Category: eating

body image · diets · eating · Guest Post · health

When you and your doctor don’t agree on what “healthy” means (Guest post)

ceebeepress15 Comments

I can tell you when I lost faith in the medical establishment’s sovereignty over my body. I was sitting in my doctor’s office and she was showing me a graph that showed “healthy” BMI as it relates to height. I was 16 years old, and I weighed about 175lbs. I was a vegetarian who ate steamed broccoli every day after school before taking my dog for brisk walks. I also ate lots of cookies and toast and secretly smoked lots and lots of cigarettes. As far as teenage habits go, I was probably on the overly responsible side of average, and I’d been chubby since puberty. She looked at me, and pointed to a spot on the graph.

“For your height…” she said “You should weigh about 100lbs”

I didn’t hear much of what she said after that. My eyes glazed over with a mixture of shame and shock. My doctor had just told me that to be healthy, I needed to reduce myself by nearly half. I thought about how I took gym every semester even though it wasn’t mandatory, and how I sometimes attended open practices for sports teams I wasn’t actually on, just to have some buddies to run around the track with. I thought about the kinds of changes I would have to make to my lifestyle to do what this person was telling me was “healthy” and I knew it wasn’t reasonable.

My mom enrolled me in Weight Watchers, and I lost some weight. I lost the most on the weeks when I went to punk shows and moshed for hours, and wasn’t totally faithful about my food journal. When the meetings before holidays were all about strategies for avoiding “cheating” when there were so many “bad” foods around, I was the person asking if it was really so terrible to eat stuffing once a year while everyone looked at me with derision. I clearly lacked their dedication to the project.

I did.

Don’t get me wrong, I hated my fat body. I loathed it. I felt hideous and horrible and unlovable and unworthy because that’s what I had been taught to feel about myself. I wanted to be thin so bad. But I also had this nagging feeling that something about the stories I had swallowed wasn’t quite right. In the moments where I could step outside my own brain I heard other girls – the girls whose “perfect” bodies I tried really hard not to ogle when changing for gym (because gay) – seemed to hate themselves as much as I did. At what weight, what BMI, what waist to hip ratio, what caliper measurement of fat rolls, what jeans size, could I possibly deserve to think I was a human being worthy of respect or care or love or pleasure or reasonable health care?

I’ve distanced myself from western medicine. I see a naturopath, an acupuncturist, and a therapist who does shiatsu and TCM. I’ve made some changes to my lifestyle and the ways I eat, none of which have the goal (or the result) of weight loss. I’m working on feeling connected to my body so I can notice when it needs to tell me something. I’m working on finding joy in my experience of my body, whether that’s through running further than I ever have, eating the most perfectly ripe avocado, finding the ways to sleep that result in actual rest, or giving myself lots and lots of great orgasms. I have come to believe that self hatred, and the urge to make ourselves ever-smaller (and quieter, more acquiescent, etc) is far more lethal than butter or chocolate or enjoying yourself. You caught me; I’m a hedonist.

But I found myself in a medical doctor’s office late in 2014 when all my non western health care practitioners agreed- I should get some tests done to check out my hormones, ovaries, and uterus. My periods have gone from seven days to nine days, then two weeks, and most recently THREE weeks. I spend several days each month incapacitated by pain and heavy bleeding. My body is telling me to pay attention; something is clearly amiss. So I asked for recommendations from friends, made some inquiries, and chose a doctor. I was sent for blood work and ultrasounds. According to the tests, I’m perfectly healthy. Healthier than he expected.

“I guess this is good news” I said. “that I don’t have endometriosis or PCOS or cancer or fibroids. But it’s also confusing news! What do I do now?”

He had two recommendations for me; hormonal birth control and weight loss. Neither of these are options I am interested in pursuing.

I use my body to get places. In the winter I walk, and the rest of the year I cycle. Most days I walk about 5k. Sometimes more, sometimes less. I do squats when I brush my teeth, and sometimes I do planks and stretching at home. I dance while I wash dishes. In the warmer seasons I am more likely to jog, hike, swim, and do other active stuff. I joined a boxing gym for a while last year, that was pretty cool. I don’t do those things because it’s “required”, or to punish myself for eating, or with the aim of losing weight. I do those things because they’re fun and they make me feel good, especially if I do them with friends. My approach to food is to eat lots and lots of plants, things easily identifiable as “food”, to cook for myself as much as possible, and to enjoy eating. It took me a long time to stop counting the WW points of everything I ate (about a decade. actually) and I am not going back to that slippery slop towards self hate.

He asked me if I wear running shoes when I walk. He told me I needed to raise my heart rate by a certain level, and probably I should sweat some. I’m 31 years old, and I was sitting in his office while he explained what exercise was.

I was livid. but I was also too frustrated to be articulate. I’m sure I sounded petulant and stubborn. I told him I needed to think more about my options before agreeing to any of his proposed solutions. The most interesting part was that for the first time, the idea of my body shrinking actually made me feel sad. It’s not just that weight loss is hard and emotionally complicated; I actually legitimately like my body, what it can do and how it looks. That sure feels healthy to me.

(bio) Carly is a 31 year old queer fat femme and white cis woman. She works in queer and trans youth sexual health in Toronto, and comes to this work from having investment in community building, body autonomy, youth agency and wisdom, intersectionality, trauma survivorship, and keeping people alive. She likes roasted vegetables and bitter foods, and hates cantaloupe and anything gelatinous. She thinks that leopard print is a neutral and that prisons should be abolished. Find her on twitter @crushslut.

Struggles and strategizing: back at the beginning, again
body image · diets · eating · Weekends with Womack

Struggles and strategizing: back at the beginning, again

catherine w22 Comments

I struggle with my weight. It’s been a lifelong drama, with many supporting players: relatives, doctors, well-meaning (and not-so-well-meaning) friends and boyfriends, teammates on the many sports teams I’ve played for, nutritionists, therapists, you name it. Sometimes there’s relative peace—when I’m active, social, well-rested, not too-too busy in my work life, and my relationships are on an even keel—life is calmer and I worry less about it.

Lately, as menopause has announced its presence in my life (I’m sorry, but who thought this was a good idea? evolution, you’ve got some ‘splaining to do) the struggle has resurfaced. My sleep is interrupted, and I have less energy (but more mood swings—yay) and my cravings for sugar and carbs are at an all-time high. Add to this a heavier-than-usual workload this semester and 108 inches of snow in Boston (and by the way, it’s snowing again now—argh) and it’s no surprise that my average baked good consumption is up, and I’ve gained weight.

Samantha, Tracy, Nat and the guest bloggers have written loads about the failures and perils of diets—they don’t work in the long-term and contribute to lowered self-esteem and increased weight. I know this, too—my research areas are obesity, eating, and health behavior change. And yet I keep flirting with the idea of dieting again. For me, diets are like bad ex-boyfriends—I’ve forgotten the pain and suffering they imposed, how the relationships failed or even backfired. I just remember how good-looking or charming they were, full of seductive promises that “this time, it’ll be different”.

So what am I to do about being back in a state of weight-panic THIS time? Here are three things I’ve done this week. I’ll report back later on to let you know what’s happening—what is working, what I’ve jettisoned, what other responses I’ve adopted, and how I’m feeling.

1. I bought a book.

For an academic, nothing is more reassuring than book purchases, especially when one is confused, frightened, stalled, or in need of comfort. Just the thought of reading books, especially in a comfy study or library, is reassuring.

The book I bought is Gretchen Rubin’s “Better than Before: Mastering the Habits of our Everyday Lives”. The New York Times Well Book Club is running an online discussion, which caught my eye this week. Partly out of academic curiosity, and partly out of need to do something, I got the book and checked out the online discussion.

