The dreaded food boredom strikes!

Michelle totally nailed it with her recent apprisal of how a fall off the wagon works. I think for the last week I’ve been coasting, pretending my weight will maintain despite my questionable food choices.

My biggest obstacle in any plan is boredom. When I started relying on my recent food routine (granola bars, yogurts, salads for lunch, protein + veggies for dinner), I knew I was running the risk of boredom. And guess what, it’s happened!

I’ve developed a severe fear of salads. This is boredom of routines, but it was also triggered by one especially bad salad. I tried to eat my regular lunch salad one day last week (when I had eaten more for breakfast than normal on a weekday) and it was just utterly disgusting to me. The baby spinach, the fruit, I had to stop myself from gagging, and threw it out after barely four bites. What is that all about? I wonder if it was simply my body trying to tell me that I wasn’t hungry — even though it was a VERY different signal from regular fullness. It really did feel like I was getting seasick from boredom as I ate. Blech.

I spent some quality time in my kitchen this weekend, cleaning and organizing after a couple weeks of chaos, but I still feel like I’m feuding with my kitchen. I make plans to hang out there, cook some tasty healthy food, and then I just don’t show up. Sometimes I feel like I’m just fighting with the dishwasher, which is old and awkwardly placed, so that leaving it open blocks the door to the backyard garden. Sometimes my husband and I have avoided it for weeks, me because I can’t stand the thought of dealing with its awkwardness, and he probably because he didn’t notice! Ha. So the dishes pile up, gradually crowd the counters, and eventually any attempt to cook means committing to at least 15 minutes of cleanup before there’s room to prep.

But the consequences of food boredom and kitchen-avoidance are severe. For instance, I’ve been wasting food because I buy things and don’t use them in time before they go bad. This causes tremendous guilt in that part of my brain that wants to feel good and healthy, but also in the hoarding, penny-pinching part of me that goes nuts at wasted food (both a blessing and a curse, as in everyone’s least favorite fat girl habit, the clean plate club, so clever at six years old and so useless in adulthood!)

So I continue to plan wonderful quiches, salads, grilled chicken breasts, and I continue to avoid making them. And recent meals have started to look suspicious. Last week we ate country bacon (ham) on toast with homemade jam and farmer’s market fontina cheese, with a side of steamed farmer’s market potatoes with butter. It was wonderful! It was also fatty protein, sugar, dairy, carbs and fat. Another time I simply ate sardines (everyone’s favorite superfood!) on crackers, which is okay but makes me feel like a 1920s bachelor living in a rundown hotel, for some reason. Meanwhile, I have peaches slowly turning to mush in the fridge, as well as a massive box of blueberries. Why are they going bad? Because they are destined to become peach cobbler and blueberry crumb bars, both desserts I clearly need to avoid.

I’ve been bad at feeding myself, but very good at feeding the compost heap lately with rotting fruit and vegetables, and I’ve also been good at killing plants which I had helpfully purchased in the hopes of getting yummy healthy results. So far I’ve killed off several eggplant plants (maybe they’re just not suited to the climate), a large basil plant (why transplant when I can just water its dying little pot?), an artichoke (screw it, no room), and other various things. Oh dear oh dear.

The end result is that I’m not eating healthy foods, but I’m not exactly going whole hog (yummy) with some of the bad choices I’ve lined up in the fridge. None of these foods are exactly the wholesome salads with protein that I was consuming a couple weeks ago in a mindless, blissful, healthy daze. I need to get back my smug Yoga attitude again! (This makes me feel a little bit Bridget Jones, though. Inner poise, body is temple, yes yes, bring on the Cadbury.)

My solution over the weekend was to totally give in to one food craving: lasagna. Since the weather was not too hot, I made a batch of homemade meat sauce, complete with eggplant, onion and peppers from the farmer’s market, that simmered for almost two hours on the stove. Then I made it into a lasagna, skipping the ricotta-with-cheese-and-egg-mixture part, so it was pretty much just a giant casserole of sauce, pasta sheets, and cheese. It was incredibly filling, and incredibly yummy. And now that I think about it, it’s not too terribly unhealthy, actually, so I’m starting to feel less guilty about having about five meals’ worth left in the fridge. It’s basically tomatoes and vegetables and sausage meat. The pasta and the cheese content is actually minimal compared to the vast oceans of yummy sauce. (Though the healthy-ish lasagna may be outweighed–literally! haha!–by the small bowl of vanilla ice cream I had afterwards, ice cream which was around because I did make the peach crumble last week and we couldn’t very well have that without vanilla ice cream! This sort of slippery slope logic is so tempting.)

