Stay Hungry

I’ve recently caught glimpses of shows on the Cooking Channel, and I can’t help noticing (and being bothered by) their catch phrase: “Stay hungry.”

On the one hand, I appreciate the idea that if you’re going to cook and eat something, you should be hungry. It’s the “stay” part that troubles me.

Shows about food often make people think they’re hungry when they’re really not. So when the Cooking Channel exhorts me to “stay hungry”, do they want me to actually be hungry, or just feel like eating?

If the former, if they actually want people to be hungry all the time, that’s just wrong. I’ve had days like that, and it’s miserable. I fantasize about food, and in the days when I was on “diets”, I thought almost constantly about when and what I could eat next. It distracted me from paying attention to my experience at that moment and made me food-obsessed. This is what happens to people when they’re starving, whether of their own choice (through diets) or externally imposed. Why would I want to encourage that for other people?

If, on the other hand, the Cooking Channel is promoting the idea of feeling like eating all the time, whether or not you’re actually hungry – well, that’s where a lot of the population already is, and you can see how well that’s working. And as any regular readers of this blog will know, that’s the complete antithesis of the “Am I Hungry?” program.

But what about a different interpretation altogether? After all, they don’t actually tell us what to stay hungry for. Given that, if I see that logo again, I’ll consider it as encouragement to stay hungry, but not necessarily for food. Rather, hungry for life, and for things that are meaningful and important to me. Sometimes that may be food, or cooking, but sometimes I may be hungry for hugs, or time to myself, or fun. That version, I can live with.

Would You Date Someone Overweight?

FYI – this is longer than my usual blog entry since it’s a bit of a book review along with my own reflections and thoughts triggered by the book.

I recently finished reading "Makers" by Cory Doctorow, a fascinating book offering a speculative look at where our technologies might lead us. At first glance, it’s not the sort of book I would expect to write about here, but one of its speculations is about finding a cure for obesity. As a result, it also offered a look at the social side of being overweight, including how it impacts relationships. Reading it, I could relate in so many ways.

One of the main characters in the book is Lester, a big man in every sense of the word, weighing around 400 pounds. We first see him through the eyes of a woman named Suzanne, who finds herself unexpectedly drawn to him. “He was smiling, and brave, and at that moment, Suzanne thought that she could get a crush on this guy, this big, smart, talented, funny, lovable guy. Then reality snapped back and she saw him as he was, sexless, lumpy, almost grotesque. The overlay of his – what? – his inner beauty on that exterior, it disoriented her.” (p. 31) And so when he asked her on a date, she thought, “He was huge…. So fat, he was, essentially, sexless.” (p. 40) The answer was obviously no, and it would have been even if there hadn’t been a professional conflict due to the fact that she was reporting on the work he was doing.

This was something I could strongly identify with from the other side. When I was overweight, I had hang-ups about even the idea of dating. I was quite convinced that most people saw me as Suzanne did Lester – gross and untouchable – and no matter how my inner beauty might shine, it would never be enough to block out the realities of my physical body. I didn’t think of myself as sexless, per se, but I also couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to even hug me, let alone anything more intimate.

I wrote about this in a fictional prose piece called “The Road to Freedom”: “I can’t even stand to look in a mirror, I’m so disgusting…. I’m surprised I don’t make anyone ill. Where did I go wrong? I was so adorable as a child. What did I do to deserve this transformation from beauty to beast?... When I [was a kid and] imagined myself grown up, I thought I’d… be married, have kids. That’s a laugh. Who would want to marry me? I’m repulsive to myself, so it must be worse for others. No, I won’t even consider it.”

I was therefore extremely interested to read about a treatment Lester underwent called fatkins. It involved: electromuscular stimulation and chemical therapy for skin tightening; appetite-suppressing hormones; stem cells as a substitute for steroids to build muscle; and genomic therapy with hummingbird genes to boost the metabolism. A new Lester emerged, one with washboard abs who could – in fact, had to – eat ten thousand calories per day. (Not without cost, it turned out, although that wasn’t something they discovered until much later.)

