pastries and prozac

In my planner, I have “write blog entry” written down in today’s slot, so here it is!

Firstly, thank you to everyone who commented on my last blog entry and encouraged me to keep blogging. It wasn’t until I had finished writing that all down that I decided that I needed to get some help. I started seeing my school counselor because I’ve been feeling so out of control and unmotivated that I’ve been skipping classes and not working on my research and every moment outside of class and work has been spent trolling YouTube and Netflix for something to distract myself with, which leads to the “pastries” part of this entry heading.

King of Pastry – This is a documentary that follows three pastry chefs who are trying to earn the title of Un des Meilleurs Ouvriers de France (M.O.F.), which translates to something like “One of the Best Craftsmen in France.” The challenge is held once every four years with roughly a dozen pastry chefs attempting to earn the title (there can be multiple winners each year).

The pastries, sugar sculptures, and cakes in this documentary are truly drool worthy, and I think my new life goal should be to marry one of these pastry M.O.F.s because a marriage filled with that much goodness could never go wrong.  Seriously, these guys create some of the most beautiful artwork with sugar and flour.  It’s also great to see how these professional craftsmen judge each work. They take so much time and care in tasting each cake, discerning each flavor and texture and judging accordingly.

Another fantastic site for us wannabe French is Paris Patisseries, a blog and patisserie review site authored by an American ex-pat living in Paris. Pretty much the man set out to find the best tarte, macaron, and éclair in Paris, and he’s doing a great job photographing and reviewing each one. Get your tissues ready and check out his list of the 38 best pastries in Paris.

Now onto the “Prozac” part of the entry title. No, I’m not on Prozac or any other kind of medication. I want to add something to my last entry on binging and depression. Late last year, I met with my school counselor for the first time. I never had counseling before, and one of the things she asked me was “What do you hope to get out of counseling?” After a few seconds of tearful reflection, the best I could come up with is “I want to have hobbies. I want to like something so much that I look forward to doing it on a regular basis.” I don’t think she understood what I meant because I didn’t understand it either. After meeting with her again two weeks ago, I realize what I was trying to say. “I don’t want to be depressed anymore.”

Essentially, I’ve been mildly depressed as long as I can remember. I was in a deeper depression for the last few years, and since April of this year, I really felt like my old self again. The problem is that my old self is just the “not as depressed as before” self. As I mentioned before, the binging thing is how I self-medicate my depression. My size is my excuse for keeping people away even though it makes me unhappy. I can restrict myself for a short period, but I inevitably cave in.

I want to get better. I want to not be depressed anymore, but I’m also very scared. I don’t know what it’s like to not be depressed or what kind of person I’ll be.

To end this, I will tell you that I had a fantastic madeleine today. It was a lemon zest madeleine by Donsuemor, a company based out of California. I bought a box of them at Whole Foods to enjoy after raking the leaves with a housemate. So good!

trouble trouble trouble

Weighed in this morning: 200.6.

It’s a little frustrating to see that since the initial inception of this blog, I have made very little progress. In fact, I think I have regressed significantly. This past month has been kind of a wash. But I do want to get back into some kind of routine. I just started a new job at a grocery store whose name sounds very much like “hole feuds.” It’s a pretty good job with a nice in-store discount. Hopefully, I’ll feel a little more up-to-task when I’ve acclimated to working around my classes and internship. Don’t want to fail graduate school now, do we?

Lately, I have felt the push to really health myself up. I want to precede the following statement by saying that I, in no way, mean for this to be offensive to those who have more life experience than I do. I’m 26, and I feel old.

I used to think that sore muscles and not being able to keep up with my fit friends was just a consequence of being out of shape, something that could be solved if I could just stick to a diet and exercise regime, which I normally couldn’t. I also couldn’t see how my bad habits were taking a real toll on my body. Now, I see that years of binging and inactivity have the capability of significantly limiting my physical abilities. I look at my mother, who has had both knees replaced, and no amount of healthy eating and weight loss will allow her to comfortably run or walk for long distances. It’s the realization that I’m wasting my 20s by not taking care of myself and by excusing present bad behavior with the promise that starting tomorrow it will all be different. Why can’t I make that difference today? What is stopping me?

