Round

For those who’ve been following my story longer (or anyone who’s looking into Intuitive Eating or any of that type of approach), I spent a few months seeing a diet doctor (a real MD) here in France who I nicknamed Dr Hope. Her basic premise was that diets don’t work and that if you re-learn to listen to your body you’ll find your correct weight.

Someone asked a few days back whatever happened to Dr Hope, as I haven’t mentioned her in a long time. Well, I stopped going but might someday go back. I really liked her approach but found her “thinking” method too unstructured for me, and she seemed way too happy to take my money every week or two while I continued to gain weight. I gained about 12 pounds while working with her, and then went on to gain several more afterwards.

I learned a lot from her, some of which I am still using, some of which I’ll go back to with time. Thanks to her and things like the Pizza Test I learned to de-mystify problem foods. I learned to pay more attention to pleasure in food. And hunger. And to try to figure out what “satisfied” means.

My new Project YOU approach is not a rejection of Dr Hope - it’s kind of building on that. Sandra talks about “Top-Down/Bottom-Up” dieting - a mix between thinking about why you eat, how you eat etc (Top Down — and very Dr Hope) and building in structure (what, when to eat - Bottom Up). I think the mix of the two can make me successful.

I’m also still committed to doing this low-stress. That hasn’t changed, nor has an acceptance that this will take a while. I’m not at all tempted to follow suit of those I see “miraculously” losing 20 pounds in 10 days on meal replacement or 800 calorie diets. Not for me, and I couldn’t have said that without regret a few years back.

All day I have been wanting to overeat. I controlled myself at breakfast and lunch, even at my snack when I first got home. I caught myself thinking of voluminous dinner options at several times during the day, and I finally gave in — with broccoli and cabbage, and also some Special K cereal. It’s still overeating, but it’s a better choice to overeat 2/3 a head of broccoli and 2 mugs of cereal than to eat piles of pasta or pie…

I don’t know how long I’ll keep noting this on my blog, probably about a week. I am a BIG BELIEVER in the food diary, I have kept one off and on for years and years, and was keeping one (on paper) for the past several weeks, but stopped about 2 weeks ago for no good reason & it’s always downhill from there…

For Wednesday 6th February

Breakfast (8:15am) :

• Ate : Muesli, coffee with milk
• Hunger : high
• Environment : home, relaxed
• Appreciation : fair. The coffee was good today, however the strawberries in the muesli were looking pretty sad (bought on Sunday). I tossed out the remaining & will make a new batch tonight.
• Leave something leftover : nope.

Lunch (1:30pm):

• Ate : small steak w pepper sauce, salad w dressing, 1/2 roll, french fries
• Hunger : very high
• Environment : restaurant with colleague & client. No choice on the meal except how the meat was cooked… luckily I like steak, and this way I could eat french fries without guilt, since I hadn’t chosen them, right?
• Appreciation : very good for standard bistro fare in Parisian suburbs.
• Leave something leftover : Yes, I left 2 bites of meat and about 1/4 of the french fries. I ate all the salad

Snack (6:15pm)

• Ate : 3 clementines and then some yogurt
• Hunger : high
• Environment : in front of the computer checking email for work. I was thinking about all kinds of things to eat for dinner, focusing on volume and creamy or crunchy at each idea. Should I make rice pudding? Pasta? Polenta? Popcorn w real butter? I just ate the clementines and yogurt and decided to choose dinner later…
• Appreciation : high for the clementines, high for the yogurt (one of my fave brands)
• Leave something leftover : no

Dinner (8:30pm)