There are loads of books with loads of theories about behavior change, and of course this blog has talked about many of them. When I actually get around to reading this book I will fill you in. For now, all I’ve done is taken the quiz to set the stage for where I fit in Rubin’s behavior-change taxonomy. From there she has lots of suggestions for tailored strategies to optimize effectiveness.

Now, I have no particular expectation that this book is better or more effective than others; I will report back on my experiences later on. But for now, just owning this book feels like it’s helping me regain a little more perspective, which is good.

2. I’ve stopped eating sugary foods (at least for now).

While talking with a therapist about my energy levels, cravings, menopausal moods and general dissatisfaction with life on planet Earth these days, she suggested that maybe stopping eating processed sugar for a while might result in improvement of my overall mood and well-being. Just to be clear, I’m not talking about stopping eating these:

apples

but rather, stopping eating these:

bakery

For now.

I’m on day 3 of the no-baked-goods-and-other-sugary-stuff plan, and will report back on what I’ve done and learned.

3. I’ve changed primary care doctors.

This was a very big move—I’d been with the same doctor since 1998, and value familiarity, loyalty, and the deep knowledge base she has. But I never felt comfortable talking about my weight with her, and dreaded what she had to say, which never felt supportive. We squabbled about calcium and vitamin D supplements, and frequency of mammograms (she disagreed with the USPSTF recommendations which I wanted to follow). I would delay physicals in order to avoid being weighed.  Again, even though I know how bad the effects of weight stigma are on women in healthcare settings, it still took me a long time to act.

The first meeting with my new provider was eye-opening: she spent an hour with me (unprecedented in my experience), and we talked about weight, activity, menopause, sex, etc. in ways that felt positive and centered on my goals and needs.  I told her that I was willing to be weighed for my yearly physical and also when there was a medical need for complete accuracy (say, if this was a surgery pre-op visit).  Otherwise, I said I really didn’t want to be weighed, that it was a deterrent to my seeing her  She agreed, and we moved on smoothly.

Here’s how I handled the scale issue with the nurse (who I saw before the provider came in). She introduced herself and said, “I need to get your weight and height”.  I responded right away with “I’m not going to get on the scale, but I’m happy to tell you my weight; I weighed myself this week.”  She said okay.  When we got to the scale, she said, “you’re not going to get on the scale?”  I said no, but then told her my weight.  Then she asked, “are you willing to have your height measured?”  We both laughed, and I said yes indeed.  It turns out I’m the same height as the last time I was measured.

The issue of primary care office visits and weighing of patients is controversial and far from settled.  For what it’s worth, in a US National Institutes of Health document about treating obese patients, one of its recommendations is to weigh them during visits only when it’s medically appropriate.  I’m not here to speak authoritatively about this issue, but I did want to include how I handled my experiences and fears of weight stigma in this environment.

I’m very lucky not to be on any prescription meds, so I don’t see healthcare providers often. But I’m hopeful about my prospects moving forward with this new practice.

I’ll report later on progress, shifts, and lessons learned. For now, thanks for reading.

eating · Uncategorized

Living Clean without Eating Clean

Tracy I16 Comments

green salad with grilled pineapple and chickpeas.Last Friday was a big day for me. It was what I refer to as my “clean date.” Six years ago, March 20 was the first 24 hour period of a new way of life for me, free of alcohol and drugs. In the circles I move in, we call that lifestyle “living clean.”

Living clean means more to me than pretty much anything else in my life.  Lots of people who know me now and even who knew me back on March 20, 2009 might be surprised that I, of all people, needed to make such a choice.

On the outside, my life looked pretty good: a successful career, a solid marriage, family and friends who cared about me. And yet I existed in a relentless state of self-loathing and sought things outside of myself to fix what was broken inside. To no avail.  That is the typical of the doomed cycle of addiction.

It’s progressive, and I have no doubt things were about to get worse.

Getting clean changed all of that and set me in a direction where the inside started to match the outside. And both are getting better all the time.

So when I think of “clean,” that’s what I think of.  Which brings me to this thing I’m hearing more and more about these days: “clean eating.”

What does it even mean?  According to this website:

Clean eating is a deceptively simple concept. Rather than revolving around the idea of ingesting more or less of specific things (for instance, fewer calories or more protein), the idea is more about being mindful of the food’s pathway between its origin and your plate. At its simplest, clean eating is about eating whole foods, or “real” foods — those that are un- or minimally processed, refined, and handled, making them as close to their natural form as possible.

The main idea seems to be to avoid processed foods.  So “clean” is a bit of a misnomer. As Sam said to me the other day, it’s not as if processed foods are dirty.

And it’s not only about processed foods. I came across this overview of 10 Ways to Eat Clean, offering itself up as a “foolproof guide” to eating clean. And here’s what it recommends:

1. Limit processed foods

2. Bump up your veggies

3. Cut down on saturated fat

4. Reduce alcohol intake

5. Un-sweeten your diet

6. Watch the salt

7. Choose whole grains

8. Eat less meat

9. Up your fruit intake

10. Nix refined grains

When I look at the list, I’m actually not doing too badly.  As a vegan, I get plenty of veggies, hardly any saturated fat, and lots of fruit. I almost always choose whole grains over refined, so that covers 7 and 10 right there. I gave up alcohol six years ago and can’t imagine going back to it. That leaves processed foods, sweets, and salt.

I eat soy milk, tofu, almond milk, pumpkin seed protein powder, almond butter, and peanut butter several times a week.  Veggie burgers end up on my plate at least a couple of times a month.  Are those all processed? Is hummus processed? I like Marmite on my toast. It’s definitely processed. Is toast okay?

Though it’s crossed my mind that I might take in more sugar than is healthy, I like sweets sometimes. I like to eat salty things. Does that mean I’m not a clean eater?  I do not know.

I thought clean eating would have something to do with organic foods, truth be told. If anything is suspect, it’s got to be pesticides and chemicals, don’t you think? Or GMO. But nothing I read pointed in that direction. No, it’s all about quinoa and brown rice, avocados and cucumbers, veggies and olive oil, black beans and kale salad.

Sam asked me the other day whether I think the clean eating movement (is it a movement? I don’t even know) has co-opted the language of “clean” from the recovery movement.  I hadn’t really thought of it that way. I’d say it’s not so much co-opted as perhaps borrowed.

When we get clean in recovery, we choose to abstain from certain substances. It’s a total commitment. Clean eating is kind of like that, though I don’t think they go for total abstinence. It comes in degrees. The primer I quoted above, for example, talks about limiting, reducing, watching, cutting down.

I myself prefer urging moderation when it comes to food anyway. From what I’ve seen, the “clean” movement demonizes certain foods. Even though they don’t go for abstinence, I’ve never seen a self-proclaimed (they’re always self-proclaimed and proud) clean eater choose something “unclean” without an accompanying, “I shouldn’t be eating this.” That comes perilously close to making some foods good and others evil, which runs in the opposite direction of my belief that food is beyond good and evil.

Maybe that’s what irks me about the whole clean eating thing. I want to roll my eyes when I hear someone say they’re “eating clean.” It’s always said with an air of self-satisfaction, as if it’s a virtue and they’re saints or angels for making clean food choices.

Don’t get me wrong. People can eat what they like, when they like, if they like. Even as an ethical vegan who wishes more than anything that industrial food production was more humane, I’m not about to tell people how they should eat.

At bottom, I’m probably bothered by this clean eating thing less because “clean” means something else more fundamental to me, more because it just sounds like another diet in disguise.  It’s just another way to moralize food and make people feel bad about their choices.

