Dining Out

Have you ever opted out of going to a restaurant because you knew (or feared) that it would mess up your diet, and/or you didn’t want to be tempted? Or have you gone out but only ordered a salad because that seemed like the healthy option, whether or not that’s what you wanted?

I’ve done both.

One time during my weight loss process, some of my company’s clients came to town. I got invited to join them for a couple of meals at some fairly high-end restaurants. I said no. I don’t remember what excuse I gave, but I certainly didn’t tell the truth: I was scared to go because it might jeopardize my progress.

Another time, shortly after the weight loss, I visited friends overseas. Most days we went out to eat once, and much of the time I got salad. Then one day we ended up eating lunch and dinner at restaurants. Both times I ordered – you guessed it, salad. One of my friends looked at me oddly and asked, “Don’t you get tired of salads?”

In truth I didn’t mind having it twice, but it’s also true that I didn’t even pause to consider if that’s what I wanted. I simply got what I thought I should have.

I’ve been thinking about this recently because one of those overseas friends just came to visit me for three and a half days, and I ate out more than I normally do in a three-month time period. But this time, it was different.

I once ordered a bean salad, and one sandwich came with a side salad, but I didn’t specifically request it. Otherwise, while I didn’t throw the idea of healthy options out the window, I also didn’t let it control me. Rather, I made my food choices based on what seemed most appealing at the time and how hungry I felt. (I also slightly relaxed my allergy restrictions.)

As a result, my meals out this time had much more variety:

• Garlic naan and chicken biryani (a dish including vegetables, cashews, and fried rice, among other things)
• Tofu jerk chicken wrap and side salad
• A gluten-free chocolate sea salt donut (so good)
• Bean salad, roasted red pepper and tomato soup, a Luna bar, and an apple
• Haddock with a mushroom ragout, polenta, some delicious pieces of bread, grilled shrimp, and a chocolate caramel torte

Chocolate Caramel Torte

It meant that I didn’t feel deprived in any way, but I also didn’t feel like I’d overdone it. We walked enough that my body really wanted that food. It made for a much more relaxed and enjoyable dining out experience, and it served as a good reminder that, if I’m mindful, I can have my cake and eat it, too.

Note: For more information on mindful eating, consider the Am I Hungry? Mindful Eating program. You can find more information at www.AmIHungry.com or visit my website.

Being My Own Authority

I’ve never liked having people tell me what to eat. In fact, most times when they have I’ve simply turned around and done the opposite. This was especially true as a teen. The more people told me to eat healthy foods, the more I found ways to get junk food and sweets. (I often wonder what would have happened if they had tried reverse psychology and told me to eat unhealthy foods.)

Yet despite this, I still sometimes struggle with being my own authority and deciding for myself what’s right for me and my body. Even after eleven years of maintaining weight loss, I sometimes find myself counting calories, or spending way too much time considering the nutritional breakdown of my food, or struggling with the voice in my head saying, “You shouldn’t be eating so much.”

I do this even though I know it never ends well, and lately I’ve been trying to figure out why.

Sometimes it feels simpler. After all, if I just eat x number of calories, or y number of nutrients, if I only eat the amounts I’m “supposed” to, I don’t have to think about why I feel like eating, or if I’m actually hungry, or any of that. I can just follow orders. On days when life is coming unglued and dealing with the fallout seems to take all my energy, it’s kind of nice not to have to think. What I lose sight of in that equation is the energy spent following those orders and fighting what my body is telling me.

Another reason is being disconnected from my body. This happened more often when I was heavier and wanted to disavow my physical self, pretend it had nothing to do with the real me. In those situations, actually noticing what my body needed and wanted, or how it reacted to certain foods, or how hungry or full it was – that all seemed alien to me. I never paused to consider how someone living outside of my body could possibly know what was best for it and me. Oh, maybe in a general way they could make some guesses, but for my exact, specific situation on any given day? Not so much.

It can also be scary to go against the flow. I spent so many years feeling like an outsider because of my weight, always being the odd one out, that the sense of “normalcy” that comes with being thin is oddly heady. I want to pretend, sometimes, that I’m just an average woman, no reason to look at me oddly. And while mindful eating is starting to become more familiar to people, it still feels unusual at times to pause and really focus on what’s going on and what I truly want, or to tell someone that’s what I’m doing. Of course, I forget that pretending, denying who I truly am, causes other heartache.

I don’t know how much this will help the next time I feel inclined to pay attention to someone else’s voice. But I hope it will, so that I can remember to cut through the noise and focus on my voice, my body, because being my own authority – in food and elsewhere – is what will ultimately lead me to where I want to go.

Note: For more information on mindful eating and/or becoming your own authority, consider the Am I Hungry? Mindful Eating program. You can find more information at www.AmIHungry.com or visit my website.

Eat Your Greens

Note: Denis Cotter has an amazing restaurant called Café Paradiso in Cork, Ireland, which I highly recommend if you’re ever in the area. He’s also written some good books, and the below quotes are taken from Wild Garlic, Gooseberries… and Me.

Have you ever noticed how many foods become green on St. Patrick’s Day, even if they’re not normally? This includes things like donuts, muffins, beer, and the like. But I rarely see a lot of energy around naturally green foods for the holiday, except for the occasional recipe with cabbage. After all, for most people, green pastries or beer are much more enticing than a dish with kale, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, asparagus, etc.