• Ate : big bowl of broccoli with some parmesean sprinkled on top. 1/2 cup homemade applesauce. 2 mugs of Special K with milk (why in a mug? I was too lazy to find a bowl…)
• Hunger : good question. Was it hunger or desire to eat? All I know is from breakfast on I kept thinking of how I’d really like to eat a LOT of food. I didn’t for breakfast, lunch I couldn’t, held myself back at snack, and when at dinnertime it was still the main thing I was looking for, I was pleased to find the broccoli & cabbage in the fridge. Because I can pack away some pretty good quantities of broccoli and it won’t kill my weight loss efforts. I know it’s not eating “mindfully” and it’s still overeating, but what are you supposed to do when your body keeps calling out for VOLUME? I figured it beat the alternative. I made the broccoli and ate half of it while the cabbage cooked. I didn’t eat the cabbage. I ate my nice small serving of applesauce. I still wanted to eat, and I wanted crunchy and creamy. I gave in to the cereal, which I probably should have STARTED with, since it was on my mind since breakfast… But live and learn, right?
• Environment : dining room, alone
• Appreciation : moderate. The broccoli was good and I don’t make it enough - I should buy it more often because I really do like it. Applesauce not so much, probably because it wasn’t what I was hungry for. Cereal was very high in pleasure for me… I spent a lot of my single girl years eating cereal for dinner. Maybe that was part of it tonight? It’s my last of 4 nights alone before my DH comes home tomorrow…
• Leave something leftover : I didn’t eat the cabbage after I cooked it, does that count?

Overall, I’m hoping I won’t have this urge to overeat very often. Since I’m just getting back into the food journal, I’m going to mainly stick to that for the coming days, but I suspect I need to work on asking myself what I’m really hungry for and what will Satisfy me. I’d have saved myself a lot of hassle if I’d just eaten the cereal for dinner first thing…

I have been slacking off.

It all starts where it always does - I’ve not been keeping my food diary for the past 8 days. I am such a bad girl. It’s always fine for about a week, and then…. one little bite becomes two. No accountability, no visibility.

Slowly the old habits reassert themselves.

Today I noticed that I ate all of every meal. I haven’t done that in several weeks. It comes on so slowly. If I mess up one meal I generally get back on it for the next. But this weekend I paid less attention, and then today, none at all.

I don’t see what choice I have other than to get more serious with myself. There is “no stress weight loss” and then there is “no weight loss at all”. I still think I can do it low stress, but I need to do it with a little bit more attention. Last September I had come up with a scoring system for each day that was a kind of checklist. I think I’m going to dig that out and re-work it for my current plans, and commit to tracking it for the month of February.

On the menu front, I ate a serving of the lentil soup for lunch, and made the celery root puree for dinner (with roast beef, as planned). I was the only one to like the celery root, as it turns out. My DH’s plans to travel have been put off for a few days, so a week of me and veggies will be less do-able but we’ll see where it takes me. I also made a pear and chocolate crumble for dessert. We had pears starting to get too old, and my DH found the recipe when flipping through one of my new cooking magazines, so…. Definitely not diet. It was too sweet, not really worth the calories or the trouble. I like pears natural better.

Yesterday was a day of hunger. It’s odd, and in the past, “dieting mode” I’d have just suffered. Instead, I ate a bit more than usual, because now that I’m evaluating hunger before I eat, I’m more comfortable knowing what’s real hunger versus just a desire to eat.

It started with breakfast, where I was extra-hungry before eating. After my muesli, I was still hungry, so I had a slice of toast w jam. Lunch was a burger patty and salad. At 6pm hungry again I stopped at a bakery near the metro station that sells these really yummy and not-too-bad-for-you little bread rolls that they fill with various toppings. I took banana and chocolate (it’s actually the only flavor I like) and ate about half of it. Dinner was lasagna. Now written down it doesn’t look like so much more than usual, but I think it was a bit more in quantity, and certainly it was more in terms of my hunger. Maybe it’s hormones, maybe just random variation. I’ve had several meals this week when I didn’t eat that much because I wasn’t very hungry, so it’s possible this is just my body trying to even things out…

Last night I cooked again - I made lasagna, from my mom’s recipe. My mom used to make it when I was a kid growing up - it was a special occasion dish and it was clear last night that it will be the same for me - it was a LOT of work. Her recipe has you make meatballs that are the meat part of the lasagna, instead of a tomato-and-meat sauce layered in. So you have a bunch of stuff to chop and mix for the meatballs, then a ton of mini meatballs to roll (about 3/4 inch each), you also make a tomato sauce from scratch, and THEN you start to put it together… 3 kinds of cheese (ricotta, mozzarella, parmesean) and of course the noodles. I was in the kitchen for a long time, but I enjoyed it.

