For some weeks now, I have been faithfully journalling every bite of food that crossed my lips. I´m trying to stay below 1500 calories and 30 percent carbs a day, as I still have plenty of condensable weight to work on. Now, the journalling software I use not only allows me to write down what I ate, it also gives me an immediate running total of how much I have already eaten on that day.
And it shows me immediately which are the culprits should I go over my limits. Which considerably dampens the appeal of my old favorite, peanuts, and helps me to stick to small portions of anything carby.
You know what the kicker is? After sticking to that plan for awhile, I find myself less hungry than before. I did, actually, have to have another protein shake in the evening several times because I was too far under my calories (don´t want to go into starvation mode).
As I am the one who cooks, I have been preparing the same meals for both of us, except DH got slightly bigger portions. Guess what, he, too, has been condensing himself by a two-digit number, and he claims that he has not at all felt hungry. Besides, he keeps pointing out how good it feels not to be stuffed after dinner.
Did I mention he´s my greatest supporter?
What really starts me thinking with all this is the amount of food we have to buy these days. Or rather, the amount we don´t have to buy.
Grocery shopping for a week used to mean having at least four to five big reusable bags filled with foodstuffs to carry upstairs afterwards. Sometimes there was so much stuff that it became difficult to put all of it plus the two of us into the car.
Sadly, most of that stuff was also eaten.
Nowadays, I usually take one insulated bag for refrigerated goods, plus one normal for the things that don´t need cooling. Even when having to stock up because some things have run out, there´s rarely more to carry than these bags would hold.
And what is in there- is enough! Enough to take us through another week, or sometimes two, without feeling deprived at all.
What the other bags used to hold, then, were the things that were too much. The things which we ate, and felt stuffed afterwards. The things whose calories are now residing in those rolls of extra flesh that I am trying to recondense.
Even if I do try to make a projection of how much more food I´d need to eat in order to just maintain my present weight, the resulting difference wouldn´t fill another of those grocery bags by a long way.
While my weight gain was happening, I never even realized just how much I ate, even though I was almost constantly chewing on one thing or another. Coming home meant making a beeline for the kitchen and the refrigerator, for a big bowl of pudding or big chunks of cheese and sausage "to stave off the worst hunger". I had no idea that what I thought was just a tiny snack had in reality the calories of a full meal. Actually, I didn´t want to know. The calorie listings were there, after all. Right on the packages. I avoided looking at them in those days. And I avoided measuring my portions. A portion was the amount in a package.
Of course, seeing the sky-high grocery bills we had, I blamed them on rising prices and went on to tell myself it was thrifty to buy the bigger packages. And then I downed a big package of pudding in one sitting instead of a smaller one, and since two pounds of pure vanilla cream pudding were likely to make even me feel queasy, I topped the soft stuff with chocolate drops, granola and chopped almonds for a bit of crunch, adding even more calories.
What I had lost was the feeling of "enough". That queasy feeling was really my body trying to tell me it had enough, my stomach trying to tell me it was full.
But I had long ago stopped listening to them. I just ate and ate. And gained and gained.
For a long time I avoided weighing myself. I knew, of course, that I was getting fatter. I knew I couldn´t walk without a crutch, I knew I could no longer reach my own feet to put on stockings.I knew that I had had to replace my clothes in a bigger size more that once. But I didn´t want to know how many kilos that meant.
When I finally revved myself up to face the music, I was devastated.
The worst part of it was not believing that I had eaten too much. I blamed the gain on quitting smoking, on an accident I had around that time that kept me from walking for several months, on medication I was on during that time. I blamed it on anything except eating too much, to the point of kicking loose a family quarrel with a relative who flat out told me I couldn´t have gained that much from the other reasons alone.
I know today that the medication was probably inhibiting my self-control when it came to food, and that quitting smoking can lower one´s metabolism. But that doesn´t mean that I had to grow all that fat in such a short time. It took another ingredient for that, namely, the amounts of food I kept ingesting.
As long as I was in denial about that crucial fact, I was absolutely helpless when it came to getting rid of that weight again. I was feeling like someone trapped on the back of an elephant that is running amok. My body kept getting fatter, I was ever more handicapped by my weight, and I was, after some time, simply scared that this weight gaining thing would never stop, that I would end up as one of those people who couldn´t leave their house any more, or who couldn´t leave their beds because their legs couldn´t support them any more.
I told the story before of how my husband kept me from that fate.
Still, it was a long way before I started to think about how much food my body really needs. And then, only then, did the pounds start to come off.
And today? I still have to weigh and measure my food, then journal it, to convince my interior glutton that these are really sufficient portions. There´s still that slight twinge of disbelief that that amount of food would be enough whenever I look at the portions I serve myself.
And after eating, the comfortable feeling of satiety. Not stuffed, not queasy, just comfortably filled.
The feeling of having had enough.
Julia
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