10/5/15: Comprehensive Article About the Negative Impact Sugar has on Our Health. Includes Study References.

I just came across this article during my lunch break (I ate stew and an apple, by the way).  It is a very comprehensive summary of the impacts of sugar on our health.  It contains many, many references to studies that have been conducted over the last couple of decades or more that prove that sugar has a significant negative impact on our health.

The article is long, I only got about half way through it at lunch, but I will read the rest of it tonight.

I encourage you to read this article.  

http://www.globalresearch.ca/sugar-killing-us-sweetly/5367250

10/5/15: A Bit of a Rough Morning. Sore Muscles!

Days of abstinence: 12

Days until surgery: 72

Weight:  167.0 pounds

I had a lot of trouble waking up this morning which is unusual for me, particularly when I get to bed on time; which I did last night.  I was in bed before nine, so getting up at 4:00 to exercise should have been easy.  Most mornings, in spite of my very early hour, I wake up before the alarm goes off.  Not today.  No Siree Bob.  This morning the alarm woke me up and I knew I needed more sleep so I reset the alarm for 4:50 and skipped my exercise for the morning.  This seemed perfectly reasonable to me considering how sore my arms are.  Ouch!

When I finally got up and weighed myself I was surprised to see that the scale had gone up, not down.  If you are like me and monitor your weight daily then you know there can be temporary swings in your weight.  For me, I usually know when it’s coming and it’s usually caused by something that I am aware that I did.  If I eat a big dinner late in the day or eat a lot of particularly salty foods, I know I will be a little bloated in the morning.  I didn’t do either of those things yesterday.  Also, and this is going to sound funny, but I can usually tell if I am going to weigh more or less than I did yesterday by how heavy my breasts are.  When my breasts feel heavy, I know I’m retaining water for some reason and I’ll see it on the scale.  That was not the case this morning though.  In fact, overall, I feel relatively lean this morning; so I was surprised to see the scale result.  Not upset, mind you, just a little surprised.  I am always curious about what causes these fluctuations.  I think it is good to know what is going on inside my body, as much as I can know. 

The only thing that I can think of that would cause this temporary weight gain is muscle inflammation.  I think the same thing caused my need for extra rest this morning.  I did a particularly difficult workout yesterday, followed by kickball.  The workout was a Daily Burn Black Fire workout called Weighted Tabata.  It goes like this:

After about 4 – 5 minutes of warm up exercises you do eight sets of 4 different exercise.  Each set is 20 seconds long with a 10 second break between sets.  You do as many reps as you can each set, then your score for that exercise is the lowest # of reps you got in any one set.  For instance, the first exercise was a push press.  Hold 15 pound dumbbells in each hand with your arms bent and holding the dumbbells just above your shoulders.  In one movement, bend your knees slightly, then straighten them to stand up tall and at the same time push the dumbbells straight up into a shoulder press.  Do as many as you can in 20 seconds.  Rest 10 seconds.  Then do it again, as many push presses as you can for 20 seconds, then rest 10 seconds.  Do 8 sets.  My first set I did 10.  By the time I got to the last set I was doing 6.  More importantly, by the time I got to the last set, I was lifting to fail.  In other words, I could not do another one.

The next exercise was easier and I timed out on it.  I was not to the point of failure during the 20 second set.  It was a dumbbell swing, like a kettle bell swing, but with a 20 pound dumbbell.  My score on that was 9.  (Therefore, I did at least 9 times 8 = 72 dumbbell swings, since 9 was my lowest score in the 8 sets).

The third exercise was a Bent Over Row using 15 pound dumbbells.  My score was 6 and I was exercising to failure on that one.  And the last exercise was a dumbbell thruster, which was not unlike the push press but instead of bending your knees slightly you go into a deep squat and then push yourself up and do the shoulder press.  Again, I exercised to failure and my score was 6.

The results?  My arms (mostly biceps) hurt today!  Not just that vague muscle soreness but seriously hurt.  Not in a bad, scary way like, “Oh my god, did I hurt myself?” hurt, but more in that, “Shit, that was one hell of a workout, hurt.”  I think my body didn’t want to get out of bed this morning because it was working hard on healing those damaged muscles.  I think the same thing caused the weight gain.  That soreness in those muscles is inflammation.  There is a lot of repair work going on in those muscles right now, and that repair work starts with inflammation, which is going to cause some weight gain.

I think I did the right thing this morning to sleep in for a few extra minutes this morning and to take the day off from a workout.  I’ll drink a lot of water today and eat right.  I’m sure I’ll be even more sore tomorrow, but by Tuesday my muscles should be feeling better.

With regard to food and my sugar addiction, everything is fine.  No cravings.  No desire to go off program.  Susie brought cupcakes to kickball yesterday for Rick’s birthday.  I was not even tempted.  I am feeling confident and strong in my commitment to abstain from sweets forever and ever.  I am not feeling deprived or sorry for myself or like there is something wrong with me.  It just is what it is.  For now, this does not feel like a big deal, it’s just a deal.

