Feel Good or Eat Good

Why are so many feelings wrapped up in our eating patterns?  Call it emotional eating, comfort eating, weakness, or whatever.  The foods I love are foods that bring back feelings and memories of the past.  Comfort food.

As I struggle to regain my focus on eating healthy and losing weight, I find myself doing a bit of comfort eating.  A friend and I took her son to his grandmother’s in another East Tennessee city.  We also went back several days later to pick him up.  Both times we took a ride through her childhood memories and they reminded me so much of my own.  I was on a memory high.  On the way back both times, we stopped at an old style drive-in.  You know the kind . . . you drive up and they come to the car and take your order.  Or you can sit at one of the wood picnic tables.  The menu boards list what seems like 100 options, from breakfast biscuits to burgers, hot dogs, chicken, chili, and sides.  And then there are the ice cream options – cones, sundaes, floats, and milkshakes.

Memories from my childhood came back.  I always loved crinkle cut fries with lots of salt and ketchup.  I ordered the large size.  I asked the waitress what kind of milkshakes they had.  She rattled of the standard flavors and then kept going.  She said banana and my eyes got very big.  “With real bananas or just banana flavored?”  She responded, “Real bananas” and I did not have to hear anymore.  Mmmmmmm.  My mom used to make us banana milkshakes.

Emotions definitely come into play when you make choices about food.  I let the emotions control what I ate and didn’t think twice.  I can’t do that all the time or I need to find healthier alternatives that will satisfy that emotion.  This is my biggest challenge on this road to healthy eating.

What is your biggest struggle?

Dance Your Hiney Off

It’s been a while since I discussed how things are going on the exercise front so I thought I would give an update on how things are going.  Here is my weekly schedule:

• Monday is Sizemology.  This is a one hour dance class and we alternate jazz and hip hop dances.  Average calories burned for the hour is 275.
• Tuesday is Sizemology Choreography.  This is a 4 week series of one hour dance classes and we learn an entire song over the series.  Average calories burned for the hour is 275.
• Wednesday is Zumba.  This is a one hour dance/fitness class combining Latin dance with aerobic moves.  Very fast paced and intense.  Average calories burned for the hour is 650.
• Thursday is Mool Mani Yoga.  A very relaxing but challenging form of yoga created by my instructor, Angie Collins.  She combines vinyasa yoga with reiki healing and meditation.  Average calories burned is 200 but there are body toning and flexibility elements that are not measurable.
• Friday is an off day.
• Saturday starts with Mool Mani Yoga at 10am and then Sizemology at noon.
• Sunday is Zumba again.

That’s a total of 7 hours per week, averaging 2525 calories burned each week
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I have spent the last few months maintaining my 50 pound weight loss.  I am trying to get back on the weight loss wagon but until I get my butt in gear, the classes and my weekday calorie counting have allowed me to not gain.  Weekends are blowing it for me but my goal right now is to NOT gain and it’s working.

What do you do to make sure you don’t ruin your progress?

Okay, That’s Enough

After a week of careful planning and thoughtful choices, I let a little crazy creep in.  I spent the long weekend at my daughter’s in Atlanta and it felt like we did nothing but eat and eat and eat.  The food we ate was pretty healthy . . . it was the sweet stuff that was crazy.

I almost never eat sweets.  I eat a lot of fruit but I don’t really like candy and could do without cakes or pies or sweet stuff in general, though I do love good chocolate.  But during that long weekend, I went on a sugar binge – pies, ice cream, chocolate, just piles and piles of sugar.  When I returned home on Monday evening, I continued to indulge in the sweet stuff, things I never eat.  On Tuesday, same thing.  And Wednesday too.  I ate really healthy during the day but at some point daily, I ate sweets.

Every day, I struggled in the afternoon.  I was worn out.  Every evening, I went to bed early and every morning, I had a hard time getting out of bed.  I assumed I must be coming down with something.  My body just didn’t feel right.  I was sluggish and had a hard time keeping my eyes open every day around 2pm, even though I was sleeping at least 9 hours each night.  On Thursday afternoon, I really didn’t feel well and went home around 3pm, crawled in the bed and slept for an hour.  I went to yoga later, came home and got in the bed at 9:45pm and slept until 8am this morning!!!

I was catching up on my blog reading this morning and went to one of my favorite healthy living blogs Loser For Life.  Today’s post was all about her struggles with fighting off the sugar urge on vacation and after she returned home.  She talked about being tired.  A light bulb went on.  I was experiencing the sugar rush and the sugar crash.  And I had kept on feeding it.  My body was reacting to the sugar.  Stupid sugar!

