Round

I saw Dr Hope Saturday morning.

We discussed any progress I may have made, and I was ready. I was able to talk about the various foods I had really enjoyed during the week, and about my victory over the baguette sandwich.

She said I am making really fast progress. In truth I am able to pay attention to hunger and satisfaction and pleasure some of the time, but more often I just eat automatically.

We discussed HOW I’d eaten this week, and also WHAT I’d had. Since the stomach flu put me off the pizza test for a week and during a few days I hadn’t eaten much, it was really mainly about how I ate during my business trip.

I’ve spent years of my life in jobs where I traveled constantly, so I don’t find it glamorous or fun to do so. I’ve gone out of my way to downsize my career to have less travel and more time at home, and am now in the job with the least possible travel I could have, although I don’t expect to stay in this job forever. But this week I had to travel, for 3 days, so Marseille, a city in the South of France. I didn’t see anything much except the hotel, train station and one restaurant, although I did manage to fit in one 45 minute walk.

I don’t think it’s an accident that I had lots to report. I had some really good food on my trip - or rather, I really paid attention to my food and was able to describe it in detail, because I took the time to appreciate it. I could probably have as much to say about what I eat for any 3 day period, but it’s not my habitual way of dealing with food

The foods I really enjoyed :

Muesli : The old-fashioned Swiss kind. It looked horrible – brownish glop with lumps of stuff.. It’s made with shredded apples and whole grains (rolled oats and another rolled something) cooked in milk and then chilled. God it was good, and so healthy. One of the best breakfast foods I’ve ever had. I have to find recipes for this.

Dried fruit and nut bread : probably one of the best breads I’ve had in my life, in a rather ordinary big chain hotel. This stuff is seriously good. Thick, dense bread just filled with raisins and walnuts and hazelnuts. No butter or anything needed, but I would have loved to try it with goat cheese… They had this the first night at dinner and not again until the last lunch, although I looked for it at every meal. When I found it for the last lunch I built my whole meal around having a big hunk of it. Luckily this is not available at a bakery near me in Paris.

Soup with truffles and scallops : starter dish at our Thursday night dinner. A rather unusual preparation of a rich soup made probably of potatoes cooked with lots of black truffles. 3 seared scallops sitting in the thick soup. Very rich, but not a huge portion. It was amazing, and I really savored it, eating slowly, enjoying the tastes and textures.

Fish with julienned vegetables and polenta in bouillabaisse sauce : Bouillabaisse is French fish soup, and something I don’t even like, but this dish was excellent, at the same restaurant Thursday night. The portion was small – maybe 2 ounces of fish and half a cup of polenta, less than that of the veggies, but due to the heaviness of the sauce and polenta it was very filling. Flavors were very deep and rich, and quite complex.

So you see, I’ve had really good food this week. Maybe I have really good food every week but I don’t take the time to appreciate it.

With Dr Hope I discussed the aspects of the HOW and WHY of what I’m eating, but except for the foodie descriptions, not the WHAT. I did ask her if people lose weight with this approach, and only then did she offer to weigh me (I declined). She said yes, people lose weight, but not all at the same rate, some people have a really hard time getting the behavioral components of healthy eating down (listening to your hunger, stopping when just barely full, savoring food instead of just inhaling it, etc). I know for myself it feels like I can do it sometimes, and at other times it just slips my mind…

Well, up this week : the Pizza Test!

I remember discussing with Dr Hope last week about eating what you want. Which means if you want a candy bar, eat the candy bar. But not the candy bar AND a full dinner.

This morning going out the door I grabbed just an apple because that was all I was in the mood for. For years I have eaten a full breakfast anticipating the next meal and next hunger. Dr Hope has pointed out that it’s important to eat for our current hunger, not the future. In today’s modern world we can always find more food when we are hungry again. Since hunger is something I fear, this habit is very hard to break, so just having an apple this morning was something of a victory.

By 1pm I was starving and was trying to decided exactly what I was hungry for and I was torn between going to a restaurant (quick, and good variety of choices) or making do with what we have in the house. But we don’t have much, we’ve been gone most of the week. There is a bad fake Tex-Mex restaurant not too far, and I was thinking maybe we’d go there - fajitas are usually reasonably edible, and my DH loves tacos.

