Hello March!

During the past month I have continued on my journey to explore the Vegan Diet. I am preparing to take a 10 week Vegan course in April and I have been transitioning to the Vegan life style. I have given up meat, but I have had some ice cream, cheese and chocolate along the way. I’d like to think of myself as a, “Health Nut in Training,”. This month has brought me some great discoveries. I discovered I do not like Green Smoothies, after purchasing my Nutribullet and putting spinach in a smoothie. I did discover that I do like the spinach when cooked with garlic and onions in a bit of Olive Oil and they are quite easy to make. I have discovered that eating a mostly Vegan diet I have to rely a lot more on vegetables.

I discovered that when I make foods ready to eat by washing and cutting my fruits and veggies, they are easy to take to work. I have also found success in eating my raw veggies salad’s first thing in the morning. I have been using a new motto, “Small Changes = Big Results, “ to keep my on track with eating my vegetables. I have discovered that my primary motivation for consuming the vegetables has nothing to do with the taste, but rather all the benefits for my body. In my mind eating a raw veggie breakfast meal is the equivalent to going for a five mile run!

I still suffer from Binge Eating, but throughout this month I have noticed a significant reduction in my craving’s as I have been eating natural air-popped popcorn, natural apple sauce and gram crackers, and dried fruit candy.

I have begun to swap sherbert for ice cream, and am working my way towards Sorbet. I have purchased some soy ice cream as well.

I have been dealing with my evening snacking primary by eating healthy stuff like popcorn and sun flower seeds without any sort of calorie counting.

I have begun to acknowledge and accept that I eat healthier on the weekdays/workdays than on the weekends. It is on the weekends that I am likely to slip back into old eating habits.

I have also noticed this month that I have been having challenges digesting wheat gluten and textured vegetable protein. Not being able to eat a majority of the fake meats has forced me to eat more veggies, nuts and beans.

Over all I am very happy with my progress this month and I look forward to March and all that it will bring.

CLM

Hello February!

This month I am going Vegan or as Vegan as Possible! My job is offering a 10 week class on going low-fat vegan and I am taking advantage of it. I have been a long time vegetarian and I have flirted around with meat recently. As a vegetarian I was very unhealthy. I am a compulsive eater who is addicted to certain foods such as cheese, chocolate and ice cream. I relied all too often on grilled cheese sandwiches and cheese pizza during my vegetarian days. I came to the realization that to help aid me in managing my compulsive eating it might be necessary to activate the power to choose foods that are not addictive. I was struggling with the beginning stages of my Power to Choose Plan when I heard about this Vegan class. I am trying to cut back on cheese, chocolate and ice cream and Vegan’s do not eat these things, why not give it a try. For a brief time while I was a vegetarian I did remove diary from my diet. I thought I was lactose intolerant and for about six months I did not consume diary and I walked for an hour a day at-least 5 days a week. Something magical happened. I went from 215 LBS to 150 LBS during that time period. At that time I did not make the connection between my weight-loss and the absence of diary. I thought it was all about the walking! Later when trying to lose weight I tried to replicate my results by going on walking routine, my latest being my 2012-2013 walking efforts. At the end of the year I was heavier than when I started! The walking did not net me any weight-loss, however it did net me 10 points lower on my blood sugar, good blood pressure and low cholesterol, so it kept me in great health despite my size. Part of my Compulsive Eating disorder is food addiction. One of my strongest food addictions is too cheese, chocolate and ice cream. By embracing this Vegan diet I hope to find another tool in my tool box in managing my Compulsive Eating disorder. I do not know if my efforts will result in weight –loss, but it certainly can’t hurt matters. The Vegan classes start in April, but I have already begun to convert to the Vegan diet. My aim is simply to be as Vegan as Possible for me, and that means choosing Vegan options when they are available. I will not be nit picking every little thing for traces of egg’s and milk. I am not a Ethical Vegan, I do not abstain from using any animal products whatsoever, I am simply adopting a Vegan diet cutting meats, and most animal products when possible. The basic things are very clear and easy to cut and that is what I will focus on, not eating pork, beef, chicken, fish, egg’s and dairy products.

My basic meal plan is simple, lots of beans and rice, pasta and vegetable plates. I will work on my diet as I await the start of this Vegan class in April, where  I hope to learn more about the Vegan diet and new things to cook.

CLM

Trusting Myself in 2014: Hello January!

