Focusing on Intuitive Eating

I can’t remember exactly how I heard about Intuitive Eating. More than likely it was through the blogosphere.

I read Evelyn Tribole’s book, Intuitive Eating, A Revolutionary Program The Works, and I also really got a lot out of Goodbye Ed, Hello Me by Jenni Schaeffer.

It’s amazing to me how reading certain books at certain times can be so impactful on our lives. I don’t think the books would have affected me as much if I had read them before I realized I had an eating disorder. I think everything happens, or people/things come into our lives, for a reason, and those books came to me at a time when my mind was open to accept what they were saying.

I had been toying with the idea of making the transition from daily calorie counting, weighing/measuring food portions, to intuitive eating for about a week or two in mid March. Due to a combination of therapy, blogging and reading books, I felt ready to trust myself and my body to try this totally new way of eating and thinking about food. I was trying to decide when the best day it would be to start based on some other events that were going on in my life. Do I wait until those events passed, what day would make the most sense to get started with this, how exactly do I begin?

In the middle of wavering about when and how to start, before going to bed one Friday night, I read in Jenni Schaeffer’s book about taking the leap off the mountain without a parachute. I had my answer. The next day, with little fanfare, I didn’t count my calories or weigh/measure my food portions. I took the huge leap of faith. I finally had the trust in myself that I could listen to my body and that my body would not do me wrong. I realized that food is just that, food; it is not something that has magical powers over me. I control it, it does not control me.

That was over three (update – four) months ago and though there are days here and there, especially in the beginning, when I still sometimes tally the calories in my head (long-time habits are hard to break!), I still did/do not write it down as I had done for decades.

I still feel like a work in progress. I am now pretty good at reading my hunger cues, but am still working on my satiety cues. (My cues have been thrown off after 30+ years of compulsive overeating and bingeing, so I understand it’s normal that it will take some time for my body to send me the right messages and for me to interpret them properly.) I have however, maintained my weight, so I guess I’ve been making good choices.

Right now things are a bit tricky because though I’ve always worked out 3-4 days a week, I’m training for my first triathlon, which is more intense than my normal workouts, and it has thrown off my hunger cues. My appetite, oddly enough, has been reduced greatly. I know eating less would not be good for my training or for maintaining my weight, so I have had to eat even when I’m not hungry in order to keep my body properly fueled for my training.

I feel like I’m walking a fine line between eating more because I know my body needs the fuel, and eating “just because” I can, bordering on compulsive eating. I have decided to weigh myself twice a month instead of once a month to help keep a tab on my food intake in relation to my triathlon training. As I’m dedicated to doing this first triathlon, I am equally dedicated to not blow my 2+ years of binge-free hard work and more recently, IE, but it’s difficult at times to keep my old ways from overtaking me again.

Still, letting go of the calorie counting, weighing and measuring food portions and making no foods forbidden has been freeing and empowering. When you stop framing foods as “bad” it takes away its attraction. Everything in moderation actually has meaning in my life now. So do the terms “eating to live” instead of “living to eat.”

I love and embrace the new mindset of no food is forbidden, although I do choose to still make healthy choices, for instance, not choosing a meal with a cream sauce or one that is fried. Although when it comes to dessert, the sky is the limit, just in moderation. =)

Follow up to when I wrote this about a month ago… with some daily self affirmations I was able to get my head back on straight and am back to IE. In fact, with my training intensifying as the race is getting closer, I am hungry almost all day long, so no problems following my hunger cues there!

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

If you just started reading my blog, this will fill you in on where I’m coming from. If you already know my story, just skip the post below. =)

My eating disorder story began over 30 years ago when I was about 8 or 9 years old, when I became a compulsive overeater and binger. I had a mother who hid junk food from me because she said/knew I would eat more than my share and not leave enough for the family to enjoy, and I had a father who teased me in my teen years about my rear end being big. He thought he was a riot and that I knew he was teasing, but he had no idea how that “teasing” affected me.

For many years I binged on sweets like there was no tomorrow, always hiding the wrappers, packages and bags out of shame. My weight ballooned up and would come down when I would diet, only to balloon back up again. It was an ugly cycle.

