Day 72 A friend's experience with the Plan

Here’s a guest blog from my good friend and Plan buddy, Lily. I asked her to tell you all how she’s doing with her changes.

Jill and I have spent lots of time talking about food, the corporate food industry, our own eating compulsions, weight gain, and the waxing/waning desire to make a change around food that is realistic and has a spiritual component. So when Jill said she was going to work with a nutritional coach, a woman she knew, trusted, and was affordable, I said, sign me up.

I’m a member of OA and for 6 years I’ve not eaten sugar or wheat (and numerous other foodstuff from time to time), and I’ve been on a food plan. This constitutes what OA calls “being abstinent.” I get it that my relationship with food can be transformed, because mine has. I lost and keep off a chunk of weight (pun intended), learned the size of my real (vs imagined) stomach, a normal portion size, and I now eat, most days, 3 times a day, with a snack now and then. Bonus is I also found a deeper, more honest relationship with myself and with others in my life, replacing people and their support for the (faux) comfort of food. But over the past 6 months, I began to sense that there was more to know about my relationship with food and eating. So I welcomed Elisabeth, the coaching, and the Plan into my life.

After my initial interview with Elisabeth, I felt like I’d found a coach who just might move with me toward what my body was telling me it wanted now: more green things, less meat, please (that’s a begging please, by the way). I got clear info in my coaching sessions that I was entering a process, a shift toward fulfilling my body’s needs with different, more nutritionally dense, whole foods, not a diet. I’m finding that I’ve entered a process for a whole life change that is actually more radical than any diet, an essential realignment with what I do or do not put in my mouth that allows my body to have it’s way with me (wink wink).

Each coaching phone call, we talk about how it’s going, what worked, what didn’t, and what I’m resisting or loving. I think I’m about 9 weeks in, about 2 weeks behind Jill. As of the last coaching call, I can now explain to others, when they ask, that I’m eating “vegan” while occasionally eating meat (2-4oz a day)! Big change from even a year ago when I was wondering if Paleo might be a plan I could benefit from, since it was already so close to how I ate (meat, oil, veggies), though I was also eating dairy products then, too.

I feel humbled by the way my body now speaks to me, letting me know the Plan is good medicine for me. After 2 weeks, I was waking up and running to the mirror to see if it was still true that my eyes were no longer puffy, then I’d notice my joints didn’t ache after I’d jumped out of bed, and that I could breathe freely before I used my prescription nasal spray. Yippee! And imagine, this was even before I reached week 6, when the relentless feeling good all the time set in. 

Lily Gael

www.lilygael.com

Day 71 I'm cooking!

With a few exceptions (family and old, old friends), most of the people I hang out with are PS friends (post-sobriety). They didn't know me drunk and they didn't know me when I cooked. When I got sober, I just couldn't cook anymore. I was used to cooking with wine. Not in the dishes. I've never particularly liked wine sauces or liquored desserts. But I always had a drink or six while I cooked. And I just found it too much of a trigger to spend much time in the kitchen without that support.

So I became a fixer. I fixed meals, much of it frozen at first and then from the wealth of excellent delis in Portland's foodie grocery stores. I ate well and had no complaints except for the slowly creeping poundage adding itself to a frame already well padded already by sweets and a fondness for Cheetos.

In those old drinking days, I was actually a pretty good cook with a knack for throwing stuff together (I was never one for recipes--too exacting, too tedious). But I never thought I'd cook again and now look at me. Twice a week or so I make soup in the crock pot (today's:  potatoes, green beans, bok choy, green lentils, lemon salt, tuscan herbs, organic vegetable broth). Hey, it's what I had and it's delicious. Most days I create juice and a smoothie. I'm learning all kinds of things about cooking with vegetables.

I find it very creative and exciting to put these combinations together, just like I do with the juicer. Sometimes, it's not so successful (don't put radish greens in the juicer, trust me on that one) but mostly it's great fun and delicious. Who knew I'd enjoy this so much?

Day 70 I could never have imagined

Today for the first time, I didn't have a green juice smoothie for breakfast. I was making fresh oatmeal/chia/hemp/buckwheat cereal and it was ready and so I ate that (my favorite combo is the hot cereal, rice milk, half a banana, a few walnuts, berries, and a splash of maple agave). It was very satisfying and I moved into my morning.

Later I drove out to my friend Susan's in the country and we had a great conversation, made some lunch together (she's also trying out the plan) of white beans, a few olives, roasted red peppers, romaine, parsley, chopped onion and a lemon vinaigrette, all heated up. Really delicious. We played some canasta and I headed home a couple of hours later.

I did a few things around the house and then realized I was hungry or needing something. I ate a rice cake and an orange but I wasn't satisfied. And then it dawned on me that I needed green juice. My body needed feeding. So I juiced and made a smoothie with apple, blackberries, and banana. I drank a big glass and felt so satisfied.

I could never have imagined a craving for green juice. Ice cream, yes. Candy bar, yes. Cheetos, yes. But green juice? How things have changed!

