Another lesson learned

After making it at work for approximately one hour, stumbling around and forgetting my words as I was speaking them, I decided to go home and rest.  Four hours later, I woke up feeling slightly better and I had a little appetite.  By dinnertime, I was feeling right as the rain currently pouring down. 

Again, atrial fibrillation won't kill you, but it will sure make you stumble around like a zombie for a while.  The lack of oxygen to the brain makes you do silly things, like lean in doorways to prop yourself up, give you a perma-scowl because you can't think, and make you stop mid-sentence because you can't remember what you were just saying. 

Suffice to say, at dinner, I put back half of what I had intended to eat.  And it was all delicious food, too:  grilled chicken, corn with lime/cilantro butter, zucchini from the garden and homemade spanish rice.  I could have easily eaten till I was sick.  Indeed, the last time I ate like that (Saturday in Bellevue), I did get sick. . . for three days. 

So now, instead of eating till I think I'm full, which is waaay too full, I am considering portion sizes by eyeballing, and paring down as I'm eating.  It's easy at home, because I can just put food back onto the serving plates. Maybe not so easy in a restaurant.  

 I had plenty of everything and I even had room for a cup of tea and a cookie for dessert.

Again, lesson learned:  Don't be a glutton!  I'm fortunate to live in a country where there's more food where that came from.

As promised, I will soon be writing about my break-up with raw veggies.  Very sad.

Curiouser and curiouser. . .

Hmmm.  Went to the Taste of Old Bellevue yesterday and tasted, and tasted, and tasted.  Rigatoni, lox, asian salad and sausage rolls, donuts filled with nutella, sliders, bratwurst, cupcakes, pizza (two kinds), strawberry lemonade, carnitas, arnold palmers, salted caramels. 

Then, I was bloated all the rest of the day and all night and this morning, too.  Yesterday afternoon and this afternoon, I felt weak, sorta dizzy and disoriented, sleepy, and like I couldn't catch my breath. All that led naturally to massive crankiness.  Any guesses?  Anybody?

Yep, I was in atrial fibrillation today and yesterday.  A-fib, as it's called by the select few, is a nasty little electrical problem with the heart beat that causes the upper chambers of your heart to quiver instead of beat regularly.  It is not life-threatening in as much as gravity assists in pulling the blood down from the atria into the ventricles, which are beating normally and deliver blood to your body, albeit in a slightly decreased capacity.  Hence, the crankiness.

Same thing happened almost a year ago when I was still on the Farm.  I had a fairly substantial lunch with my girls and I came back upstairs feeling just 'not right."  I went down to the handy-dandy blood pressure machine on the second floor and I threw numbers of  95 pulse and something like 90/60 blood pressure.  Those are textbook a-fib numbers:  high pulse, low blood pressure.

So, a little kink in the undiet plan.   Rather, a little change of plans.  No eating till I'm stuffed. . . ever.  Not to sound like a major drama queen but overeating can equal a stroke for me.  That's a huge overexaggeration, to be sure.  Overeating can trigger a-fib.  A-fib can trigger a stroke due to blood pooling in the atria, coagulating, and then breaking off into the blood stream and lodging into my brain.  Hence, overeating can cause me to have a stroke. 

I will still be eating what I want, when I want, but no more eating how much I want.  Let the "selective" undiet begin!

Next time:  Dear veggies, I like you.  I just don't *like* you.

A different type of hunger

So, I was racing to meet a friend at 5:45pm last Wednesday and I had to get from Lakewood to Lacey during rush hour, plus I had no gas in the car. 

*Crap! I'm gonna be late.* 

I stopped at Safeway in Lakewood to fill up and grab a Coke Zero (No matter how hard I undiet, I will not drink sugared soda.  I don't have a death wish.).

A little backstory will help at this point - I was coming from the doctor's office after my annual girlie exam, so I was in slight pain, major embarrassment and humiliation, and completely frazzled.

So, along with my Coke Zero, I grabbed a bag of black pepper Kettle chips, mainly to be a snack to hold me over till dinner with my friend and her grandson, but also to soothe my hurt pride and modesty.