As I got older and got married, it continued. When we went to parties or events, my mind was busy centered on the food, instead of enjoying time with friends. When we hosted parties, I loved cleaning up because then I got to devour leftover desserts when everyone had gone. I lived to eat, instead of eating to live.

I thought about food all the time. I would think about what I would eat next before even finishing what I was currently eating.

My recovery first began in December of 2007, a few months before I turned 40, when one night, the words “compulsive overeater” somehow popped into my head. I got on my laptop and did some googling, and found my way to the Overeaters Anonymous website. They had a list of questions that asked something to the effect of “are you one of us?” I answered “yes” to most of them.

This was both horrific and wonderful at the same time. There was the shame of having a sickness, a disease, an eating disorder, but at the same time, being an A-type personality, I was thrilled there was a name for what I was doing and realized that I could get help.

So my passion then became getting help for myself. I went to OA meetings, I found a therapist, and I got honest with myself and my husband. I wrote him a very long, cathartic letter revealing all of my food/eating secrets. He knew I liked to eat sweets, but had no idea that I did so much eating in secret and how much I thought about food/eating.

I cried off and on for days. Decades of my secrets had finally come bubbling up to the surface.

OA helped me to realize that I was not alone. Through therapy I learned that the things I mentioned earlier in my childhood are what turned me to the comfort of food. I was not getting the nurturing and love that I needed from my family, so I found it in food. This pattern repeated itself over and over again as I got older and had become deeply ingrained even though I married an amazing man almost 13 years ago.

I have been binge-free since I realized and embraced that I had an eating disorder. I lost the extra weight I had been carrying and have maintained the loss for 20 months now. I did this by counting calories, weighing and measuring food portions, and working out. I also weighed myself every day.

Oddly enough, I weighed myself and have counted calories for over 20 years actually, even when the numbers were astronomically high. I felt like food was the only thing I could control in my life.

In January 2010, I started to just get on the scale once a month. The mere thought of that gave me heart palpitations, but it turned out to be quite simple. Then in late March, a certain calm or peace came over me and I decided I was ready to delve into the world of Intuitive Eating. Six months prior, the mere thought of giving up my calorie counting, weighing/measuring my food portions would have had me laughing in your face, but at the end of March, all the therapy, eating disorder books I read and blogging gave me the awarenesses I needed to make the giant leap of faith.

Almost three months later, I can’t tell you how empowering and freeing it is to have dropped that white-knuckle grip of control I had on my food. I have come to learn that “normal” eaters overeat occasionally. The difference is that they don’t focus on it and beat themselves up about it. They just put it behind them and move on to the next meal or day.

The “voices” in my head that roared like a lion when I was in the throws of compulsive overeating and bingeing have become the whispers of a mouse.

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

On Tuesday, my husband showed me a really interesting article in the Wall Street Journal. It was called “Eating to Live or Living to Eat? Stomach vs. Brain: Discovering Why Some People Can Resist Dessert While Others Can’t” By Melinda Beck.

It was a really interesting article and I wanted to share some quotes with you…

“Scientists have learned much more about how appetite works in the brain and “nowadays, scientists are using sophisticated brain-imaging technology to understand how the lure of delicious food can overwhelm the body’s built-in mechanism to regulate hunger and fullness, what’s called “hedonic” versus “homeostatic” eating.

Two conferences this week on obesity are each examining aspects of how appetite works in the brain and why some people ignore their built-in fullness signals. Scientists hope that breakthroughs will lead to ways to retrain people’s thinking about food or weight-loss drugs that can target certain brain areas.

“If you are of normal weight, your homeostatic mechanisms are functioning and controlling this region of the brain,” says lead investigator Dana Small. “But in the overweight group, there is some sort of dysfunction in the homeostatic signal so that even though they weren’t hungry, they were vulnerable to these external eating cues.”

Studies have found that a diet of sweet, high-fat foods can indeed blunt the body’s built-in fullness signals. Most of them emanate from the digestive tract, which releases chemical messengers including cholecystokinin, glucagon-like peptide and peptide YY when the stomach and intestines are full. Those signals travel up to the brain stem and then the hypothalamus, telling the body to stop eating.