Then I had the idea to use yesterday’s leftover roast beef to make tacos. The roast beef was yet another culinary disaster by yours truly - my DH showed me how to put a sliver of garlic into the meat before cooking but didn’t tell me how much garlic to use, and I used 4 cloves — WAY too much. But the beef cut up and simmered in some salsa it wouldn’t matter, and I had some cheddar at home hidden (hard to find here) and an onion and cherry tomatoes. We have taco shells in the pantry, so I figured it was a good way to try to cook, please my DH with tacos, use the beef, and respond to my hunger level and focus on savoring my food. They were pretty good, I had 3. And I was proud of how I handled it, even being very hungry in the kitchen I didn’t just wolf down the quickest thing I could. That alone is very unusual for me - usually when I’m very hungry food is just about speed.

I read a while back that men who are married (or living with someone) eat more than twice as many fruits & veggies as single men.

In my house, that’s not a huge surprise, because I know I have several sneaky ways to get my DH to eat produce. On his own, he’s perfectly happy with meat & a starch, sees nothing missing from that meal. I don’t think he’s very unique in that regard.

I thought it might be fun to share our techniques - whether they be used for kids, husbands, or ourselves.

What I’ve done :

• Buy the fruits he likes and make him a sack to take to work for his snacks (I’m sure some get thrown out, but some make it into him too)
• Raw carrots and celery : my DH will not reach for carrots or celery but if they magically appear already cut up in front of him he’ll eat them and then say “we should eat these more often”. If he’s working on the computer I’ll sometimes bring him a bowl of them and a few minutes later they’re gone.
• Kid-pressure. He knows his son needs a balanced diet and so he has to set a good example. I make more veggies on nights we have my stepson than when we don’t simply because of this. When it’s just the 2 of us it’s not unusual to be the only one eating veggies.
• Fruit for dessert. Sometimes just a plain piece of fruit, sometimes a tropical treat like pineapple or mango. Sometimes I make applesauce (a big hit around here) and sometimes I make ‘yogurt sundaes’ where plain yogurt is topped with nuts, honey & dried and fresh fruit. My stepson loves this - as big a hit as ice cream ones for him.
• Stews and other one-dish meals (where there is veggie hiding inside next to the Meat)

Personally I really like veggies so I don’t need to trick myself, but I know some people do.

I’d love some new ideas - any tips please leave them in “comments”.

Do you reward yourself for staying to your plan?

It’s more common to reward yourself when you lose a pound, but I don’t believe in that. I’ve spent too many weeks slogging it out, exercising like crazy and dieting myself silly and the scale didn’t budge to believe in that. I think we need to focus on our behavior, what WE actually DO each week. I can remember cheating in a given week and still losing, and others where I was the perfect dieter and the scale didn’t budge — or worse, went up. Clearly, I am not a fan of measuring my progress on a daily or weekly basis by the scale.

But I do think taking time to pat ourselves on the back is important. It’s pretty easy to pass up. For me the question is where do you find the time? For some - the money? For me, we’re not rich by any means, but buying myself a small present won’t break the bank. Even when I didn’t have as much, it was pretty easy to add up how much I’d have spent on junky food and put that money towards a small gift.

The idea being to take the time to say to yourself “Hey, I did something good here”. We’re our own harshest judges and worst critics, and the internal voice is often pointing out the small flaws and not the bigger success. Sometimes you have to force that positive reinforcement. And while we may get compliments, and if we’re lucky a present from a friend or family member, the reality is we need to get our OWN inner voices clapping and jumping up and down with pride at our accomplishments. It’s that little voice that’s often saying the critical stuff - we need that same voice to pay us a compliment once in a while.

I have not been rewarding myself recently. Years ago I had about a 15$ range, and usually bought a CD (that I would then listen to at the gym). I was pretty religious about getting a treat (not food) every week, although sometimes I put 2 weeks in one if I wanted something that was $30. Nowadays I listen to stuff on my Ipod and between me & my DH we have tons and tons of music so that’s not really the right approach. I’m also not sure I really need something every week now, the way I did before (when I was doing really hard-core dieting & exercise).

But I think periodic gifts to myself are a good idea - a pat-myself-on-the-back thing. Stuff I want, but don’t really need. If I really need it, the truth is I’d buy it anyway, and so it doesn’t have the same pyscological impact.

I had my first idea for what one of these things could be recently. I drink a lot of tea during the day when I’m home. I make a big pot & take it into the office but it gets cold pretty fast and it’s less good cold. What would help would be an insulated pitcher. I started looking a few days ago and finally found one this week, and bought it for myself.

Now when I drink hot tea hours after I made it, I’ll be able to remember I earned that after coming back on track for a month.

Do you reward yourself? With what? How often?

Yesterday I had to eat lunch on the run, something I don’t do very often these days.

In France the most common on-the-run lunch is to grab a baguette sandwich.  If you’re lucky they can be very good, if you’re in a train station they are usually not.  They’re better than the American on-the-run fast food places, and probably better than a sub sandwich in terms of quality.  You find them everywhere.