Chips and soda in hand, I race off to Lacey to make it to friend's house on time, which I did.  Baby boy was adorable, friend was welcoming as usual.  We went out for a walk around Capitol Lake, my first time and it was beautiful.  We walked, caught up, cooed and goochy-goo'd at baby, and Friend got hit on by an old codger who told her she "looked good for an old biddy."  In context, it really was a compliment.  Alas, Baby "chucked a wobbly" in public, as Friend from NZ put it and we had to bundle him up screaming in the car seat and drive away before someone called CPS on us.

We went back to her house after our walk and made baby laugh till he caught hiccups and we were laughing hysterically with him.  I held him, she held  him.  He sucked down a bottle like it was nothing and ended up burping and farting simultaneously.  We watched TV for a while and had soda.  All in all, a marvellous evening. 

I raced back home just in time to kiss Husband - who was pouting about me being out all evening - and flop blissfully into bed at 10pm. 

*Wait a minute!  I didn't get dinner!!* 

Baby was screaming so loudly out in public, we didn't stop at a cafe to eat.  I hadn't had anything to eat since a bag of chips at 5pm and I worked up a sweat walking around Capitol Lake at a mountain-climber's pace.  Geezus. . . I didn't get dinner.

My next realization was that I wasn't hungry.  All that time out and energy spent and I was no more peckish than when I eat a full dinner at 7pm.  Hmmm. . .

That's when it dawned on me. . . I didn't satisfy my physical hunger, but I more than sated my psychic hunger.

First, the doctor says I'm healthy, despite my shameless display of lady-parts.  That's a good thing.  Plus, I only have to go every three years now that I, too, am an old biddy.  Health is a good thing. 

I had an amazing bag of chips - guilt free.  I got fresh air walking around a beautiful lake in a beautiful city with my WA-BFF and her adorable grandson.  We goofed off through the evening into the night, sharing many genuine belly-laughs in the process, with Baby indulging in most of them. 

I didn't miss food at all.  I didn't even think about it.

Fast forward to yesterday, I am covering the receptionist's desk this week, as she is my subordinate, and I am her cover.  When I do her job, I can't do my job, which adds to the stress.  Everything in her work area is dingy and unorganized; whereas, I obsessively clean and organize my office.  I hate being interrupted because I analyze data for a living and the phone rings approximately every two minutes.  I found a money order lying on the floor that has been missing for 3 months and a whole stack of unfinished work she has crammed away/hidden dating back four years.  Did I mention that she goes apeshit if you even try to admonish her and she has been labeled the office bully?

A box of petunias I had planted to spruce the place up had withered away beyond rehydration because nobody watered it this week (including and especially me).  I wiped down a radiator in the waiting room and my rag came up pitch black.  I rubbed a clean spot on the front door, so now I'm possessed by the need to clean both doors and polish the brass fixtures.  Everywhere I looked, I found dirt, disorganization, and apathy.  I spent over 10 hours at work yesterday trying to do everything at once. 

Guess what I had for dinner last night?  A lot of chips and a big ole fro yo with nuts, coconut, and caramel sauce.  Oh, then I came home and went out for a beer with the hub.  I shoveled and shoveled the food and alcohol in, but could not fill up the gaping hole in my psyche. 

Same thing today.  Lots of hassle and interruption at work.  Ground in dirt everywhere.  Yesterday, someone found broken glass at the bottom of our playground slide and the maintenance man, when confronted with said glass, laughed it off.  So, now the preschool next door and our own five small shelter children can't use the playground on a nice, sunny summer day due to his apathy.

Guess what I had for dinner tonight?  McDs.  I know I am a big, grown girl and I am capable of making the healthy choices if I want to. Nobody carjacked me and forced me through the drive thru. 

I also know that I have been under tremendous work stress this week, well on the trajectory for 40+ hours.  I haven't visited my friends, aka my lifeblood, without whom I would shrivel up and die. My nails are ragged, my leg stubble becoming silkier by the day, my neck tense enough to warrant an asian beat down, uh massage.

