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Losing Myself IV
Jul. 29th, 2004 05:04 pmWhat I actually did. (part III here)
My habits were awful, my sense of being out of balance was high, and I could see a dark future. As I said, it started in a lot of ways with a forceful recognition of my own mortality. One look into the crystal ball at my daughter running circles around an exhausted and sweaty mound of dadflesh made me very anxious. Furthermore, the revelation that we are eating the oceans to extinction, and that repetitive stress is rampant in the already-terrifying abbatoirs of the increasingly-terrifying "agribusiness industry", for which I used to work!
Okay, enough of that soap box. I focused on these things and asked myself, "what do I want?" When the answer came back "a better relationship with the world through my food," I had taken one key step. I meditated on these things for about three months. Thinking about my relationship to food, and my place in the world, and the personal as well as global impact of my diet.
As I soaked in this, I started to analyze my diet. Empty calories, reflexive eating, comfort foods, processed, smooth foods. I made no resistance to the things that felt momentarily good in my gullet, no effort to eat foods that were actually work to eat. To embrace a metaphor I was just using earlier today (probably it's been on my mind): the contours of what I was eating were topologically the same as what I was excreting! (I think topology is kind of cool and funny, and has wider applications for analogies than we've seen to date, so I like to show off a little)
I ate sweets and bad meats. I ate a lot of processed foods, greatly removed from their source materials, or devoid of grown things. Instead there were many many awful chemicals. So I set up a structure with a strong conflict stance: no meat, no sweets, low fat (or mindful of the kind of fats, wherein I ate pure plant oils, etc). I did a minimum of negotiation: find substitutes for sweets, if I can't go without; and vegetable protein sources that are able to remind me of the meat textures I sometimes craved . And I determined to work to eat and digest my food. I wanted a greater sense of connection to the ethics of food and the politics of food and hunger like here and here: sometimes I feel that it's like I want to get closer to a third world kind of diet. Well, I'm not totally chemical free (uh, diet soda anyone?), nor process free (soyfoods, fakemeat burgers, etc) but I have gotten closer to the ground, a lot closer. And I eat a lot more complex carb foods, which I really have to work to digest (brown rice, chana dal, fruits, bulgur, whole wheats, legumes, nuts, etc)
I definitely rearranged my mental approach to think in terms of many years-- I kind of had in mind something the opposite of that great tangent in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash where Hiro reminisces about the dream of disappearing for five years and trying to become the baddest mother on the planet through secret kung fu training or whatever, and how he let go of that whole fantasy the minute he saw Raven--and decided that if I could just spend five years getting things set right, I'd extend my life, and I'd be happier and healthier in time for Eleanor to enter her to-the-nth-power-active period of childhood. To aid that, I also set in motion a very long term activity plan. Very slow and steady increases of activity, with a goal of having fun and being sporty at the end of the process.
I decided that a slow path of averaging 40#/year for five years would do it. That would allow for small fluctuations over the course of the years, and would reflect reality. Because I figured the initial loss would go quickly, but that as my body became more adapted to the new lifestyle, and as I added muscle from exercise, I'd see some slowing of weight loss trends. And it would get me to a weight level that was not skinny, and not fat.
I also decided to journal. I knew I couldn't keep 1827 days worth, but I also had seen that food journaling could be very useful, a way of focusing the mind to recognize "hey, I can survive on this much or this little, I really can." Here's my food journal, Day 1. The journaling started on July 21, 2003. I've switched the "private" setting to "public" for the first 60 days of the effort. At about 60 days I started getting sloppy. July, August, and September. I include this information as a kind of reference, and cuz it's mildly amusing. I know some diets like a really strong structure, and since it's documented, a person could adopt this for a structure. I suspect if you weighed over 350 pounds and you followed these as menu guides, you would lose weight. When I say I got sloppy after 60 days, here's some samples: days 66-84 and days 88-92. These were in the period after we moved and the attempt to summarize is kind of hilarious to me.
I kept this journal for about the first 100 days. I'm going to reinstate journaling when I do my re-ignition/re-inspiration routine soon.
As I progressed, I also decided to make one big negotiation, I decided to reward myself for good behavior. But since I was doing the long term, I decided not to do it once a week or once a month or whatever, which a lot of diets "reward" you with. To... uh...keep it real... I decided to do an annual thing. Thus Meat Day was conceived (which is a misnomer, since it's really meats-n-sweets day, but meat day rang truer). I'm happy to report that I did not get sick at the first annual Meat Day, even after not eating meat for a year. I believe that was helped because I am a lacto-ovo vegetarian (orovo-lacto if you prefer!), rather than pure vegan, and the fact I've continued to eat animal fats and proteins over the year probably prevented illness when I ate my small quantities of meat on July 21, 2004. Or I have a very high constitution (and maximum charisma!).
Okay. Next I guess I'll blather about what I've learned. Hope this isn't too long and/or boring for people (that was not a desperate fishing for compliments, I swear). It's my freakin' journal after all. Keep watching the skies!