So much has been going on that I have not written about, and my life is feeling very out of control at the moment. I like having control, which is why I turn to binging when I can’t control anything else.

Maybe this is just one of those tough years.

I hope that wasn’t too dreadful to read.

sick

I unexpectedly traveled to my parents house this past weekend. Nothing bad, but I won’t be going home for Thanksgiving so I figured I should see them before my new job keeps me here all the time. I’ve got a terrible cold, which reminds me that I hate being sick so so much.

The good news is that I’m feeling more in control of food intake, especially because I have no appetite for anything right now. I just force feed myself toast and tomato soup.

New weigh-in and proper post in a few days, when I’m not a zombie.

cycles

Thank you for your patience.

I haven’t updated in a while for three reasons:
1. I went on vacation for a week
2. I lost my job and stressed for a week until I could got a new one
3. I’ve felt like a total failure and have considered just giving up

Vacation was very nice after working 40 hr/wk all summer while studying for my comprehensive exam. (I passed! Hurrah!) I was staying with an older couple who I used to work with, and they are complete food pushers. Basically, I was force-fed at dinner and the rest of the time I was surrounded by boxes of processed crap, which I am not strong enough to resist. A friend of mine had also flown in to go on this vacation with me. I love her to bits, but she stressed me out a little, and I wanted to binge. I can’t place my finger on it, but I think it’s because I always admired her and I can’t help but compare myself to her. I end up feeling so bad about myself, I just stuff my face.

I weighed myself on Saturday, October 1st: 202.4 lbs

Not happy. Actually, it freaked me out so much that I immediately pulled out my old Weight Watcher materials and started counting Points. That lasted until today when I completely went overboard and devoured a bag of Milano cookies.

That is my cycle. I go through a few days of devoted dieting that just end in a few days of binging. Over and over again. They only way I got it to stop was when I was very conscious of what I ate and where and when, like when I started this blog. I was in the zone for a few weeks and it was working so well. Then I guess I just got tired or stressed or needed the comfort of the binge. Geneen Roth says somewhere in one of her books or audio recordings that when we binge for comfort or safety we are caring for ourselves in the best way we know how. I think I need to learn a new way of taking care of myself.

If you’re not familiar with Geneen Roth, I recommend any of her books. Here is a short article written by her: Love Food to End Emotional Eating

I’ve always been a binger. I remember being in middle school and wearing a path between the TV and the kitchen. I’d go back and forth all evening, heating up plates of whatever we had on hand for dinner. At the time, I didn’t realize that I was trying to make myself feel loved. As a teenager, I always thought I was so strong and that I didn’t need friends. I really didn’t have any friends at all growing up. I really mean that. From kindergarten to high school graduation, there were only three people I spent time with outside of school, and two of them dumped me. I ate lunch with my younger sister and her group of friends. Now I realize that all of that eating and weight gain was just an attempt to cover up my loneliness, but I can’t shake off that desire to binge.

Thank you to those who have commented on my blog. I don’t think I would have kept it up if I thought that nobody was reading it. I’m not going to give up. There will be a new post this weekend.

i’m still here

Wow, I’ve been gone for a while, but here I am. In my last post I talked about hitting a rough patch. That patch didn’t go away as quickly as I hoped it would. Mostly I was stress eating in anticipation of an exam I had last week. I was so tired and anxious about studying that good food really took a back seat. I ordered pizza, ate a lot of ice cream, and got take away more often than I should have, but the good news is that I didn’t regain much weight and actually lost since my last weigh-in. This morning I was 196.6 pounds.

I think there were two things really helped me from shooting back past 200, which is the norm when I binge.

