Primary Foods™

Note: For additional information about the Institute for Integrative Nutrition®, visit www.integrativenutrition.com, or my health counseling website.

I like doing things my own way, which probably isn’t a secret to anyone familiar with this blog. When I lost weight, I did it through my own methods, but I’ve discovered since that other people have had the same sorts of ideas. Except in some ways, I approached them from the other direction.

For instance, at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition (IIN), one of the things I learned about was the concept of Primary Foods™, which are all the things that help to nourish and fulfill us, in addition to the physical food we eat (physical activity, career, spirituality, and relationships). The idea is that if we can bring those other areas of our life into balance, our food choices will improve.

I had something of an inverse reaction. When I lost weight, I suddenly realized how unsatisfactory those other areas of my life were, and I went about changing them. This is why it’s so hard for me when people ask what has changed since I lost weight, because almost everything has.

• Physical Activity: This is the most obvious, since I can now be active without feeling like it will kill me, or it being so hard that I take no pleasure in it. I now enjoy my body’s physicality and abilities, not only to climb mountains but to walk out from swimming without being overwhelmed by gravity, to climb a jungle gym with special children in my life, and to miss such activity when I can’t get to it.

• Career: When I had a review after losing over one hundred pounds, my manager commented that I spoke up more often and was better at taking on new challenges. I also briefly considered moving into a management position, and my weight loss gave me the confidence to look for new employment when I was unhappy at my job.

• Spirituality: Around the time I was finishing weight loss, some of us weren’t satisfied by the Sunday morning services at church but loved the community too much to leave. As a result, we began holding lay-led evening worship. This satisfied a spiritual need I didn’t even know I’d had. And when we looked for a new minister, I was concerned enough about the caliber that I dedicated close to two years to a very intense ministerial search – with wonderful results.

• Relationships: My weight loss helped me be more open with my dad, and it allowed me to form new friendships more easily. I also for the first time considered the possibility of dating (although that’s a whole other story).

Even though I approached these areas from the other direction, I attribute a large part of my success at maintaining weight loss for over nine years to the fact that I did make changes to those other parts of my life. It makes even more grateful to be able to help other people in some of these areas, wherever they are in their journey.

No Dessert? But It's Fun!

Note: For information about the Am I Hungry?® program, please visit www.AmIHungry.com or go to my website.

When my book group meets every month, we start off with a potluck, and we always eat very well despite certain food restrictions (cow’s dairy free, gluten free, and vegetarian). We rotate main dishes based on who’s hosting, but other dishes are up for grabs last-minute, and one that usually gets taken first is dessert.

At our last meeting, one of the women asked wistfully, “Can we rotate dessert like we do main dishes? I don’t get to check e-mail as often as some people, so I never get to make it.”

We quickly agreed to that, but it made me realize that most of us do enjoy making desserts, sometimes much more than we like making the main dishes. I started wondering why that is and then realized it’s because desserts are fun!

This is true in a couple of ways. As Dr. May likes to point out in the Am I Hungry? program, some foods have what we need to stay strong and healthy, and other foods are just for fun. Desserts generally fall into that category, and they can certainly be fun to eat.

But they’re also fun to make. You can do things with cakes and pastries that you simply can’t with vegetables and grains and fruit (or if you can, it’s probably much more challenging). For instance, at one of our earlier book group meetings that was also partly a baby shower, one woman made a cake with some amazing baby decorations involving fondant. I also have a friend who has been making elaborate cakes for her son’s birthday - this past year was a dinosaur. And while the food at weddings may be of interest, what everyone really pays attention to is the cake.

I also think of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (and both movie versions), and realize that if you tried to adapt that to savory foods, it simply wouldn’t work, or at least not so well, nor would it be as appealing if left out for a couple of days. 

Not that I need dessert all the time, but every now and again is nice, and even more, it’s important for me to remember that it is fun, and to enjoy it fully, from the making to the presentation to the eating. Now I just need to wait for my next turn at book group.

How to Be Hungry

Note: For more information about my weight-loss story, and what I am doing to help others achieve their goals of health and wellness, see my website.

Do you know how to be hungry?

For some people, this might seem like a trick question, since the pre-requisite is to know when you’re hungry, and not everyone can tell that. If you’ve been in the habit of eating for reasons that don’t have anything to do with needing food for energy, you may have enough fuel that those hunger symptoms simply never appear.

Even for people who recognize those signs, knowing how to be hungry is a different question, and it’s not one I’d thought much about until I read Passing for Thin by Frances Kuffel. Like me, she lost half her body weight, but she took a very different approach. She followed a very restrictive diet, with set amounts and types of food and how many times a day she could eat.

As a result, she commented at one point that she knew how to be hungry. It got me thinking about what that’s like.