I knew lunch today would be tough.  I got to the train station with a few minutes to spare, but not enough to get a sit down lunch where I might find the onion soup I’ve been fantasizing about.  Since the sandwiches that they sell on the trains are even worse than what you find in the station, I bit the bullet and bought my baguette sandwich lunch to take with me.

There were lots of choices, but I took feta cheese with cucumber and lettuce.  What was really calling to me was the big basket of granny smith apples which it turned out I could select as my dessert if I got the menu.  Sold.  A bottle of sparkling water rounded out the take, and off I went to the high-speed train to the South of France.

My baguette sandwich was fine, typical.  The bread a bit dry because in the train stations it’s all big chains that use industrial bread and probably make them the night before.  Toppings are towards skimpy, as is usual for this kind of sandwich – adds some taste but you really eat mainly bread (unlike US sub sandwiches where the filling is sometimes falling out). Not bad, but nothing fabulous either.

I’ve really been trying with my Dr Hope homework and the thing that kept calling to me was the apple.  I stopped eating the baguette sandwich halfway through and put it away for later.  I grabbed the apple, because that’s what I was really hungry for.  It was good.  Crisp, tangy, and satisfying.  I never went back and finished the sandwich.  After eating the apple I decided my hunger was satisfied enough to get by.

I’m finding the more I focus on finding the pleasure in food, the more pleasure I’m finding.  Even in a simple sandwich (not much pleasure) and apple (much pleasure).

I think this learning bears repeating : the more I focus on finding pleasure in what I eat, the more pleasure I find.

A few weeks back I decided to start counting my exercise time towards a goal. Since I am currently walking for exercise I chose to measure in miles. Since I’m very interested in the Basque country, and we have a weekend planned there in February, I chose Bilbao Spain as my destination. So I’m walking to Bilbao.

Bilbao is 462 miles from Paris (my home). Some of you suggested I makes some stops along the way, which I found to be a big improvement to my original plan.

With today’s 3 miles (completed early this morning) my total miles walked is now 68. And 68 miles from Paris is Orleans, France.

Orleans is less famous than the US city that tried to honor it (New Orleans). But it was quite a powerhouse in it’s day, being the second-most powerful city after Paris for 2 centuries (10th & 11th). Probably the best known thing about Orleans is that it was seized by the English when they had overtaken France, and was the site of the brave and legendary Joan of Arc leading the French to defeat the English in battle in 1429.

Geographically, Orleans is Southwest of Paris, in the middle part of the country, and is on the far Eastern edge of the Loire valley. I visited once for work, but don’t remember much, but I found a cool virtual tour of Orleans online.

In France just about everything runs around food, and each city and region has a specialty. (Just about every time my DH travels, and that’s every week, he brings home the local specialty from where he’s been).

In Orleans, where he goes often for work, it’s Cotignac d’Orleans, a candy that’s a clear gel made from apple and quince, put into a small round wooden box.

I’ve tried it, and quickly decided it wasn’t worth the calories for me. It’s like eating concentrated, thicker jelly. My stepson loves it, however. And it is very quaint with the round wooden box. We even have some in the pantry right now.

Author’s note : I actually found different measures of distance for Orleans from Paris, but I’m going to stick by the site where I found the distance to Bilbao. I’ve decided NOT to trace my route to Bilbao (because it will mainly be in just a few regions) and instead focus my periodic updates on where in France I could have walked to. I’m loving this project already!

Yesterday I awoke feeling kind of a grumbling feeling in my tummy. I’d had a light dinner, and had taken my iron pills early, so I thought it might be one of those things. I was working on the computer and had breakfast a bit later than usual. My usual, oatmeal w milk. For the 3rd time in about a week I didn’t finish my oatmeal but I chalked it up to this new “paying attention to hunger thing”.  A few minutes later I started feeling really icky.

I will spare you the details, but I spent the next 4 hours with major stomach flu symptoms. I called the doctor who thought it was more likely stomach flu than food poisoning (my milk was slightly old, I thought it might be that). Anyway, he gave me several drugs for various symptoms and told me to eat white meats and white starches for the next few days.

So long, pizza test. The pizza test will have to wait until next week now, because the idea is to have a ‘taboo’ food several days running and train your body to find a new approach other than Feast or Famine. As I’m going out of town from Wednesday - Friday (and won’t have control over what foods are served) the pizza test will have to wait for next week.

The little weigh-in devil on my shoulder was whispering for me to weigh myself again after the waves of icky-ness started to subside. I flicked him off my shoulder and kept my scale deep in the closet, even though that call to see a lower number was tempting… But not real weight lost, and not in line w my new approach.