My habits were awful, my sense of being out of balance was high, and I could see a dark future. As I said, it started in a lot of ways with a forceful recognition of my own mortality. One look into the crystal ball at my daughter running circles around an exhausted and sweaty mound of dadflesh made me very anxious. Furthermore, the revelation that we are eating the oceans to extinction, and that repetitive stress is rampant in the already-terrifying abbatoirs of the increasingly-terrifying "agribusiness industry", for which I used to work!
Okay, enough of that soap box. I focused on these things and asked myself, "what do I want?" When the answer came back "a better relationship with the world through my food," I had taken one key step. I meditated on these things for about three months. Thinking about my relationship to food, and my place in the world, and the personal as well as global impact of my diet.
As I soaked in this, I started to analyze my diet. Empty calories, reflexive eating, comfort foods, processed, smooth foods. I made no resistance to the things that felt momentarily good in my gullet, no effort to eat foods that were actually work to eat. To embrace a metaphor I was just using earlier today (probably it's been on my mind): the contours of what I was eating were topologically the same as what I was excreting! (I think topology is kind of cool and funny, and has wider applications for analogies than we've seen to date, so I like to show off a little)
I ate sweets and bad meats. I ate a lot of processed foods, greatly removed from their source materials, or devoid of grown things. Instead there were many many awful chemicals. So I set up a structure with a strong conflict stance: no meat, no sweets, low fat (or mindful of the kind of fats, wherein I ate pure plant oils, etc). I did a minimum of negotiation: find substitutes for sweets, if I can't go without; and vegetable protein sources that are able to remind me of the meat textures I sometimes craved . And I determined to work to eat and digest my food. I wanted a greater sense of connection to the ethics of food and the politics of food and hunger like here and here: sometimes I feel that it's like I want to get closer to a third world kind of diet. Well, I'm not totally chemical free (uh, diet soda anyone?), nor process free (soyfoods, fakemeat burgers, etc) but I have gotten closer to the ground, a lot closer. And I eat a lot more complex carb foods, which I really have to work to digest (brown rice, chana dal, fruits, bulgur, whole wheats, legumes, nuts, etc)
I definitely rearranged my mental approach to think in terms of many years-- I kind of had in mind something the opposite of that great tangent in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash where Hiro reminisces about the dream of disappearing for five years and trying to become the baddest mother on the planet through secret kung fu training or whatever, and how he let go of that whole fantasy the minute he saw Raven--and decided that if I could just spend five years getting things set right, I'd extend my life, and I'd be happier and healthier in time for Eleanor to enter her to-the-nth-power-active period of childhood. To aid that, I also set in motion a very long term activity plan. Very slow and steady increases of activity, with a goal of having fun and being sporty at the end of the process.
I decided that a slow path of averaging 40#/year for five years would do it. That would allow for small fluctuations over the course of the years, and would reflect reality. Because I figured the initial loss would go quickly, but that as my body became more adapted to the new lifestyle, and as I added muscle from exercise, I'd see some slowing of weight loss trends. And it would get me to a weight level that was not skinny, and not fat.
I also decided to journal. I knew I couldn't keep 1827 days worth, but I also had seen that food journaling could be very useful, a way of focusing the mind to recognize "hey, I can survive on this much or this little, I really can." Here's my food journal, Day 1. The journaling started on July 21, 2003. I've switched the "private" setting to "public" for the first 60 days of the effort. At about 60 days I started getting sloppy. July, August, and September. I include this information as a kind of reference, and cuz it's mildly amusing. I know some diets like a really strong structure, and since it's documented, a person could adopt this for a structure. I suspect if you weighed over 350 pounds and you followed these as menu guides, you would lose weight. When I say I got sloppy after 60 days, here's some samples: days 66-84 and days 88-92. These were in the period after we moved and the attempt to summarize is kind of hilarious to me.
I kept this journal for about the first 100 days. I'm going to reinstate journaling when I do my re-ignition/re-inspiration routine soon.
As I progressed, I also decided to make one big negotiation, I decided to reward myself for good behavior. But since I was doing the long term, I decided not to do it once a week or once a month or whatever, which a lot of diets "reward" you with. To... uh...keep it real... I decided to do an annual thing. Thus Meat Day was conceived (which is a misnomer, since it's really meats-n-sweets day, but meat day rang truer). I'm happy to report that I did not get sick at the first annual Meat Day, even after not eating meat for a year. I believe that was helped because I am a lacto-ovo vegetarian (orovo-lacto if you prefer!), rather than pure vegan, and the fact I've continued to eat animal fats and proteins over the year probably prevented illness when I ate my small quantities of meat on July 21, 2004. Or I have a very high constitution (and maximum charisma!).
Okay. Next I guess I'll blather about what I've learned. Hope this isn't too long and/or boring for people (that was not a desperate fishing for compliments, I swear). It's my freakin' journal after all. Keep watching the skies!