A couple of decades ago when I was still caught in the throes of dieting, losing, gaining, dieting, losing, gaining, a friend gave me a card. It had a Victorian style painting on it of two young women in a garden. One of them gazed down at a strawberry she held in her hand.  The other delivered the card’s punchline in a comic bubble: “For Pete’s sake, just eat the thing.”

For now, I’m going to keep on living clean, and I’m going to keep on eating how I eat.  Agonizing over food choices isn’t part of my life anymore.  Clean, semi-clean, not-clean — when it comes to food, if I want it, I’m having it, one day at a time. 😉

 

 

diets · eating

What’s natural? And why do we care?

Sam B10 Comments
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/5f/91/d7/5f91d7eb9ddc7230c3a8d85b77fc15d8.jpg
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/85779567877556239/

From Amber of Go Kaleo:  “I watch a lot of nature videos, and it struck me a while ago: no matter what native tribe you look at, the women are never exactly thin, despite their healthy lifestyle. I mean, those people live in harsh conditions and work their asses off to survive a hostile environment, be it the Amazon jungle or the African steppes. And yet look! They have belly fat! And thick thighs! Oh noes! And the best part? THEY DON’T CARE! A thin tree is as beautiful as a thick tree, so why not a human being? Indeed.”

I like the point very much. Not all natural bodies are super lean. Nice to be reminded of that.

Why does it matter to us so much though? Why are we so fussed about what’s natural? I get that lots of people are critical of North American diets with overly processed food and North American lifestyles with not enough walking and lifting and way too much driving and sitting. But it doesn’t follow from the rejection of that diet and that lifestyle that we ought to seek out exactly what’s natural.

With Paleo diets, for example, you see a kind of romantic attitude about our natural bodies.

Now there’s lots to say about the Paleo diet. As an academic I’m interested in what anthropologists have to say about the way our ancestors really ate.

Here’s Archaeologists Officially Declare Collective Sigh Over “Paleo Diet”

In a rare display of professional consensus, an international consortium of anthropologists, archaeologists, and molecular biologists have formally released an exasperated sigh over the popularity of the so-called “Paleo Diet” during a two-day conference dedicated to the topic.

The Paleo Diet is a nutritional framework based on the assumption that the human species has not yet adapted to the dietary changes engendered by the development of agriculture over the past ten thousand years. Proponents of the diet emphasize in particular the negative effects of eating large quantities of grain and its numerous by-products, which can lead to hypertension, obesity, and various other health problems. Instead, the Paleo Diet posits that a reliance on lean meats, fresh fruits, and vegetables while minimizing processed food is the key to health and longevity.

The nutritional benefits of the diet are not what the grievance is about, said Dr. Britta Hoyes, who organized the event. She agreed that a high-carbohydrate diet can have a detrimental effect on long-term health, as many studies have demonstrated. Instead, the group’s protest is a reaction to the biological and historical pediments of the diet, in particular the contention that pre-agricultural societies were only adapted to eat those foods existing before the Neolithic Revolution.

Hoyes, a paleoethnobotanist who specializes in reconstructing prehistoric subsistence, stated that only thing unifying the myriad diets that she’s studied has been their diversity. “You simply do not see specific, trans-regional trends in human subsistence in the archaeological record. People can live off everything from whale blubber to seeds and grasses. You want to know what the ideal human diet consists of? Everything. Humans can and will eat everything, and we are remarkably successful not in spite of this fact, but because of it. Our adaptability is the hallmark of the human species. We’re not called omnivores for nothing.”

As for the idea that agricultural products are somehow maladaptive to the human species, researchers at a seminar entitled “It’s When You Mate, Not What You Ate,”  pointed out that evolutionary fitness is measured by reproductive success, not by the health or longevity of an individual.

Richard Wenkel, a biostatistician who chaired the panel, explained: “As long as the diet of an individual keeps them alive long enough to successfully mate, then that diet has conferred an evolutionary advantage. By that metric, the agricultural revolution has proven to be the most effective dietary system in the history of our species. We are the most prolific higher-order vertebrate on the planet.” It is a point that he feels is overlooked by Paleo Diet enthusiasts.

See also  How to Really Eat Like a Hunter-Gatherer: Why the Paleo Diet Is Half-Baked [Interactive & Infographic]

I also want to read Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live.

But let’s suppose we did have a handle on our natural diet. Two things rub me the wrong way about this.

First, what’s natural versus what’s cultural is often very hard to tell. Here’s one example. People say it’s natural for men to have a more muscular physique than women and that women are naturally smaller and thinner than men. Okay. But why then, if it’s natural, do we work so hard to achieve those differences?

Read Are You Working Hard Enough to Achieve Your Natural Body?

We commonly hear claims that men are naturally more muscular and physically intimidating than women.  “It’s a biological fact,” someone might say.  If that were true, though, we wouldn’t have to work so incredibly hard to make it so.

@IllMakeItMyself sent in this great example of the way in which we are pushed to force our bodies into a gender binary that we pretend is natural.  On the upper right part of the Men’s Health cover, it reads: “Add 15lb of muscle” and, right next door on the Women’s Health cover, it reads “5 ways to lose 15 lbs.”

If we have to try this hard to make it true, maybe we’re not as different as we think we are.

This point is true for all sorts of so called natural differences between men and women. Men and women are fed differently and treated differently from birth (maybe even earlier as more people choose to know the sex of the child they’re carrying). How we turn out is a result of both social and biological forces. It’s hard to weed out the social and talk about how men and women would be if we were treated the same. What’s nature? What’s nurture? We just don’t know.

Second, that something is natural is neither here nor there in terms of goodness. Not everything natural is worth wanting. That’s something that authors of the Natural News ought to consider.

What’s Natural News? It’s the worst of the anti-science health sites on the internet, according to Skeptoid.

When Natural News began, it was basically the blog and sales portal of anti-pharmaceutical activist Mike Adams. His basic premise has always been the Big Pharma conspiracy, the idea that the medical industry secretly wants to keep everyone sick, and conspires with the food industry to make people unhealthy, all driven by a massive plot of greed to sell poisonous medicines. Adams appears to have become a protégé of Alex Jones, for he now writes on Natural News at least as many police state conspiracy articles as he does anti-science based medicine articles. They carry ads for each other on their sites as well.

The Natural Society is also opposed to Google’s new evidence based news ranking.

But I wouldn’t wave the banner of “natural” quite so proudly. Cancer is perfectly natural. Nature isn’t all sunshine and rainbows.

Philosophers call the fallacy of assuming what’s natural is good the fallacy of the appeal to nature.

…[C]onsider the…argument that what is natural is somehow good and what is unnatural bad. …[T]he principle is rarely stated so explicitly, but if we look at what people actually do, this does seem to be an assumption that underlies people’s behaviour. Consider, for example, the popularity of “natural” remedies. A great many people would always prefer to take a “natural” remedy over an “artificial” one. Similarly, people prefer foods that have “all natural” ingredients.
One obvious point to make here is that this very characterization of certain things as “natural” is problematic. What always strikes me about health food shops are the rows and rows of bottles and tablets. A greengrocer seems to be a much better source of natural products than such collections of distilled essences and the like. …
However, let us set aside such doubts about the category of “the natural” for the moment and just ask, even if we can agree that some things are natural and some are not, what follows from this? The answer is: nothing. There is no factual reason to suppose that what is natural is good (or at least better) and what is unnatural is bad (or at least worse)

Source: Julian Baggini, Making Sense, Oxford, 2002, pp. 181-182.

