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New Category for free-writes and lines of thought to explore: I’m Just Sayin….

A couple of friends and I were joking and reminiscing yesterday about an old diet habit we had as older teens: The Coke and M & M diet. I’m sure it looked a little different for all of us, but for me, it was a combination of factors that made the mixture a frequent source of substinence. For one, school started much too early for me to be hungry first thing, so I’d roll out of bed and sleep through First Period without eating first. By second period, which to get to I had to walk right past the PE coach selling candy from shopping cart, brought me a pack of peanut M & M’s (protein) and a few steps from there was the coke machine holding chilled caffeine…just what I needed to jump start the day! And I wasn’t alone. Half of my art class was eating the same freakin’ way.

Lunch was a Chip Which (ice cream sandwich made of chocolate chip cookies) because two hours after the Coke/Candy Combo, I was sugar crashing hard. The Chip Which and Chocolate Milk got me through the second half of the day. Just before Marching Band practice I’d grab a half gallon of Tropicana Twister (Strawberry Banana). After band, I needed salt, so it was french fries from the McDonald’s I passed on the way home. Dinner was always pretty decent because my mom cooked.

Why wasn’t I huge? Because of that band practice and portion size. What was I learning? To scrape by on sugar hits rather than nutrition.

After graduation I became more size-obsessed. Enter: Not Eating. That, of course, doesn’t get you far either, so the sugar hits continued in even smaller portions. It’s also a convenient way to fly under the radar while honing an eating disorder: no one seeing you eat junk food thinks you have one. Hot beverages make you feel full, so when you have communal drinks like coffee and tea, no one worries that you are starving yourself. I’d figured out how to make it on about 900 calories a day and just as the shakes would start, I could pop a few M & M’s, take a swig of Diet Coke, and the edge was off.

That year I started caring a smidge more for “healthier” eating so I’d dropped the ice cream sandwiches and chocolate milk, replacing them with sauteed veggies in toasted pita pockets and garden salads with no dressing. No one but my mom worried; my body looked pretty good. But her tip off was the depression symptoms that surface when your mind and body is so nutritionally depleted.

I was underweight when I got married, and when I was quickly pregnant 6 months after the wedding, I finally had a reason to get serious about eating better. My midwife, in so many ways the catalystic person starting me on a journey thoroughly touching every corner of my life, took me from an under-weight, mal-nourished Hungry Girl to a mother who could care for her baby by first caring for herself.

Still, I can’t entirely hate the eating disorder. It was that year that developed a strong sense of self-control and discipline, which in and of itself is not bad and quite necessary in order to in turn become healthy. I learned to push myself, learned to set goals and reach them, and heck…I lost weight.

I’ve never understood the American mentality of asking Overweight people or Yo-Yo Dieters for dieting advice (Have You Tried Jenny Yet?). Isn’t that a bit like asking the chain smoker how to quit? If I were a smoker and needed advice, I’d go find the NON smoker. The one who built a life around not being tempted, of rising above the habit. Ditto with drinkers; I’m not going to AA to learn how to not drink. AA is for *support*, but I would think those really needing to dry out would be better served to surround themselves with other dry people. A social life sans drinking, a healthy work life, healthy relationships.

So when it comes to weight loss, I can see the validity in going to the real experts on weight loss: the Anorexics. Not to emmulate their distortions or unbalance…but to actually get from them the methods that work. Healthy people don’t have to take them to the same extreme and that’s their power: because what Anorexics in turn don’t realize is that true self-control is in being balanced. Take the good and just let it be good: more is not always better.

What are my favorite Anorexic tips? Here they are:

• weight loss ALWAYS comes down to burning more than you eat. It is never harder or easier than that.
• exercise matters. If you’re going to burn more than you eat, and you’re going to eat, then you have to do more than sit on the couch and breathe.
• water, water, water. It doesn’t just hydrate you, it fills you. Likewise, frozen water (aka ice) can give your mouth something calorie and additive free to munch on when you know you’ve eaten enough but still want to work your yapper.
• hot fluids are miraculous. Clear Soup is part of almost every ethnic diet around. Coffee and Tea count too. They are communal, so are great choices when you need to consume things around other eaters but don’t want to dip into the Chili Cheese Fries. You’ll feel full, get a measure of nutrition, and won’t consume a huge portion
• Which reminds me: PORTION. You truly can eat ANYTHING you want, as long as you keep it to a decent portion size (define “decent”? Gastric Bypass people learn this the hardest way of all). If you have to have something, teach yourself to s-l-o-w-l-y eat a bite or two and then fill up on something else.
• Speed matters. There are lots of studies out there showing that the human appetite becomes satisfied in an amount of time, not just amount of food. So, in that 15 minute-or-so span of time, you can inhale the super-size, gluttonous mass of food, OR you can slowly savor a more sane portion. Watch someone with a disorder eat, and they are doing so slowly, unless that disorder is gluttony, in which case they are inhaling food by the pile-full.
• Never fill your fork. This plays into portion and speed. If your bite doesn’t fill the twines of your fork, it’s a decent size mouthful. If your fork resembles more of a shovel, it’s too full.
• make it count: if you need a protein hit, eat something whole and simple, like cheese or a hardboiled egg instead of a chicken sandwich with a bun and mayo.
• a little hunger is necessary. Hunger pangs are not always a bad thing. When your body needs to use fat stores, it needs hunger to signal it to do so. Go distract your mind for a while with something else; the first three days are the hardest and then your stomach adjusts.
• GRAZE. Lots of small meals, bites here and there, keep your metabolism high. This helps with inordinate amounts of hunger, blood sugar fluctuations, and energy.
• Fiber. Grains, Veggies….in short, roughage, is your friend. Fills you up, moves it on out, and usually is nutritious.

This many years later I know: balance is the key. The brain needs healthy fat to think clearly and avoid the depressive mood swings. If your diet is fat-free you’re in for one heckuva a dark period. Get sun, get exercise, get air. Seek out pure foods. If you’re growing a person, or feeding them via breastmilk, get over the weightloss thing almost entirely and remember you need extra fat and nutrition: that season is more about them than you. And it will take self-control. Self-control is it’s strongest when it’s used for GOOD rather than bad. It’s easier to deny something entirely than it is to be moderate, and that’s where gluttons and anorexics conjoined make the mistake.

I’m just thinkin’ it makes more sense to take the baby out of the water before tossing it.

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