1. I exercised as I normally would have up until a few days before the exam (it also rained non-stop for days). I actually went for a jog after my exam ended and that felt really good. I still haven’t found something to replace the pole-dancing fail, but I’m looking into swim classes. I don’t know how to swim very well.

2. Although I ate out a lot, I noticed that I didn’t really eat as much junk food at home. Usually in a bout of EE (emotional eating), I’ll to go the shop and buy anything and everything that strikes my fancy, go home and annihilate it. That didn’t really happen.

Other than that, it’s a recommitment to managing/pushing out my offenders. Those are pizza delivery, ice cream (getting too chilly for that), iced coffee (slipped once), certain types of bread, etc.

I realized yesterday that I haven’t craved chocolate in forever. A couple of years ago, I was living abroad, depressed and lonely, and a binge eater. I avoided going out with friends, missed work and some great experiences, and kept to my home all for the sake of eating inordinate amounts of food. Normal binge foods were entire pizzas, chocolate, boxes of cookies, chips, fried foods, pastries, ice cream, and pretty much anything that remotely resembled food (example, partially baked philo dough). This meant daily rounds to grocery stores and convenience shops. I alternated stores on certain days, but sometimes I’d make 3-4 runs to difference stores in one day. Sometimes I’d fall asleep so full of junk, I’d wake up in the middle of the night because my body needed to purge whatever was in there.

Okay what does this have to do with not craving chocolate?

At this bad time in my life, chocolate was one of the seven deadly food sins, hence it was irresistible. I could eat entire trays of chocolate in only a minute or two, usually two or three at a time. I got tummy aches, sores on my tongue, and weight on my hips, but I couldn’t stop myself from eating it. So, it feels very liberating to not hear the beck and call of chocolate as I go through the check out line. Certainly I’m still battling with other offenders, but I’m glad that this isn’t one of them.

A final note about binge eating. It has been the most embarrassing and socially debilitating thing I have ever faced as an adult. I couldn’t enjoy my friends or my life, and often my only thoughts were about what I was going to eat next. Every time I went to a restaurant, I felt like people were watching me and whatever I was served just never seemed like enough. I relished the moment I had safely arrived home with my prizes and could gorge myself in peace. I hope I never find myself in a place that unhappy and devoid of true enjoyment ever again. Now I’m an occasional binger, long time overeater, but overall healthy person who just needs to learn how to slow down and enjoy life a good food.

 If you can relate to anything that I wrote here and think you need some help or just some kind words from someone who’s been there, you’re not alone, it’s not your fault, and you are not a bad person or a failure.
I first became aware of my binge eating problem a few months after it started. I say “became aware” because I was in denial for a few months, couldn’t understand why I felt so hungry, and just chalked it up to post-break-up blues. When I started to realize that the binge demon was beyond my control, I tried to help myself as best as I could in my situation. I read books by Geneen Roth and Susie Orbach, both very helpful. It really wasn’t until I came back to US after two years abroad and another six months of grad school that I was able to get help through counseling. Surprisingly, I found that focusing on all the issues surrounding my family, education, social life and personal goals was what really helped me to let go of the binge as a method for dealing with life. Yes, I still binge sometimes, but never to the extent I once did.

Thank you for reading all of that. I actually wasn’t planning to write about binge eating, but it just kind came out.

I leave you with this photo of David Tennant because I recently became obsessed with Doctor Who, and I think he has the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen. Enjoy!

Setbacks

The last week has been less than stellar, and I shall tell you why.

I live in a house outside of Boston with three other girls, but two of them were gone for the summer while the third was splitting time between Beantown and New Hampshire. I was working 40 hours and alone most nights, and while previous experience (two years living alone) taught me that this usual led to binges, this time around, I had no problem relaxing and regulating food. I really paid attention to what I was eating. Now I’ve got a full house again, and the shift in dynamic has turned me into a secret eater. Example: last week I ordered a small delivery pizza (offender!), shared a slice with a roomie and then after said roomie went back to her room, took the rest of it to my room and devoured it in less than 5 minutes. Why?

