On Hunger

So, there are a number of topics I keep thinking of writing about, things on which I have opinions. I sort of balk at posting about these things, because it’s possible (er, likely) that other people will have their own opinions that might not match up with my thoughts and experiences, and there might be silent (or not so silent) judging that takes place. Also, because I get distracted by shiny things and flying cats and post about them instead. But I’ve been thinking about writing this for a while now, so here are my thoughts and experiences on eating and hunger:

I’ll warn you that this is going to get long and rambly, so brace yourself.

Okay, I’ve already posted once on eating and pickiness, and I started talking there about calorie counting and my departure from it. But just to recap and maybe fill in a bit more background information:
I signed up and started training for a 5k when I was still living in London, sometime in March or April of 2006. I’d never bothered with any sort of scheduled exercise at that point, and I’d certainly never thought of myself as a runner. But I used the beginner’s plan from the Runner’s World UK site, and slowly went from running in sixty-second bursts to being able to finish an entire 5k. I loved it! However, despite the fact that I was now running three or four days a week, I felt heavy and blobby — even more so than before I’d started training.
So I decided to keep track of my calorie intake for a week. It was supposed to be a purely observational exercise, because I really had no clue about the calorie content of food, much less my own consumption. At that point, I had made a habit of keep a bag of pumpkin seeds in my desk drawer, because I saw them as a highly preferable snack to the chocolate bars and biscuits from the shop next door. Problem was, I routinely downed handful after handful of the seeds as I sat at my desk. I estimated that I was consuming anywhere from 500-1000 calories of just pumpkin seeds on any given day. Whoa!
‘Little’ things like that kept revealing themselves to me, and I started dropping or cutting back on the foods with the highest concentration of calories — basically, anything too fatty or sugary. I started doing that around the middle of June 2006 and kept up with my running, and slowly but surely, I started losing weight.
Now, I’m 5′ 9″ (175 cm), which isn’t towering, but it’s tall enough that a little extra weight never made me look chubby (as an adult), but it was enough to make me feel uncomfortable in my own skin. I’d never experienced what it was to feel ‘skinny’ or ‘slender’ or ‘fit’ at that point in my life, having been a slightly overweight child, and so I certainly didn’t see myself as any of those things, regardless of what I may have actually looked like.
Anyway, by the time I moved back to the US at the end of October 2006, I’d lost about 20-25 pounds. I was keeping track of everything I ate and its calorie content, and I’d worked out a pretty great system, I thought. It was all about the math, what when in, and what came out (in the form of exercise). Flawless!
And so it went for about a year after that point. Because I work from home and could control my meals, it wasn’t very difficult to make sure I ate the right things in the right quantities. I got very good at making meals with a very high volume-to-calorie ratio, because I loved the feeling of being full. Bingo, bango, right?
Well, bingo bango, except for when friends wanted me to eat out with them. Or when there was a holiday involving feasts. Or when my mom baked something amazing and wanted to share it with me. Or when I baked something amazing and wanted more than a sliver. Or when I passed an ice cream shop. Or when I was really hungry, but I wasn’t ‘supposed’ to eat for another hour, because I would run out of the day’s calorie allotment if I ate any earlier than that. Or when I really, really just wanted a second bowl of cereal.
Okay, maybe not so flawless.
There seems to be a lot of obvious problems there, but it didn’t seem so painful at the time. I learned to deal with situations and to say ‘no’ and cultivated a willpower made of steel. After all, I was never starving myself; I was just being sensible with my food choices. Too sensible sometimes, but still.
There was a bit of a downward slide at the end of last year, wherein I stopped taking the long walks my body had become accustomed to, and I started eating out more, with friends, at family gatherings, in restaurants. A typical holiday slide, that was all. I didn’t have a person-scale at home (just a food scale), but I started feeling uncomfortable in my body again. By the time January 2008 rolled around, I was up ten pounds from where I really wanted to be.