There are plenty of other metabolic mysteries, too: Why are some “foodies” who get intense pleasure from eating able to stop when they’re full and others aren’t? Is the tendency to eat way past fullness genetic or learned behavior, and how much can it be changed?”

Here is what I found most fascinating, as this is what applies to where I’m at right now…

“Some of the most intriguing imaging studies have peered into the brains of people who have lost significant weight and kept it off through diet and exercise alone.

Angelo Del Parigi, a neuroimaging scientist, located 11 “post-obese” subjects who had dieted down to the lean range. In his studies for the National Institutes of Health’s diabetes research center in Phoenix, Dr. Del Parigi found that food still elicited strong responses in the middle insula and the hippocampus, brain areas involving addiction, reward, learning and memory.

This suggests that the temptation to see food as pleasure doesn’t go away. “Post-obese people are extremely prone to regain weight,” says Dr. Del Parigi. “The only way they have to counteract these strong predispositions is by having a very controlled lifestyle, with restrained food intake and exercise.”

He and his colleagues at the NIH have observed that in PET scans, too. In another study, 17 people who had successfully lost weight had more activity in the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain involved in impulse-control in response to food than people who were still obese.

In short, successful weight losers seemed to have having second thoughts about eating on impulse, says Dr. Del Parigi. “These people see a piece of pie that is very inviting, but they think, ‘No, I have to diet. Otherwise, I will become obese again. I will suppress that pleasure,’ ” he says.”

A sidebar to the article, was a poll called “The Power of Food Scale”. Now that I have recovered from my compulsive overeating / bingeing, I found that my answers to the questions right now, compared to how I answered them a year ago, were very different. This was a good thing.

However, I guess that is why, even though I’m basically recovered, according to this research, food/eating will always be somewhat of a struggle for me, for the rest of my life.

I kind of expected that to be the case, but now I’ve seen it in black and white.

For some reason I cannot put the link here, so if you want to read the article, please cut and paste this into your browser -

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704288204575363072381955744.html?KEYWORDS=eating+to+live

On another note, did anyone see the Oprah follow-up show with author Geneen Roth? Pretty powerful stuff.

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

Unless it pours, I’m set to do a sort of trial race on Wednesday, 7/7. It is a duathlon that involves the same distance open water swim as my tri , followed by a 5k run. It would be really helpful for me to do at least one open water swim before my triathlon, so I won’t be shocked from doing all my training in a pool, where I can see clearly, to going to seeing lord only knows what kind of aquatic life and other junk in the open water. Though I will only be 6 weeks into my 12 week training, it will be a scary test to see how my training is coming along. Overall it should be great experience for me.

So while all that is great, there is a bit of negativeness in all this… I’m still battling with my eating, i.e. eating enough to fuel my body for my training, but not taking advantage and crossing over the line back to compulsive overeating. I’m trying to listen to my satiety cues, but with some carte blanche to eat more, I know darn well I am ignoring my cues and it has to STOP.

I have not binged, but I have definitely been exhibiting some ED’d behaviors

The past couple of weeks have been stressful. I’ve written a little about it in my last few posts, so don’t want to bore you again with my issues. Suffice to say that on top of those, I have been exposed six days/night out of eight, to buffets of desserts. Tough for even a “normal” eater to deal with! Once a week or every two weeks eating a little too much is “normal” and I’m totally good with it.

But for the past few solid weeks, the fact remains that while before I was just standing next to the line in the sand, that if I stepped over would lead me to the “dark side”, I feel like I’m now standing on top of the line.

I got on the scale to touch base to see how I was doing and I have in fact gained weight. I’m totally fine with that, but I don’t want to keep gaining. I’m sure some of it is muscle from the training, but I can’t kid myself, I know that some of it is from my carte blanche eating.

I need the rope of common sense, the lifeline reminder of how hard I’ve worked to recover from my eating disorder, the help and support to keep me from being drawn back into the world of compulsive overeating and bingeing, to pull me off of “the line” and back into making the right choices.