1) an entire pizza is a binge trigger for me

2) I don’t like to have people observe how much I eat (though there is one roomie who is like an unofficial sin buddy)

3) I feel safe in my room.

This behavior has been going on for like a week. I was 197.8 pounds on Sunday.

Good news is that I’m still jogging a few days a week and I’ve been going to my pole dancing classes for activity. However, I’m not going to go to pole anymore. I bought a deal off Living Social for four intro pole dancing classes at a local studio. I was so excited to start because I had tried pole dancing when I was in college (admittedly I was 40 pounds lighter at the time), but the first class was soul crushing.

It started off well enough. I joined with a friend who had bought the same deal, and we showed up excited to learn. The stretching felt great and then we got started on the pole. In one class we learned: a dip, pirouette, fireman (spinning slide), and a back hook (spinning background, holding onto pole with hand and the back of a knee). I made a lot of mistakes and I don’t have a lot of upper body strength, but I had chocked it up to first-time failings and laughed it off. It was different from my previous experience because my previous lessons were larger group lessons (vs. 2-3 people/class) and it focused more on sexy, both-feet-on-the-ground moves. I felt so sore the next day, but it was a good feeling.

Last Friday night, I went to an open session with my friend. We ended up being the only two there and a different instructor conducted the class, a review of the previous week. I. was. crushed.  She was so aggressive and insisted that we do stretches that her expert group does. My friend (just got out of the military after 9 years and very fit) was having a great time, but though I am not morbidly obese, at my level I am simply no able to do a lot of those stretches. She didn’t offer any alternate stretches, and when it came time to work on last week’s moves, she would simply do them and expect us to copy. I can’t do a fireman or a back hook because I’m too heavy and not strong enough to keep myself on the pole.  The instructor just watched me and kept telling me to do it again, do it again. It wasn’t helpful, it was exhausting and embarrassing. Tears started running down my cheeks, but luckily, it was dim in the studio and the instructor went to the other side of the room to help my friend. I pulled myself together until I got to my car. I swore up and down that I wouldn’t go to class the next day.

I slept on it, and the next day, I had major PMS (Poor Me Syndrome). But then I found this blog:The Token Fat Girl and a post by the author inspired me to go for a jog because while I can’t spin down a pole, I can jog. While jogging, I decided to go to pole class because I had paid for it and maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. And it wasn’t as bad as the night before, but I still found myself embarrassed and frustrated and crying in the bathroom. So next week would have been the final class, but I’m not going to go. No matter how judgment-free or open to all body sizes this studio is, I don’t think they really understand that a woman with a larger body, specifically as a beginner, may need modified moves until she can build enough strength to hold her own weight.

Sorry. Long, sad, pity story. But I’ll end with this: I’m not giving up. I’ll find something else to do. Tomorrow is also my birthday. Hurrah for birthday cake!

offenders 2

So it’s been two week since I started the FWDGF lifestyle change. The first weekend, I attempted (and failed) the Magical Leek Soup weekend. The rest of the week I was more particular about my food choices, avoided snacking, and compensated the following day if I ate something higher in calories. I don’t feel deprived at all.

I was at 195.8 this morning. While I realize that the number on the scale doesn’t mean anything, I do rely on the scale to give me a sense of cause and effect. If I can eat a certain amount one day and see that I’m losing, maintaining, or gaining weight the next day, over time I will learn how to regulate how much I eat.

Some things that I learned these past two weeks:

-Any type of Asian food that comes in huge portions is an offender for me. I just feel compelled to eat the entire container, whatever it is.

-I like baking, but fresh baked foods are offenders. Case in point, I made banana bread muffins yesterday. I ate four and had to ship the rest off with a friend today because I knew they’d be gone by the end of the night.