In the past I have taken many tips, tricks and words of wisdom from others when it has come to my physical wellness, but rarely have I looked within for answers. After reading Heath At Every Size, by Linda Bacon I realized that the HAAS Approach was not quite for me. I am not an intuitive eater. I need structure, goals, habits and rules. While I can agree that being larger does not make you automatically unhealthy, my own proof is my low blood sugar and low blood pressure despite being 291 pounds. I know that for me I am a Compulsive Eater and that my nature is more destructive and harmful to my body than not. Having some outside barriers helps me to be healthy.

In my journey toward wellness I am embracing weight-loss as a personal goal. Want to lose weight is not bad. I desire to lose, not so that I will be healthy, but so that I can maintain the great health that I already have. I also desire to have greater mobility, flexibility and I want to be my best self. I think my body would be at it's prime at 170 pounds instead of being 291 pounds. I could also be happy and comfortable being 230 to 200 pounds. I feel best when I am a size 16-18 or lower.  I can still function at a size 24, but being greater than a size 24 is not comfortable for me. I cannot express the freedom of movement that I can with a smaller body. I will not put unrealistic goals on my body, but I do believe that with the addition of some healthy habits I could see my body reach 230, 200 and my ultimate goal of being 170 pounds. I am not worried about getting there overnight, my focus is on enjoying the ride and loving and accepting myself at each point along the way.

I appreciate that my 291 pound body still houses my soul, my intelligence, my creativity. I appreciate the fact that my body allows me to take daily walks, that Catherine's bless their hearts crafts garments that I feel attractive in, even at 291 pounds. I appreciate that all my limbs are intact and functioning and I know that I am blessed indeed. I will not become a better person with each shed pound, but I will have more comfort, and I will have greater appreciation for myself as I am already learning to love myself in my present form.

So, now that I am back on a weight-loss journey, with the knowledge that I am a Compulsive Eater, how will I approach weight-loss? For one thing I plan to embrace all the goodness of the HAAS message, while I will be using structure, and developing habits, and even monitoring my weight-loss, I will not carry the old baggage of guilt. I will not feel like a failure when the scale is not moving, I will know that my body has a genetic barrier against shedding pounds and is designed to maintain and hold onto weight. I will not starve myself or deny myself pleasures. I will not beat myself up. I will simply nudge, guide my body to a new path of healthy taste. I will ease my body in slowly to a healthy life style that will help me to shed some pounds. I will love myself all along the way. I will fuse and marry HAAS and the development of Healthy Habits.

As a Compulsive Eater, I will embrace my compulsion. I am a compulsive snacker and instead of denying myself snacks or limiting the amount of snacks I consume I will do what I call damage control. The fact is that I snack on a variety of sweet and crunchy snacks and I eat multiple serving's of those snacks. The problem is that the snacks I usually eat are high in fat, sugar and calories. The foods are my trigger foods and they are highly addictive. I will shift my snacking energy towards snacking on foods that are lower in calories, sugar and fat, foods that are not addictive to me, and that are not my trigger. In this way I can still snack every night, without gaining as much weight. To address my reasons for eating, I will use indirect approaches such as therapy, prayer, music, journal writing etc.

I plan on keeping a record of the foods I eat using myfitnesspal, tracking the calories, paying particular attention to snack calories. I will also employ meal planning.

Two things that I have already started are eating chicken and turkey. I have been a vegetarian for a long time, but I started listening to my body and my body is telling me I need the meat. A little meat goes a long way for me. The other thing I have done is let go of the notion that I have to eat breakfast foods, at breakfast time. I do not eat most breakfast foods, and was frustrated trying to come up with a healthy meal plan, knowing that I hate egg's, and oatmeal. This morning I ate a turkey wrap for breakfast and it was yummy! I got a little protein, and even got some veggies in.

This phase in my journey is about trusting myself, gleaning from the abundance of health wisdom that is in the world and tailoring it to fit my needs.I am learning to take wellness advice with a grain of salt.

CLM

Hello December!

I can hardly believe that December is really here! December for me is a time for reflection and celebration. I love looking over my experiences and seeking where I have grown, and looking at lessons I have learned along the way. I plan to review my journals and see what I discovered and to do a post on it at the end of this month. One thing that I can see right now is that when I started 2013 I thought I was on a weight-loss journey, I ended up learning more about myself in the process of trying to lose weight and discovered that I am a compulsive eater.