I have a HUGE week ahead of me at work.  Very soon I will be able to blog about what is going on.  Until then, all I can say is that we are undergoing a mid-year audit (for good reasons) and I’ve had zero time to prepare for it.  As far as I can tell I’ll be working long days and weekends until my surgery date of December 16^th.  Fun Stuff.  Oh, yeah, the stress doesn’t help with weight loss.  I do believe that stress causes increased cortisol levels which makes it difficult to lose weight.  That said, I took the day completely off yesterday, got all our meals cooked, played kickball, worked out, and had time to sit on the couch to relax with Jack.  I know it is important to have days like that, even when I am extremely busy.  I know it helps keep the stress level in check.

That’s it for now.  Have a beautiful day!!

10/4/15: Two Hour Bonus!

We had two kickball games scheduled today.  One at 12:30 and the other at 2:30.  I planned my day accordingly.  I put up a blog post this morning, made a nice breakfast and ate with Jack, cooked one of our meals for the week, did my work out, and was going to get ready to go when I checked Facebook.  There was a post saying the Gladiators had forfeited the first game of the day and that we didn’t need to arrive until the 2:30 game.  While it’s sad that we didn’t get to play, I’ve been so busy lately, that I was happy to have an unexpected two hour bonus.  When I was cooking this morning I discovered that I had forgotten to put ground beef on the shopping list, so Jack ran to the store and picked up my ground beef for me.  Then he headed to the fields in case everyone didn’t see the post (he is one of our team captains) and I used my bonus time to get two more of this week’s meals cooked.  I’ll fix the fourth and final one this afternoon after the game since it is a recipe that tastes best right when it comes out of the oven.  That is what we’ll have for dinner tonight.

The meals this week are:

Roasted chicken and vegetables (that’s the weekly staple)

Plantain Nachos – this is a delicious dish.  I make the nacho chips by tossing thinly sliced plantains in melted coconut oil, placing them on a baking sheet in a single layer, and baking them at 350 degrees for half an hour.  They are terrific.  The taco meat is a hamburger base with a great combination of onions, garlic, tomato paste, chicken stock and spices.  We eat the entire concoction like a taco salad with a bed of greens, a handful of plantain chips, and a nice scoop of taco meat.  We top it with homemade guacamole, chopped tomatoes, green onions, peppers from the garden, and whatever else we want.  It’s really pretty yummy.

Beef Stew

Oven Fried Chicken Legs (aka World’s Best Chicken), green beans (from the garden), and baked potatoes.

Over breakfast, after I warned Jack that I talked about him in my blog this morning, I asked Jack why he was uncomfortable with the idea of me abstaining from sugar for the rest of my life (see previous post).  I was expecting him to say that he was concerned that he would not be able to enjoy some of the things that he likes to eat, or that he would feel bad about eating them in front of me.  That is not what he said at all.  In fact, when I asked him about that he said he wasn’t worried about that because I had already assured him that that would not be an issue.   What concerned him was how I was going to feel later, after surgery and after I was healed, and after life got back to “normal.”  He was worried that I would feel bad about myself if we were at an event where sweet treats were being served and I couldn’t have any.  His concern was that I would find abstinence unbearable, and that made him sad.  I assured him that that would not be the case.  I know that there will be rough moments, there might even be moments when I say something silly like, “Why me?”  But I also know that 99% of the time I am going to be OK with this.  I appreciate his concern.  It’s all going to be OK.  That is one thing I know for certain.

For now, I need to put on my red KCBlueBalls Kickball shirt and go score some runs. 

Have a great afternoon!!

10/4/2015: Is This a Big Deal?

Days of abstinence: 11

Days until surgery: 73

Weight:  165.8 pounds

I do not eat sweet treats.  I don’t eat sugar or sugar substitutes.  I have determined that eating foods with added sugars in them is bad for my health, therefore I have made the decision to never eat them again.  Is this a big deal?  If it is a big deal, why is it?  It doesn’t seem like it should be a big deal.  Who really cares, anyway, if I eat sugar or don’t eat sugar?  Anyone?  This decision impacts no one but me.

And Jack.

It impacts everyone else that cares about me only in the fact that (I believe) I will live a longer and healthier life and if someone cares about me then that should be a good thing.  Right? 

The internet is an amazing tool.  I just googled “why is it hard for people to give up sugar” and got tons of hits.  All but one said the same thing, “I gave up sugar, had a difficult withdrawal period, and now I feel better than I have ever felt in my life.”  There were countless studies, mostly from the UK and Australia, sited that discussed the negative impact sugar has on our health.  There was one article, one lone article, that said all this talk about sugar being bad for you is poppy cock.  It’s not sugar that is bad for you it is overconsuming calories that is bad for you, and sugar is just calories, after all.  That theory seems to be getting totally debunked these days.