I felt gradually better all day, although not 100%.

It’s been 4 weeks now since I’ve been easing back to healthy living and trying to find a new way (Low Stress Weight Loss).

I pulled the scale out of storage this morning because from the feel of my pants I was pretty sure I’d be able to confirm I was back in Onederland and get that nagging question off my mind. I was.

No major weight loss but that neither surprised nor bothered me. My hormones were completely wacky for most of the past 4 weeks and while I’ve been much better than before, I certainly wouldn’t say I’m anywhere close to hard-core dieting.

Honestly if I can keep losing about a pound a week with this level of sanity I’ll be very happy. For one of the first times in my life the speed of weight loss seems unimportant.

The numbers in general are unimportant too. There are a few major milestones worth noting, but otherwise I don’t think it’s a really big deal.

• My first milestone was getting back to Onederland
• Next up is hitting -10% body weight (181)
• Third will be moving into the “overweight” BMI classification & out of “obese” (175)

I’ll probably do a happy dance when I re-find my ’stabilization’ weight of the last few years (185) simply because it’ll mean most of my clothes will fit again! And the proof that I’ve recovered after my biggest and longest lapse in over 5 years.

I’m going to stick with this plan through the end of the year — food diary, fruit, veg & water, some walking, and whatever Dr. Hope throws at me… this week, the Pizza Test.

The scale, however, is already back in the closet and won’t come out again until sometime in 2008. All my milestones are far away, and I have the clothing fit test I can use over and over for the next several weeks if I want to see if I’ve made progress…

Well, in reheating the beef barley stew I tried to improve it a bit - more pepper and a deeper beef flavor.  We had some steak in the fridge that I decided to add to the stew instead of just eating like normal tonight.  So my DH was so kind as to cut it up (I hate cutting meat) and I added it to the pot.  And somehow the temp got out of control (ok, I put it on too high and then ignored it, it’s not really a mystery) and then we smelled this weird awful smell …. the whole bottom of the pot had burned and given an awful taste to the whole thing.

My DH just laughed and said every good cook has been through this several times, and it helps you learn.

I was seriously pissed off at myself because I’d imagined eating my stew tonight and tomorrow and then freezing the rest.  Now it’s all gone in the trash and all that effort wasted.  And the too-good-for-stew steak that I threw in the pot? Ruined too, so now what’s for dinner?

Getting this right - from both an eating and a cooking standpoint is going to take a while…

I am reminded by the saying ” I came. I saw. I conquered.” It’s very premature to say I’m conquering anything, but I do think I’m moving in the right direction. Conquering anything in the kitchen is a big achievement for me.

I’m pretty surprised that it turns out focusing MORE on food, instead of trying to make myself think about it LESS could be a solution. I, like many overweight people, really like food. But since I’ve been dieting for years I am actually very uncomfortable around it.

I have never been much of a cook. My first forays into cooking came around the same time as my first real weight-loss attempt as an adult, in the midst of the low-fat craze and I basically cooked everything with as close to zero fat as I could get.
Making steamed broccoli was cooking for me. It seemed relatively complex and time-consuming : washing the vegetable, getting out the cutting board and the knife, cutting the thing into florets, putting it in the steamer basket, turning on the stove, watching the right number of minutes.

I am Simple Sally in the kitchen- single ingredient salads, plain steamed veggies. When I lived in the US I adored those egg-white cartons because I’d buy 3 at a time and have them daily as ’scrambled’ for dinner. When I didn’t dine on cereal.

When I wasn’t dieting (which was most of the time in my adult life) I ate a lot of restaurant food and the convenience foods that about in modern America. Frozen, take out, prepare-from-mix or box, etc. Cooking from scratch was extremely rare for me.

My mom often cooked, and I appreciated it - still do. She made everything from scratch, we almost never had prepared foods in the house - I remember Kraft mac n cheese was a treat for us, or an occasional frozen pot pie (remember those?). She was a single mother with 3 kids and had a demanding professional job, but somehow she put dinner on the table every night, almost always cooked from scratch. Why I didn’t pick up more of the cooking bug from her I don’t know - probably because I was hounded about my weight from a young age, so hanging out in the kitchen wasn’t really encouraged.

My husband is a very busy man, but he likes to cook (and he LOVES to eat). He does most of the cooking at home, but a few times we’ve cooked together & it’s been fun. I think it would be nice if the daily cooking wasn’t all on his shoulders, something that’s been bugging me for a while.