The result was fabulous - it tasted just like my mom’s (well, maybe a bit too salty, and I needed a different pan, I should have had one more layer). My DSS loves lasagna and was my excuse for making it, and he loved it, which was really nice. My DH is never a big fan of tomato-based pasta dishes, but he said it was good. We’ll have it today for lunch with a big salad, and then I’ll freeze the rest.

I’m glad I’m able to find a way to eat when I’m hungry these days, and to make favorite dishes too… As you can see, I’m also doing well on my “cook regularly” goal for 2008!

I had an interesting exchange w iniya on her blog a few weeks back, and I decided to expand our discussion for my own blog.

One of my key philosophies in life is this : UNDER-promise, OVER-deliver. I am a fanatic about it at work, constantly fighting my bosses to get timelines and project goals that my team can accomplish, then pushing my team to beat those goals. When successful it makes you look and feel like a superstar. The opposite is awful, and unfortunately, much more frequent - Over-promising, and then Under-delivering. In work meetings I’ll often write on the board ______ - Promise ______-Deliver when we are working on planning a project, or at various steps in the completion. And I’ll try to remind people that maybe we’re getting it backwards again, we want to UNDER promise, OVER deliver, not the opposite. So when the young whipper-snapper tells me he’s calculated every step needed to get the project done, and if he works really hard and everything goes perfectly, it can be done in 10 weeks. That means I tell my management we need 14. I explain to my team that things will come up - someone will miss a flight, an exec will be in a meeting the day we need an approval, certain steps will take longer than planned, etc - 10 weeks is a theoretical timeline - for real life you need to add more time for the unexpected issues. We almost always will bring the project in around 11-12 weeks with that approach - and everyone is happy.

For years when I began a diet I would calculate what my weight “should” be at a certain date in the future, calculating from 2 pounds per week in a straight line. I would chart my weight progress vs that “should” line. In the first weeks it was usually pretty positive (in early weeks of weight loss you often see big numbers) and then about 8 weeks in I’d start to fall further and further behind.

I am a perfectionist who pushes myself very hard, and I am also very competitive. I am by no means an expert at applying this philosophy to my own life, but I’m trying. If you see on my progress page I’ve tried to apply this to my exercise goals. I selected 500 minutes of exercise as my first goal - chosen totally at random. I was surprised when it was pretty easily and rapidly achieved. So I thought about upping the goal, to 1000 or even 2000 minutes. Instead, I’ve kept it at 500 and I’ve now almost completed my 4th 500 minutes.

This way I keep MEETING and SURPASSING my goal. It’s at least as motivating, maybe more, than having the bigger number as my goal. Same basic approach has been true for me getting back on track since my backslide this Fall. I set goals each week that I can meet pretty easily, and surpass. In fact, I think I’ve surpassed each goal by quite a large margin, which just gives me confidence to keep going and set the next goal just a wee bit higher. Maybe it’s stupid, but I think that approach of seeing myself WINNING and SUCCEEDING is pretty important to my success. I can’t tell you how many years I spent beating myself up because I’d only exercised 5 days that week (instead of 7) or that I had one day when my calories went over by 150. I didn’t focus on what I DID do (the exercise, the great control of calories), I focused on the gap between my accomplishments and my goals.

I read similar attitudes in so many other people’s blogs… I just want to point out that there is another way, and life is so much nicer…

I saw Dr Hope again late last week.

I continue to be awed by the way the universe sometimes provides what you need when you need it. I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate Dr Hope a year ago, but right now she’s exactly what I need.

I have never, NEVER felt so peaceful and eaten so well while trying to actively lose weight.

Did you see that? I said I am “actively trying to lose weight” — BUT I AM NOT DIETING.

Oh no, dieting certainly not. I ate pasta carbonara for lunch yesterday. And I had 3 chocolate truffles too. In the past few days I’ve eaten waffles, french fries, fried eggs, bread and so much more. Not to mention that I use real sugar, real butter, full-fat milk on a near-daily basis.

And yet, I am losing weight - slowly, slowly - but surely.

I am starting to get the hang of some more of the Dr Hope guidelines.