Why is this? Why does the phrase “eat your greens” sound so ominous? According to Irish chef and author Denis Cotter, “Green vegetables… have very often been taken as if they were medicine…. It was inevitable that this attitude led to greens being cooked as though they were medicine, too, with little care given to how they might taste.” (pp. 14-16)

He makes a good point. We all know that greens are nutritious, but if we regard them only in that light, we’re apt to feel like we should eat them. The “should” might in turn lead to resentment and avoidance – or at least it does for me. (I’ve never reacted very well to having people tell me what to eat.)

But if you can get past that, approach the greens on their own terms, you might find that you actually like them for themselves. Not all varieties, perhaps, or all preparations, but you might find that Brussels sprouts with bacon is quite tasty. You may discover the joys of a fresh salad made with baby spinach – a far cry from the canned spinach my grandfather used to give me for Christmas. Kale has also been making a comeback, with lots of new fans of kale chips, and I am personally excited to see asparagus appearing in stores, a sure and tasty sign of spring.

So if you want to celebrate Ireland and green and the end of winter, and you haven’t traditionally eaten a lot of the natural greens, you could consider if you want to try them with a new perspective. And maybe, like me, you’ll come to agree with Cotter: “[We] have actually come to love green vegetables for their flavour, texture, and almost indefinable life-force quality.” (p. 50)

Either way, enjoy the holiday, and hopefully those of us in wintery states will soon see some green emerging from beneath the snow!

The Waiting Game

I used to think that I had to wait for my life to really start until I was thin – wait to be loveable, wait to do the things I wanted, wait to be happy, wait to like myself.

At the same time, I practiced the flip side of the waiting game. I told myself I could wait until next week to start eating better and exercising, or until after the holidays, or even just tomorrow morning. Except I always found a way to move out that starting date. I felt like I needed to find the exact right time.

Only after my mother died did I realize that I had played that waiting game too long. I still had time to lose weight for myself, if that’s what I wanted, but that didn’t stop the regret. I had missed my chance to have a relationship with her that wasn’t focused so much on food and weight, and I never did get to climb Mt. Katahdin with again.

Which is why part of this recent blog post by Andrew W. K. struck me: “Caring too much about our looks -- and that includes our weight, our height, our hair, our face, etc. -- becomes an easy surface game to play and to keep us occupied so we don't have to dig deeper into life's more challenging and important games…. Your life is waiting….”

It simply never occurred to my younger self that something might be waiting for me. Or perhaps that what I truly waited for wasn’t the right time, or the right numbers on the scale. I was waiting for myself to wake up, to truly live.

This knowledge would have been particularly useful because, as it was, I didn’t discover until after losing weight that all of those things that I wanted didn’t happen automatically even when I fit into regular clothes. I still didn’t have the body I expected, I didn’t instantly fall into a perfect relationship, etc. Certainly I could accomplish more physically, which I enjoyed, but as for the other things, I realized only belatedly that I could have started liking myself and finding ways to be happy long ago.

I wish someone had told me this before. Admittedly I don’t know if I would have listened, but it would have been good to at least hear it. I can’t say for sure what might have changed except that I might have been a little easier on myself, and maybe I would have lost weight sooner, and maybe I would have been able to climb mountains with my mom while she was still alive. But maybe not.

I’ll never know, now. I’m only glad that I decided not to wait any longer, and I hope that any of you who feel like you’re waiting for that perfect moment – not necessarily to lose weight, but for whatever you want to happen in your life – will consider that maybe it will never come, or conversely, that every moment is the perfect one. You just need to stop waiting and grab hold of it.

Disney Princesses

Have you ever heard of the “Princess Syndrome”? Even if not by that name, you might be familiar with the fact that many little girls go through a phase where they want to be princesses, getting their own way and looking pretty. Nor is this necessarily confined to young girls. In The Contractual Obligation Implementation episode of The Big Bang Theory, for instance, three women skipped work to go to Disney and dress up as princesses, even fighting over who got to be Cinderella.

Disney is not the only contributing factor in this desire, but it’s certainly a major one. After all, their princesses have been around for decades, to some extent evolving with the times to present different images of how women should behave. Consider the difference between Sleeping Beauty, who simply waited to be rescued by a prince, and later princesses such as Mulan, who fought battles and saved her husband-to-be.

And yet, that evolution has not included body type. Every one of the Disney princesses is slender and beautiful, if in different ways. None have any noticeable physical trait that marks them as different or differently abled, and certainly none of them are plus sized.

Disney is not alone in this. Media portrayals of women almost always show skinny women as the ideal. Even those who have gained weight to play roles (think Renee Zellweger in Bridget Jones’s Diary, or Jewell Staite playing Kaylee in Firefly) don’t look plus-sized at all, just normal. (At least, they do to me.)

Such images are difficult enough to deal with as an adult, but to a child they are even more damaging. And I can’t think of any young girls in the media who are shown as both heavy and a heroine.

Which is why a junior high school student named Jewel Moore has created a petition to ask Disney to create a plus-sized heroine. As she writes:

“Studies show that a child's confidence correlates greatly with how much representation they have in the media…. If Disney could make a plus-size female protagonist who was as bright, amazing, and memorable as their others, it would do a world of good for those plus-size girls out there who are bombarded with images that make them feel ugly for not fitting the skinny standard…. This move on Disney's part would have an amazing positive ripple effect in people all around the world.”

I couldn’t agree more. It wouldn’t solve all the problems, of course, but it would be a wonderful starting point. It might also inspire others to create similar characters, allowing girls and women of all ages to start accepting their bodies as they are, and to perhaps focus on living healthy, rich lives instead of ones consumed by numbers on the scale. It’s hard to say just how far that would go in making other positive changes, but I, for one, would love to find out.