So why does it feel like a big deal to say, “I don’t eat sugar.”  There really is only one answer.  It’s because sugar has been my go-to fix.  When I’m feeling “used and abused” I turn to sugar to comfort me.  Keep in mind I am neither used nor abused and I know that.  I have a comfortable, safe life.  I am loved and I love.  I have a nice home, a good job, a loving husband, two cars in the driveway, and a cupboard full of food.  I have a supportive family, with siblings, grown children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews, cousins, a parent, an aunt (I’m getting old, that generation is getting small), etc. who love me and care about me.  I am most definitely not “used and abused.”  But sometimes I feel that way.  Sometimes I spend too many hours at work or I take on too many projects and I start to feel ragged and worn out.  If I’ve had a particularly hard day or even if I get really bored, sugar has been my go-to pick-me-up.  For whatever reasons, when I sit down on the couch at the end of a long, difficult day and eat a bowl of ice cream, it’s comforting.  Just for a moment, it’s comforting.  That feeling doesn’t last long, but there, for a minute, while I am eating it, I feel sublime.  The feeling is fleeting.  It does not last long.  But it is a powerful moment.  For that moment, while I am eating that ice cream, it is all I think about.  It is an escape from the world.  I am sure it is exactly why an alcoholic drinks, or a drug addict pops a pill, or a gambling addict walks in a casino; it’s an escape.  For a moment, the world falls away and nothing else matters.

I just had an interesting moment when I wrote the words, “The world falls away and nothing else matters.”  A moment that made me anxious and caused me to get up from the computer and heat up my coffee and think about what it means, if anything.  Perhaps it means nothing.  Sometimes my thoughts are ridiculous and this may be one of them.  But those words, “The world falls away and nothing else matters,” implies that for a moment, I have totally isolated myself from everyone and everything.  For a moment, I am completely and totally alone, and that is a good thing.  The funny thing about this is that I don’t think it is a good thing to be completely and totally alone.  In fact, I think the opposite is true.  I think being actively engaged in a community is key to being mentally and physically healthy, particularly as I get older.  The truth is, outside of work and my relationship with Jack, I find it difficult to be actively engaged in a community.  It is something I really have to work at, and do work at, but I often feel like I am not working at it hard enough.   Huh.  I’ll have to think about this.

Anyway, here we are.  I’ve been completely sugar (and all crap food, for that matter) free for 11 days.  I am no longer having cravings for sugar.  There is no reason in the world why I should ever eat sugar again.  It’s completely unnecessary, and really, it’s not that hard.  As I’ve said before, I don’t cook with it anyway and I do cook all my own meals.  My love affair with sugar has come to an end.  It’s that simple. 

The one person this impacts the most, aside from me, is Jack.  I don’t talk about Jack in this blog much, mostly out of respect for his privacy.  But Jack and I are a team and it is impossible to tackle this subject without dragging him into it a little bit.  Jack appreciates the fact that I am an excellent cook and he appreciates the fact that the food I prepare for him is very healthy.  He is much healthier now than he was when we got married almost 7 years ago and he knows it is because his diet has improved so much.  He is also a key partner in keeping healthy food in the house.  I don’t like grocery shopping, at all.  I wouldn’t care if I never went in a grocery store again.  Jack does all of our grocery shopping.  He’ll go to multiple stores to get exactly the ingredients I want.  If I am cooking and don’t have something in the house he will stop what he is doing and go get it for me.  Yes, I do all of the cooking, but the fact that Jack does the shopping is huge.  It makes maintaining our healthy eating regimen so much easier for me.  Also, if I ask him to, he will help me cook.  Occasionally, rarely even, I will be really pressed for time and I will ask for his help.  But mostly, I cook and Jack and I both like it that way.

But, and there is a but, Jack likes his sweet treats.  He seems to be struggling a little bit with the concept of me being a sugar addict and abstaining from sugar for the rest of my life.  Jack has participated in numerous food programs with me.  For the first six months or so that we were married I only prepared vegan foods.  He was OK with that.  Then it was vegetarian for a while.  I eventually added poultry and fish.  We now include pasture raised beef and pork in our diet.  When I decided to give up all wheat, he went along for that ride.  Then when I decided to do the Whole 30, he participated in that.  He’s been more than supportive, he’s actively participated in my various food program experiments because he has come to realize how much a healthy diet has improved his quality of life.  He recognizes, as do I, that the Whole 30 food program is the program that makes him feel and look his best.  Ever since we’ve been married he has fully participated in and not minded my various attempts at providing us with an optimal diet.  But when I came home after my first therapy session and said that I may be coming to terms with the fact that I am a sugar addict and, therefore, I may be coming to terms with the fact that I will never eat sugar again, he flinched.  He visibly flinched.  He does not like this idea.

