Out With the Old, In With the New

If you’re thinking of making a New Year’s resolution that relates to weight, health, or fitness, you’re in good company. According to Statistic Brain, the top resolution for 2012 was “lose weight”, while number five was “staying fit and healthy”, and my guess is that 2013 resolutions will follow a similar pattern.

How do we achieve these (and other) goals? One suggestion comes in the form of that familiar phrase, “Out with the old, in with the new.” For example, we can apply this to food. For most people, a good start to losing weight is to cut out a lot of sugary, fatty foods (the “old”) and replace them with more whole foods such as fruit and vegetables (the “new”).

Unfortunately, this old and new approach might not quite work with food. After all, most everyone knows what diet changes they could make, and yet many fail to keep this resolution, not just at New Year’s but at other times as well.

Part of the problem is that the sugary, fatty foods, in addition to tasting good, can be very comforting, familiar, and easy to prepare. Getting them “out” is therefore challenging, especially if you’re bringing “in” foods that you don’t like, don’t know, and/or take longer to prepare. Consider. What if eating chips, baked goods, candy, etc. is a great source of comfort to you - will replacing them with things like quinoa, kale, and apples give you the same enjoyment? It’s doubtful, especially in the beginning.

This is where thinking about why we like those foods help. Sometimes it can be emotional reasons, but it’s likely also something about the food itself that you truly enjoy. Maybe it’s the texture, the sweetness, the spiciness, the heat or cold, the familiarity, or something else that appeals to you.

Once you know that, you might be able to find something that has similar qualities but is healthier. For instance, if you’re looking for crunch, crisp vegetables with hummus might work instead of chips. Or if it’s sweetness, a baked apple with some cinnamon and a little honey might swerve for dessert.

Whether this approach is something you want to try or not, I hope that you find a way of keeping your resolution (if you made one) that works for you. And to everyone, as we usher out the old year, may the new year coming in bring much happiness and peace.

Revealing Weight History

Dating post-weight loss is a tricky endeavor for many reasons, but one particular challenge is the question of when to share that you didn’t always look this way.

I thought about this recently when watching the “History vs. Mystery” episode of How I Met Your Mother. In it, Ted’s friends started researching all his dates to warn him if they turned up something that was an instant deal-breaker. The very first one was when they found a picture of his date from six months before, when she was morbidly obese. Ted ran.

I know this is a sitcom, but still, it breaks my heart. It means that to the Teds of the world (and they do exist), nothing you do or say will ever matter: the simple fact of earlier obesity is damning, putting you past all reclamation.

This is the fear that we face, those of us with that history. I’ve gone through it many times, wondering when it’s right to tell a date about my past, feeling like a fraud if I don’t but terrified of the response.

Nor am I alone in this. Shauna Reid, who also lost half her weight as chronicled in The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl, waited until the night before her wedding to tell her now-husband that she had kept a blog about her weight loss. And it wasn’t until after they were married that she felt able to reveal exactly how much she had once weighed.

I tell myself that negative responses don’t matter, that anyone who would judge me like that isn’t worth my time. In my head, I know that’s true, and I’m even starting to believe it in my heart. And in truth, those fears have never been realized for me. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, or that the prospect of such rejection doesn’t hurt. Nor does it stop me wishing that I didn’t have to think this way in the first place, or know that reactions such as Ted’s are a real possibility. But since they are, I will simply keep reminding myself that who I am, and my worth as a person, is not all about my weight.

Body Image, Food, and Gender

NOTE: I realize that not everyone identifies as male or female, but for purposes of this piece I’m focusing on two genders – no offense is intended to anyone regardless of how they identify.

A recent study in Maine found that if nutritional information is provided in restaurants, some people will choose lower calorie meals. This didn’t surprise me. What caught my attention, though, was the breakout by gender:

• Women: 50% (two out of four)
• Men: 25% (one out of four)

That’s a significant difference, and it reminded me of how the way we approach food and body image if often tied to gender. That’s especially easy to think about this time of year, with numerous images of Santa Claus and his round belly (how many female icons can you think of who are supposed to be fat?), but many other examples abound.

For instance, the book Teenage Waistland by Lynn Biederman and Lisa Pazer is a fictional account of some teens considering gastric bypass surgery. One of them is a boy who realizes that if he has the surgery and loses weight, he’ll never make the minimum weight requirements for a certain football position, something that’s very important to his father. And in a related discussion, a friend recently commented that he knows a guy with a very high metabolism who struggles to keep his weight up and how it’s a sensitive subject because skinny guys feel a stigma, too, not just overweight ones. 

Marc David also noted this in Nourishing Wisdom: “For many men food is also directly linked to weight, but whereas a woman sees fat when looking at food, a man sees protein, the potential for food to add muscle weight to his body.” (p. 101)

This is something that took me a long time to understand. I used to assume that anyone heavy would want to lose weight, and that anyone thin would be happy with their body, regardless of gender. It unfortunately made me sometimes judgmental about how I saw other people eating, thinking I knew what they wanted because it was what I wanted for myself.

Knowing now that this is not the case, I think about that study and wonder if fewer men are swayed by calorie counts because they want some of that additional bulk. I don’t know, but it may be a factor. 