If I’m really going to go with the food cravings, then I need to step up and actually make the blueberry squares this week, too. I might as well. I can only save that giant box of blueberries by cooking most of them, and sending them off (except the few we will eat while they are fresh) with Kirk to impress his workmates once again with my amazing cooking. I’m just going to go ahead and accept the fact that
I’m going to eat some of them. And then they will be out of my house and I can start to make other choices.

If I sound a little bit resigned here, I don’t mean to be. I am not happy with how the scale has crept up a pound from last week, but at least I’m enjoying the ride. I’m hoping that by indulging these food cravings this week, I can help my stomach and brain accept the fact that they are not totally forbidden, thus reducing the need to binge and feel guilty. I wish I could say I’m going to throw out all the unhealthy food and start fresh with a zen palate, but I’m just trying to be realistic, because if I don’t indulge this unhappy mood now, it will only get worse later on.

Magic pills versus the real thing

What would life be like if there was a magic weight loss pill?

My husband and I enjoy ridiculing the various quack weight loss remedy commercials we see on tv, but I always feel a little embarrassed and angry after seeing them, too. Advertising is so crazy — it makes me feel guilty for not trying worthless pills! I get the feeling I should be trying them, because maybe they work! But they just want to make money off of suckers. I know they won’t work. Or not permanently. But sometimes I wonder, what if?

To me, if a magic pill existed, it would let you absorb the exact nutrients you needed, and no more. Somehow it would also make you stop craving junk food and crave whatever you really need, like protein or spinach or a banana, if certain vitamins are running low internally.

I think Alli was supposed to work kind of like this, except it didn’t — more likely it scared you into eating clean because you are constantly afraid of the oily black runs. Seriously, they recommend wearing dark pants when you start out. I don’t think it’s been such a successful drug, because fear of diarrhea is not quite the mechanism people were expecting!

The problem with magic pills is that I doubt there will ever be any such thing as “garbage in, perfection out.” If your body is not stockpiling excess energy in the form of fat, that food has to go somewhere, and there’s not enough fiber in the world to prevent that from coming out the other end!

There’s just never going to be a substitute for being truly in tune with your body, feeding it well, and being active and alive. And I am glad for that. This is a lot like recent reactions against too much processed food in our diets. We are finally learning that there is no real substitute for food grown locally, food that doesn’t require us to poison the soil or drain all its nutrients. After a while, that lettuce that was chemically fertilized and watered in a near-desert and then transported 1,000+ miles to your supermarket is going to taste bland. It’s been bred to withstand mechanical harvesters, refrigeration trucks on the highway and the rigors of conveyor belts and deliveries, not to be tasty food! To my mind, there’s no substitute for a homegrown dinner, a gourmet experience that can transform even the simplest veggie omelette into a sublime distillation of flavors. I’ve been trying hard to lower my food mileage this year, by growing my own garden, buying fruits and veggies in season as much as possible, and shopping the farmer’s markets as often as I can.

But it strikes me now that my quest for local, homegrown food is just like trying to get back in touch with my stomach and my heart (and the connections in between). I think I yearn for an organic food and garden experience in the same way I yearn to be close to my body: I want to be in tune with things, stuff, whatever it is, that ineffable hippie ether of the world. The soil, the body, the seasons, my needs. I’m working to make my body a coherent system again, an organic life that includes exercise and healthy foods, not a scheduled, regimented, ruled existence that eats the “healthy” but flavorless tomato in the dead of winter, or that mindlessly consumes a bowl of ice cream in front of the tv when there is a whole wide beautiful world to be explored outside.

I love the world of science, but it’s so clear to me that it’s yielded amazing victories in the same way it’s yielded questionable mistakes. Cars can be pretty awesome, but reducing my ability to walk everywhere is not very healthy. Refrigeration is an amazing invention, but I don’t like how it makes the food world so industrialized, disconnected from the soil, and ultimately less nutritious. But I’m trying to work within the systems of my world, not fight them. The thing is, we sent pilots and scientists to the moon, not poets, but they’ve all been there anyway.

Forgive me for my hippie digression here, I’m just glad that there’s a real reason to eat good food and get my body moving. It’s not just for the sake of a scientific dictate on inputs and outputs, because real health and connection to the world is the result. I don’t think I understood before how my need to garden and my need to love myself more are so intimately connected.

Gardening: the exercise that also creates healthy food

Lately, it seems that gardening is most of my exercise. On the plus side, I have harvested about a gallon and a half of snap peas and peapods, which make amazingly tasty and healthy snacks, not to mention I’ve prepared about eight million tomatoes, onions, eggplants, zucchini, beans, potatoes and cucumbers for equally tasty and healthy meals later this summer. On the less positive side, I’m not being as active as I’d like to be! I go into the garden daily, but the strenuous tasks (transplanting, heavy weeding) really only occur once per week.