I am beginning to recognize these stressors as they're coming up and acknowledge the detrimental effect they have on my ability to make good life choices. So, I put my stubbly pale legs into a pair of shorts and walked the trails behind my house for 20 minutes.  It's beautiful out there and I saw some wonderous things - like a two-story spider web and a little white foxglove in bloom, and the sun glinting off Puget Sound as it set.  Ahhhh.

Psychic hunger versus physical hunger.  I'm learning to tell the difference and ingest the appropriate nourishment at the right time.

PREVIEW:  Super cool stuff.  I bought the book "Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life" by Thich Nhat Hanh (SuperBuddhist) and Dr. Lilian Cheung.  Excerpts and reflections to come.  Looks awesome!

Postscript:  I read a few minimalist blogs and saw the following phrase that I have adopted as a mantra.  Maybe it will help you:

"Food is not entertainment."

Quick update

I tried to "mindfully" eat my Chobani pineapple yogurt this morning for a snack.  I only ate 1/2 to 2/3 of it and got full.  Curious. . . I will continue with this experiment and report back with my observations.  :-)

Another great food post. . .

http://zenhabits.net/the-zen-of-real-food-keeping-eating-simple/

I promise I will think up something original soon to write.  I am writing for pay at the moment, and that zaps all my creative energy.  Zen eating. . . worth exploring.

WARNING:  This is the website my laptop caught a virus from, but ONLY because I started clicking links within links. Stay away from "Zen to Fitness."  :-)

Nuff Said. . .

And I've only just read the first paragraph.  Did I mention how much I *love* Zen Habits?

http://zenhabits.net/basics/#more-8277

You show me yours. . .

I've got one.  I'm pretty sure you have one.  I usually keep mine hidden, but I'm going to show it to you.  It's not very pretty, and I rarely expose it to anyone, so consider yourself lucky or unlucky - your choice. 


My 'phat photo'

I know you have one you're ashamed of and wouldn't show if I paid you a million bucks. I'm not particularly pleased with this photo.  I look like someone cut out a wall of my home to remove me from it for the first time in  years. 


But then, I have photos like this where I look like a million bucks.

But my weight isn't substantially different.  In fact, it's the same.  Is it my attitude that's different (as well as my hair).  Can attitude really affect the way you appear to yourself and others?  I dunno, but I was feeling pretty run down in the top photo and awfully sassy in the bottom one. 

Oh, and short sleeves + fat arms is a baaaad combo. 

Talk to you soon, Loveys!

Couldn't have said it better.

Let this little gem keep you company for the weekend:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mireille-guiliano/aging-with-attitude_b_870365.html#s286365&title=Add_Your_Own

The ice cream story

I was so excited to eat everything in sight last week, that I ate half a quart of mint chip ice cream over the course of two days; thus, producing the, uh, dilemma I've been in this week.

The first time I ate it (I've had this brand/flavor before and it is *heaven*), I had three big scoops after dinner.  It was wonderful going down, but I felt a little greasy and full afterwards.  I vowed that two scoops would be my limit from now on. 

The next night, I had two scoops after dinner and ate it very slowly.  What I discovered is that there is a cool, tingly minty flavor at first followed by a mouthful of dark, bittersweet chocolate flakes that are all crunchy and yummy.  So, on the second night of ice cream bliss, I realized that I wanted the ice cream more for the textures and the *experience* of eating it rather than for nourishment.  I wasn't hungry, I wanted excitement in my mouth (hold all off-color comments, please). 

So, as a 'commandment' of the Undiet, or tenet, or whatever you like - I will pause before I eat something so wonderfully nutrient-bereft and ask myself, "Am I eating to obtain nutrition or am I eating because it's my favorite hobby?"  That doesn't necessary mean that I *won't* eat something because it's a hobby.  I will just pause first and ponder my motivation.