As I continue to work through what this new approach is for me, I’ve been poking around cooking and food sites on the net. On one of them, I ran across a recipe for beef-barley stew. It seemed very comforting to me, I guess reminding me of home, the US, etc. So I started looking at various recipes and yesterday bought the meat at our butcher’s and barley & some root veggies at the organic store (barley is not very French…). Today I started cutting and dicing, even having to cut up the beef (not a favorite task). It was a hit, both my DH and my stepson liked it. I’ll need to play w the recipe some for it to be really terrific, but not bad for a first try from a non-cook.

I also made apple-cranberry crumble. I had picked up fresh cranberries at a fancy grocery store on Monday because you never find cranberries in France (these were imported from America) and because everyone’s talks about Thanksgiving had created a longing for those tangy suckers. I’d been looking for a good recipe to use them in and came across the crumble, and having lots of aging apples decided it would be a good choice. It was a “diet” recipe I found online but when I was making it I added some butter (not in the recipe) and a bit of sugar (and should have used more sugar). Yes, I improvised, and it was fun. Still, it was very healthy - topping is rolled oats, wheat bran, some flour, applesauce, spices, and in my case some butter. A BIG hit with the family tonight, which was nice. And for once I made the whole dinner.

Both of these culinary experiments were driven my my desire to make things that appeal to me — not just low cal food to fill me up. I used the things I thought would make the food taste best (within reason) so I used olive oil to brown the onions, and added the butter to my too-dry crumble.

I enjoyed the food I made, and I was glad my family liked it and happy to have made them a good and healthy dinner.

Is this what my new “low stress weight loss” plan will keep bringing me?

I hope so.

Last night a friend of my husband’s took us out for dinner. To a top-rated fancy restaurant, well-considered in the Michelin guide and other gourmet-rating systems.

As you know, Food is taken Seriously in France. Dr. Hope told me she often tells her clients to go to a gourmet restaurant early in their work with her if they don’t do that on their own (I do). Last time I was there we traded addresses - yes, my diet doctor giving me suggestions of fancy places to chow down on rich foods! Eating in these restaurants is an Event. The ratio of staff to clients is often close to 1 to 1, and in addition to feeling pampered you often feel like you’re part of a club. Everything served is specially prepared to be a mix of taste, texture, aroma and visually appealing. Portions are often small, sauces are often present but usually delicate and just a drizzle. It’s very different from what most of us eat everyday.

My husband is a real Foodie, and I’m not far behind. Such culinary excursions are not unknown to us, but I’ve always had a hard time considering how to fit them into my life. I usually try to eat very little all day, arrive ravenous and decide I’m “off program” for the meal (and maybe the next day…). Not this time.

Yesterday I ate “to my hunger’s satisfaction” breakfast and lunch. I didn’t have an afternoon snack, but I really wasn’t hungry.

Usually at these kinds of fancy restaurants there are plenty of healthy choices because seafood usually figures prominently, so I wasn’t too worried about navigating the menu. Except our friend had decided that we should take the tasting menu. For those that haven’t been to these kinds of fancy gourment restaurants, a tasting menu is when they bring you lots and lots of courses, each one smaller than the usual, so you can taste the range of the cook’s talents. Ours was 7 courses! 2 appetizers, fish, chicken, cheese and 2 desserts. Plus 2 different “amuse bouche” (small tasting to start the palate) at the beginning.

Doesn’t sound too diet, does it? Except that if I put all the food on one plate I think it would be less than you’re served as a main dish at any American chain restaurant (like Chili’s, TGIFridays, Applebee’s, Olive Garden, etc). It took hours. We were there from 8:30 pm to 1:00 am. Good conversation. Mostly excellent food (a few things weren’t knock-your-socks-off good, just okay), and some very good wines.

My husband and his friend are both big wine lovers, and the maitre’d, knowing them, had arranged for a different wine to be served to us for each course, blind (we had to try to figure out where each came from, a game I suck at but most wine lovers adore). Luckily each glass was small (and I just took a few sips of each) and we took a taxi. I did start the meal with champagne when the waiter came to ask for our cocktail order. I’ve ordered tomato juice for years and years but Dr Hope pointed out to me at our first visit that champagne and tomato juice have the same amount of calories so you should choose which one you like.  At a restaurant like tha there’s no contest - the house champagne is terrific.

All in all I’d say I had a dinner slightly higher in calories than normal, and the equivalent of 2 glasses of wine.

Most importantly, I savored every bite and I enjoyed what I ate.

And for once, instead of feeling like it was my time for free-for-all, I was relaxed and calm, enjoying the company and the luxurious surroundings.

This is part of my weight loss program. Not bad, huh?