I have thought about this a little but not a lot.  Mostly I have been inside my own head and I’ve been trying to figure out how I feel about this.  But this thing with Jack is nagging at me.  He and I have to come to terms with this.  I have told him that it is my choice to not eat sweet treats, not his.  I am not going to ask him to give them up.  I am not even going to ask him to keep them out of the house.  I am not going to ask him not to eat them in front of me.  I acknowledged that I may have a weak moment now and then, and in those moments I might ask him to keep his treats away from me, but for the most part, I don’t think his treats being in the house will bother me.  Once I’ve made up my mind that this is forever, I’ve made up my mind.  Yet he still seems uncomfortable with my decision to abstain from sweets forever.  Is it because he is afraid that I will never bake cookies for him again?  He really likes my cookies.  I don’t know.  He and I will have to talk this through and figure it out.  I know that we will.  That’s what being in a partnership is all about, after all.

Now that I have had several days to process the concept that I am a sugar addict and all of its implications, I have had to conclude that never eating a sweet treat again is not that big of a deal.  So what?  What is sugar anyway?  It’s just sugar.  It’s just this thing that wreaks havoc in my body.  It has a huge allure, I am not denying that.  But I don’t need it and I most certainly don’t want it, anymore.  I’m done with sugar, and that’s that.   I’ll never eat it again.  I’ll figure the rest out as it comes.

That’s it for today.  I have cooking to do, a couple of kick ball games to play, and a week to plan for.

Have a beautiful day!

10/3/2015: More About Therapy and Addiction

Days of abstinence: 10

Days until surgery: 74

Weight:  165.8 pounds

The last time Stan saw me I weighed over 200 pounds, so his first reaction when he saw me was, “Wow, you’ve lost a lot of weight!  You look terrific!”  That felt good.  Most of the people in my life have gotten used to the fact that I am not way overweight anymore so it’s always nice to see someone that hasn’t seen me for a while and see their surprise and delight at my accomplishment.  It feels like a reward for all the hard work.

As the session got started, Stan wanted to know why I was there and I reviewed the last three and a half years and my decision to have surgery to remove my loose and sagging skin.  I weighed 224 pounds in February of 2012, lost 74 pounds over the course of 11 months of hard work, gained back 5, then 5 more.  Maintained that for quite a while and then last fall and winter gained back 15 more.  This January, I recommitted to being at 150, was introduced to the Whole 30 by Luz, and got back within 8 pounds of my target weight.  I made the decision to have the surgery and committed to losing that last 8 pounds, instead I gained 8.  All summer I’ve been battling this 16 – 20 pounds.  Losing 4 gaining 3, losing 5, gaining it back.  I blamed stress for the fact that I was eating sweets on a daily basis.  The summer has been stressful, but that is just an excuse.  I knew that, but I used it as an excuse, anyway.

My problem, I told Stan, is not my entire diet.  My daily food regimen is fine.  In fact, my daily food regimen is excellent.  I cook all of my own food and almost never eat out.  Meals consist of lean proteins, lots of veggies and a little fruit.  I eat three healthy meals a day.  This is not a problem.  The problem is sweet treats.  In particular, the problem is my desire to sneak sweet treats.

The epiphany came this way.  One day, a few weeks ago, I was on my way to work at 5:45 in the morning after dropping Steve off at the airport.  The drive from the airport is difficult when it is very dark out because the route is so dark and I have trouble seeing in the dark.  There is also a lot of road construction at an already confusing intersection and it’s difficult to figure out which exit is the right one.  So I’m driving along, it’s very dark, I’m a little stressed about the upcoming road construction confusion, and I think to myself, “It’s early, I can stop at Starbucks on the way to work and get a coffee and a treat.  Nobody will know.”  I thought about it for a minute or two, savoring the idea of the treat.  I wasn’t hungry.  I had a good breakfast an hour ago.  I didn’t need coffee, I had my coffee with breakfast.  But, I still wanted that treat and nobody would know.  Nobody would know?  What the fuck is up with that?  As I’m driving down the dark and deserted highway I’m wondering to myself, “Who cares if anyone knows?”  There is no one in my life that is going to give a shit whether I have a treat or not.”  No one.  The only person who cares is me.  So what is the allure of “Nobody will know?”  I realized that sneaking the treat somehow felt like winning to me, or like I was getting one up on someone or something.  Then I knew that this was something, that this was somehow significant.   There was something about sneaking the treat that was as satisfying, if not more satisfying, than the treat itself.