So bear with me over the next few days as I detox and get that stuff out of my system.  Stupid sugar!

And On The Menu Today . . .

 . . . only healthy stuff.  Do you ever just get tired of hearing yourself whine?  That's where I was yesterday.  So after posting yesterday's thoughts, I decided to kick my butt in gear and get back to focusing on healthy, not just on calories.  I always feel better when I focus on health and not just on the weight.

Yesterday was pretty good although it was a little heavy on the carbs - blueberries and vanilla greek yogurt for breakfast, Kashi Lemongrass Coconut Chicken frozen dinner for lunch, wheat thins and hummus for a snack, a chocolate vitatop for another snack, and chicken/apple sausages on wheat buns with greek pasta salad for lunch.  I also had a KIND Coconut and Almond bar right before I went to dance class.  I ended the day at just over 1900 calories, a little higher than planned, about 150 calories over my goal.

After dance I stopped by the market to pick up some more healthy snacks for the week.  I ran across some buttermilk cheese that sounded interesting, picked out some pretty plums and apples and stocked up some hummus from my favorite local restaurant.  I really try to keep healthy snacks around that are easy to take with me to work so I can keep my regular meals smaller.

Today was also pretty healthy.  Breakfast was a canadian bacon and raw spinach on a sandwich thin and I added some of the buttermilk cheese.  Interesting flavor, kind of mild with a cheddar flavor.  For a morning snack I had raw broccoli and sliced cucumbers with hummus.  So yummy.  Lunch was organic turkey, raw spinach, buttermilk cheese and Dijonnaise on Ezekiel sesame bread.  I am generally not a sandwich eater but this was so good and very satisfying.  It's almost 3pm and I still have over 800 calories left for today.  I have my cooler that right now holds a KIND snack bar, a small cucumber salad, and some kale salad so a snack later before dance class should not throw me off my targets.  And dinner after dance class tonight should be ok because I am having sushi with the girls.


I feel better and I am not hungry.  There is something about eating healthy that just makes you feel good.

Finding The Reason

 I love the show Ruby on Style Network.  The show is about a real woman, Ruby Gettinger, and her struggles to go from over 700 pounds to a normal size.  All fat women can identify in some way with either Ruby or with her friends.  On tonight’s episode, the season finale, Ruby and her friends attend a 6 day intensive therapy session to deal with their food addictions.  It was enlightening and hard to watch.  Ruby and her friends all went in thinking they were not addicted to food.  Don’t we all feel that way?

I am not one that leans toward group therapy.  I think it’s wonderful and works for many people but I don’t think I am one of them.  I am more of a one on one kind of person.  Of course, no one ever thinks it’s for them but I see it really does work and this show was interesting and gave some insight into the process.


One thing I’ve learned is that there are a lot of reasons people are fat but the reasons generally have nothing to do with food.  Things in their past, issues of control, or depression all lead to issues with food just like they lead to drug addiction or alcohol abuse or exercise obsession.  It’s all addiction and none of us ever think we are addicted.

To watch the women on the show and see them relive the horrors of their childhoods and teen years was heartbreaking.  So many women have stories of abuse or alcoholic parents or unhappiness.  They use their weight as protection or as control.
I recognize now that I have an addiction but I am still trying to figure out where that addiction came from.  I had a very happy childhood.  There were unhappy moments as with all children but I really had parents that loved me and siblings to which I was close.  No trauma, no abuse, nothing to lead me to an answer.  There were addictions in my extended family but they did not directly affect me.

My family was a military family so we traveled and moved all over the world every few years.  We would return to my grandparents or family members would visit us at various times.  There would always be a feast or special meals.  Visits from or to the homes of family and friends were some of my favorite memories and I was always so happy during those times. 

I think that because some of my best memories and times in my life were always centered around family and food, I try to constantly recreate that feeling.  My favorite foods are foods that were served during those times.  They bring back that feeling.  And when family visits me, I want to serve those foods and provide that feeling for them.  It’s like rather than some time of pain causing a food addiction, the feeling of pleasure caused it.

I don’t know if that is the reason I’m fat.  My logic mind tells me I would not make myself fat because I want to be happy, especially because being fat does not make me happy.  But I do know this is a problem that I have to deal with and have learned that I cannot center family events around food.  I still do but I am trying to change that.  Thanksgiving should be about what we did, not what we ate.  That’s hard for me.