This month my journey has taken on a new focus. In the past I was focused on weight-loss and then I became focused on managing my compulsive eating. In my journey to manage my compulsive eating and I really should say, control my compulsive eating I discovered that the real problem is not my compulsive eating, but the emotional problems that lead me to eat compulsively. (Problems being anxiety, stress, depression and trauma.) I have begun to seek therapy to help me to address my emotional issues, and in the course of trying to fix my emotional issues I made yet another discovery, that underneath my emotional issues was a spiritual problem. That problem being that my Hope has been damaged. I have undergone some very  tough stuff over the years and the more stuff I went through the more I ate, and the more I ate, the larger I got, and the more I fixated on losing weight as the answer to all my problems. Weight-loss was not going to fix, that jobs dissatisfaction, the depression, the grief etc. I use to have a tool box for dealing with my emotional issues, and that was Hope. My hope can in a particular package and that was in the form of my religion. When I experienced some shifts in my belief system and I lost my tool box with my Hope in it. I am now on a journey to build a better tool box to contain my Hope with my new beliefs.

I just read a new book that opened my eyes on Weight, “Health at Every Size,” by Linda Bacon. The book talks about how the body can naturally maintain a set point weight and how it is easier for the body to maintain or gain weight than it is for it to lose weight. The book asserts that being larger does not automatically make you unhealthy. I can personally attest to not having high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer or any of the other big bad’s, despite my larger size. The book also advocates intuitive eating, eating more mindfully and listening to your bodies, wants, hunger and fullness levels.

I personally find the mindful intuitive eating part to be a bit of a challenge in our busy world that is full of processed foods, but I do like the idea of looking inward for food cues instead of always focusing on external cues.

Through reading this book I did some reflection on my previous methods to control my compulsive eating, such as food restriction and I am re-thinking that approach, since instead of motivating me to eat less, I seemed to always binge more. I am now focused on an in-direct approach to dealing with my compulsive eating. Perhaps leaving the food out of it and focuses more on filling myself with spiritual food aka Soul Food, by truly taking care of myself, I can in-directly have an impact on my compulsive eating. Sometimes I am trying out are journal writing, prayer, art, music, and therapy. I will be seeking out ways to please myself without just using food. I don’t think that I will find a magical cure and that I will cease to binge eat or compulsive eat for good, but I do think that I may be healthier in the long run and that these indirect effects while not entirely measurable, may produce a healthier  and happier Carolyn that does not always need to binge.

Happy Holidays to Everyone!

CLM

Not on a weight-loss journey?

I learned that I am a compulsive eater and that makes it difficult to lose weight. Being a compulsive eater does not define me, but it has redefined my journey to acquire and maintain good health habits for life, because there is no point in getting healthy if you don’t plan on staying healthy. Healthy is a state that is constantly moving and changing, I think  striving to live a healthy life is all one can hope for, because you only have so much control over your health as the human body ages, is exposed to accidents and encounters illnesses. For me living a healthy lifestyle is not about weight-loss, diet and exercise. Living a healthy lifestyle is about total wellness, mental, physical and spiritual health. I will never be at a point where I feel like I have arrived, what my focus on instead is on developing, building and maintain healthy habits that I can maintain for life. The standard I use to develop these habits and test them for usefulness is whether the habit is realistic, attainable and sustainable. I can do a self-check periodically on my habits to see how I am doing with them and to make any adjustment s I need to make. I do aspire to lose weight, but I am no longer setting weight-loss as a hard goal or using it to measure my success. Over the course of my journey so far as it has evolved from a weight-loss journey into a wellness journey I have observed that I have developed and maintained many healthy habits despite what the scales says. I have been on a solid walking routine for over a year now, I have continued to drink plenty of water daily, I have cleaned up my breakfast, lunch and dinner meals. I have found ways to stay inspired and stay motivated and instead of focusing on what has gone wrong I am choosing to give myself credit for the lifestyle changes I have made and managed to stick with.

CLM

Tracking for People Not In Love with Numbers!

I have a love hate relationship with numbers. Some times I think they are so cool, it can be exciting to learn the amount of calories in a container in X,Y,Z, but other times, I just get a headache constantly counting numbers. I found two ways to tracking/monitoring/observing your food intake that are free of the dreaded numbers.