I now pretty systematically evaluate my level of hunger before eating. I’ve even skipped a few meals in the past week because I wasn’t hungry, or eaten “too soon” because I was. I’m not at 100% on this yet, but it’s definitely in the majority zone.

The thing I am probably best at of all the Dr Hope tricks is evaluating my food for pleasure. Everything I eat, from a breadstick to an elaborately prepared gastronomic treat, I try to think about the taste, texture and how much I like (or dislike) it. What is that subtle spice? How do they make it both crispy and creamy? It’s a lot of thinking, but it makes the eating much more enjoyable. And, as I learned at my weeklong work meeting in early January, if it’s not good, I don’t eat much of it anymore. I would say I now evaluate my food for pleasure about 90% of the time.

And to respond to a few comments on the blog in the past few weeks - I RARELY thought about the pleasure from my food before November of last year. Only at Special Events where food was a featured item (fancy restaurants, someone making me dinner, etc).

The latest challenge Dr Hope added has been to leave something on my plate uneaten. This has been really hard for me, but finally this week I started to see some real progress. The idea of this one is to actually build up to being able to stop eating when you have had enough. If you are like I was, “enough” meant when the plate is empty. I still have a long ways to go for this to be routine for me, but I’m now more and more consistent, leaving something over more meals than not. Sometimes if something is particularly good I set the “leftover” bit aside early, and finish the rest, which isn’t quite the same thing, but it’s helping me to get over the “mine! all mine!” mentality, and work on giving up some of what is on my plate. In the past week I’ve had 2 times when I stopped much earlier than one bite uneaten - really able to sense my hunger and leave a good amount untouched. It feels really good, and I can see how in the future this will really help.

I’m much less stressed about food in general. Yesterday afternoon one of my employees wanted to stop at a local bakery because “they have the best chausson aux pommes (apple croissants) in Paris.” Mind you, this is AFTER we’d had pasta carbonara (loaded w cream, egg yolk, bacon and cheese) for lunch. Did I sweat it? No. I was glad to have an expert showing me something, glad to find a good address for this flaky treat. I was not hungry at the time so I took it home. Knowing that I’ll eat it when I’m hungry. And I know I’ll enjoy it, or I’ll stop eating it. I haven’t eaten enough chaussons aux pommes to know which is the best in Paris, but I’ll be able to tell if it’s really good or just ok. And I won’t eat it all, either.

My discussion w Dr Hope also centered around emotional eating. I’ve stated this before, but for the record I wouldn’t categorize myself as a binge eater or an emotional eater. I’m just an eater. I eat with or without emotion, but apparently a bit more with emotion.

The same day I saw Dr Hope I got a call about a job opportunity that is moving into the next phase. It’s flattering and a big move, and I’m very conflicted because while it’s a great job, it would also be a big change in lifestyle (lots more travel and pressure) and I really like my life right now. So after a few email and phone exchanges to set up the meetings, I found myself wandering around the house looking for stuff to eat. I wasn’t hungry. I was conscious that I wasn’t hungry. But still I was looking for stuff to eat. Specifically, I wanted Crunch. Apples. Popcorn. If I wasn’t actively trying to lose weight it would probably be something else. But I wanted, really wanted, to crunch my way through the stress. I didn’t. But knowing that this issue would keep bugging me for the next several days or weeks I discussed it w Dr Hope.

She said she found it interesting that I was looking to eat because of it, and a great sign that I was aware of the emotional pull and not giving in to it. She then told me to have a fun weekend and to spend Tuesday - Friday when I was back at home paying attention to think-as-you-eat principles. And to enjoy my weekend vacation.

A diet doctor who tells you to enjoy life…. not bad at all!

By the way, just identifying this stress-induced desire to eat was enough to keep it from coming to pass. I haven’t had the crunch-fest nor any other food-fest that I could easily justify from the stress.

Where do some of the ideas in Low Stress Weight Loss come from?

Mainly from my own history and my own successes and failures. But I have always read a LOT of diet books and magazines and listened to podcasts, and read blogs etc too - to keep up the motivation. But that kind of intensity is exhausting, and rapidly crosses the border from “interest” to “obsession”.