Today is my last BBQ. I’m going in with the mindset of not giving myself carte blanche anymore. I’ve sampled and enjoyed enough junk five times already in seven days. I know they are unusual circumstances, but I need to go back to making better choices for myself.

Sorry for the rambling thoughts, thanks, as always, for listening!

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

Saturday will make seven weeks of no weighing/measuring of food or counting calories, though I do admit to still doing some tallying in my head once in a while. Long-standing habits are hard to break! For what it’s worth, I used to write down all the counts and use a calculator to tally. But now since I stopped officially counting, if I feel the urge to get an idea of how much I’ve eaten, I have to figure out everything in my head, which is quite a daunting task for my pea brain!

I had a pretty big test over the weekend. We had a dessert event Friday night, a dinner and dessert event Saturday night (where we ate dinner at about 9:00 pm, VERY late for me) and then a luncheon on Sunday for Mother’s Day. (Happy belated mother’s day to all the moms!)

All three times I did not frame any foods as forbidden, and I allowed myself to taste things to see if they were worth it. Some things were, some things weren’t. If they tasted good, I enjoyed them, but without bingeing.

After the third day in a row, because my body was probably in a bit of shock after eating treats that it hasn’t had much of since I’ve been binge-free, along with eating dinner very late one of those nights, I didn’t feel too good both physically and mentally.

Physically, my stomach was feeling full throughout a good portion of those three days, something I’m really not used to anymore. (On a side note, I have been pms’ing for a week on this estrogen supplement, so I’m sure there was some bloating going on. TMI?). Mentally, I didn’t like the feeling of being full.

Actually, both those things worried me a bit. Though I did not binge, there were some bad/disordered behaviors going on in my head. Basically, overeating a little bit at these three events, three days in a row, made me a little nervous in that – would I go back to being a “normal” eater, someone who can overindulge a little bit at a special event, but then go right back to normal eating the next meal or the next day? As a compulsive overeater for decades, it would be SO easy to slip back into my old disordered ways. So would I slide right back into that sickness or would I be able to keep my act together, be the recovering/recovered person that I have worked so hard at being, and bounce right back?

The answer is… I was able to get back to being a recovering person, although on Monday I was still a little bit pick-y with some leftovers.

On top of the 3-event weekend, I also discovered that the 12-pack of caffeine free soda which I drank seven cans of during the course of the week, was not diet soda, as I usually drink. So there was an extra 1050 calories right there. Ugh! To add insult to injury, I dropped a can on the floor and it exploded onto just about every wall, pantry door, table and chair within a 5′ radius in my kitchen. Talk about a sticky mess!

I’m due to get on the scale for the first time in a month on Tuesday. Though my clothes still feel pretty much the same, my jeans slightly less loose, I will touch base on the scale just to see what’s what.

Another good recovery step for me – I had my annual physical with my primary care physician yesterday. Though I’ve only known I’ve had an eating disorder since December of 2007, I came clean to my doctor about it. Add him to the short list of people who know.

On another note… There were two great eating disorder-related shows on yesterday, if you didn’t see them, try to check them out on line.

First, on Oprah, she interviewed author Geneen Roth about her latest book called “Women, Food and God”. Here’s the link to the show on Oprah’s website. (I have previously posted about Roth’s awesome book “Breaking Free from Compulsive Eating” here, here and here.) I think I’m going to be picking up this new book. Oprah rattled off a quick list of guidelines at the end of the show and one of them was something to the effect of – to eat in full view of others, which struck a chord with me.

Then on Dr. Phil, he did an “in your face” with a girl who has been suffering from anorexia and bulimia for the past nine years, and her family. It was pretty disturbing. Here’s a link to the show on Dr. Phil’s website.

Lastly, I’m going to remain on “blog break” to enjoy being more present and until I figure some more things out, but I will check in again soon. I apologize for not reading your blogs and keeping up. I hope you are all doing well!

I’ll be back, so please bear with me. If you have any questions or want to contact me, please feel free! love2eatinpa@gmail.com.