Day 69 Unhooking guilt, shame, and fear from food

There is, I think, a special relationship that we addicts have with shame and fear and guilt, the triumvirate of yuck. For nearly two decades I felt ashamed of my drinking, guilty for the lies I told, fear that I was killing myself. then I got sober and for a few years, I didn't have those three malevolent stooges in my head anymore.

But after about five years of consistent candy consumption, I was deeply hooked into the sugar addiction that had begun when I was a child and I expanded my horizons and became thoroughly habituated to using food as a sedative. And as I put the weight on and more weight and ate a lot of fat and sugar and salt, I felt out of control (shame), and worried about my health (fear), and angry that I couldn't stop myself (guilt). And the Larry, Moe, and Curly of emotions came back from their extended vacation and took up residence again. Although I've been off sugar for more than three years (with one month of relapse), I've been stuck in this place of self-loathing around food, loving it, hating it, fearing it, being ashamed of it, being defiant around it, for way too long.

Even on the plan, I can overeat and I did that this afternoon and for no good reason. I had a good lunch and instead of putting the low-fat corn chips away, I just kept eating them. I was half-aware I was doing it and I didn't care. And I certainly didn't stop myself. But curiously I didn't feel ashamed or guilty. I just felt too full. I ate too much and so I didn't eat too much tonight and maybe I won't eat too much tomorrow.  I don't want to entertain the stooges anymore. And just maybe I have some say in that.

Day 68 Things that work and things that don't

Here are some of the things that make eating this way a pleasure and some that just don't!

Great discoveries: 

• Adding almond extract or vanilla extract to my steelcut oats before I cook them.
• Baking root vegetables with vegetable or chicken broth instead of roasting them with oil
• Guacamole made from avocado, baked sweet potato, and salsa
• Pacific organic beef, chicken, and veggie broth
• Heirloom naval oranges
• Seedless grapes in a smoothie
• Chia, hemp, and buckwheat mix (Qia) added to the oats before I cook them
• Maple agave
• Kit's bars from the Clif Bar folks (simple, organic nuts and dates)
• Celery: juiced and in soups
• Lemon-infused salt
• Trader Joe's 8 chopped vegetables, sunflower seeds, and a little vinaigrette
• New Seasons and Whole Foods salad bars
• Amy's Sonoma Burgers, Black Bean Chili, and most of her soups
• Vanilla rice milk
• Udi's bread
• Baby turnips
• Fava greens
• Reboot with Joe's website tips and recipes
• Nature's Path Sunrise cereal (corn, rice, quinoa, amaranth, flax, and buckwheat)--low-sugar, low-fat
• And, of course, my pals: the crock pot, the juicer, and the Nutribullet

No thanks:

• Brown rice tortillas
• Stevia
• Most rice bread
• Sunshine burgers
• Lima beans
• Cilantro (I've got the soap gene)
• Juiced mustard greens
• Rice flour pancakes

Day 67 My two overeating challenges

All of my overeating behaviors have not vanished although I wish they would. I had my phone consult with my coach, Elisabeth, this afternoon. She had sent me back an edited version of my food diary with a very few tweaks (less nut butter, skip the dried fruit and eat fresh) and we talked about that and how things were going. I told her I had two challenges around eating more than I needed.

The first was when I got too hungry. I had a couple of experiences over the last two weeks where I had lunch too late (breakfast at 8 and lunch at 2). In both cases, I was out and about and just got busy and diet mind kicked in and I said wow, I can eat less by not eating until I get home. But once I got home and fixed some lunch, I was ravenous and a bowl of soup and a big salad and I was full but not satisfied. It took a fair amount more food to get me even enough to stop. So we talked about things I can carry with me to eat in such cases.

The second challenge is tougher. Some of my paid editing work isn't the least bit riveting. I have to pay close attention and that can be tedious hour after hour, so for a long time (like 18 years) I've been using food rewards to get me through the restlessness that comes with the boring parts of the job. The thing about food is that I can eat while I work so I go on earning and getting things off the to-do list. I can't walk around the block and keep working or read a novel and keep working or call a friend and keep working or take a shower or any of the other things I can think to do. For so long, food has been the perfect work buddy! But I really don't want to go on overeating even if the food is healthy and low calorie. I want to stop using food as a drug. Elisabeth didn't have an immediate answer but we both agreed to give it some thought.

Day 66 Moving out of the easy/difficult conversation

In my morning meditation readings this morning, one of the questions was this: What would your life be like if things were "easy" or "difficult"--they just were? And I've been thinking about this all day. How we color what is with an evaluation of good and bad rather that just is.

When I talk to people about my food changes, they often want to know if it's difficult. I wonder if they want it to be so that they don't have to consider changing for themselves. Of course, I'm not asking them to change. I'm just talking about what works for me. As we say in AA, attraction rather than promotion. And I remember that from the film Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead--that the people Joe Cross interviewed mostly said, "I can't do that. It would be too hard."

I don't really have an answer for the "isn't it hard" question. I don't think about it in that way and haven't from the beginning. I think about the fact that it's important, that it's a possible solution to something I've struggled with for a long time. I think about the fact that it's working in the ways that I want. And I wonder what else I could apply this to in my life. Dropping the difficult/easy conversation, and just being with what is.