At that moment, I didn’t try to delve into the psychology about why the sneaking was satisfying, but I did say to myself, “Who is going to win if you sneak that treat?”  Me?  No, clearly not.  Then who wins?  The answer hit me like a ton of bricks.  The BFFI wins, that’s who.  Monsanto and ConAgra and the entire Big Food Industry that has gotten insanely rich getting us addicted to Crap Food are the ones that win.  If I buy and eat a treat from Starbucks, I am supporting the industry that I despise so much.   If I sneak a treat, my enemy wins, not me.  That was a powerful moment.  I decided not to stop at Starbucks after all.  My cravings did not go away, but my conviction to not feed the BFFI was stronger than my craving to have a sweet reat.  My intellect was stronger than my instinct, for a moment.

I thought about this all the way to work and wondered how I was going to stop myself from feeding the coffers of the BFFI the next time I had a craving, and the time after that and the time after that.  What am I going to do?  I cannot let the BFFI win this war.  I will not let the BFFI win this war.  I just won’t.  What am I going to do?  Then I had a great idea, a brilliant idea!  This idea got me through the next couple of days of abstinence, which were days of intense cravings.  What I decided to do was this:  every time I had a craving for something sweet, I would text Carla and say, “I want a treat because _______” and fill in the blank.  The blank would be filled in with, “because I have a craving,” or “because I am stressed,” or “because I want a reward,” or something like that.  Whatever popped into my mind as to why I wanted the treat is what I would write.  Then, right after I hit send on the text message, I would text her again and say, “I want to be thin because _________” and fill in the blank with the first thing that came to mind.  This turned out to be a fascinating exercise.  Very quickly I recognized the power of this.  While my reason for wanting the treat was always an insipid response like, “because I am feeling stressed,” my reason for wanting to be thin were always powerful.  My fill-in-the-blanks for wanting to be thin were things like, “because I feel strong and confident when I am thin,” and “because I want to be healthy,” and “because I want to be as fit as possible going into surgery so that I can have the best possible results.”  They were real reasons, not excuses.  By texting Carla whenever I got a craving, I did two things.  First, I took away the fun of sneaking a treat.  If I told her that I was getting a treat, then I was no longer sneaking it.  Second, I overpowered the craving with an intellectual response, so that I could get past it.

This tactic got me through those really rough couple of days of intense cravings and in fact, that epiphany, that I like to sneak treats, is what caused me to decide to start blogging again.  I’ve been meaning to talk about that morning ever since I resurrected my blog, and I just haven’t had the time or opportunity until now. 

I explained all of this to Stan and, of course, (at least to me, of course, because I know Stan and I’ve been here before) this led to a discussion of childhood.  He wanted to know if I felt the need to sneak food as a kid.  We then had a brief discussion about the weird food environment that I grew up in.  I did sneak food as a kid.  As far as I know, we all did.  I know my memories of childhood are different than my siblings, but my memories are of a mother that had significant food issues of her own.  Sweet treats were rationed at our house, probably as much for economic reasons as anything else.  Food was certainly a significant part of my parents’ budget.  It seemed like there was never enough of it, or certainly never enough of the food that we wanted to eat.  Everything was rationed, from cereal to milk to the pork chops at dinner.  We used to “Horse-n-goggle” food.  I know that is not the word, I think the actual word must have been a German word, but it sounded like “Horse-n-goggle,” to me.  When we were at the dinner table and there was one serving of something left and there were 5 kids that wanted it, my dad would count to three in German and then say, “Horse-n-goggle.”  At that moment we would all hold up as many fingers as we wanted.  My dad would count all the fingers, add them up, and come up with the sum.  And then, starting with the kid on his left, he would count around the table until he got to that number.  Whoever he landed on would then get half of whatever it was that we were Horse-n-goggling, let’s say it was a pork chop (pork chps used to come in packages of eight and there were seven of us, so usually, when we had pork chops, one would get horse-n-goggled).  That lucky kid would get half the pork chop, then it got passed to the next kid who got half of that (so that person would get a fourth of a chop), then the pork chop got passed to the next kid who got half of that (an eighth), and the food would continue to get passed and halved until there was not enough left for anyone to care about.  At the time, this seemed very fair to me.  It was a very random way to see who got the limited amount of food that was available.  But I can see now how this whole scenario reinforced the notion of scarcity when it came to food.  The scarcity of food was particularly pronounced when it came to sweets.  My parents did buy some packaged treats, I remember Ho-Hos and Ding Dongs, in particular, and Oreo cookies.  We took sack lunches to school and I think we sometimes got a treat like this in our lunch.  Honestly, I don’t remember the treat being in my lunch bag as much as I remember the packages being in the cupboard.  We were not allowed to eat any of these things unless my mom gave them to us.  So we snuck them.  Mom used to get so pissed!  I don’t know why.  Was it because they were expensive?  Was it because she wanted the treat?  I don’t know.  I also remember her keeping Snickers Bars in the freezer.  We were not allowed to eat those, they were for her.  But we snuck those, too.  I remember her baking cheesecakes, but always for company, never for us.  That seemed so unfair.  I have a lot of memories around food and sweet treats as a kid.  Most of the time those memories have something to do with trying to get something that was being withheld from me.  It doesn’t take a huge leap of intuition or a PhD in psychology (sorry Stan) to figure out where this desire to sneak food, particularly sweets, came from.  It’s solidly rooted in the strange and twisted food environment that I grew up in.  Add to that my mother was the central figure in all of this and it gets more obvious that this is the root of my addiction.  My relationship with my mom was not good, for reasons that I don’t need to discuss now.  That was my first eleven years of therapy and mostly that has all been put to rest.  But, this sugar addiction, this sneaking of sweet treats, this still needs to be figured out, once and for all.