Here’s an excerpt from Tim Minchin’s heroine in the story Storm:

Pharmaceutical companies are the enemy
They promote drug dependency
At the cost of the natural remedies
That are all our bodies need
They are immoral and driven by greed.
Why take drugs
When herbs can solve it?
Why use chemicals
When homeopathic solvents
Can resolve it?
It’s time we all return-to-live
With natural medical alternatives.”

 

diets · eating · equality · Uncategorized

Does Feeling Good about Weight Loss Make Me a “Bad Feminist?”

Tracy I24 Comments

EqualityMy post the other day about reasons for losing weight besides body hatred generated a great discussion about my implication that appearance-oriented reasons aren’t “consistent with” feminism.

This world has lots to be sad about, including the phenomenon of healthy disagreement among feminists (a good thing) turning into accusations and finger-pointing and the charge that someone is either a “bad feminist” or not a feminist at all. I don’t like to participate in that.

And yet, I don’t think that just anything is consistent with feminism. It’s a political ideology with a clear agenda. That agenda aims first and foremost at promoting gender equality and eradicating gender oppression. Recognizing that women are a diverse group, most feminists either implicitly or explicitly acknowledge that you can’t just isolate gender — race, class, disability, sexuality, ethnicity are also significant dimensions of oppression, and these can interact with one another and with gender to create unique forms of oppression–that is, structural patterns of systemic disadvantage and inequality (forgive me if this is pedantic — I am after all a philosophy professor).

In short, feminism is not just a simple matter of promoting choice for individuals. We need to be keenly aware of the way structures can create social arrangements that privilege some and disadvantage others, not on the basis of individual skills, talents, or means, but rather on the basis of membership (or perceived membership) in visible social groups (be the marked by gender, race, class, sexuality, disability or some combination of these and other social categories that people use to classify people and create social hierarchies).

So while I don’t like all that slamming of one another for not being feminist enough, I also truly believe that there is usually room for improvement.  It’s a simple fact that some behaviors and attitudes do contribute to and promote those patterns of inequality.  And that means that individual choices can have consequences beyond the individual who makes them.

Someone commented that she didn’t really like the implication that it was un-feminist to want to lose weight for the sake of appearance only. I’d suggested in my post that there may be other reasons — health, performance — that were “okay,” but wanting to be thinner for its own sake wasn’t among them.

The fact is, I have unsettled views about all of this as it plays out in my own life. I spend a lot of time trying to re-train my reaction to weight gain and weight loss. For decades the scale determined how I felt about myself. Daily, it either gave me permission to feel okay about myself (if the number went down) or not (if the number went up).

In other words, losing weight has always made me feel kind of good, gaining has always made me feel kind of bad. And at a meta-level, my self-awareness about this fact about me makes me feel a little hypocritical, as if I’m a “bad feminist.” Natalie commented about this and we agreed that there is a lot to say about this issue still.

Intellectually I believe 100% that I am not my weight.  I’m 110% behind the view that no one else’s worth or worthiness is determined by the number on the scale. And yet in my own case, at some level, I still think of weight loss as an achievement of sorts.

Now, why should that make me a bad feminist?  If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that we are anti-diet, anti-appearance focused in our approach to fitness. I have a strong conviction that this is the right way to go, that dieting and the obsession with getting thin is not only self-defeating at the individual level, but oppressive to women more generally. It buys into normative femininity, promotes a narrow view of what an acceptable women’s body is like, and supports a fat-phobic point of view.

The saving grace in my life over the past couple of years has been my slow and steady evolution from a chronic dieter and slave to the scale to a triathlete who cares dramatically more about getting stronger and faster than getting thinner.

And so when I feel that twinge of disappointment, as I did when I got back from my vacation and had gained four pounds, I feel bad twice. Once from the disappointment and once from judging myself for being disappointed. Bad feminist!

When I reflect more fully on this state of affairs though, I don’t actually believe that it makes me a bad feminist. Instead, I think it means I’m having an understandably difficult time fully extricating myself from oppressive social attitudes. My gut still reacts in the way it always has, in the way I’ve been conditioned to react — as if weight loss is a good thing, weight gain a bad thing.

But upon reflection, I know that it’s just a thing — not good, not bad. And I know too that there are lots of other more productive ways we, as women, can spend our time than embroiled in our typically fruitless attempts to change our bodies.  Weight loss can be empowering, but so can all sorts of other things.

Maybe the real issue is that I’m weighing myself at all. Whether that makes me a bad feminist is not so much the point. The fact is, I’ve had times in my life when I swore off the scale completely, and at those times, I was able to turn my attention to other things.  Whatever our view of weight loss, for most of us there are more important things in the world that we can spend our energy on, and without compromising our health.

Those things might actually contribute to social equality. And that’s something any feminist can feel good about.

eating · training

Vegans and Protein: Yes, We Like It, Too

Tracy I11 Comments
Photo of a vegan chickpea burger from Jamie Oliver, with lettuce, an artisan bun, and tomato.
Jamie Oliver’s best vegan burger.

Last night I went out to one of the best restaurants in London (Ontario). It’s the only place in town that makes it onto lists that get national recognition. Even on a Wednesday night, there was a group at every table in the compact, dimly lit space. My two friends were already sitting at the table in the warm and bustling room when I arrived for our late dinner.  The restaurant offers a delicious winter vegetable salad, a heaping portion of beets and carrots, turnips and leeks, peas and even corn, all roasted or grilled, served in a dressing with fines herbes and excellent olive oil.

That was a definite for my starter. But I’d been at a lunch event earlier in the day where the lack of vegan options meant I’d had only a dinner roll and two kinds of salad, and I’d been rushing around ever since.  So by 7:30 last night I had in mind a more substantial meal. I scoured the menu for something else I could make vegan and came up short.

After ordering a bowl of olives for the table, I mentioned to the waiter that I was vegan, that I wanted the vegetable salad, and then asked what else they could do for me.

He started talking about a mixed veggie plate and demoted my starter to the house greens if I wanted two courses. I actually did want two courses, but I wanted one of them to be the salad I’d been thinking of for the past few hours.  Following that with grilled veggies didn’t seem like it would do it for me. So I opted for the good salad (not that the greens wouldn’t have been tasty) and left it at that. My companions ordered it too, as a starter.

So when the starters came — those salads I’d been dreaming of all afternoon — they each got their winter vegetable salad and the waiter plunked a bowl of warm and plump green olives in front of me. I promptly moved it to its intended spot at the centre of the table. I guess my salad was coming with the mains. Which it did. Almost one hour, twelve fat olives, and at least three slices of high-end white bread later.

The most common question vegans are asked (other than “how could you give up cheese?”) is “where do you get your protein?”  Well I can tell you this: not at the majority of the fancy restaurants “foodies” like to frequent. It astonishes me every single time I go to one of these places with a supposedly talented and award-winning chef and they can’t come up with something even a little bit creative that includes vegan protein.

We live in a world where protein is synonymous with animal protein. We picture a plate divided into sections with the starch, the veggies, and the meat. But that view of it all demonstrates a lack of imagination. It’s not even the way the plate looks in most national cuisines. And yet our best chefs can’t manage to break from that pattern.

Last night’s restaurant is just one example. Every single “main” had some sort of animal protein taking centre stage. Then you could order some sides to go with it — olives, potatoes roasted in beef fat (that’s one way to ruin a vegan option!), roasted vegetables topped with a dollop of goat cheese (that’s another, but granted they can leave that off), polenta “fries” (sadly, and I know this because I asked, they’re made with milk).

Now I know most places won’t happen to have a tub of tofu or a block of tempeh or some freshly made seitan just sitting around. But what? You don’t have a single legume in the back? No lentils or chickpeas? No black beans or, come on, edamame? Work with me, people!