BTW, problem solved.  I have more spring in my step than your average zombie now.  I also have learned the importance of fiber in the diet.  Lots and lots of fiber.  Ice cream and McDs do not have any.  Fruits, veggies, and the lovely Mexican-inspired veg ragout I made tonight do.  I had about a cupful of said lovely ragout this evening because my inner workings are still ravaged from this last week of abuse and the clammy, cold-sweat, abdominal cramping explosion of solved problem I experienced this afternoon.

But enough of the pleasantries.  To recap what I've learned during Week 1 of the Undiet:  My body will tell me what it wants me to eat, and low-fiber, high fat and sugary foods are generally not it. 

My auntie always used to chide, "A minute on the lips means a lifetime on the hips." I would say that a minute on the lips means a lifetime in the colon.  It doesn't rhyme, but damn if it ain't true.  8-}

I have a wedding to attend and a mini-road trip to B-ham this weekend to let Connor check out Western WA university.  Aaaaaand, Sunday is my birthday.  Aaaaaand, I'm going to Europa in downtown Tacoma for my birthday dinner on Saturday evening.  Busy weekend - busier that 99% of them usually are, but I'll make sure to observe and report any thoughts on the ample opportunities I'll have to put the Undiet to the test. 

Ciao, Bellas!

An observation

My ass hurts, but not in that black tar heroin kind of way.  I've been sitting at work for faaaar too long this week already and my butt literally hurts - my tailbone, lumbar spine, and all the surrounding muscles are either tense or have a dull ache, or both.  


I'm beginning to take my work way too seriously, like I did at the Farm, and there's absolutely no need for it where I work now.  All that work stress - real, imagined, or self-imposed - is a contributing factor to the 25+ pounds I gained working in claims.  Nobody's hair or house is on fire, and there's nothing stopping me from leaving at 5pm like a normal person.


If I put one half of that nervous stress energy into taking evening walks or gardening, I may not have to bemoan the size of my posterior for much longer.  


Question to *constantly* ask myself:  What's the worse that could happen if I say 'no'?  

The Theory, the test, and the very bad results. . .

So, after fleshing out the concept yesterday, I was met with a goodly amount of criticism, albeit respectful, thoughtful, and with much love. 

What I didn't share last night, at the risk of putting you to sleep with my diatribe, is the theory behind the concept.  Because I am a writer and not a scientist, I'll put it to you as my thesis statement. 

I believe that, by putting zero restrictions on what I eat, I will eventually develop a pattern of eating that is perfect for my needs; thus, allowing me to maintain or lose weight, but not gain. 

How's that, for a long-ass, grammatically-correct sentence?! 

Seriously though, I know me.  I know that, the minute someone tells me what to do, I will do the opposite or nothing at all, thanks to my raging internal locus of control.  If I perceive that someone or something else controls my fate, I will balk.  Conversely, if I feel like I am calling the shots, everything is cool in the Land of Sharon. 

Starting to catch my drift yet?  What does a diet book do but tell you what to eat, how much, when, and sometimes where?  Instant turn-off.  I feel deprived, starving, and way out of control of the only thing I was born to have control over - my corpulent corpus.

So, by removing all restrictions, I believe I will develop a healthy pattern of eating that will allow me to become more attuned to my body's needs.  But here's the rub.  Until I develop this zen relationship with my body, I will probably eat anything and everything that has sugar and/or fat in it to make up for years of deprivation. And, oh yeah, I have been.

My test week diet has mainly consisted of cereal, McDs, ice cream, cookies, chips, and TV dinners, as I expected and planned.  I wanted to get the "no holds barred" gorge-fest out of the way first.  Giving myself permission to eat with reckless abandon felt GREAT!  FANTASTIC!  Sensual, even. . . like dirty sex. . . on a pile of twinkies, you know, in case I got the munchies after the dirty sex.

Not unlike facing the walk of shame after a one night stand, I woke up after a week's orgy of ice cream to the walk of constipation.  You know, that bloated, miserable shuffle you get when things aren't quite right in the Land of Bowel. 

Three words to describe it:  Black Tar Heroin. 



real black tar heroin, but not mine.

 If you're lucky enough to "score" some, that is. 

Soooooo, the first lesson learned on the Undiet is to know your limits, your 40-odd year old sluggish limits. I am currently dragging around like a constipated zombie.

