Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Yeah, I DO just like food

I like food. I like everything about food. I like cooking it. I like shopping for it. I like reading about it. I even like food related marketing, package design and food science. There are few things that are as exciting and satisfying as finding a cool recipe with neat ingredients and an interesting preparation method and then questing for the ingredients and then coming home putting it all together and then putting it into my mouth. It's like a scavenger hunt that turns into a science project that turns into an art project that ends up in goodness in your tummy.

And I don't have a lot of emotional baggage about food and weight.

Honest. I don't.

I watched Bob Green on Oprah not too long ago doing a show on weight issues. They set it up for you to journal about weight and body image issues so that you could get to the bottom of your body issues and conquer your weight problem once and for all. One of the questions was something like why are do you over eat. And they said you cannot answer "I like food". That wasn't good enough. There MUST be an underlying emotional trauma as to why you are fat. You apparently must hate yourself therefore you eat.

I've done a lot of personal soul searching around food and weight issues. I don't hate myself and cover it up with weight. I kind of like myself. And apparently for self help gurus, simply liking food is not enough.

Yeah, I know I over eat, especially when I'm bored. Because what do I do when I'm bored? I cook. And when you cook, you have food to eat, and I just can't let it go bad, so I eat. And I know I get sucked in this cycle when I'm down, I get bored, and then I get all blue about being down and bored, and then I get bored with being bored and there goes a little circle of internal drama which results in lots of cupcakes and bread being baked and cupcakes and bread being eaten.

I've lost a good deal of weight in the past. I guess I was about to turn 30, I felt terrible, unhealthy and just yuckie. And I tipped the scales at 274lbs. Over the course of a year I got down to 203. I felt alive and sexy and awesome. Then of course I put 50lbs back on. I was in a terrible relationship where my partner would get on my case for not working out but then an hour later would take me out for ice cream. Talk about unhealthy!

I'm out of that toxic environment now.

I'm back home, living with my parents for awhile and it's been great on many many levels. On the weight front, my mom has been doing Weight Watchers for a while and signed me up. She's been really strict and has lost 60lbs and looks fantastic. I catch a peek at here every now and then and think "Wow! I have a skinny mom!". So since she's on the program, all the food in our house is WW approved. There's no chips or ice cream or even bread.

So I joined WW in November of 2008 weighing 250lbs. And I've lost 30lbs. But I've lost that weight really because there's no crap food around. If I want a Devil Dog, I have to get my ass up and walk to 7-11 and buy it for myself. So I've lost these 30lbs not by really dieting, but because the environment in this house is such that there isn't crap to eat.

30lbs in 30 weeks isn't bad. That's a pretty good accomplishment. But now I'm in the game. Now I have the commitment to make health a priority. To make me a priority. I want to be done with this nonsense. And it is nonsense. At work last night I inhaled two little packages of M&M because they were there, I was in a munchies mood, and yes, I was bored. That's nonsense. I felt all queasy after eating them. I let myself get pulled out of a good head space into bad patterns. And that stops now.

Now is where real life begins.

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