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

This bracelet came out of a brainstorm session between me and my first therapist in January of 2009. It was when I first realized I had an eating disorder (after 30 years of bingeing / compulsive overeating but didn’t know there was a name for what I was doing) and sought help.

The therapist asked me what I was doing to mark the daily achievements of each day I didn’t binge. I was like, um, nothing. So she suggested that we come up with a way to acknowledge every binge-free day because that was a victory. We tossed some ideas around and ended up with this bracelet idea.

I went to the craft store and bought a few items to get started. I was very excited. I went to the jewelry making section. I bought some thin black cord, which also included clasps in the packaging and some beads that I liked.

I started just putting one bead on for each day in a row I was binge-free. Once I pretty much strung the daily beads around my wrist, I bought a different pack of beads that I used to represent weeks. Here is a photo of the 8-week mark I hit in March of 2008. (Eight beads representing eight weeks)

8 weeks

Then when those weekly beads filled up most of the bracelet, I went back to the craft store and bought a different pack of slightly different beads to represent months and I would just put the months on. Slowly those months and weeks built up to a year, so I bought slightly different beads to represent a year. Here is a pic of it from last November, when I hit the 23-month mark. (one yearly bead plus 11 monthly beads)

23 months

This last photo was taken last month, when I hit 26 months. (two yearly beads plus two monthly beads)

26 months

It really is just a silly, simple thing, but I wear it every day. It was, and still is, a badge of honor for me. I don’t want to have to take off the beads and start all over again, so I’m doing everything in my power to keep that from happening.

I’m not sure if that is healthy or not in my recovery, but I have chosen to make this bracelet and what it stands for to be very important.

What do you to mark the milestones in your recovery?

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

Like most people, I’m assuming, I feel hungry when I wake up in the morning. The problem is that I feel different types of hunger and I don’t know how to interpret them.

Let me see if I can put what’s in my brain onto this page. I’m having one of those days where I can’t seem to find the right words to express myself (unfortunately, a common occurrence!)….

There are some nights when I eat dinner at my normal time (roughly 6:30 or so) and I sometimes feel a little hungry a couple hours later. Sometimes I honor my hunger and have a light snack, sometimes I don’t.

Then there are other nights, where due to an event or other circumstances, I eat dinner much later than that and on top of that, sometimes eat a little more than normal.

So here is my question …. how do you know if that hunger you feel in the morning is from not eating enough the day/night before, or if it is a different kind of hunger because I ate later at night, perhaps ate a bit more than usual, and I feel like it’s a hunger/craving for more overeating?

Am I crazy or can there be a hunger that stems from not eating enough compared to a hunger from eating enough, perhaps more than usual, that is almost a craving? Does this make any sense at all?

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

Through all my years of compulsive overeating / bingeing, my body weight has fluctuated between 105-172 pounds. During those times, the things that were important to me were – how I looked and where in my closet are the clothes that will fit the particular weight I was at.

I calculated a few months ago that, not including my two pregnancies, I had lost and gained a good 250 pounds. It never even occurred to me that changes were happening on the inside of my body, not just the outside.

Well, I just had a scary eye-opener. The April 2010 issue of “Women’s Health” magazine has an interesting article about the facts of what happens to your body when you lose and regain weight over and over again.

Everything here is straight out of the magazine…

“If you go on a very strict diet and gain the weight back quickly, you might lose a lot of muscle and regain a lot of fat,” says Keith Ayoob, M.D., R.D., an associate professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. “Then your metabolism operates on a slower idle, which means it’s going to be harder to lose weight as time goes on.”

The more times you yo-yo, the theory goes, the more fat your body gains in each rebound. Because muscle burns 10 times more calories than fat does, your metabolism eventually will slow to a crawl.

“Losing and gaining regularly takes a huge toll on your body,” Ayoob says. Beyond aesthetics, such as loss of skin elasticity, regaining weight burdens your arteries and skeletal system and may stress the liver, which can become covered in fat.

Yo-yoing also does a number on your ticker: A study in Clinical Cardiology found that women who weight cycle five times or more during their lifetimes may be damaging their hearts in the process.