When we got back from London in January, I resolved to get back on the straight and narrow, and if there’s one thing I’m excellent at doing, it’s setting rules for myself and following them. I love strict and complicated plans, and while I don’t have an addictive personality (particularly for booze — I try to drink and just wind up thinking, ‘Meh. Why?’), I have a highly obsessive personality. If I decide to do something, I do it 100% (anything more than that is just silly).
I joined the gym and started running again three or four times a week. Thank goodness for that, because this winter/spring was a difficult time, and I would have gone more than slightly bonkers if I hadn’t also been racking up the endorphins. Then I got plantar fasciitis (which I still think sounds like my foot became a fascist), so I started with yoga. But yoga isn’t much in the way of a cardio workout, so I also started doing the elliptical machine. There were weeks that I was at the gym six days out of seven, and it made me feel good.
I was also back to calorie counting, of course, even on the weekends and when I went out with friends. There were a few days I allowed myself to indulge — when I hosted brunch with a friend, on my mom’s birthday, etc. And since I was sometimes burning 500 calories on the elliptical, I was able to eat out occasionally. And since math is math, I lost the weight I wanted to lose.
But I was starting to realize something — I constantly thought about food. Newsflash, right? Okay, of course I constantly thought about food — I love the stuff, and moreover, cooking and baking are two of my favourite hobbies. But I was thinking about food in a way that I didn’t want to. I always thought about what my next meal would be, what I wished I could be eating but couldn’t, how good X or Y would taste, etc. I was hardly eating any sweets during a regular week, but I would watch the Paula Deen show and watch her eating sweets. It was kind of insane.
I think most of us who subscribe to diets or strict ways of eating like to think that we’re outside the normal temptations that others succumb to. But you know what? If you really want to eat something, really, really, and you don’t let yourself eat it time after time. . . you WILL eventually wind up eating it. And not just some of it, but ALL of it, for all those time you didn’t. I know, DUH. So obvious, isn’t it? But you think you’re beyond that — I did, anyway.
I had a series of incidents this winter and spring that proved to me that I very much was NOT beyond that — all my polite refusals day after day would result in binges. Not the sort of binges I’ve read about; I never went to the supermarket and stocked up on all the forbidden items I’d been craving and then downed most of them on the car ride home. But I would eat enough of my trigger foods (cereal being the number one, all sweet things right behind on the list) to make myself feel ill physically and mentally.
It was really tiring. I started seriously thinking, ‘This is not making me happy.’ Having to deny myself, having my head full of thoughts about food, the feeling of stuffing my face when I decided to ‘look away’ (because that’s what a binge feels like — ‘Quick, get it down while she’s not paying attention!’). For the first time, I just felt like I couldn’t possibly go on like this into the future. And it all stemmed back to calorie counting, because the problem was with the math. It allowed me to keep tabs on everything, to constantly know where I was at, and to constantly think about where I should be going.
It was the binging that made me realize that this was a problem, because it was very clearly atypical. It wasn’t just ‘eating too much at my favourite restaurant,’ it was an attempt at filling something up. I can’t remember where I first came across the terms ‘conscious eating’ and ‘intentional eating’, but they led me to Geneen Roth, and this book.
The funny thing is that a lot of Roth’s books are written about/for women who routinely overeat and binge, and who want to adopt normal eating patterns so they can lose weight. I didn’t need to lose weight, but I did need to learn to eat normally. Because, oh my gosh, how weird is it that eating is so basic and yet most of us don’t know how to do it?
The first thing we learn is to ignore the signals from our body. I read a really interesting article a while back about child development and the fact that a toddler’s rate of growth (and therefore caloric requirements) drop significantly during the second year of his or her life. A baby triples its birth weight in the first year, but it takes another twelve months to quadruple it. What does that mean? That a child will be significantly less hungry during those toddler years, and because they haven’t yet learned to ignore their body’s messages, they’ll want to eat less. But what do we see so many parents do? Beg and plead and force their children to eat anyway (an urge which I can totally understand, of course!). So from very early on, we learn that our bodies are wrong — and develop an appetite for all those sugary/salty/fatty things our parents tempt us with, if you ask me.