The biggest guideline for “Low Stress Weight Loss” is to eliminate the stress I’ve so often felt while attempting to lose weight. So out go the daily weigh-ins, out goes calorie counting, out goes long frequent sessions at the gym. And I’ve also radically cut back on my reading diet books and magazines, and listening to diet-and-fitness podcasts. Basically aside from this blog and seeing Dr Hope every 2 weeks, I’m just on my own.

That said, a lot of my approach is based on what I’ve learned over the years. There are a few books that have had a substantial influence on my current thinking, and some books and websites that go in the same direction. To be clear - I’m not following any of these plans specifically, but I think there are some good ideas in a lot of them, and some of those ideas are similar to what I’m working on.

There are two books that have had a pretty major influence on me. The first is “The Path of Least Resistance”, by Robert Fritz, which is a general self-help book I bought and read maybe 15 years ago. The basic premise is that your life will go in the direction that you make to be the easiest for you. So if you want to change something you need to think about all the things that keep you where you are so you can build new ways into your life to go in a new direction. I got this book for reasons having NOTHING to do w my weight, but I’ve applied the principles to job, weight, relationship, etc - and I think reading this book fundamentally affected the way I looked at personal change.

A more recent book I can recommend is “Mindless Eating” by Brian Wansink. I bought this book because it seemed interesting (a mix of psychology and marketing), not really for “diet” reasons. He is a university guy who runs a food center at Cornell where they do a lot of the work that is behind the manipulative packaging and context of eating - or more to the point, overeating. His book kind of walks you through the way portions, context, etc contribute to overeating, and he made an attempt to make it diet-y by adding some mild suggestions of how you can incorporate that knowledge to change your behavior and lose weight. Because it’s not a typical diet book perspective and the ‘diet’ hand is pretty light it’s refreshing. And it was maybe the first time I saw anyone write down that making a few small changes you could lose 1-2 pounds a month pretty painlessly but that over time that would really add up. So the idea sat in the back of my head for a few months until I was again unhappy w my weight and ready to do something about it, and that’s when it kind of cemented for me - so I’d say his book was a major influence, even if not directly.

A few months ago when I started all this I was looking for some more understanding and found on the web several sources that talk about “intuitive eating” and it’s twins (”mindful” and “normal”). I haven’t read books on the topic or spent more than a few minutes finding sites and bookmarking them, but I thought I’d share some of what I found for those who are looking to explore this type of approach further.

My personal issues aren’t really binge-eating, nor do I feel the least bit receptive to Overeaters Anonymous, but both of those topics have lots of info in the same vein, and a lot of people seem to find them helpful. I also tend to avoid the “emotional eating” stuff, because I am someone who tends to put more emphasis on BEHAVIOR than anything else, and what I’ve stumbled upon on emotional eating hasn’t really pushed my buttons.

Of what I’ve found online and liked, the most popular seems to be “Intuitive Eating” by Tribole & Resch, who have written a book (which I don’t have and haven’t read) but they have good (and free) info on their website : http://www.intuitiveeating.com/

The other search term I had success with is “normal eating” where there are a few authors and “mindful eating” where again there are a few authors. Here is a link to a mindful eating site http://www.tcme.org/patientNewsletter.htm

I like to call what I’m doing “Low Stress Weight Loss”. It’s my own thing, that’s for sure, built on years of my dieting experiences. Over time I learned what worked for me, and I’ve spent the past few years learning that what worked for me once doesn’t work for me now.

I would say 2007 was the year of waking up - realizing I can’t keep doing the same thing and frustrating myself, that in order to manage my weight in my new life, I needed a new approach. This realization came gradually, probably becoming most clear to me when I pushed myself way too hard at the gym and aggravated whatever underlying back problem I already had.

My wedding was coming up and I was determined to drop some weight. I pushed myself HARD at the gym, going for 60-90 minutes 6 days a week, trying all the machines, and somewhere in there I ruptured a disk and within 3 weeks mild sciatica became horrible, incapacitating pain, rendering me unable to walk 10 feet. I was unable to work, unable to think, unable to move. I took a lot of painkillers. I canceled my honeymoon, sucked down the morphine, tried all kinds of steroid injections, made it through the wedding (a bit loopy!) and had surgery when I should have been on my honeymoon.