Now Stan and I are about a half hour into the session.  We’ve identified the fact that the thrill is in the sneaking of the treat (I don’t even try to hide it afterwards.  I leave wrappers in plain sight, for example) and that the roots of the addiction come from feeling like I won something if I successfully snuck a treat as a child.  Now it’s time to figure out how to fix it.  He introduced me to the idea of cognitive distortions and we ran through the 10 most common mind games people play with themselves.  We determined that that didn’t seem to be a major issue for me.  We talked about aversion therapy.  The idea here is that every time you do the thing you are trying to quit (like eat a sweet treat) you do something else that is painful for you, like send $20 to an ex-husband.  That just seems silly to me.  Reject that idea.  Besides, if he really wanted it to be painful, it would be more effective if I sent the $20 to the republican candidate of Jack’s choice.  Yeah, that would stop me in my tracks! We talked about Freud and the id, ego, and super ego.  We talked about behavior modification therapy.  We knocked around a lot of different theories and ideas, not really settling on anything, but just exploring different theories and ideas for how to get this thing figured out and fixed.  After talking about the different theories for treatment, Stan summed it up like this, “You know, if you accept the premise that you are an addict, and it appears to me as if you are, then you can never use sugar again.”  Bam!  Just like that!  Never use sugar again!  He said, “You keep talking about abstaining for the next 77 days and that’s great.  I am convinced that you are committed to that goal and that you will be successful in achieving that goal.  But the problem isn’t the next 77 days.  The problem is after that, after you have had your surgery and you’ve recovered.  Then what?  Are you going to start eating sweets again?  Gain that 10 pounds, and then 20 and then 10 more?  Is that what you are going to do?  This commitment isn’t about the next 77 days, it is about the rest of your life.”  (Obviously, that is not a direct quote, but it is a pretty decent paraphrase.)  He said, “Can an alcoholic have one drink?  A drug addict snort one line of coke?  A gambling addict walk into a casino with $25?  No, of course not.  Can you have one sweet treat?  I don’t think so.”

I acknowledge that this is obvious, but I tried, inanely, to argue the point.  I brought up the Whole 30 and talked about what they say about food having social significance and that once in a while a piece of birthday cake is OK because it is part of the celebration of life.  He just looked at me.  I knew it sounded foolish.  I knew he was right.  Ugh.  Really?  No more sweet treats ever?  And double ugh, why do I care?  Why is this a big deal?  What is it about sugar, anyway?

I have talked to a few people about this since Wednesday and their responses are fascinating.  People have such a visceral response to the statement, “I can never eat sugar again.”  They all say, “I couldn’t do that!”  To sum it up, they all think the statement is ridiculous for two reasons.  First, they think it is unnecessary and second, they think it is impossible.  “Sugar is in everything,” they say.  As if that is a good reason to eat it.  In fact, sugar is not in everything.  Let me clarify, when I talk about sugar I am talking about all sweeteners added to food.  I am not talking about the sugar that naturally occurs in an apple.  Sugar is not added to chicken.  Sugar is not added to broccoli.  Sugar is not added to butter.  Sugar is not added to a pineapple.  In fact, the food that I cook, the food that makes up my entire diet, with the exception of sweet treats, is free of added sugars.  Therefore, I can change the statement to, “I can never eat a sweet treat again.”  But, let’s get back to my friends’ response to hearing this statement, “I can never eat sugar again.”  They claim that this is impossible and unreasonable.  And I say, “Should the alcoholic ever drink again?”  Everyone agrees the answer is no.  Everyone.  When I ask, “What’s the difference?”  The answer is, “We don’t have to drink alcohol, but we have to eat.”  And I say, “But do we have to eat sugar?”  You know where this is going.  It doesn’t take long to follow this logic trail.  No, I don’t have to eat sugar.  No, I don’t have to eat sweet treats.  It is becoming pretty obvious, in fact, that I had my last sweet treat 11 days ago.  Huh.  I should have enjoyed it more.

It’s time for me to go.  Jack is up and showered and I need to cook breakfast, make a shopping list, and head to work. 

Have a beautiful day!!

10/2/2015: Therapy, Addiction, Where to Start?

Days of abstinence: 9 (Oops, I miscounted yesterday.)