On the one hand, I’m not an advocate of starving yourself to shed pounds. I remember too well how difficult it was when I became very restrictive toward the end of my weight-loss process. I fantasized about food, counting down the minutes until I allowed myself to eat again, distracting myself as best I could but not always being able to focus on what I was supposed to be doing. Looking back, I was a bit too extreme at that point.

Apart from that period, though, I have focused on hunger in moderation and discovered that it’s a good thing. It makes the food taste better, and it provides a much clearer sense of when you’re satisfied, having had enough to not be hungry anymore.

Knowing how to be hungry, to me, means that I can recognize the importance of that feeling. Instead of reaching for food the instant I notice the first signs – growling stomach, perhaps, or slight emptiness – I pause to sit with the feeling. I consider how hungry I am, and if I’m better served by waiting a little longer to eat. Most times I wait, accepting the slight hunger without fear. It’s simply part of me, part of the way my body works, and it may make me more focused.

And then when I eat, what joy! To have the physical as well as emotional satisfaction of the food is so much better than the ways I used to feel when eating. It makes me appreciate all the more the value of knowing how to be hungry.

Fitting Out and Glass Slippers

Note: For more information about IIN (Institute for Integrative Nutrition), visit integrativenutrition.com or my health counseling website.

In one of the recent lectures I listened to for my health counseling certification, I heard about the IIN concept of “fitting out”. Most of us think about “fitting in,” feeling that in order to be accepted we need to fulfill a certain image and expectations. But “fitting out” is the opposite, that we should be our authentic, genuine selves, even if that means parts of us will not confirm to expected norms. Only by doing so will we be the best and most effective health counselors (and people) possible.

What struck me about this is how my weight has impacted my attempts to fit out or fit in, in ways that I hadn’t previously considered.

My weight gain and experience was during adolescence and young adulthood, times when it becomes almost crucially important to fit in. Unfortunately, being heavy prevented me from doing that. Literally, I could not fit very well into clothes, desks, bus seats, etc., and I would always be noticed as someone fat. Beyond my weight, though, I knew that I could not fit societal norms. At the time, it was not typical to have a dad who was mostly a house-husband, or a family that recycled and composted. Most kids didn’t spend hours writing fantasy novels or teaching themselves to type, or laughed helplessly while listening to Dr. Demento, or cared about social justice issues.

None of this was bound to win me any popularity awards, or make me generally acceptable to my rural high school classmates, and so I didn’t even try. Knowing that I could never fit in was oddly freeing, even if I didn’t recognize it at the time. It meant that I didn’t care what most other people thought of me, even if I was, as I wrote once, “an overweight, bespectacled, intelligent adolescent with furtive dreams of publication.” Occasionally I longed to know what it would be like to be accepted by the masses, but mostly the few true friends I had were enough.

Once I lost weight, though, that adolescent dream of being accepted surprised me by resurfacing. For the first time in my life, I could at least pass for “normal” (whatever that was). Looking at me, people would not immediately know that something was different about me. I didn’t automatically attract attention.

The problem was that this made me want to blend in a little too much. I stopped talking much about some of the things I enjoyed, or about my childhood, feeling oddly embarrassed about them. How could someone who looked like I did now be so strange? I shut down some areas of my life, until I realized that while I could pass as typical on the street, I was afraid that someone getting to know the real me would leave, because inside, I’m still the same as I was before. Physically, too, my body will always bear the marks of the years of extra weight. It left me paralyzed, unable to make connections that I might normally want, uncomfortable with myself, unable to do some things that I enjoyed.

One such area that I haven’t talked about it in certain circles is my love of fairy tales. But it occurred to me that “Cinderella” has a very tragic and poignant take on the dangers of trying to fit in. In the original version, the two step-sisters wanted to “fit in” to the glass slipper. When it didn’t work, they tried to make their feet smaller – one cut off her big toe, the other part of her heel. It didn’t work. In some versions, they die, bleeding out, and in others, they are crippled for life.

And I realized that’s the road I was going down, at least internally. It was a very humbling moment, and I knew that I could not continue. I will never wear a glass slipper, nor do I want to. I don’t even want the dream that went with it, of being a princess in a castle. I just want to be myself.

Since then, I have been much more comfortable with all the parts of who I was before and who I am now. People may still be surprised as they get to know me, and how I might be a little different. But that’s okay.

What matters is that I no longer feel I have to hide or be embarrassed by anything. It doesn’t mean that I don’t need to improve in some areas, but I consider it more now as smoothing down some rough edges on my bumps and angles, not cutting them off altogether.

What is especially lovely and ironic about this is that I had to turn to my younger self, the self who was heavy and who I tried to disavow, to remember what it was like. I’m just glad that she was there to teach me, and that I can embrace her now wholeheartedly as part of my authentic self.