I’m much better now, the surgery cleared up the problem of the back and pain right away, but the issue of how to manage my weight with my new full, wonderful Parisian life was still gnawing away at me. Out of terror of not fitting into my wedding dress I kept my weight stable through all the trauma, but after the second wedding party (in the US) all discipline dissolved and another 20 pounds arose. I’m still 2 pounds up from what I had considered to be the high-end of my “buffer zone” for the past 5 years.

Over the past 5 years my weight was usually around 185, went up to 195, down to 175 in cycles. I have not been happy at that weight here - probably because in France people are skinnier than in the US. At the same weight I feel like I fit in in America, and as a person who has always been fat, that is a great feeling. But here at the same weight I’m REALLY fat, and all the social stigma that goes with it is present. So for as long as I’ve been here, I’ve wanted to get my weight down by a good amount.

But it’s just recently that I’ve come to the clear conclusion that I can’t lose weight successfully the same way I did in the past. Counting calories and other strict diet programs makes me obsess about food and become draconian with my daily choices. I see the world full of things I can’t have, daily, constantly. I think about food all the time - what I can have, what I’ll have next, do I have calories left over, what will I have to eat at the next meal if I eat that, etc… It’s EXHAUSTING.

And going to the gym in a non-gym culture is hard too. My life isn’t organized to get to the gym. I have no more excuses than anyone else to avoid exercise, but the truth is right now I’m not ready to carve out the time for it. I might someday go back to the gym, but not right now. And I acknowledge and accept that I will have slower weight loss because of it. For now, it’s the right choice for me. Long term, I want to be fitter, not just thinner, so I’ll need to work out a way to get more exercise, but at least for right now, I know that what I always considered a “real workout” will just add stress to my life. Stinky hot dirty and run down expensive Parisian gyms will have one less client for a while longer. Long walks a few times a week is what I can commit to.

I got home around 10pm last night and am very happy to be back in my own bed, and happy to have more control over my schedule again.  I’m also happy to no longer be eating in that hotel, but I must say I am grateful for the experience.

I spent the whole week “thinking-while-I-ate” and had pretty good results.  I left something on my plate almost all the time (I forgot to during one lunch).  I did a pretty good job of listening to my hunger and drank all the water.  Except for champagne the last “gala dinner” night, I didn’t drink.  Where I saw the biggest impact was in paying attention to the pleasure from my food - which in this case was more the LACK of real pleasure in the giant buffet.

The truth is I am like you - I usually wolf down whatever is around, good or not good, out of habit.  I fully credit my nearly miraculous ability to eat reasonably this week on the several weeks of training I’ve had in paying attention to the pleasure in my food.

In my food diary is a column where I mark how much pleasure a particular food has given me.  I choose to rate it on a scale of (-) for negative, (=) for neutral, and then (+) or (++) or (+++).  I am not 100% on keeping the food diary, but do it more days than not, and so that’s lots of foods rated and evaluated over the past 2 months or so.

The ratings force an awareness, an evaluation, and a realization that some foods taste better than others, some things satisfy more in certain conditions.

I am still in my infancy in this approach, but for the first time in my life, this week I was able to face a buffet table of pasta in sauces and a huge dessert spread without the slightest hesitation or panic.  I overate nothing.  I often put stuff on my plate that only made ONE trip into my mouth, quickly deciding that it wasn’t GOOD ENOUGH TO EAT.

Nothing was BAD, mind you.  Everyone else was happy with the food, and they’re all French and as such, relatively demanding in terms of quality.  But big buffet meals served out of warming trays can only reach a certain level of refinement (and this place didn’t even hit that standard).  By the end of the week I’d learned which foods the resort did best, and I’d learned to eat a pretty hearty breakfast knowing that lunch for me was always a light affair.

I’m extremely pleased with myself for having shown an ability to have a markedly different relationship w food in two situations that are usually very difficult for me (buffets and work meetings).

I’m hoping this is really the beginning of the new eating habits I’m working on in Low Stress Weight Loss becoming deeply ingrained and my overall, daily, new “NORMAL”.