Days until surgery: 75

Weight:  166.4 pounds

I don’t often sit in my chair and fidget when it comes time for me to write a blog post.  I either have something I want to write about and the words just pour out or I don’t have anything I want to write about and I type a quick update and go on with my day.  That has not been the case since my session with Stan on Wednesday.  Yesterday morning I didn’t have enough time to write a long post but I wanted to touch base so I tried to record a couple of thoughts.  I found myself stumbling over my words.  I am doing that again now.  It’s not that it’s hard to talk about, because I talked freely to a few people about going back to therapy, but it is hard to write about.  Maybe it’s because things become more real when I write about them.  It’s one thing to talk.  It’s another thing to put things in writing.  It makes it a lot more difficult to hide from the truth.  There it is.  The answer just came out through my fingertips.  It is hard to write about this topic because when I write about it, it makes it much more difficult to hide from the truth.  Well, good!  We got that out of the way.  Let’s go for it!

First of all, therapy is a process.  It is not a simple, “This is your diagnosis and here is your cure.”  Yet, one of my hesitations about blogging about this process is that a lot of what I am going to talk about will seem like an over simplification, a gross generalization, or a little trite.  We need to keep in mind that Stan really has seen it all.  He started out his career treating prisoners at Leavenworth and has established a well-respected practice in gambling and other addictions.  He has a tendency to start out bluntly and fish around for answers.  He is a no bullshit kind of guy and wants to make as much progress as he can in every session.  Because of that he offers up theories to see if they fit.  We ran through a lot on Wednesday and I won’t remember it all.  I guess what I am asking from you is this, don’t judge the process.  If something sounds off base or ridiculous, it could very well be off base or ridiculous.  Or it could be a roundabout way of eliminating possibilities.  It could also be hitting the mark and we just don’t know it yet.  One of the things I know about Stan is that therapy with him is most effective if I challenge his ideas and tell him when I think he is wrong.  I guess a good way to describe therapy with Stan is that I am the one that has to fix these things that I think are broken, but he has a bigger and better equipped tool box than I do.    Stan is an effective therapist for me because he is not reluctant to share his tools.  As we talk he makes suggestions, I try them on, reject most of them, accept some of them, and then I need to process this new idea that seems to fit.  Sometimes I come back a week or two or more later and tell him that this thing that seemed to fit doesn’t fit after all.  Sometimes he disagrees and we argue about it.  I have been angry with him before.  I have no idea if I will get angry with him again.  As I said, this is a process. 

OK, let’s stop putting this off and begin.

I made the appointment with Stan last week after my sister Ruth, responding to my blog post about abstinence being easier than moderation, asked me if I had ever considered getting therapy for my food addiction.  Oh shit.  There it is.  She said it out loud.  Well, she said it in a text because I missed her call.  Food addiction.  I have thought about this for a long, long time.  Longer than you can imagine, probably.  Many, many years ago (I was 30 or 31 at the time) I attended Overeaters Anonymous (OA) meetings for a while.  This was the first time I was introduced to the idea of food addiction.  It didn’t take long for me to realize that I exhibited a lot of the patterns of having a food addiction, a sugar addiction, in particular.  I found it interesting to learn that one food a lot of people are addicted to is peanut butter.  Peanut butter is a real trigger food for a lot of people.  Mine is sugar, plain and sweet.  Usually sugar mixed with butter in some combination.  Today, since I have my own money and access to a grocery store and know how to bake, that sugar and butter combination usually ends up as a cookie, but as a kid I thought the most delicious thing in the world was a piece of bread (it was all white bread back them!) slathered with a thick layer of butter and sugar.  Not just a little sugar, mind you, but enough sugar that some would fall off the butter when I was eating it.  So yeah, the best combos includes butter and sugar, but plain old sugar will do.  I used to eat brown sugar right out of the bag.  I liked those little moist clumps of brown sugar that I could pop in my mouth.  Until this minute I forgot that I used to do that.

So when I was 30 or 31, significantly overweight, again, for the umpteenth time, I needed some answers and tried OA.  In fact, Stan may have suggested it because I had started seeing him shortly after my 30^th birthday.  I know we talked about it in our therapy sessions.  Through the OA meetings I started to explore the possibility of having a sugar addiction and I think I pretty much decided I did have one.  I say pretty much, but I don’t think I completely accepted the notion.  I say that because now, 23 years later (I guess I am a little slow on the uptake), I am finally rephrasing that statement from, “I have a sugar addiction,” to, “I am a sweet treat addict.”  OK, there are two big differences between these two statements.  The first one was easy to type, the second one I typed, changed, typed, changed, and finally typed and left it the way I originally typed it, because I think it is the best way to describe my addiction.