I know I’m in the minority.  Heck, I chose the restaurant because we wanted to go somewhere special and the places I normally frequent, nice though they may be, aren’t in that high-end bracket. You know the places. The ones with the good wine lists.

But it frustrates me to no end.  I know too that most people don’t think of it. And I can forgive them for that. But most people aren’t chefs! I can’t imagine that most of the people who call themselves chefs would construct a regular main with no protein. But somehow, when a vegan walks into the room, they don’t need protein to have a satisfying meal.  No, no. They can be happy with a plate of vegetables.

Well you know what? I’m training. I had a tough bike class the night before and didn’t eat in time or enough after it. And that always makes me hungry. Famished. For at least a day. That’s why when I went out with a friend for breakfast yesterday, I had a bowl of oatmeal AND toast.

A lot of vegan primers tell us not to be too preoccupied with protein. They say we’re likely to get it along the way. Well, yes, if you add legumes to your salads and take a handful of nuts with your afternoon snack or eat soy products fairly regularly (I have no gripe with soy). But if you’re eating green salad and grilled veggies all day, then you will have a problem with protein. You at the very least need to eat a varied diet. See this article about vegan protein.

So here’s a quick list of vegan protein sources:

  • legumes like lentils, chickpeas, kidney beans, pinto beans, black beans, lima beans — all manner of beans qualify and are chock full of protein
  • nuts and nut butters
  • soy products like tofu and tempeh and plain boiled or steamed edamame
  • TVP (textured vegetable protein)
  • seitan (otherwise known as “wheat meat,” made from vital wheat gluten). Read about it here.

I’ve blogged about vegan protein before.  See “How to Get Lots of Vegan Protein.” But I still haven’t really figured out how to get the amount recommended for someone in training (1 gram per pound of body weight, which would be over 125 pounds of protein per day for me. If I reach 100g that’s a probably good day, though I’m not counting right now).

Of course, yesterday was a perfect storm of bad dietary moments.  First, it’s a rare day that I will be out for all three meals. I usually prepare at least two and usually three of my meals every day.  Not so yesterday. Second, I hadn’t properly re-fueled myself after that 90 minute class on my bike trainer the night before. Third, my day got away from me, with back to back meetings and errands that meant I had no time to fend for myself. I had to make do with what was available. And finally, I chose a restaurant that I knew wouldn’t be a great vegan destination. But I hadn’t planned the rest of the day well enough to create balance.

I still don’t see why chefs have such a block about this. There are plenty of excellent things you can make with vegan protein sources. And the plant-based diet has certainly gained a healthy following in recent years.  It’s got to be possible to love food and eat this way. I wish our more exciting and inventive chefs would get on board with it.

I mean, even Jamie Oliver has noticed that it’s a thing.  On the Jamie Oliver Blog, there’s a post called, “Our top five vegan recipes.” It says:

For a long time, veganism has had an unfairly bad name in the food industry. If you’ve been keeping an eye on the web and its foodie communities over the last few years, however, you’ll know that followers are growing in numbers quickly, and the creativity and resourcefulness of its chefs, from independent bloggers to specialist restaurants, is blossoming. With recipes like these gorgeous ones from Jamie and his food team, it’s no longer only omnivores who can enjoy a varied and satisfying diet – dig in!
Read more at http://www.jamieoliver.com/news-and-features/features/top-five-vegan-recipes/#QW1kYzbq3tQJLuQu.99

And the shepherd’s pie and the “best vegan burger” both have legumes as a base.  Three cheers for chefs who try!

I’m taking the leftovers from my delicious salad with me to work today. I have another catered lunch meeting and I expect my meal to be inadequate. I’m adding chickpeas to the winter veggies this time, and taking a side of hummus just in case I need more.

If you’ve had a better experience finding satisfying and balanced vegan meals at fancy, omnivore-type restaurants, please share them.

competition · eating · food · Uncategorized

Competitive Eating: Is Excelling at This Good for Women? Good for Anyone?

Tracy I6 Comments

Molly Schuyler with a 72 ounce steak dinner.Last week I saw a report of a competitive “achievement,” in which a small woman did what no one expected her to do.  Now, I’m usually pleased by this sort of thing. I like it when women, large or small, do things that defy “type.”

But this time I wasn’t so sure about the achievement. Molly Schuyler from Nebraska is a competitive eater. She weighs just 120 pounds.  What did she do?

She ate TWO 72 ounce steak dinners in less than 20 minutes at Amarillo’s Big Texan Steak Ranch. This happened in May, but it got another round of attention when it got recycled by Fox news in January.

My reservations don’t stem from my vegan convictions.  It’s nothing like that at all.

It’s just that in the realm of things that it’s a good thing for women to be good at, competitive eating doesn’t make my top ten.  For one thing, it’s kind of dangerous.

People get injured or even die when they undertake to eat competitively.  In this Slate article, “Dog Bites Man,” author Jason Fagone reports that Japanese competitive eater, Takeru Kobayashi, is suffering from an arthritic jaw. But that’s mild compared to the full range of possibilities:

The annals of gurgitation are dotted with strokes and blocked windpipes, of guts literally busted. Go as far back as you like. The novel The Golden Ass, written around A.D. 200, tells of an ancient food fighter almost choking to death on a piece of cheese. The native Tlingit peoples of Alaska used to hold raucous eating contests at their potlatch feasts; one such bacchanal came to a tragic end when a warrior ate a box full of dried hemlock bark and washed it down with water. According to a turn-of-the-century ethnography of the Tlingit, “This caused the hemlock bark to swell and his stomach to burst.”

As for more recent harms, you can’t top Mort Hurst’s Guinness World Record attempt in 1991. Hurst, a MoonPie-eating champ from North Carolina, suffered a stroke after eating 38 soft-boiled eggs in 29 seconds. He recovered and went on to compete again. Others weren’t so lucky. In 2002, a 14-year-old schoolkid in Japan raced his friends at bread-eating, choked, and died. In 2004, a Japanese housewife choked to death on a wheat-rice cake at a contest in Hyogo prefecture. And just this January, a 28-year-old woman in California died of water intoxication after drinking almost two gallons of water in a contest sponsored by a morning radio show. She was trying to win a Nintendo Wii.

Another article about competitive eating, “Eating to Win: 5 Things You Didn’t Know about Competitive Eating,” talks about the intense training regimes serious competitive eaters undertake to get “in shape” for their events:

The masticator muscles of the jaw are among the strongest muscles in the body. Bob Shoudt, who holds the world record for eating more food by weight or volume than any other competitor, says he chews gum constantly – up to 25 pieces at a time — to strengthen his masticators so he can grind up food more quickly. Shea said the jaws of top competitors can exert 280 pounds of force, about the same as a German shepherd.

Shoudt and other competitors push the limit of stomach distension by drinking copious amount of fluids. Even those who don’t train this way appear to have a super human ability to expand their stomachs. A 2007 study published in the American Journal of Roentgenology found that competitive eaters’ stomachs can grow four times greater than the average person’s to hold four liters’ worth of food and fluid.

Competitive eaters also learn techniques to speed up the eating process. For example, Shoudt says he hops up and down to accelerate the swallowing process with gravity, and he sometimes presses against his stomach to push food lower into the abdomen. Some eaters use a move called the Valsalva Maneuver, which involves pinching the nose and holding the breath. This closes off the airway and supposedly increases the squeezing movement of the esophagus known as peristalsis.

None of these are particularly healthy.  As regular readers of the blog know, I’m a big advocate of eating slowly and mindfully. That’s about the opposite of what happens at a competitive eating event.

That’s not to say they eat like that all the time. But one time is all you need to choke on a hot dog or suffer a stroke or a burst gut.