Then enter adolescence and young-adulthood, a time when many women decide they’re going to change the way they eat, and the great era of dieting begins. Hunger doesn’t mean anything, because you’re not allowed to eat whatever and whenever you want. You eat according to a clock or somebody else’s menu or a system of points. You don’t have cravings because your body needs something, you have them because you’re ‘bad’.
And that’s pretty much where I found myself. Hungry and with issues.
It’s such a strange circle that I’m having trouble figuring out where to begin describing it. A lifetime of having ignored my body’s cues, for one reason or another (and there are plenty to choose from: purposefully ignoring hunger in order to lose weight, an industry that’s created food-products that trick your body, listening to outside signals instead of internal, etc), resulted in a lack of trust with myself. I couldn’t trust that I would eat when and what I needed to, and I definitely couldn’t trust that, if I gave into cravings, I would ever stop.
That’s something Roth is big on, and which will make perfect sense to anybody who has had problems with binging — ‘If I let myself eat what I want, I’ll never stop eating.’ It’s a lie, at least in the big picture, but it certainly seems true on a short-term basis. I can’t have one bowl of ice cream, because then I’ll have ten (or three, or whatever is ‘too much’). So I don’t have any ice cream, until I can’t stand it anymore, at which point I indulge and wind up having too much. Theory proven. So you decide that your body’s cues are bad or lying to you, and you ignore them, and it all goes ’round and ’round.
I wanted so badly to learn to eat normally and to build up truly healthy eating habits (not just habits that appeared healthy on the surface), to lose the guilt that I associated with eating whatever I wanted (which far predates my calorie counting, I should add! Farrrrrrr.). So that’s the journey I’m on now.
I started the first week in April, which I can remember, because it was the weekend I had to take S to the ER. I went that entire morning without eating, since I was woken up and in the car at about 6:30am. By the time I was able to leave, it was almost noon, and I’d been thinking about what I wanted to eat for several hours (gosh, it takes a long time for not very much to happen in hospitals). I had a very specific craving — I wanted a cake donut with chocolate icing from Wuollet Bakery, which happened to be on my way home. So that’s what I got.
Yep, it was pretty good. It was starchy and sugary and did the job of quickly getting my blood sugar up and running. And it also filled something emotionally; it was comforting. There are no two ways about it: food is tied in with emotions, and you can either let that work for you or against you. At first, I cut the donut in half, thinking that I shouldn’t eat any more than that. But I wanted the second half, so I ate it and then thought about how I felt. Not hungry anymore, but not gross. I hadn’t been ready to stop eating Donut after that first half, but by the time I had finished the whole thing, I didn’t want any more. Donut had lost its appeal. Which is saying something, considering how much I like Donut.
So I’ve been trying to explore my desires and limits. I used to be really afraid of hunger, because it meant I should do something about it when I usually wasn’t ‘allowed’. I tried to pack as much food into my calorie allotment as possible to get past that hunger. And when I ‘looked away’, I tried to pack as much food in as possible, period. In fact, the opposite of not eating when I was hungry (most of the time) became eating even when I was full (binging). Which was part of the reason I didn’t trust myself to eat intuitively — that feeling that I’d constantly be on the lookout for something to put in my stomach, even when my stomach really didn’t want anything. I love eating when I’m hungry, but eating when I’m full just ruins a good meal.
I’ve been making a lot of discoveries about myself. There’s a point where I can be pretty darn stuffed, but still feel able to go for a walk — that’s not so bad. It’s that feeling of oh-my-god-I-can’t-stand-up-straight that I want to avoid. If I eat just to the point of being satisfied while I’m working at home, I’ll be hungry again in about two hours. If I eat rather a lot while I’m out and about during the weekend, it might be five hours before I start really thinking about food again. Obvious, but these are the things I used to ignore.