The first difference between the statements is saying “I have an addiction,” vs. saying “I am an addict.”  The difference seems subtle but there is a powerful difference.  The difference is you can get rid of something you have, but you can’t get rid of something you are.  It is so powerful that it is making me squirm around in my chair right now to say it. “I am an addict.”  Saying those words forces me to change my behavior because I know that the substance I am addicted to, sugar, is bad for me in more ways than I can imagine.  I want to be healthy.  I don’t want to take maintenance drugs as I age.  I don’t want to develop type 2 diabetes or heart disease or high blood pressure or be overweight.  I believe that sugar is bad for my brain and bad for my blood.  I believe that sugar messes up my hormones in ways that we are just beginning to understand.  I know that sugar is bad for me.  Therefore, if I believe I am a sugar addict and I believe that sugar is bad for me, I must change my behavior or I will not be content with myself.  I have a great quote by Gandhi taped to my monitor at work.  It says, “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”  Those words ring true to me.  Therefore if I think and say I am an addict and I know I am addicted to something that I know is bad for me, I must stop using that thing.  There really isn’t a grey area here.  I am an addict.

The second difference, before I get too far off track, is taking out the word “sugar” and replacing it with the words “sweet treat.”  This is a lot more subtle and is the part that I am stumbling over.  Should I use the word sugar?  I am not absolutely certain about this yet.  My thought process is this:  I don’t eat sugar out of the sugar bowl, anymore.  I don’t dig my “baking box” off of the top shelf of the cupboard to get a fix of brown sugar.   Thanks to the Whole 30 (and a couple of other programs I tried before settling on the Whole 30) I don’t cook with sugar, honey, syrup, sweeteners or artificial sweeteners of any type.  My food contains no added sugars of any kind, and that is fine by me.  I like my cooking.  It is delicious and healthy and satisfying.  Therefore, I don’t get sugar, nor do I crave sugar, in any form other than sweet treats.  Sweet treats include any form of baked goods (cookies are my favorite), candy of all kinds (preferably chocolate, but mints aren’t far behind), and ice cream.  I’ve never been a huge fan of puddings or jello.  I can honestly say that I have never craved either of those things.  Sweet treats definitely include muffins.  What I crave, when I have cravings, is a sweet treat.  I can’t explain it exactly, but describing my addiction that way makes sense to me.  I think it is more precise and accurate than saying I am a sugar addict.  So, at least for now, that is what I am going with.

I am a sweet treat addict. 

Enough for now.  I have to go to work.

Have a beautiful day!!

10/1/2015: Am I an Addict? What Does That Mean?

Days of abstinence: 8 (8 completed, today is day 9)

Days until surgery: 76

Weight:  166.2 pounds

When I restarted this blog on September 19^th, I weighed 166.2 pounds.  Today I weigh 166.2 pounds.  Ugh.  I lost two weeks.  I spent a week starting and restarting my program.  First there was the beginning of the season kickball party and then there was a baseball game in the Diamond Club section.  I chose to indulge in Off Program food at both of those events.  It doesn’t take much for me to gain 3 pounds and sure enough I did.  Prior to going back on the Whole 30 program and starting my 84 days of abstinence on 9/23/14 I weighed 169.8 pounds.  Therefore, in my 7 days of being 100% On Program I am back to where I started on the 19^th.  Sigh.  That is a little frustrating, but it is what it is.  I can’t change what happened in the past but I can influence what happens in the future.

I had my first session with my shrink yesterday.  His name is Stan.  I haven’t seen him for over 10 years so it was a little odd walking into his office.  In fact, it had been so long since I’ve seen him that my file had been shredded, which was just fine by me.  That file needed to be shredded!  I told him I wanted to fix two things.  First, I want to fix my food addiction, and while I am there anyway, I want to fix the pattern I have of getting fairly seriously depressed every year between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  As far as I can tell, these are the only two lingering issues that I have left that are unresolved.  He chuckles a little when I say I want to “fix” these issues.  I don’t know why it sounds funny.  That is what I want, I want it fixed.  Maybe that sounds a little too much like taking a car to a mechanic and saying the window won’t roll down, please fix it.  The thing is, I am willing to do the work to fix these things, I just need help getting there.

The session was interesting.  After a fairly brief conversation it was clear that I had truly resolved many of the issues that were plaguing me when I first started seeing Stan 24 years ago.  24 years ago!  Wow, that is a long time.  He wanted to know why I thought I had a food addiction.  I clarified that I don’t think I have a food addiction, exactly, I think that my addiction is to sweets, in particular.  Unfortunately I don’t have any more time to blog right now so I will come back to this topic later, tonight, I hope.  But the bottom line is he agreed that I appear to have a sweet treat addiction and if I accept that premise, that I am a sweet treat addict, then that means that sweet treats need to be something I abstain from forever, not just for the next 77 days. 

I want to resist that idea.  I want to embrace that idea.  Both desires are equally strong.

I’ll talk about it a whole lot more in posts to come.

Have a beautiful day!