-I can be satisfied with much less food than I thought. On WW, I used to pack huge lunches with mid-morning and afternoon snacks. Now I pack a sandwich or soup, salad, and a fruit, and I’m actually full by the time I’m done eating it.

-I don’t snack between meals, so I’m usually hungry around 4PM when I get off work, but I’m realizing that often times, I’m just stressed out at the end of the day and want to go home and relax. Now when I get home, I either read for an hour or I go for a jog/walk. I feel more relaxed and don’t feel genuinely hungry until 6 or 7.

-Eating at the table is important for me. If I don’t eat at the table, it’s like I didn’t eat at all. I used to eat dinner in front of the TV or computer, but now I force myself to sit at the table. I notice that I feel less compelled to eat because I know I have to do it at the table. It’s strange, but for the first time in my life, I’m actually thinking less and less about eating as way to fill my time.
In terms of activity, I jog/walk three times a week and try to go to a walk when the weather is nice. I started pole dancing classes today, which are very fun but kind of difficult at my size. I’m not very flexible and some of the spinning moves are awkward and difficult. Oh, well. Have to start somewhere.

Next update, maybe in a week, but maybe later because I have something big coming up that needs a lot of work and attention.

offenders

The very first step in FWDGF is to keep a three-week journal of what you’ve eaten so that you recognize your “offenders.” These are foods that you just can’t seem to pass up, or simply can’t eat in moderation.  Honestly, I kind of fudged this step (am I seeing a pattern here?) since I’ve been tracking on WW for the last few weeks. Here are my offenders:

Iced coffee – I am hardly the type of person who needs coffee everyday, and during the winter, I seldom drink it more that 2-3 times a week. However, during the summer, I just can’t get enough of iced coffee, and while I only use milk in my hot coffee, I need both sugar and cream in my iced coffee. A medium iced coffee from Dunkin Donuts with cream and sugar, at least 4-5 times a week. That’s a 24 oz cup (give or take the ice) of sweetened coffee each time, sometimes just a few hours after a regular cup of hot coffee. Too much caffeine and sugar!

Sweet nectar of life!

Ice cream – I don’t usually go out for ice cream, but I can’t buy a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and expect it to last more than a day or two.

Cake and pastries – There are some amazing bakeries in my area, and typically, I avoid them. For me, the danger is in the grocery store. Easy and cheap to buy, what I usually get is laden in fat and sugar and not nearly as tasty or satisfying as what I could buy at a premium bakery.

Bread – To say that I love bread is an understatement. I will eat an entire loaf in a single day. I love hearty breads with lots of grains and all types of biscuits, rolls, and scones. At this point, I don’t buy loaves of bread at all, and only occasionally purchase the other types of breads. The only bread I regularly keep at my house is a loaf of high-fiber, light toast that never goes bad. I want to eventually be able to buy a loaf of bread without eating the whole thing in a single sitting. Oddly enough, I don’t like bagels that much.

Pizza – My favorite pizza place makes a great veggie pizza. I order a small (so that’s six smallish slices), and I’m usually full after the second slice, but somehow, I can’t stop eating it. I normally end up eating the entire thing all at once. However, if I go to a pizza-by-the-slice restaurant, I’m normally content with a single slice. Weird, I know.

Heavy and Fried Foods – These are foods that I have always labeled as forbidden because they’re so bad for you, like French fries, mac and cheese, and donuts. It truth, I generally feel sick after eating them, but that sinful aura around them makes them so attractive.

Here are some foods that I can’t control the amount I eat and avoid buying all together: cookies, salty snacks, sweetened cereals

So it seems to me that sugar, desserts, and bread are my worst offenders. The next step is to determine which I can completely eliminate for three months and which ones I can reduce without feeling deprived. I think ice cream, most fried foods, and iced coffee can be thrown out completely for the next three months. I’ll still drink hot coffee since I don’t have the same problem with that.  Bread, pastries, mac and cheese, and pizza are foods that I’m unwilling to give up completely, so I’m just going to try to moderate them.