So in the scheme of things in which women of all sizes surprise us by doing things we don’t expect them to do, I’d rather see more small, strong power lifters and plus-sized endurance athletes than 120 pound competitive eaters. Yes, it pushes the body’s physical limits, as do most sports, and yes it requires focus and conditioning.

And probably for everything physically demanding that anyone might do, from running marathons to climbing mountains, there are those detractors who just can’t wrap their heads around why someone would do it.

But is it a worthwhile pursuit? Put it this way – I doubt we’ll be seeing it in the Olympics any time soon. And if the reward is simply that you get the meal for free, as was the case for Molly Schuyler (you have to pay up front to take the challenge), why not just forgo the 72 ounce steak dinners and keep your money in your pocket in the first place?

Here is Molly Schuyler breaking the record by eating two 72 ounce steak dinners in under 20 minutes:

And that’s not her only achievement. To see a list of Molly’s challenge history (and it’s not even an up-to-date list), check here.

 

body image · eating · fitness · racing · training · weight loss

Do I Dare Mess with a Good Thing? The Temptations of Going for My “Racing Weight”

Tracy I15 Comments
In July, right before the Bracebridge Olympic distance triathlon.
In July, right before the Bracebridge Olympic distance triathlon.

This must be the week to post about weight loss.  Yesterday, Sam came right out and said it: she wants to lose weight.  Then our cycling friend and instructor Cheryl, who is the blogger at Happy Is the New Healthy came right out and said it, too, in her post Coming Clean: Weight Loss versus Body Love: she wants to lose weight.

They have their different reasons. Sam’s reasons are about two things: performance and awareness of the realities of bias against people who are perceived as overweight. Performance-wise, she wants to fly up hills on her bike even faster than she does now (she says she’s not super fast now, but so far she’s smoked me on every challenging hill I’ve ridden up with her). She says:

…we live in a world with pretty strong anti-overweight bias. While my self-esteem is pretty secure (see here and here), I do worry sometimes about the external effects. I’m pretty sure it hurts my teaching evaluations. Research also shows that being overweight has a financial impact.

And finally, there’s hills. And it’s harder to run fast when you’re larger. And pull ups. I’d love to be able to do an unassisted pull up.

So yes, I want to lose weight.

Cheryl’s poignant post comes clean about her continuing struggles with body image. She says:

I know that there’s a lot of talk about the way that CrossFit, for instance, can help us to really appreciate our bodies and what they can do. This usually comes with a point about how it doesn’t matter what the number on the scale or the size in our jeans reads any more—but what if it does? Where does that leave the girl who doesn’t want the quads that won’t fit in normal jeans or the shoulders that make wearing a blazer next to impossible? Where does that leave the girl who doesn’t want to go to the beach because she just can’t get used to the body she has?

That girl is me. One of my the most powerful questions we can ask ourselves is, how’s that working for you? When I ask myself that in relation to trying to love my body/eating and training the way I am, I have to be honest: I’m frustrated and I’m looking for change this year.

I’ve been thinking about this same issue lately. My body image stuff has subsided quite a bit. One thing Precision Nutrition’s Lean Eating program really helped with, though I would never have thought it would turn out this way, is that the weekly weigh-ins actually neutralized what used to be a tortured relationship with the number on the scale.

Their motto for measurements is “get ’em then forget ’em.” And that’s pretty much what I did every Saturday. I got ’em and forgot ’em. I can now weigh myself without feeling hugely preoccupied with the result. It’s just information.

I’ve done weekly weigh-ins before, back in the day when I attended Weight Watchers, and again when I was in personal training. But at both someone else did the weighing. With PN, it was just me and my scale. I entered the numbers into a form that for the most part, unless my coach took a boo, was for my eyes only.

Maybe it was just the right time or something, but there is no denying that I don’t hold my breath and my stomach doesn’t go into knots anymore before I get on the scale (I confess that I still engage in the ritual of peeing first).

A few days ago I started reading the book, Racing Weight by Matt Fitzgerald. Sam was surprised. Why? Because apparently a couple of years ago she put it in my mailbox at the philosophy department where we work and I returned it within minutes of reading the introduction. At the time, it was too much like a diet book with its focus on weight. Back then I really didn’t have any performance goals to speak of.

But things are different now. Now I have base times for several distances in triathlon and running. I want to get faster. My performance as an athlete now matters to me.

As I reflect on this, two questions turn in my mind. First, does it matter enough to mess with a good thing?  And second, does approaching weight loss with performance in mind have any impact on the facts?

What’s the good thing I’d be messing with? Well, I didn’t weigh myself through the holidays — no need to tempt fate with this newly discovered neutral attitude towards my weight. My workout schedule wasn’t consistent and I definitely enjoyed (thoroughly and without guilt) my share of holiday treats.

But I weighed myself this morning and I weighed the same as I did before the holidays. To me, a stable weight is one of the most elusive and precious things I’ve ever had in my adult life.

Considering I bailed on PN (not the habits, but the coaching aspect of the program) about six weeks ago, and didn’t really pay much attention to it through the holidays, I feel like the fact that I still weigh the same is a good sign that I’m doing something right.  And it’s not just the past six weeks, I’ve weighed in the same three-pound range — sometimes a little up and sometimes a little down, but always within the same three pound range — since May.

So there’s that. And what about the facts? It’s no secret that I don’t believe diets work.  I’ve talked about it lots and I continue to break the news to people. There is a ton of denial in our social world about just how rare long term weight loss is. But it is–see Sam and Tracy Respond to the Near Impossibility of Weight Loss: All Our Posts in One Place. And also:

This isn’t to say that no one has ever lost weight and kept it off. But the vast majority of people who try don’t succeed.  That’s why Sam talks about weight loss unicorns.

Now, what about my racing weight? A couple of things. I actually don’t know exactly what my racing weight is, but based on my rough estimate using the formula in the book (which provides a weight that “may be too high or may be too low”), my racing weight is about 12 pounds lighter than I weigh right now. Even scarier, if I use the calculator on the racing weight website, I’d have to lose about 16 pounds to be my ideal racing weight (that’s checking off the box that says it’s relatively difficult for me to lose body fat).

Whether it be 12 or 16 pounds, that’s not going to happen unless I make some major changes. I mean seriously drastic of a kind I can’t quite even imagine.

What I was hoping was that I was already close to my racing weight but could just try for better body composition. But that was what I was supposedly working on through the PN LE program and I’m fairly confident that my body fat percentage hardly budged after the first six months.

And yet I want to perform better in my sports. I would love to become speedier as a swimmer, on the bike, and when I run. I’m training the way I need to for all that to happen. And I plan to stay consistent with my training.  There are some minor tweaks I can make to my eating, but for the most part, as a vegan athlete who prefers whole foods, I’d have to totally deprive myself of any and all treats even to have a chance of losing 10, let alone 12 or 16 pounds.

I’ve not talked with either of my coaches about this issue yet. But it’s no secret that dropping body fat can aid athletic performance. And with my more neutral attitude about the scale, now might be a good time to dabble with it as part of my training plan.

But unlike Sam and Cheryl, I’m conflicted, not because it wouldn’t be nice to drop a few pounds and lower my body fat percentage — but because I don’t know if I’d be messing with a good thing or if there is any reason to think that a different motive can magically yield better results.

 

 

eating · training

Precision Nutrition Lean Eating Program Review: Reflections on My Year of On-Line Coaching

Tracy I13 Comments

Last year Sam posted her review of the Precision Nutrition Lean Eating Program. You can read her review here.  Now it’s my turn.  I just completed the year-long program of on-line coaching last week.  Like Sam, I have a mixed view of the program.  I liked some aspects of it a lot. Others, like the photo contest, not so much. So here goes.

