8/27/28: Feeling "Full," Why is it Satisfying?

Weight:  154.4

Yes, you read that right.  After all my talk and all my determination to stay the course, I veered off of it in a serious way for about 4 hours late yesterday afternoon.  Four hours is all it took for me to "gain" 2 pounds.  I put the word gain in quotation marks because I know it's temporary.  I know most of it will be gone tomorrow.  I know most of it is fluid retention, swelling, systemic inflammation, water-weight, or whatever you want to call it.  I call it my body's warning sign that tells me I mistreated it yesterday.

It started with dinner.  Well, it started before dinner.  I was hungry all day, just like I had been hungry all day on Friday and all day on Thursday.  There was only one day last week that I wasn't hungry all day long, I think it was Wednesday.  For the most part, throughout this last 4 years of losing weight, I have not been hungry. I am not sure why now, all of a sudden, I am hungry all of the time.  That's not true, I guess when I think about it I know what it is, it's stress.  The hormone cortisol is released when you are excessively stressed and cortisol stimulates hunger.  That is what it is.  Ugh.  I have to get rid of this high level of stress.  It's just plain unhealthy.

By the time I got to dinner last night, I was tired of being hungry.  I had a healthy breakfast and I had a healthy lunch.  We ate dinner on time, so that was not the problem.  Part of the problem is that we had a dinner that I really like.  When we sat down to eat, I took a reasonable portion of food.  After I ate it, I kept eating out of the serving dishes.  I ate until I was full, probably consuming about twice the calories I should have.  After dinner, it didn't stop.  I really wanted a beer and there were a few cold brews in the fridge.  I opened one and sipped at it while we played games.  It was a beer that Steve had bought and it tasted OK, but it wasn't my favorite, so I only drank about half of it.  I also opened a bottle of wine, but I only had about two sips even though it tasted pretty good.  Therefore, I didn't drink a lot, not even the equivalent of "one drink," but I was also craving something sweet.  I settled on raisins.  Raisins are not technically a forbidden food for me, but as a rule I don't keep dried fruit in the house because of its high sugar content and because of how I can substitute it for candy.  I did that last night.  I ate a lot of raisins last night.  I ate raisins until I didn't want any more.  By the way, the raisins were left over from making oatmeal cookies a few months ago, when we had a lot of family in the house.  I should probably throw the damn raisins away.

Last night I ate until I was full.  You know what I am talking about, right?  That feeling you get when you put enough food in your stomach that your tummy feels just slightly uncomfortable.  I never eat until I'm full.  Well, almost never.  I can't say never because I did it last night.  Most of the time I eat my prescribed portion of food, just enough to fuel me until my next meal, and most of the time I am fine with that.  Yet, there is something incredibly comforting about feeling full.  I have no idea why it is comforting, but it is.  Last night I wallowed in it.  This morning, I saw the result on the scale.  I just want to knock myself upside the head for that one.

It's as obvious to me as I am sure it is to all of you that I need to correct the underlying source of stress.  I am working on that, but it takes time.  There are a variety of scenarios that can play out and I need a little longer to see which makes the most sense for me and my family.  In the meantime, I have the day off from work tomorrow, which will help.  I can relax a little more today, get some cooking done, have a play day with Jack, and finish chores and relax a little more tomorrow.  I'm also going to go for my run when I am done with this blog post.  Last week rain and lightning kept me from two of my three runs and that frustrated me.  Yes, I know, I need a treadmill.  I'll remedy that one of these days.  But today, I can run outside.  It's 7:00AM and it is already very warm and very humid, but there is no lightning.  It's a perfect day for a run!

So there you go.  It is humbling to admit failure and my ridiculous eating yesterday afternoon feels like a failure. There is no reasonable excuse for it and I do not try to rationalize my behavior. At the same time, I do try to understand what triggered the behavior so that I can decrease the frequency of these episodes in the future.  I have lost about 100 pounds in the last fifteen years, 74 of them in the last four years, and it will probably take another 5 years, or more, to adjust my set point to a healthy 150 pounds.  I still have issues with food.  It's still a mood altering drug for me.  It takes constant vigilance and constant determination and a desire to be healthy into old age that is bigger than my desire to medicate my moods away to stay the course 98% of the time and to immediately get back on course when I stray.  I am back on track.  Again.  I am sure we will have this exact same conversation in the future.  Again.  Such is the way it goes.

Have a great day!  I know I am going to do my best to do exactly that!