No matter the reason, I am changing my life.  I am learning that I need food to survive but it cannot make me happy.  It’s just food and it’s not that powerful.  I will not be happier if I eat three servings of mashed potatoes.  In fact, I will be mad later because I did it.  I can eat one serving.  Or I can take control and not eat any of it because it’s just potatoes.  It doesn’t bring back any of the people I love and miss.

And I will keep looking for answers and inspiration.

This Too Will Pass

It’s been a tough week.   I never really thought I was an emotional eater until now.  In the past, I did not react to stress by going to food.  At least not that I was aware.  I tended to not really think about food when stress came around.  I don’t really have a lot of stress in my life on a regular basis so maybe I just didn’t know.

This week was stressful.  And I wanted to eat all kinds of things that were bad for me.  I wanted a McDonald’s hamburger and fries.  I don’t really even like McDonald’s except for their french fries.  I wanted pizza.  I wanted a foot long hot dog from a local drive-in in a combo with krinkle cut fries with lots of salt and ketchup.  And a milk shake.  And I ate it all over the course of the week.

I don’t really even like fast food.  I have not really missed it at all during the last 8 months.  But in a reaction to the stress, I wanted all that stuff.  I wrote it all down too in my on-line tracker, every day and all of it.  It was a lot of calories every day and I didn’t burn much more than what I took in each day but I did burn more.  The tracking and the lack of calories burned gave me a wake up call.  It had to stop.  And hi, my name is Tere and I am an Emotional Eater.

It made me look at what I was doing and made me realize it has to stop.  I have lost a lot of weight and gained so much more over the last 8 months.  It really has not been hard until this week.  I ate more than one serving of everything.  I ate things I didn’t really love.  All because I was stressed. 

The stress will go away but the weight gained (or not lost) will be here to remind me that I cannot do that.  The trips I have made to the bathroom have also reminded me!  Ugh!

Like I said, this was a tough week but I will not self-destruct.  I have done some self-reflection and learned something.  The stress will pass on by eventually and it is not in my control.  But what I put in my mouth is in my control. 

Score!

I don’t do regular weigh-ins.  As far as I’m concerned, the scale is just a tool to measure my progress.  Some people get so wrapped up in what the the number is on the scale and they must get on it every day, obsessively.  If the number goes up, which it inevitably will if you weigh daily, they are devastated.  And I can’t take those teeny losses that come with weighing daily.  I want progress.  I want positive losses.  I need to lose a total of 130 – 140 pounds and if I measured that in ounces, I would have given up long ago.

I weigh when I can tell I have lost.  Or when I am close to a milestone.   And last week, I realized I was close to one of those milestones.  I could tell I had lost more weight over the last few weeks so I got on the scales and, oh my goodness, I was at 48 pounds lost, just 2 pounds away from the 50 pound mark. 

I knew I had been staying within my calories really well and dancing my butt off, literally.  So this morning, I got on the scales again and those 2 pounds were GONE!

So it’s photo time!  I have been measuring my progress with photos at various points.  Now I have a new “Along the Way” picture.  You can see the “Before” as well as more “Along the Way” pictures by clicking on the link at the top of the page, just under the blog header.

So it’s 50 down and about 80 more to go.

I Need Another Blog Like I Need . . .

It was this picture . . . 






And this one . . .
And this one too . . .  






All of these photos were taken in the spring of 2009, two of them in May, one in July.  They are the photos that made me decide that maybe . . . just maybe . . . I needed to change my life.
There you see me in all my 292 pound glory.  There . . . I said it.  292 pounds.  I have not said that out loud to anyone but my doctor and now it is out there . . . in writing.
So I decided to change my life.  You can call it a diet but I choose not to do so.  I have not figured out what to call it yet.  I have another blog where I write about everything in my life, including my weight loss but I needed to say more about this journey and felt a separate blog would be a better place to share more about the struggles and successes I have had over the last few months.
I started the first week of August, 2009.  Since that time, I have lost 46 pounds and today weigh 246.  Again, I have not told anyone that.  But I will share here.  I will share my story, my daily food tracking and calories burned, the weight losses and my real weight, tips for food and alternatives for exercise as well as my thoughts on food, weight loss and diets.
I hope you can identify with my thoughts or feelings and if it helps one person then great.  If not, I know it helps me.