I saw Dr Hope again yesterday. I got kind of nervous beforehand, actually, because I haven’t been keeping my food diary, have barely paid attention to the new food rules, and have eaten “Holiday Fun Style” more days than not these past 2 weeks.

Luckily, I didn’t listen to the little voice in my head telling me to cancel, and luckily Dr Hope is really nice and understanding. Her first words, after “best wishes for a happy new year” were “well, it’s that season…”.

So it has been. The season of Overindulgence. The season of Overeating. The season of dropping some of my good food habits. The season of very little exercise. The season of the clothes getting tighter, the face looking puffier.

I decided that yesterday was back to totally normal (although Wednesday wasn’t so bad). I started with a check-in on the scale, up one pound from when I last weighed in a month ago, which isn’t so bad considering what I’ve been eating, and I’m still in Onderland (but barely!). As I mentioned recently, the scale will now be my helper, coming to check on me every 2 weeks or so. I don’t want to get into letting the scale rule my life, so it’s staying in the closet to prevent daily (and more) check-ins. But it’s not hard to take it out, and I’ll do that periodically.

I started eating a lot better Wednesday, (dinner excluded) and Thursday was downright good. I have listened to my hunger and eaten at odd times of the day, helped by my schedule which was remarkably flexible today. I made muesli again, and I am yet once again reminded how much better I do when I start with an oatmeal or muesli breakfast. Anything else seems to open too many doors to temptation, whereas the oatmeal or muesli are delicious and Satisfying.
I am away next week for work again. I discussed the challenge of next week w Dr Hope. It’s a big national meeting of my company, with about 1500 people crammed into some hotel. Almost the whole time is spoken for, from breakfast meetings at 7:30 am to “disco nights” until 2 am. Don’t worry, I need my sleep and won’t be drinking and dancing, but I’ll need to do some socializing until at least 11pm every night and just the thought of that makes me grumpy. I think we have one or two 2-hour free sessions during the week. I am not a big fan of this kind of meeting personally, although I recognize it’s importance for the teams to help them get motivated for the year, so I put on my best “team player” smile and go at it.

The food challenges will be considerable - there are not so many ways to give great and healthy food to that many people who eat at once, so the meals will probably be almost all buffets and filled with starch and oil. Alcohol is the social lubricant of choice for these events, and I’ve decided that apart from an occasional glass of champagne in my hand, I will not drink (and I never drink very much of cheap champagne, so the glass will be mainly decorative).

I also don’t know if I’ll be able to blog (there is apparently very little internet access), and I’m sure I won’t be able to read others’ blogs. I’ll at least write while I’m there, even if it’s only to post it upon my return.

Dr Hope & I discussed this coming week, and the plan is three-fold.

1) Keep the food diary every day (the document contains where I ate, hunger level, what I ate, did I leave anything left over, pleasure rating and relaxation level). I know this will help me. Some structure usually does.

2) Drink at least 2 liters of water a day. Should be do-able, and it will give me something to do at coffee breaks besides eat the snacks, since I’ll be in line for the bathrooms… I agreed to this step quickly, because I know hotel air and travel is dehydrating, and I’m a big water drinker anyway.

3) Leave something uneaten at every opportunity. Breakfast. Coffee breaks. A square of chocolate served w coffee. At meals, at the appetizer, the main dish, AND the dessert.

We talked a lot about the difficulty I was having with this ‘leaving something’ uneaten bit and this was her suggestion. Out of habit, out of comfort, without thinking, I eat what I am served. It is ENORMOUSLY hard for me not to do that. Its even harder when I serve myself. I need to be able to FORGO some of “my” food in order to be able to move to a place where I can judge which portions will satisfy me. But until I can stop myself from cleaning my plate mechanically, I can’t get to that next step.

So I’m taking a step backwards to concentrate on just this. I’m not going to worry about pausing in the middle of my meals and evaluating hunger again for now.

I will be packing my walking shoes, and a new audiobook. Not sure how much opportunity I’ll have, but certainly more than if I leave the shoes at home! I’ve been pushing myself to get back into my mild exercise, and have walked 3 times this week and hope to post a “walking to Bilbao” update soon after my trip.