Precision Nutrition’s Lean Eating program is an on-line coaching program that focuses on developing “healthy habits.”  When you sign up, you are assigned a coach. It’s not one-on-one coaching. Each coach has a “team” of I’m not sure how many people. I would say there were more than a hundred in my group, though this information is not readily available.

For the year, you get a new habit to work on roughly every two weeks. For that two-week period, that’s the habit that you want to focus on.  After the two weeks, that habit stays in play but you focus on a new habit.  In that sense, it’s cumulative. By the end of the year there are quite a few habits that, with any luck, you’re practicing on a regular basis.

Every day you also get a new lesson to read. They take about 10 minutes or so to read and sometimes you’re asked to answer a few questions.

Finally, every day you are given a workout.  You can follow their workout plan or do something else, but they do encourage clients to follow the prescribed workouts.

Each day, you can get a checkmark for each of these things — practicing the habit, completing the lesson, doing your workout. This is all recorded automatically in a progress log, so over time you can get a pretty good sense of how well you are working the program.

They make some bold claims about the program. The boldest claim is that it’s 100% guaranteed: “We coach you for 12 months, you get in the best shape of your life or it’s free.” I am not sure how many people, if any, have ever tried to collect back their money.

And I’m not sure what you need to do to prove that you’re not, in fact, in the best shape of your life. What measures are they using?  In my case, I probably have a higher level of cardiovascular fitness than I’ve ever had and I’m pretty strong, but I don’t know that I’m in the best shape of my life. And if I am, it’s more because of the triathlon training than the PN program.

What I liked about the program:

1. The workouts. The workout schedule of three weight training workouts per week, active recovery, and interval training with one day off is reasonable and do-able. The workouts are varied and easy to do either at home (with some equipment or at the gym).

There are 11 “phases” over the course of the year, so the workouts don’t get boring. Most phases are 4 weeks long, with each week getting slightly more intense than the last.  I was fairly consistent with the PN LE workouts for the first six months, until triathlon season hit.

When I was consistent with the workouts I definitely got stronger.  I’ve printed them all of and will continue to use the suggested workouts even though the program is over.

2. The habit-based approach.  I love that the program emphasizes healthy habits over dieting and food plans. It’s not that they don’t think people should plan their eating, but they don’t provide strict plans or encourage huge restrictions on what we eat.  My favourite two habits were the “anchor habits” of eating slowly and stopping when 80% full.  With these two habits in my back pocket I’ve got two simple strategies that help me navigate most eating situations and come out feeling comfortable.

3. The coach. I really liked Janet, my coach. She posted video messages to us pretty regularly, especially at the beginning, and she checked in with me at least once a week to see how things were going. Whenever I contacted her with a question or concern, she got back to me pretty quickly.

4. The support of my team members. We all stayed in touch through the Facebook group (private to our team) and the PN forums.  There are a few people on the team whom I will definitely stay in touch with, and even though the program is over, my team’s Facebook group remains active and will continue.

There is something really powerful about the support of the team and the coach, working together to help everyone succeed. We also had a couple of team mentors, who were women who had gone through the program before and who played a special role in keeping us motivated.

5. The lessons. I learned a lot from the daily readings that were provided each morning.  I made a point of downloading all of the material into folders sorted by week.  I will revisit some of the material over the next year. If I want to, I can do it day by day from the very beginning all over again.

Lots of the lessons focused on internal change and getting in touch with yourself to understand what motivates you, what you need, what matters, what your goals are, and so forth.  I’m a big fan of that sort of internal work. I like to reflect and answer questions, and I like to see how my thoughts about things evolve.

6. The food experiments. This is something that I didn’t expect to like but I enjoyed quite a bit.  At about the halfway point of the program, we started to be assigned different food experiments on Thursdays.  These ranged from plant-based eating to fasting, as well as a paleo day (which I blew off because, as a vegan, I wasn’t interested in eating nuts and seeds all day), and a sugar-free day. I liked the 24-hour fast and did it a couple of times. But just generally I liked the opportunity to move out of my comfort zone and try something I’d never thought to try before.

What I wasn’t so crazy about

1. The weekly measurements.  Every Saturday we had to weigh ourselves and take quite a few measurements and enter those numbers onto the website.  The idea was that it would help us gauge our progress. For me, it was an exercise in learning not to get too hung up on the numbers. But until PN I had set aside the scale for a whole year, so I was worried that it would trigger me and make me fixate on the number on the scale.

In the end, it didn’t do that, but it still wasn’t my favourite part of the program. I can report that I lost a little bit of weight (about 10 pounds). It all came off within the first four months and then I leveled off at the same weight and measurements after that.

2. The monthly photos. Another progress marker was monthly front, side, and back photos, in which you wore either a bikini or workout shorts and a sports bra. I opted for the workout gear. The photos got easier as I got more used to them, but I never did enjoy taking the photos and uploading them to the website. It’s true that I could see visible changes from the first month to a few months later. But somehow the focus on the visual didn’t do anything for me.

3. The clash between PN values and my triathlon goals. Now, this isn’t strictly their fault, but I don’t think they are explicit enough up front about just how difficult it is to do endurance training and PN at the same time.

When I mentioned that I was trying to fit in all of my training, my coach told me that for the program to work best, it should be the only training you’re doing. She sent me a post where they talk about the incompatibility of endurance training and strength training.

That may well be, but I honestly didn’t realize that at the time. Had I known, I might not have signed up for PN since I had very clear goals for my triathlon training over the summer and I wasn’t about to give them up. As a result, I was trying to juggle too much.

4. The photo contest. I hated the photo contest and blogged about my reasons just the other day. Mainly I feel as if it goes against the whole focus on habits and internal changes, it focuses on appearance in a way that I find really off-putting, and it gives PN a bunch of free advertising. For more about why I don’t like the photo contest, see here.

5. The habits that weren’t habits, namely: prepare for your photo shoot and recover from your photo shoot.  Seriously?  The last month of the program was pretty much a waste of time for me because I opted out of the photo shoot.

6. The cost. I actually thought the pre-sale price of $100 a month wasn’t too bad considering the extensive materials they provided, but for 2015 it has spiked up dramatically in cost. The pre-sale, which is going on now, gets you a $400 price reduction. But after that it’s $179 a month (this is from what a team member told me — I can’t see the price anywhere on the website right now). I also think that for that price, we should get some sort of resource, maybe a pdf with materials we can refer to later. Instead, we have a week of access to all of the on-line materials and then, boom, we are cut off. I get that they need to move on to the next group, but it’s not cheap and having some permanent materials would be a good thing.

So that’s my view of PN. I’m not sure if, on balance, I would recommend it. I think it really depends what you are looking for and what your goals are. If you’re serious about endurance training, I don’t think it’s a good match.  If you are triggered by weighing and tracking measurements, that’s also an issue.

For someone who hasn’t got a solid workout program or schedule or who is bored with what they’re doing and wants to try something different, it’s a better fit because you can then dedicate yourself to the workouts as prescribed.  The habits and lessons are extremely informative, so if you’re seeking solid and balanced information the program has lots to offer in that respect.

As for me, I feel that even though the program wasn’t really compatible with my endurance goals, I got stronger and I acquired a few solid habits that will serve me well. Despite losing a few pounds, I don’t feel much leaner though I guess I must be. This year they didn’t have us measure and record body fat percentage, so I don’t know for sure. I don’t know anyone on my team who is doing another round of coaching and it’s not something I myself would consider.

For 2015, I plan to keep practicing the habits that are working for me–especially slow eating to 80% full–and to focus on my training so I can have a strong triathlon season in the summer without trying to divide my attention between the PN LE program and the triathlon training schedule.