Suzanne was blown away. She was also very attracted to him, now, on every level. But Lester didn’t want to spend the night with her because, as he told her, “’You didn’t want me before.’” (p. 106)

Here, too, I felt echoes of myself. After losing weight, my issues morphed into worrying about what my date would think of me when he finally realized that I had not always been this petite person, and that, unlike Lester, my body still bore evidence of that time. And the big question, of course – what would my date have thought of me had he met me before? But then, is that really a fair question, since I’m not the same person I was before?

This, too, was something that Lester ran into. As he explained to a friend, “’Since fatkins, I’ve felt like – I don’t know – a real person. When I was big, I was invisible and totally asexual…. When I felt something for a woman, it was… like I was a beast and she was a beauty and we could enjoy some kind of chaste, spiritual love.’” (I was interested to see that he, too, considered himself a “beast”.)

He continued, “’Fatkins made me… whole. A whole person, with a life below my belt, as well as above my neck…. [And] I guess I really resent [Suzanne] for not wanting me when I was big, though I totally get why she wouldn’t have…. Why would she want me now? I’m the same person, after all.’”

To which his friend replied, ‘”Except that you’re whole now.’” (p. 207)

Ah, there’s the rub. Would someone be attracted to me now because I’m not fat, or because I’m someone who’s finally comfortable with who I am? How do you answer those questions?

Lester spent quite a lot of time avoiding those issues at all by sleeping primarily with other fatkins. In fact, it seemed that all the fatkins became super-sexed after the treatment, which might have been a side-effect of some of the changes they underwent. In reality, I know that some people who lose a lot of weight do go into overdrive in that perspective, but not everyone, and it might have been nice to have that a bit more balanced in the book.

Despite all that, eventually Lester and Suzanne ended up together, and I was also a bit disappointed by this aspect of the book. Nowhere did we see what made Lester change his mind about being with her, or how he got around feeling like he was still fat with her, even though he wasn’t and would never be fat again. In general, though, I found it a refreshingly frank look at the social realities of being overweight, and for that I applaud it.

In considering my own journey, I’ve actually found that the facilitator training for “Am I Hungry?” has helped move me to a better place. These days when I meet someone and talk about what I do, I share some my hopes for offering that course, which makes it natural to slip in my own past up-front so I can gauge their reaction. It’s allowed me to feel, now, like I’ve owned it, and am no longer hiding a very significant part of my life behind this person that I’ve become.

But then I started thinking about being on the other side and asking a new question. How would I feel about dating someone overweight?

This came up for me even before reading about Lester and Suzanne. It started some time ago when a neighbor asked me, “I saw a really big guy go to your house the other day. Was that your dad? I know he’s heavy. I mean, you wouldn’t date….”

She trailed off before actually completing the sentence, perhaps finally cluing into who she was talking to. It didn’t make me any less offended. And though it was my dad she had seen, I suddenly wondered if some of my anger was because I was afraid she was right. Would I really be so hypocritical as to judge another person on their weight?

A while after that I went on a date with a man who wasn’t quite as big as Lester, but still big. It surprised me when we met because I’d only seen profile pictures before (we met online). I got nervous as I examined my reaction. Was there more to it? But I was pleased to discover it really was only surprise. No disgust, no aversion, no feeling that I could never be attracted to him. In fact, I enjoyed our time together enough that I didn’t even really notice it again until he tried to squeeze himself into my car (a 1997 Saturn sedan is not designed for tall and/or large people).

That relationship didn’t end up going anywhere, but the reasons had nothing to do with his or my weight. While I was disappointed that it didn’t work out, I felt a strange sense of freedom. Whatever my issues have been in relation to weight and dating, I knew then that they were truly gone. And about that, I couldn’t be happier.

Earning the Right to Eat

This past week we had a major snowstorm in Maine (along with other parts of the country), dropping over a foot of snow on us. Happily, I don’t have to shovel my driveway, but I do have to move my car so my spot can be plowed. Between snow that drifted as a result of the heavy winds and getting plowed in, that took me half an hour.