So many things go into our food choices, after all, sometimes without us even being aware of them. While that can be hard to remember, I do my best these days, reminding myself that we’re all in different places, have different needs, and that no one way of viewing food or body image is going to be right for every person.

A Love of Cooking

It’s still a surprise to me that I love cooking, given that it’s only something I discovered since losing weight. I wouldn’t have even phrased it that way until recently, when I was having a conversation with other women about what we love, and one of them said cooking.

That’s when I realized that what I feel, too. Then I started to consider why I love it. I hear so many people say that it’s boring to cook for one person, or they don’t have time for it, or it’s simply not something they enjoy. Why is it different for me?

I have to be honest and agree with the other woman who said she loves it: part of it is the control factor. When I’m in the kitchen and cooking, I am fully in charge of the food, what goes into it, how it’s prepared, etc. In a way it gives me a way to still be focused on controlling food but in a healthier way than obsessing over calories, grams of fat, etc.

It’s more than that, though. Much of my time is spent working on intangible things - computer software at my job, these words that go into the internet ether, music when I practice my flute, conversations with family and friends. Not that those are bad things, but they are not visceral. I cannot hold them or retain them in any but the most fleeting way.

With cooking, I am fulfilling a deeper desire to be doing some physical, with an actual result that I can not only see and touch but smell and taste and even hear, with bubbling soup or sizzling garlic and more. Having something to chop or peel or stir or measure is much more hand’s on than many of my other activities, as well as providing me with something tasty. In this way it’s relaxing for me, especially with some good music playing. It’s also addictive - I find that if I go for too long without preparing food in some way, I miss it and feel out of balance somehow. 

And I am continually delighted by the sheer possibility of what you can do with raw ingredients. I have fun flipping through recipes, and picking out something new to try has become one of my favorite activities. What’s also interesting is that when I’m cooking, or thinking about food in this way, I’m not tempted to eat. Even if I’m starting to get hungry, I don’t generally sample what I’m working on unless it’s toward the end and I want to check spices, etc. Simply working with food, or thinking about working with it, is enough to satisfy my mental craving.

So I have to take it on faith that other people don’t like to cook. I am so grateful that I have the means to indulge this love, and it is a continual wonder and blessing for me to enjoy food from this newer perspective.

No More Compliments

In recently reading Teenage Waistland by Abby Ellin, I was reminded of something that I had encountered along my own weight-loss journey but had forgotten over the last 10 years: all the compliments I used to receive. Before I started losing, it never occurred to me that so many people would notice or remark on my weight changes, or that I would almost get addicted to it, but that’s what happened.

A sampling of some of the more memorable comments, mostly from my co-workers:

• “You’re my inspiration.”
• “You should be on a Subway commercial!” (Minor drawback - I wasn’t eating Subway sandwiches to lose weight.)
• This in an e-mail: “I just wanted to send you a note to say that I am incredibly impressed at how WONDERFUL you look – I don’t know what you’re doing or how you’re managing to do it, but you look great! I have infinite admiration for what you’ve accomplished… keep up the good work – you are amazing!!!” 
• “I passed you the other day when you were standing at the bus stop, but I almost didn’t recognize you because there’s so much less of you!”
• “Look at you. You don’t have a butt anymore! I mean that in a good way.”
• This from someone in the neighborhood: “Are you the one I’ve been seeing walk all winter? You’ve lost a lot of weight. You look good.”

The problem is that you get to a point when there are no more compliments. When you stop losing, the new you becomes the norm, and people no longer remark on it. This can be a let-down and potentially make it harder to stay motivated on maintaining. In Teenage Waistland, Anne Fletcher described it this way: “‘When it’s new everybody notices, it’s so exciting. “Look at you! You look like a new person! How thin your face is!” But what happens two or five years into maintenance? It’s deadly boring.’” (p. 210)

I didn’t even think about this aspect of things until I left my company right after achieving my weight goal. As I wrote in my memoir about starting my new job, “It wasn’t until I got introduced around that the new reality of my situation occurred to me: these people had never known me when I was heavy. They weren’t going to greet me by saying, ‘You look great!’ or asking how much weight I’d lost.... [It] meant that I would no longer get compliments on a regular basis, which would take some adjustment.”

And it was an adjustment. Every day I went in, maintaining my 130-135 pound loss, but it didn’t matter anymore, at least not to the outside world. Even when I returned to my former company, the most I could hope for was the occasional, “You still look good,” comment from someone I hadn’t seen in a while. It was disheartening. After all, who doesn’t like to hear such wonderful comments on a regular basis?

What helped was the fact that I hadn’t lost weight simply to please other people or get those sorts of compliments. For me, that was an added bonus. And by the time I had gotten to my goal weight, my happiness with everything I could suddenly do - from little things like crossing my legs to big things like climbing mountains - carried me through until that weight became my new reality and I didn’t think of it as a struggle to maintain.

Remembering all this made me wonder - would I want more people to compliment me on my weight loss these days? The answer is no, for two reasons. One, because I’m okay with my daily interactions not being focused on my weight anymore. And two, because now if someone does compliment me after hearing my story, it’s a surprise again instead of being expected. And somehow that makes it sweeter.