumber to repair something i tried to fix but made worse.
Calling the state to resolve a fee for sales taxes I forgot to file.
Finding the lost prescription I need for blood work before I see my doctor.
(ten or twelve other items, all of which follow that theme.)

Okay, there's a pattern here, isn't there.
Yep.
Every one of these is a fuckup on your part.
Yep.
Every one of them is a failure to grown-up properly.
Yep.
Every one of those things makes me feel bad.
Yep.
Like a failure.
Yep."

Now, i'm not saying that I've figured out The Answer in capital letters. But I have realized that this is a recurring thing for me. I don't mind when things go slightly haywire, as they so often do, if I can get a good story out of it. I don't mind sharing things that acknowledge things about myself that other people might find embarrassing, in general. I think one of my most-liked pictures on Facebook was posted when I came in from working outside on a horrible hot humid day, and I posted a selfie with the caption "It's great when your hair looks like a movie star's - until you realize that the 'star' is every male hobbit." Most people I know would never have posted that picture, it was truly awful. But that kind of 'failure', in the sense that I did not look good at all, doesn't bother me.

So it's not like I'm overly obsessed with appearing perfect or anything.

But, I do NOT like to admit to incompetence, and every damn thing on that list reeked of it. And, in true Katie fashion, I'd dealt with those things by not dealing with them. I ignored them. Thus, the ding in the windshield turned into an expensive crack,. The late sales tax got turned over to a collection agency. If I don't find the paper for the bloodwork, i'll go to my rheumatologist in a few weeks without all the info we need to make decisions. Those customers prepaid for a summer's worth of veggies and fruit, and should have heard from me long ago about the first pickup day.

Apparently I think that if I ignore things, they'll just go away. Talk about magical thinking! I mean, obviously I KNOW better. But now that I'm aware of this, I'm realizing that this is my own personal cycle: screw things up, ignore them so that they get worse, and then reach this kind of stress level that - and this is important - STILL IGNORES THE ACTUAL PROBLEM. And then I eat.

See, I don't do this with other problems. I've had the life-changing, parents-in-hospital-dying while the kid breaks a leg the same week and the husband is in bed in the fetal position with a yet undiagnosed illness. I had that week. And I didn't overeat. I was, actually, amazing.

I've had the farm tsunami problems, when everything's backlogged because of weather and suddenly it breaks and there is no solution other than working 16 hour days. And I do it, and I don't overeat.

I've had performance stress, where I have a solo to play that's at the very edge of my comfort level, and I do it. I have stood on a stage and given a talk to a thousand people. I'm fine.

BUT.

Yesterday morning, pre-binge, I had a rehearsal with a group I love; the four other members of the quintet are like brothers. I am very, very comfortable with them, and after working together for years, we know each other very well. We have very few secrets. But, I was running late, and i was running late because I couldn't find one of the folders I needed for rehearsal. And I couldn't find the folder because my house is a cluster of a mess and I don't really have a good organization system and the damn things was buried on a table somewhere, or under the desk, or in a car, and I couldn't find it. And THAT is what probably ignited the fuse yesterday. I was late to rehearsal,

I wasn't all that late, maybe five minutes. No one was bothered. I've occasionally arrived later, as have other members, if there's terrible traffic. But yesterday, I was late because I am a failure - do you see how my thinking was going? I beat myself up the whole way there. And I genuinely think that sparked the sequence of feeling like a failure that led to those chips.

I think I sat in my driveway stuffing chips in my face because I did not want to come back inside the house and own up to my incompetence.

And all of a sudden, I remembered one of my worst binges ever. My younger son was almost three. i'd just been told that he'd have to have his little front teeth capped, because they were decayed, because I had let him fall asleep with a bottle.

It was awful. I felt so terrible. I can still feel it. They were baby teeth, there was no permanent damage. But this was my fault. Never mind that I'd become a mother at twenty one and didn't have any support system (or understand that I needed one). I had, through my own ignorance and laziness, damaged this precious little human who depended on me.

That was a weeks-long binge, and I'm not kidding.

i can't even dwell on it now, to be honest. Nor, perhaps, should I. So let's think about right now.

There are two keys here to unlock the door that will allow me to move forward.

First, obviously, I need to grownup better. I need a system. I need to get organized. I need to get my shit together. If I had one place for receipts, they wouldn't end up going through the wash. If I kept a running grocery list, I wouldn't make multiple trips. If I removed half the crap in my house, my mind would be less cluttered too, surely. I need to block out a time period each week for paperwork. I need to block out a time period each week to deal with the unexpected things like windshield chips.

And secondly, I have to stop this thing I do, where I just pretend to myself that it isn't a problem. When I screw up, which I will of course do in the future, what with being human and all, I need to just deal with it, not put it off for another day. Most of my problems, the problems that I now think lead me to binging, are secondary: they're the result of not dealing with the original problem in a timely way.

I know why I ate those chips yesterday, and that is a huge breakthrough. I ate them because I felt like a failure, and I was dreading the actions that I needed to take to remedy the mistakes I'd made, actions which would nearly all involve admitting my own culpability. I sat in the car eating because I genuinely couldn't face coming into my house and starting that process.

It isn't, maybe, the reason for all my food problems. And it isn't, maybe, the answer to everything. But figuring this out is a huge step for me.

Our progress happens in little moments like this. It's only in the movies that it happens in a flash. Real healing is an excruciating process. Knowing that, I think, is essential for all of us. My issues aren't your issues. My solutions aren't your solutions. But the agony of this process is the same for both of us.

One tiny step, one tiny insight at a time. We've got this.