By the time I got inside, I felt like having some hot chocolate. Then an insidious thought crept in: “After all, I’ve earned it.”

I literally stopped in the act of walking to the kitchen. Did I really just think that?

The concept of earning the right to eat is almost certainly familiar to people in our diet-obsessed nation. Exercise requirements, either to justify eating or as punishment after the fact, go hand-in-hand with those sorts of restrictions. For instance, a friend doing Weight Watchers told me they had points for food but also points for exercise. If you exercised more than recommended, you could “spend” those extra points to get more food points and therefore eat more.

One problem I have with this is that it’s very cerebral. Rather than simply trusting your body to let you know if it’s hungrier than normal as a result of activity, the concept of earning food is much more involved. How much exercise allows for how much food? What kind of food? As you exercise do you have to check your heart rate and go for a certain number of minutes to get that ice cream or piece of cake? It takes you out of your body, whereas I found that reconnecting with my body was essential for long-term weight management.

Another piece that seems to get lost with this approach is recognition of the simple fact that if you exercise heavily, you need to eat more. It’s not a privilege. If you burn a lot more calories than you consume, for any extended amount of time, your body just shuts down. My brother, for instance, does the Trek Across Maine, a 180-mile bike ride over three days. While he’s doing it, he can eat pretty much whatever he wants – and he has to. If he doesn’t, he might not be able to finish the ride.

Finally, this approach puts a negative connotation on physical activity. It took me years to get past the notion that exercise was evil. This was partly because when you’re overweight, physical exertion is not particularly fun, but it was also because I always equated it with dieting. What a novel idea to consider that exercise is not necessarily about food! Certainly it burns calories, but that is not the be all, end all. Physical activity can be enjoyable for its own right, something to engage in for no reason but pleasure.

So yesterday after I went out cross country skiing (a much more pleasant activity than shoveling packed, heavy snow), I came home and found that I was hungry. Instead of thinking about how much I had “earned” or even if I had earned anything at all, I simply ate until I was no longer hungry. And that felt good.

Grace

I’ve now eaten at two restaurants in what used to be former churches, and the difference could hardly be more extreme.

My first such meal was in the fall of 2004, when I was visiting some friends in Ireland. They had heard about a chapel in Glengarry that had been converted into a café, and we thought it might be fun to check out. It was one of the strangest experiences I’ve ever had.

The oddity began on our arrival, when we saw signs outside saying, “Do Not Touch The Flowers”. They were quite serious about it, too; one woman got yelled at for even leaning down to smell the flowers. Inside were similar signs warning “No Photography”, “ Do Not Touch”, “Keep Your Children Seated”. The décor also left something to be desired. The inside was dim and slightly claustrophobic, decorated with numerous animal heads on the wall and, on an almost altar-like area in the back, a carving of a man’s bloody head on a platter. The only part I liked was that they had converted the pews into seats for the tables.

All of that might have been fine if the food was good, but sadly, such was not the case. We ordered expensive carrot soup, and my friends were actually indignant over it, convinced that it was really just orange-colored potato soup. Our meagerly-filled sandwiches were served on the Irish equivalent of Wonder Bread. We decided not to tempt dessert, instead wanting to leave as quickly as possible. It was in no way a religious experience.

In sharp contrast to that was taking my family out to dinner last night. It was my Christmas gift to them, an annual tradition of treating them to a meal at an up-scale restaurant. The choices in Portland are almost overwhelmingly abundant these days, but after some thought I decided on Grace (www.restaurantgrace.com).



The building alone is worth a visit. The restaurant is housed in a space that used to be a Methodist church, and it’s absolutely gorgeous. High vaulted ceilings, stained glass, open view of the kitchen from our seat on the balcony, a circular bar, and the host or hostess overseeing everything from the pulpit. It was all very elegant and, dare I say, graceful.