 

diets · eating · Uncategorized

Planning another New Year’s Diet? Three Alternative Approaches that May Spare You the Grief

Tracy I11 Comments

Far more tempting than the sugar cookies and shortbread, the spinach dips and puff pastries, the stuffing and the gravy…more tempting than any of these is the allure of that January 1st diet.

There are few women’s magazines and no fitness magazines on the stands right now that don’t have a feature about weight loss and dieting: a new plan for a new you!

Diets that begin on January 1st don’t typically work any better than diets that begin on any other day.  We’ve talked before about the sad news about losing weight and keeping it off.  See for example here and here and here and here.

I too ate more than I needed to over the holidays and my jeans are a bit tighter than they were a month ago.  So I get the temptation.  But I also know enough that dieting isn’t the answer.  By dieting, I mean following a very restrictive food plan and a drastic reduction in calories. It’s temporary and designed to make us lose weight.

The thing is, the body goes into a famine response — the metabolism slows and what food we do take in, our body hangs onto.  What’s worse, restrictive diets don’t really give us what we need to lead physically active lives. And they do nothing for our metabolic health. See “Metabolic Health Is a Feminist Issue.”

I’m here to tell you that there is still hope. I don’t mean there is a diet that is the last diet you will ever need. No.  I mean there are things you can do instead of dieting that have a good chance of improving your relationship with food.

What the three approaches I’m going to talk about have in common is that they require us to give up the diet mentality and focus more on what’s going on with us internally.  The three approaches are: (1) mindful eating; (2) intuitive eating; and (3) the EAT Q method that applies the idea of emotional intelligence to eating.

savorMindful Eating

The book Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life is a collaborative effort between a Buddhist monk and a nutritionist. Amazon quotes Donna Seaman from Booklist, describing what the book has to offer:

So essential to healthy eating is a healthy perspective that Zen Buddhist master and prolific author Nhat Hanh joins forces with nutritionist Cheung for a truly holistic approach. The duo pairs the latest nutritional information with the age-old Buddhist practice of mindfulness—that is, of being fully aware of all that is going on within ourselves and all that is happening around us—to draw attention to what and how we eat. Guidance is offered for recognizing what barriers—physical, psychological, cultural, and environmental—prevent us from controlling our weight, and readers are encouraged to savor food in order to fully nourish both the body and the mind. To that end, Nhat Hanh provides guided meditations on everything from eating an apple to coping with stressful situations, along with advice on selecting and preparing food, staying active, and avoiding self-criticism. Complete with a discussion of why healthy eating is also good for the environment, this is a uniquely insightful and positive program for wellness: a book of tested wisdom; practical action; and intellectual, emotional, and spiritual nutriments.

The idea is not to fixate on weight. Rather, it encourages us to bring our awareness to ourselves, our relationship with food, and the experience of eating.

You can find out more about the book and the approach on the Savor website.

Eating mindfully, free of distraction, is a challenging undertaking. When I took a mindfulness meditation course, one of the first things we had to do was to eat a raisin mindfully. That meant feeling it, smelling it, looking at it, rolling it between our fingers — all this before we even put it in our mouths.  From start to finish, it took about five minutes to eat — to savor — that raisin.

I’ve scarfed down whole meals in about the same amount of time, not even tasting them, on auto-pilot, or distracted by a magazine, the television, or that thought of dessert (!).

Learning to pay attention, not just to the food I’m eating but to the way I feel as I am eating it is a difficult challenge for me but it’s definitely something that I’ve been working on and I’m renewing my commitment to eat as mindfully as possible in 2015.

intuitive eatingIntuitive Eating

I’ve been a big fan of intuitive eating for quite some time now.  You can see my post “Intuitive Eating: What It Is and Why I Love It” from almost two years ago.

My main source of information about this approach comes from the book, Intuitive Eating, by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch.

The book outlines 10 principles of intuitive eating:

Intuitive Eating (IE) is based on ten principles, to each of which the authors devote a full chapter:

  1. reject the diet mentality
  2. honor your hunger
  3. make peace with food
  4. challenge the food police
  5. feel your fullness
  6. discover the satisfaction factor
  7. cope with your emotions without using food
  8. respect your body
  9. exercise: feel the difference
  10. honor your health with gentle nutrition

Much of it is in the same spirit as mindful eating, but there is a more explicit focus on rejecting the diet mentality and learning to approach food differently. There is much more emphasis on getting in touch with your internal cues, feeling what it feels like to be hungry (and to respond to that hunger) and to feel full and satisfied.

I credit the intuitive eating approach with helping me learn to enjoy food again without feeling so bound by the rules and restrictions I’d internalized after years of dieting.

There’s an on-line community focused on intuitive eating. You can find it here.

eat qThe EAT Q Approach

Susan Albers’ book EAT Q is subtitled “Unlock the weight-loss power of emotional intelligence.”  Anything that talks about the weight loss power of anything automatically raises my hackles. But what I like about this book is that it devotes a whole chapter to undoing the diet mentality.

Dieting is a major barrier to the EAT Q approach. You can’t get anywhere with EAT Q if you’re stuck in the mindset associated with dieting.  Why?

Dieting distorts feelings around food and eating to the point that the feelings become secondary to the basic rules of deiting: restrict (food) and resist (desire).

There are other obstacles to EAT Q (i.e. pleasure seeking, social eating, stress, and trauma) but dieting is the first one on the list.

Lots of people who have difficulties with food engage in emotional eating.  Eat Q is “a concept that helps you align your intellectual knowledge about food and nutrition with your emotions…Eat Q improves the quality of your food decisions no matter how you’re feeling.”

It combines emotional intelligence and mindfulness to address emotional eating.  Emotional intelligence is “a set of skills that, collectively, helps you be aware of and understand your emotions and the emotions of others.”

Emotional eating is “defined by experts as eating in response to emotions–whether positive or negative–in order to change those emotions.”

And mindfulness, as mentioned before, is rooted in Buddhism and is about being “fully present in the moment, in a nonjudgmental way.”

When we employ the Eat Q method, it “helps us navigate our relationship with food–our overall ability to manage the relationship between what we feel and how we eat.”

The book outlines what it is, spends quite a bit of time talking about barriers to practicing it, and finally provides a few “tools for success.”

You can find out more about Eat Q here.

A New Year, a New You — Doing Things Differently in 2015

Each of the books I’ve talked about here outlines an alternative to the trap of dieting.  They’re challenging in their own ways. Unlike diets, these are not just temporary solutions. Rather, they are lifelong undertakings that can bring peace to our relationship with food and with our bodies.

One qualification worth mentioning: if you are very physically active, perhaps an athlete who trains intensely, you may find that simply paying attention to your physical hunger signals may not be good enough for you to get the food you need to support your training.  When I’m doing a difficult bike class on the trainer or out for a long run (over 12K), I need to eat regardless of whether I’m hungry. In fact, if I wait until I’m hungry, I’ve waited too long.

Nevertheless, except in the middle of a difficult training session, my internal cues are fairly good guides. And I consider it a huge achievement that I can recognize them. Back in the day when dieting was a way of life for me, I didn’t even know when I was actually hungry or when I’d had enough.

One final point. An important practice related to all of these approaches is the practice of eating slowly. Just learning to slow down is a major step for many chronic dieters.  For more about eating slowly, see Zen Habits’ post about Slow Eating.

I’m not going to promise that any of these approaches will guarantee weight loss. You might lose weight and you might not — but you will enjoy your food more and be less likely to eat more than you need.

Does anyone want to join me in my 2015 commitment not to diet and instead to eat slowly and mindfully?

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