Next week, I’ll update you on how my experiments in reduction are going. I think eliminating iced coffee will be the hardest one.

magical leek soup weekend

If you’re not familiar with FWDGF, Magical Leek Soup weekend is the first step in recasting. You prepare a simple soup of boiled leeks in water, and over the course of two days, preferably a weekend, you drink a cup of broth every 2-3 hours and eat a cup of boiled leeks for each meal. On the second day, you may eat a small meal for dinner.  It’s meant to be a detox prior to recasting and to help jumpstart your weight loss and motivation.

boiled leeks for breakfast, nom!

I’ve personally detoxed once before. On that program I didn’t eat anything, but drank a mixture of juice, clay, and psyllium husks every couple of hours and took a digestive stimulant. I did that for three out of the five prescribed days. I can say I didn’t feel hungry at all until the third day, and then I bowed to the desire to eat and ate some boil potatoes.  Either way, I figured that a weekend of leek soup would be a snap, but day one was a little challenging. Here’s what happened.

Day 1

I made my leek soup in the morning and drank/ate the prescribed portions, but around 3pm, I got a terrible headache though I didn’t feel hungry. I took a nap for a few hours, and once I woke up, I was hungry. I like boiled leeks well enough, but it’s hard to choke down leek-flavored water. I ended up with a veggie burger and a side of leeks for dinner, followed by a bowl of cherries (I think I’ve already eaten like 20 lbs of cherries this summer). Oh well, I felt better for it.

Day 2

What can I say? I just didn’t want to eat leeks for breakfast. I decided to just start applying the rules of mindful eating, like sitting down to eat without distractions. That’s quite difficult for me since I have a tendency to sit in front of the television or laptop while eating. Anyway, I don’t feel bad for not eating my leeks because I definitely didn’t fall back on my offenders and I bought some fabulous foods at the store.

The result: 198.8 pounds on Monday morning. How much credit can I give the leeks? I don’t know, but something is working.

Next post will be on offenders, expect it sometime later this week.

getting started

Here are my stats and some photos for my beginning weight. Sorry, I blurred my head out of the photos! I want to share my story, but I don’t really want people to know who I am.

This morning I was 202.6 pounds on my bathroom scale.

Right. I recently quit Weight Watchers after starting up for the 5^th or 6^th time in the past 12 months. I lost 50 pounds during my first stint on WW back in 2007, but after a few months, I went back to my old ways of eating, started binge eating, got depressed, and gained the weight back. I know WW can work for me if I keep tracking points, but that is not a lifestyle I want to embrace. I know some people can accept it and thrive on it (I’m thinking of a particularly awesome blogger), but tracking and weekly weigh-ins make me scared. I think a lot of people feel this way, too.

Instead, I’m going to try to change my mind. I want to become the master of my own destiny, so to speak. Some days I just eat whatever I have around the house because it happens to be there, or I eat because someone has offered it to me, or I eat because I happen to be passing a restaurant I like.  C’est fini

I’m going to honestly and truthfully try to apply a more mindful way of eating and living to my life. This is not a diet, but a change in the way I think about food. I think WW does a fantastic job in stressing that eating better is a lifestyle change, but I also think it’s a little contradictory that one must weigh-in every week and that most meetings become a pow-wow for discussing the lowest point snacks and fake-food alternatives.  I like real food.

So how am I going to do this? Well, I’ve had Mireille Guiliano’s French Women Don’t Get Fat on my bookshelf since 2005.  I love this book because I love France (though I’ve never been), but more importantly, I love the life style and joy of life that is encouraged in this book. I want to be free from the obsessive diet-mentality, not “good enough” mentality, and I think this may be the way to get there.

Wish me bon chance! I’ll be updating this blog on Monday, August 8, 2011 with the results of the Magical Leek Soup weekend that is recommended in FWDGF.