These past two weeks there have been some mitigating factors, including a week-long heatwave that led into a week where Yoga class was canceled, and then this whole July Fourth weekend which has generally thrown my routines off. But also, hey, a good deal of laziness. Not bringing a gym bag to work, not making time after dinner to take a walk when I’d rather watch tv or read, you know how it goes.

The only nice thing is that despite only exercising 2-3 times per week, I’ve been losing weight consistently for the past two weeks! After gaining about five pounds on my ill-fated trip to Chicago, I exercised a bunch and then made some small changes to my diet. On PhysicsDiet.com, where I track my weight and bodyfat percentage, these two weeks of weight loss have slowly tipped my average back down towards loss after it had skewed toward a gain for so long! This feels like a tremendous triumph, much moreso than the loss itself.

I shouldn’t minimize the loss, though. From my highest post-Chicago weight, I have lost a total of eight pounds. Woohoo! It feels really good. I’ve talked about this before, but my eating habits feel really good right now. Two small breakfasts, salad/light lunch, afternoon snack, normal dinner, fewer sugary treats. Nothing groundbreaking, duh, but I do notice that my food cravings have changed dramatically. Is it because I’m eating less sugar in general? Fewer carbs? (But I’m not really avoiding them…afternoon snacks are sometimes crackers, for example.) More leafy greens and more fiber? Am I just happier, so I’m more inclined to make healthy choices for my body? Whatever is going on, it’s working!

Now I just need to add back in a little more exercise and keep this wave of positivity moving in the right direction.

My active weekend

We had an unusually gorgeous weekend here in Portland, Oregon — blue skies and sunshine for two glorious days in a row! For some time now I’ve been asking my husband to go on a bike ride with me, and we finally went on Saturday. We went riding on the portion of the Springwater Corridor that goes from the Sellwood Bridge to just beyond the Ross Island Bridge along the Willamette River.

We drove to the Sellwood Bridge (bottom of the map) and then went north on the path for 3.8 miles and turned around and went back, so nearly 8 miles total. It was so exciting! Riding my bike out in the real world, just like a real person! (My neighborhood bike rides include traffic and occasional pedestrians, but they don’t feel like The Real World.) The path is mostly level and goes through a beautiful wildlife preserve. It was good practice for me to be around other bikers and walkers and dogs and such, to learn how to maneuver and pass and look behind me without falling off my bike.

I did feel a bit guilty about driving there, because it is only 3.2 miles from our house, according to Google Maps (that’s $1 in gas roundtrip, at $4.19/gal and 26 mpg). But the first part of that route goes down a scary steep hill, and then through some trafficky bits of Milwaukie and Sellwood. I don’t know if I’m ready to handle that hill (not to mention return back up it) or the cars! It can’t be that bad, though, because my husband rode his bike to work today for the first time, along the same path we would have taken if we hadn’t driven on Saturday. And he did it on a fixed gear bike! Surely I can handle it on my 21-speed cruiser. I have to keep reminding myself if I use my brakes properly, hills will be just fine. It’s only if I panic that hills become a problem — sometimes I envision grabbing the front brake by accident and flipping over the handlebars (my brother earned some face gravel doing this when he was young), or slowing down so much that I wobble and fall over. I know, I know, I need to confront this fear! It’s really irrational. (Though I want to say, have you seeeeeen that hill? Ohmigawd it is so steep the sheer g-forces of descent will shatter my bike into tiny bits!)

Aside from the awesome bike ride on Saturday, I spent a lot of time this weekend in the garden. I needed to transfer all my tomato seedlings into one-gallon pots (Hey Amy! Great minds think alike!), which was nice mild exercise for a Sunday. Now my plants are all happily assembled in their sun room on new shelves, and my garden is looking beautiful. Here are my shelves of newly transplanted tomatoes:

As a very, very nice coda to my weekend, this morning after my ten-minute cardio + abs circuit, I weighed in with a three pound loss. Some of this is dehydration, from a brief bout of stomach trouble last night, but some of it is hopefully a real loss and normalization, getting me closer to my weight from before the Chicago Work Travel Food Freakout. So I was very happy this morning! I have really felt the difference of carrying around those three tiny extra pounds during the last week — if i want to be fit, I need to do a lot more exercise (I’m averaging 3-4 times per week right now), and right now my heart and muscles are just not up to the task. Aside from everything good I’ve got going on, I haven’t maintained consistent exercise, which makes it harder to work on self-acceptance. I don’t want to accept myself as a lazy person! I want to love myself so fiercely that I will go on a walk even if I’m too scared to show myself to the world. So it feels good to have this small gain as proof that change is possible, and I hope it will help me as I pursue my fitness and nutrition goals this week.