The food, too, was fantastic. I’m not sure exactly what type of bread we had to start, but it was something like a nut bread, delicious on its own or with the herbed butter. Most of us saved room for the main course and dessert, but those who had appetizers (fettuccine with a seafood medley and pork crostini) were quite pleased with their choices.


I spent some time agonizing over my entrée, but I eventually opted for something a bit different. I got: venison loin, cooked to perfection over a savory-sweet huckleberry sauce; venison sausage over shredded beets; delicately crunchy and earthy mushroom spaetzle; and a puree of yuzu-parsley root. My side of pickled vegetables – including beets, fennel, and pearl onions – was a perfectly tart, crunchy complement. Others had steak, scallops, and gnocchi with goat cheese, with sides of fried green beans, Brussels sprouts with bacon, and roasted fingerling potatoes. Everything was delicious.


And dessert! Many of us went with the flourless chocolate cake, a lovely dark circle topped with milk chocolate mousse and a peanut butter powder, accompanied by a scoop of peanut butter crunch ice cream with a bit of peanut brittle. It was truly heavenly. Others enjoyed the goat cheese cheesecake, cookie and bon-bon plate, and apple pie. Leaving, we were all satisfied but not uncomfortably stuffed. We couldn’t find any fault with our meal – a perfect evening.

Of course I ate more than I needed, and this morning I’m sneezing a little from the milk in the mousse and ice cream, but I’m okay with that. Because what I was thinking about last night, as we lingered over our food for a couple of hours, was that meals like this truly are a type of grace. Many of us who have struggled with weight can forget the simple enjoyment of an exceptional meal, getting caught up in trying to count calories, or determine carbs, proteins, fats, vegetable exchanges, etc. Had I been worried about any of that, I would not have been able to enjoy myself. And that would be a shame.

I also appreciated that the restaurant actually wanted the experience to be joyful. When I think of the café in Glengarry, it almost seemed like the owners were trying to cultivate an idea of deprivation and solemnity. It was not something we were meant to take pleasure in.

And I have a problem with that. No matter how humble or elegant, food should be enjoyed. It is more than just some combination of nutrients, and while we do need it to live, being able to eat more than subsistence foods is a blessing, as is being able to share such a meal with loved ones. I admit that I don’t always remember that, either, but I hope to more often, recalling, as I eat my fill of whatever type of food, that I am graced.

Let Yourself Be Empty

I thought I was going to write about New Year’s resolutions today. Not so much because I wanted to as because I felt somewhat obligated. After all, this is the time of year when people are waking from their holiday eating stupor. They’re looking in the mirror, or getting on scales, or trying to put on that pair of jeans, and thinking, “I need to lose weight.” Television, magazines, radio, and newspapers are flooded with ideas of how they can achieve. Shouldn’t I add my two cents?

Then I went to church to listen to a sermon about living in the present. It included a Zen quote that rang within me: “If you want to be full, let yourself be empty.”

That simple phrase distilled for me precisely what I’ve been remembering and thinking about in relation to the “Am I Hungry?” program. How can you know when you’re full if you never let yourself get empty?

It sounds so straightforward, but that simplicity is deceiving. I think most of us are scared to feel that way, not just in relation to food but in all areas of our lives. If we’re empty, maybe that means something is wrong with us. Especially in the holiday season, emptiness can be equated with loneliness, with lack of love. If we do not spend these special days with other people, if we have no one with whom to share a meal, if no one bakes us cookies, what does that say about us?

Perhaps more frightening is the idea that with all that space, we may have to face ourselves. What will we see? What will we uncover?

That can be frightening. It can also be freeing. When you don’t keep yourself filled to the gills, you may find that what you want or need becomes much simpler. If you’re truly hungry, you may discover that what you eat is so much more satisfying. Having experienced the opposite, fullness becomes a rich blessing.

So perhaps this is about resolutions after all. Perhaps this year, though, instead of thinking about what’s wrong with you that needs changing, you could think about what will make you truly satisfied. Then empty yourself enough to hold that fullness. And may the new year bring you just enough of what you need.