Ate a second bowl of frozen cherries at dinner. It seems that frozen cherries and acorn squashes have become my addictions! Much better than entire boxes of Cracker Barrel Macaroni and Cheese, and Food Lion strawberry/cream cheese Danish bites! I was eating both multiple times a week before I started getting serious about losing weight again this past March.
I have decided three things with regard to coping better with my McDougalling and doing a better job of trusting the process - and healing from my increased rearing of my food demons that has come back with the change in my way of eating -
1. I am no longer going to write down what I eat in a day here. I find that I am going back and editing when I change my mind about something, or add something, or remember something, and that's not so much different than tracking food on Sparkpeople. I also batch cook meal bowls in advance and forget exactly what I put in them, so I am going out of my way to figure out the ingredients. It's still keeping my mind in an obsessive place where I need to be hyper-cognizant of what I eat. As far as I'm concerned, this is not McDougalling. He teaches us not to count calories or measure portions. I am not ready to give up measuring yet, but I am definitely ready to let go of my food logging! For those who can do it easily, I fully respect you. I can't.
2. I am not going to count calories anymore at all. Not on Sparkpeople, or any other weight loss website, not using the calorie list I made, not at all. When I made the post above with the Sparkpeople quote, and the maintenance calorie range, a lightbulb went off in my head.
As long as I follow the calorie density rules, it is virtually impossible for me to overeat that 155-pound maintenance range of 1550-1750 calories, as long as I am fully McDougall compliant. (Yes, I know that has been taught, but I just "got it"). I didn't think I could eat that way now and still lose. I could log my food every day, make fancy meal plans, but I'm only going to make things much more complicated for myself...and fuel an obsession. I have been worrying about staying under a "magic" arbitrary 1400 calorie ceiling. But I will still lose weight at 1500. Probably even 1600. I am still 211 pounds, so my body will still shed weight at the level where I am eating, since it is living at an excess.
If you REALLY want to hear something crazy,
I can't even remember why I picked 1400 calories. But I have been observing it like some kind of freakish rite, like McDougalling won't work except for that one number. It must be different for me.
That's simply not true. It's time to let go of 1400, and after reading enough from Dr. McDougall and spending that time researching maintenance calorie ranges and how natural they really are, it's
finally occurred to me that I can't NOT succeed on this program as long as I am compliant. I'm ready to let go of 1400. I really feel like it's finally clicked in my brain.
3. I am only going to weigh myself on Saturday mornings. No more jumping on the scale four or five times a week to see if I can get a lower number after only a day or two. I hadn't been doing badly with this before starting McDougall, but in the last several weeks, especially with the sweet potato bloating of the past three, I have regressed. I am calling an end to that immediately. It's not healthy to be THAT caught up in a number that fluctuates so much day by day. (Is that you who taught me that already, Jeff Novick?)
Once a week is enough, and Saturday mornings makes sense to me at the start of a weekend.
I am still going to write here in my journal. I am just not going to keep writing my food down.
I batch cook to make life easier. I think about what food goes in there once, as I'm assembling grain bowls, to make sure they are starch based and have enough nutrients in them. I shouldn't be inventorying exactly what I did a day or two later, in order to write it down for my journal. I have to literally stir up the bowl and make note of each thing to write it here. That just encourages me to obsess over food. I wouldn't worry about it once I made it, but I do in order to keep track here. By now, it's obvious to those who read here that I am compliant, and what kinds of meals I eat. So I would really only be logging for myself...and I don't need to be that caught up in it. I create my grain bowls with many ingredients, based on Dr. McDougall's recommendations, and I know they are compliant when I make them. That's good enough as far as I'm concerned. No more logging and worrying about whether I had more corn one day or ran out of peas. I found myself falling into the same obsession I had when using the Sparkpeople nutrition tracker. I was so relieved to not have to do that anymore, and then I just morphed into a similar thought process. That is just not cool.
Sorry this is so long! But I had to get some of that out of my brain and into a place where I can come back and read it again if I feel like I need some encouragement. I mentioned yesterday about reading about a link between a vegan diet and an eating disorder - some clinicians believe that an ED patient will go vegan to have a reason for eliminating entire food groups, and it becomes it's own way of food obsessing, as opposed to recovering. I had been doing much better with my old demons, but then I got so caught up in wanting to do McDougall *exactly right* that I created all sorts of rules like I would have done years ago, when *no such rules existed*.
I let the fact that I was eliminating meat, dairy, and oil throw me back into olden days when I was systematically obsessed with my food, even though it had been a relatively long time since then. I found a parallel developing - reading every label to make sure there is no oil started to trigger old patterns where I would arbitrarily limit some thing or another, or try figuring out which potato chips brands had the biggest serving sizes. I really didn't know I was doing it until a few days ago, there's no denying it. I simply can't let this negativity creep into what is the healthiest way I've ever eaten, into a program that is so simple! I now have my oil-free versions of things in regular rotation, so it's just a matter of checking occasionally to make sure they are still compliant, not every time I shop.
So! No more making food lists, no more being married to 1400 calories, and no more jumping on the scale every day. There, it's written out for posterity. I think I would probably have been a prime candidate for the 10-Day Intensive if I wasn't trying to live off a disability salary. I could have probably learned a lot of this stuff from the very beginning instead of trying to figure it out of a disordered brain along the way!
To all those who read my journal, thanks for your patience! I really am trying hard to get better.
Right now I have so much free time, it's easy to get obsessive.
But there's no denying that potatoes give me mega-bloat. It's literally so uncomfortable, I can't stand it. Disappointed.
(I normally don't examine my poo, but I was afraid it wouldn't all go down)!