But perhaps most startling is the dangerous and lasting effect weight cycling has on the immune system. According to the first study of the long-term impacts of yo-yo dieting, women who repeatedly lost and gained weight had lower immune function, particularly lower counts of natural killer cells.

“These cells are important for fending off infections and are also vital in fighting the early stages of cancer,” says Cornelia Ulrich, M.D., of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. Low killer-cell activity is associated with higher rates of cancer. In her study of more than a hundred overweight but otherwise healthy women, those who had yo-yoed most frequently – five times or more – decreased their natural killer-cell activity by a third.

With so many drawbacks, you might wonder if you’d be better off just accepting your belly rolls. But the perils of being overweight still outweigh the risks of yo-yoing. So how do you quit the cycle for good?

The article then gives a bunch of suggestions about being realistic (think of what you are doing as a permanent lifestyle shift, not just dieting as temporary fix); being patient and not losing too much, too fast; being supported (socializing with other who have successfully lost weight improves your odds of maintaining your own weight loss); recording your mood changes and hunger levels so you can learn to distinguish when you’re eating for emotional reasons; switching eating plans if you get bored; and being active along with eating properly.

The one I liked the most was- Be optimistic – “One of the most important tips for being a successful weight loser is not to let past failed attempts keep you from trying again. Every time you fail, you get more insight about what to do differently the next time.”

What do you think? Was any of this news to you? Did it worry you like it did me?

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

Tanya wrote…When you first stopped binging to now, what is it that you do or say to yourself that stops the binge?
thanks!

Well, it all really began back in late December of 2007 when I realized that for the past 30+ years I had an eating disorder (not just a “sweet tooth”). Once I realized that I had a true sickness, a disease, I was determined to do whatever I could to fix it. I mean, wouldn’t anyone want to fight and beat a disease that they learned they had?

Armed with this new knowledge and drive, I stopped bingeing the very next day and haven’t done it since.

I went to overeaters anonymous meetings, found a therapist and read a lot of literature. As far as OA, here I had thought I was all alone with these crazy thoughts in my head about food and it was SO helpful to find out that I was not alone. That gave me strength.

Through therapy, I learned what things happened in my childhood to lead me down this road. That enabled me to understand where the compulsive overeating/bingeing came from, deal with it, put it in it’s proper place and move forward.

Stringing the non-binge days together became a badge of honor for me that I’m still determined not to break. This is illustrated in the beaded bracelet I wear every day, with certain beads representing years, other beads are for months, binge-free.

Some of my mantras are/were – “It’s (the food) is not an option”. “Nothing tastes as good as lean and mean feels”. “It’s just food.”

I also employed my husband to help me when we were out at social situations when I’m faced with dessert buffets (and still do!).

Blogging about my honest feelings has been really helpful too. The eating disordered/health/fitness/weight loss blog community is so awesome and supportive.

I wrote another post not so long ago about how I remain binge-free here.

Also, I wrote another blog which lists a lot of the things that I do when I feel a binge coming on – bag of tricks

I really don’t feel the need to binge anymore. I know now it is all emotional eating and I have much better ways of dealing with emotions now, I do not turn to food. Do I sometimes overeat a bit, yes, but I am comfortable with that because even “normal” eaters overeat sometimes on things that are really worth it.

Tanya, I hope that answered your question.

Can anyone else share their tricks of how they stopped bingeing?

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

It is a post about my journey through compulsive eating/bingeing, from where I began to pretty much where I am today. If you want to check it out, you can read it here.

I also wanted to write about my appointment with the therapist on Tuesday. I told him how totally good I was feeling and that I had taken the giant leap of faith to intuitive eating, which I could have never done without his help.

We also talked about the difference between my labeling myself as being “in recovery” versus being “recovered.” As always, he put a different spin on it. He said that I should look at it like “I’ve recovered my self,” that I’ve recovered my life and it’s aspects, taking back more of what’s mine so that I can fully in this world. Is he awesome or what?

With that being said, I decided to add the word “recovering” to my blog name *shy smile* last night. Props to my husband for bringing that to my attention.

And last, but certainly not least, giving a shout out to my girl Holly who is having a Larabar giveaway. Check it out – Larabar giveaway.

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body