And it doesn’t take as much food to fill me up as I thought. If I know that I can eat something as soon as I get hungry again, I don’t have to worry about having to make a meal ‘last’ a long time, so I don’t need to get as full. Since early April, I’ve been a pound or two either side of the same weight, which happens to be pretty low for me. Partly it’s the fact that I’ve been more active as it warms up outside, but I like to think that intuitive eating (or my attempts at getting there) really suits my body.
I’ve gotten to the point where I look forward to being hungry, for the most part. I love to eat, and if I’m hungry, that’s what I get to do. It’s hard to go from calorie counting to eating totally carefree, and I definitely haven’t done that. Part of my brain often tries to keep a tally on what I’ve eaten. But some days it doesn’t, and those days are becoming more frequent.
Things I’m still working on: Getting over the feeling of wasting food. I absolutely hate to waste food, whether that means leaving something on my plate or letting it go bad in the fridge. And for a good reason, too — it’s not in the best interest of my pocketbook or the planet to buy food that will be thrown away. But sometimes I make something that I don’t really want to eat, and if I can eat anything I want, I shouldn’t really have to eat it. And if I’m done with Donut halfway through the donut, yet I keep eating it out of a sense of duty — and I don’t enjoy it, maybe even feel worse for having et it — how is that not a waste too? So I’m trying to come to terms with that.
I’m also trying to learn what I like and what I only think I like. This happens with a lot of ‘forbidden’ foods, ones I loved once-upon-a-time but have eaten so rarely in recent memory that my lust for them is much greater than my love. It also comes with reflecting on how I feel after I’ve et something. Really sugary things leave my stomach feeling acidic, and donuts can actually be really greasy-feeling. If I have a scone and jam (exciting!), I often feel heavy and uncomfortable afterwards. If I have a whole-wheat English muffin with peanut butter and sliced banana, I feel satisfied without feeling dragged down. It’s not just that one is ‘healthy’ and one isn’t; that’s how my body reacts to those things. It gives me something to think about when I’m deciding what I want to eat. If I REALLY want to eat a scone, I will, but I have to do so with the knowledge of how I’m likely to feel afterwards.
I’ve also been admitting to certain quirks in my personality. Some things I’ve always known, like the fact that I get obsessive about my interests. Others have made themselves clear more recently, like my penchant for imposing rules on myself. The freedom of intuitive eating has been beyond refreshing, but at the same time, I keep looking for new guidelines. Don’t think I don’t see my interest in local eating for what it is (at least in part). I need to either find a way to get past that need for rules or at least make sure the rules are wholly positive to my well-being.
So, over three thousand words later. . . I can’t really imagine having done anything differently and having still wound up at this point. I couldn’t have jumped straight from the eating habits I grew up with to this path towards intuitive eating, because there was a lot to learn between those two points. Calorie counting did that for me. It was an education in how food works, what acceptable portions are, etc. I’m not sure I would have tried as many new foods and learned to make them for myself if I hadn’t made those changes and restrictions to my diet.
And I spent a fair amount of time defending the calorie counting and the structured eating, not, I feel, because I was lying to myself and didn’t want to admit that I was wrong, but because it was working for me. I mean, if you want to lose ten pounds, I can tell you how to lose ten pounds (hint: math). It didn’t happen immediately, but when I started thinking that my lifestyle wasn’t sustainable, I decided to change it. I always felt in control of the situation, and it was when I started to feel out of control (with binging) that I knew I had to do something.
So, I think that’s that. I mean, there are dozens of tangents I could have gone on and didn’t, and maybe those are posts for another time. I’m not sure why it seemed important to write all this, apart from writing’s sake, but you can decide. Maybe it speaks to you, where ever you are in your own eating journey. Maybe you’re just nosy and like to read all about other people’s experiences. It doesn’t matter.
It would be great if you want to leave a comment (there’s nothing worse than writing a mini-manifesto/biography and then thinking nobody’s read it!). But comments are always moderated, so if you say something negative, it won’t be published, just so you know.
The end.