We went out for Mexican food last night and I wisely eschewed the cheese- and sour cream-laden enchiladas for a more sensible bowl of albondigas (meatball soup with zucchini and carrots in it - oh, and one potato peel this time!).  I didn't even eat many chips.   

What I'm counting on during this experience is that, deep down, I am a pretty smart cookie.  I learn from my mistakes.  Heck, I even ate two pieces of fruit today and supplemented my frozen meal with a little extra veg and protein.  That should more than make up for the two pieces of homemade banana bread I scarfed at work. 

Regardless, I am still jammed up and miserable, and I have a newfound respect for fruit and its wonderful, laxative effect. 

Next time:  the lesson I actually learned from eating half a quart of mint chip ice cream over the course of 24 hours.  Till then, may your BMs be copious and pillowy-soft.  :-)

The concept

This is why I don't write. 

I sit in front of the computer and develop instant writer's block when I had it all planned out in my head moments earlier.  I shall miserably attempt to recreate the awesome story I concocted while driving home.  It was perfect.  Now, it's crap.

The thought occurred to me one day not so long ago:  What if. . . just what if I quit dieting?  What would happen?  Would I gain, lose, or hold steady?  Would I eat everything in sight?  Could I be chaste in the face of no limits?  Might Ben and Jerry's stock quadruple in value overnight?

This concept of the Undiet Life whispered in my ear around about the same time I was embracing the UnDyed life, which coincided with a change of career, wading knee deep into my 40s, and coming to terms with the fact that I have a college student for a son. Big changes - yep, yep.

Those are all stories for another day, though.  Back to the Undiet.  I couldn't shake the question for days.  What if I quit worrying about what and how much I eat?  What's the worse that could happen?

Well, I could gain a tremendous amount of weight, develop diabetes, arthritis, or cancer, or even succumb to genetically-predisposed congestive heart failure.  BTW, I am third in line to ascend the throne of CHF-induced death in my family.  Grandfather had it.  Mother has it.  Now, I have all the indicators for it. Oh, and that little electrical problem with my ticker that garnered me a cardiologist at the ripe old age of 40.  My husband could lose interest in me.  My son could find me even more of an embarrassment than I already am.  So much for the cons.

Now for the pros.  Um. . . I get to eat a lot, if I want.  I get to eat what I want, when I want it.  I could even commit the mortal sin of eating chocolate for breakfast (an absolute no-no in my house.), if I want.  Ice cream for dinner.  McDonald's for breakfast.  Cookies for lunch.  It's all up for grabs, like my big fat ass.

Speaking of ass, I'm not thin.  It won't be too much longer before I waddle into the obese category from a mere overweight.  I will not use the bathroom scale, because that's akin to counting calories, which is verboten on the Undiet.  I will, however, admit to a few stats.  I wear a size 14 trouser/skirt and a medium top, some of which are getting a little snug.  I wear a 34D bra, which is now furiously cutting a trench into my back-fat.  The "D" stands for Desperately trying to find a 34D anywhere but expensive, high end department stores.

So, far from being a lark or a prank, I am quite serious about Undieting.  Gaining more weight can put me into larger clothing sizes, bring on a host of health issues, exacerbate the ones I already have, and devastate my fragile newly-discovered self esteem. 

But, that "What if" keeps buzzing around my head, like the mosquito who has bestowed half a dozen welts on my legs and ankles over the last 24 hours.  What if I could free myself from the guilt that accompanies eating for pleasure? What if I stopped punishing myself for enjoying life?  What if I rid myself of one of the many stressors sapping my soul on a daily basis?  What if I bought out of the youth-obsessed American fitness culture?  What if, indeed.

Certainly more to write about on the subject.  As you may have noticed, I warmed up between the first paragraph and the last.  Oh, and I am terribly long winded when writing.  Next time, I will catch you up on what I've been up to this week as I come to grips with no-holds-barred eating, including what happens to your colon when you indulge on a 4-day ice cream bender.  It ain't pretty.

Ciao, Bellas!