by Lynn Haraldson-Bering
If I had a dollar for every time someone has said to me in the last year, “Is that all you’re eating?” or “Are you ‘allowed’ to eat that?” I could afford a personal chef to prepare all my meals as I contemplate life sitting on the “hillside” Barbara referred to in her last blog entry.
How I choose to feed my body has become almost a spectator sport when I eat out in public or with family and friends in their homes or mine. I’ve been told I’m a “nightmare” to cook for. I laugh at that because my food demands are much simpler than those who subscribe to the Standard American Diet (SAD). When I’m invited to someone’s house for dinner and they ask me what I “can” eat, I always say I can eat anything I want to, but I choose to eat simple and healthy.
Barbara asked a good question: “What are the things you can you do now that you couldn’t do prior to weight loss?” I know she was asking what we can physically do now as opposed to before we reduced. But the question can also be answered from a sensory and emotional perspective.
What I “can” do now is listen to my body when it tells me I’m hungry and when I’m satisfied. The cues were always there, but I was so out of touch with them back in my SAD days that I often spent my evenings miserable and popping Gas-X all night because I’d eaten far more than my body needed. There’s nothing wrong with a piece of pizza. There’s something wrong when your body says after that one piece “I’m full!” and you keep eating the entire pie.
I can overdose on salad, too, but if I’ve made a large salad and halfway or three-quarters of the way through it I’m not feeling the love anymore, I throw out the rest and call it a meal. I don’t “have to” eat when I’m not hungry. That is the problem with many diet plans, including the Weight Watchers Points system, which insist we eat a certain number of calories or Points a day, no more and no less, regardless of what our bodies tell us. I prefer the philosophy of Weight Watcher’s Core plan and Barbara’s primarian diet plan which emphasizes eating simple foods and eating them until satisfied. Learning to read our body’s cues is key to maintaining our weight and not wasting time uncomfortably digesting on the couch.
I take the teasing I get for bringing along my own salad dressing to restaurants, for insisting food be prepared without oil or butter, or for eating three types of veggies for dinner rather than partake in the “main meal,” which is almost always meat-based, because I do not need the approval of others for my food choices.
We’ve all got food pushers in our lives, people who prepare things we didn’t ask them to make and insist we “try” them or tell us they’ll be “hurt” if we don’t eat whatever it is they made. My answer is usually kind but the message is firm: I don’t eat to make others feel good about themselves. This is something I “couldn’t” do with my body back in my SAD days.
I much prefer to watch the feeding frenzy from the hill. I also do my best to consult my body and not my emotions regarding food choices. It’s a constant discipline, but one I’m getting more and more comfortable with as I adjust to life in this new body, the one that’s far from perfect, but I love nonetheless.