#1 You can keep a food dairy/journal. In your food diary you can record just what you ate, or you can record your moods and tudes along with your food record. You can use descriptive language such as, "banana, cereal and milk," You can choose to add other data such as the quantity, "1/2 banana, 3/4 of a cup of Special K," you can develop your own short hand. This frees you from having to do database searches and looking up food data. You can use any journal type, note book or even your computer screen, or random scraps of paper if you please. I have tried many different things and what works best for me is an excel spreadsheet, I have a column for the day of the week, the date, breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks and I just record what I ate in the row. I like to add color to my chart, by pick a different color fill for each day. I have a sheet for each month. I found that using the spreadsheet was the most consistent food recording I have ever had. As a some what perfectionist I can understand how bad it feels to forget what you ate for a meal, or to have skipped a few days of recording, that is why I also use descriptors like Skipped, if I have missed a few days of tracking, or ate random junk, if  I can't really recall what I ate, if I am recording a few days later. The wonderful thing about keeping some type of record of what you ate, is that it can keep you accountable, you might see that you are eating a ton of junk and it might inspire you to eat more veggies, or if you are having a bad week, you can look back to a good week to get some food ideas. No matter how crazy I am eating, I feel better about my eating when I am recording my food intake.

#2 Another device I use quite often is Meal Planning. I create a plan for the day, as well as use a calendar where I come up with meals for months at at time. I am very flexible with my menu calendar, If I scheduled broccoli for Tuesday and I find I am craving string beans, I will eat them. Having a plan does not mean you are forced to eat what is on it, I can always cross something out and change the menu for a meal or a day. I see my meal planning in much the same way that a retirement home or school might have a menu plan for the week or month. I have a daily meal plan, and I also have menu's that I choose from to help me with making food decisions. I find that having a meal plan, helps me with grocery shopping and preparing healthy quick meals. With meal planning I have noticed a significant decrease in the amount of fast food that I consume. I also have very few days where my eating is totally out of control. ( Still a binge eater! I am a compulsive snacker, do pretty well with regular meals especially during the week.)

Hope this helps someone who may be feed up with their current calorie tracker. For those who do love the numbers here are two  websites that I used frequently www.myfitnesspal.com and livestrong.com, you can also try WW online if you like counting points.

I will also say that I do keep my membership to the numbers database websites, because it is nice to be able to spot check an item for the calorie info, when I am using Calorie Common Sense. Calorie Common Sense is when I look at the calories in foods while shopping to choose foods that are lower in calories, without counting my daily calorie intake. Calorie Common Sense might help me to buy Skinny Cow ice cream bars vs eating a pint of Ice Cream. Also if you are noticing that you have gained weight and you ever want to look up your calories for the day, you can always do a spot check by recording the info from your food diary/journal into one of the databases.

There are also some people that might be following a particular diet plan such as Atkins and may not want to track calories, but may want to look back as some of the things they are eating for meal planning, keeping some type of food journal even one without numbers could be helpful.

CLM

Hello November!

This past month I have been really struggling with my compulsive eating. I decided to try out some new things, I have been using a Sobriety Journal so that I can stay in touch with what is really eating me every day and I have also been writing out Sobriety Prayers, a way to draw strength for the day. I have been attending some OA meetings and keeping an open mind.

When I first began this blog I had one simple goal and that was to lose weight. Through this experience of trying to lose weight I have discovered that I am indeed a compulsive overeater. Now I understand that weight-loss for me isn’t as simple as exercise more, as I have held to a walking regimen for the past year. It is also not as simple as eating right, while I did learn a great deal about nutrition on my journey. I have learned to eat a healthy breakfast, lunch and dinner as well as healthy between meal snacks. The problem for me is that I have a compulsion to eat junk food after dinner and to eat junk food between meals on the weekends.

I thought I would find the answer to weight-loss in diet and exercise and that when I began this blog, that I would end it with a beautiful after picture, a number of pounds lost and a few tips on what helped me to lose the weight. I know understand that my problem is not being overweight, my problem is that I am a compulsive overeater and that problem will not just go away, I cannot fix that problem through diet and exercise alone. As of this moment I am no longer on a weight-loss journey. I am on a never ending journey to manage my compulsive overeating.

The purpose of this blog is no to no longer record my weight-loss journey, but to share any wellness, self-love, inspirational, motivational healthy lifestyle tips that I come across along my own journey to self-love and complete wellness. I may occasionally share some of my struggle with compulsive overeating, and what I am doing to help deal with it from time to time. Thank you to all the readers that came along to share in my weight-loss journey and thank you to any readers that want to share in my wellness, self-love, healthy lifestyle journey.

To any readers that are compulsive overeaters, you are not alone. I do not claim to have any answers and I am not cured. I am learning to take every day “One Day At A Time”. Like I said earlier I am using three things right now to help me, the Sobriety Journal, a journal where I reflect on my thoughts and feeling’s for the day,  a written prayer for Sobriety that I write each day and I am currently attending OA meetings.

CLM