Sugar highs, sugar lows

Part of successful weight maintenance is learning how to manage the various foods and social situations that inevitably surface.  This weekend, my challenge was my sister-in-law's baby shower - more importantly, the cake, and ice cream, and brownies, and rice pudding (two kinds!), and cookies, and fillozes (Portuguese doughnuts) that were served at the baby shower. Portuguese folks sure know how to make some tasty sweets, and they're super hard to resist.  So I planned to have a modest amount of cake, skip the ice cream, and have small bites of everything else just to taste it.

That was a pretty good plan, and I followed through on it all right.  There are two problems for me, though, when it comes to eating sugary foods.  The first is that I'm "out of practice" of eating them, so even a small amount hits me like a ton of bricks.  Don't misunderstand me here - I have no desire to get back "into practice" of eating them!  I'm just much more aware of how they affect me now than I ever have been before.  The second problem is that sugar makes me want more sugar.  It seems to have the same disinhibitory effect on me when it comes to sugary foods as alcohol does on pretty much any kind of food.  So not only do I want more sugar, I'm much more inclined to have more sugar.

Then if you add on the fact that many of the sugary foods I had I like a lot, you can see where this is going.  I'm sunk.

So yesterday I had my cake and tasters of everything but the icing.  And then at dinner out at, I ordered dessert.  And after that, another fillozes.

My reward?  A sugar hangover this morning which made me feel like my head was packed with wool and my stomach was tied up in knots.  I felt so awful this morning that I slept two hours later than I intended to, and missed my opportunity to go running like I planned.  I realized this morning that how I felt when I woke up today was how I felt pretty much every morning before I started on the MNP program.  Every day before I began losing weight, I felt physically awful and I couldn't think clearly.  That realization was very sobering.

But not sobering enough, apparently.  Today, I brought home some cake and rice pudding that my mother-in-law gave me as a care package for my husband.  He had a piece of cake, I had a piece of cake.  And then I started obsessing about the cake - specifically the icing.  And then I caved and ate the rest of the icing that was left.

Fortunately, I realized that things were not going to get any better if the cake stayed in the house, so I put it down the sink garbage disposal before any more craziness could occur.  No, I've never gone into the trash to take out something I have thrown away, but I didn't want today to be that day.

There's a reason I don't keep sweets in the house.

In the grand scheme of things, I probably haven't done myself any lasting damage - as long as this doesn't turn into a pattern.  What's frustrating is that, once again, I need to feel the pain of these bad choices more than once in order for the lesson to sink into my thick skull.  Lots of refined sugar might taste good, but it doesn't feel good.  It makes my stomach cramp and my head light and achy, and a little buzzed right after I eat it.  Then I feel bloated and sick.  The buzz wears off quickly, and I'm left with just the discomfort.  Which lasts.

I can't decide if I'm hoping to wake up tomorrow with another sugar hangover or not.  Part of me, the part that thinks I need to be punished for my bad choices, is rooting for the sugar hangover.  The more merciful part wants me not to have the hangover but to remember how icky I've been feeling for the last day and a half.  The temporary pleasure is definitely not worth the pain and discomfort!  And it's not worth the risk of losing the health and fitness I've gained over the past year by losing all this weight.

So at my next meal (which will be breakfast tomorrow), it's back to my healthy eating plan.  Back to what I know works.  Lots of veggies and salads, lean proteins, healthy fats, and sugar free drinks.  Back to food that makes me feel energized and empowered and in control.  Back to exercising for at least an hour a day.  And back to the new life I'm building for myself.

Some thoughts on Fear*

This has been an emotional day. Not just for me, but for everyone in our country. The memorials of 9/11 have been wide and varied, and I suspect every single one has brought tears to the eyes of the viewers or participants. Even watching something as simple as a trumpet player play "Taps" on TV before the football game started this morning made me cry. Yes, I'm a notorious sap, but today has brought that to the stark forefront.

As my husband Mike and I reflected on where we were, what we were doing, and how we felt when 9/11 happened, it hit home to me how much our lives have been impacted by Fear*. Fear of outsiders, fear of being hurt, fear of not being good enough or smart enough to prevent problems from happening, fear of the unknown. And Fear can drive us to do crazy, foolhardy, vicious things - both to ourselves and others. I listened with increasing horror as Mike recounted a story about one of the customers who came into his shop shortly after the Twin Towers fell. Apparently this customer was so full of Fear and Rage he was talking about going to a nearby Muslim school and burning it down. Fortunately, Mike was able to talk the customer out of that plan by reminding the customer in no uncertain terms that he was talking about hurting innocent children who had absolutely nothing to do with the tragedy in New York, but the level of fear and anger that man felt was all-encompassing and led him to plan an action that probably never would have even crossed his mind previously.

It isn't just fears about 9/11 that impact our lives. As I was thinking about the story my husband was telling me, I began to think about all the small and seemingly inconsequential ways Fear eats into my life. Fears about managing my food intake, about whether I'm getting enough (or too much) exercise, about not being good enough in my chosen field or letting down my supervisors in some way that only I could imagine. Fear is a box that keeps me trapped when I'm not careful about how I let it affect me.

For me, weight maintenance is an exercise in managing Fear. The scale fluctuates from day to day and week to week. It varies with my monthly cycle, with what I ate, with how much and what kinds of things I drank, with how much sodium was in my food, with how recently I went to the bathroom, and a million other factors I have no idea about. I've had to learn to give myself a window of acceptability when it comes to looking at the scale, and I have to remind myself to think in terms of trends, not in terms of any one particular moment's weight. However, when I get on the scale and see it up a couple of pounds (especially if I had a less-than-stellar week of managing my food intake), the moment of Fear strikes me and I have to consciously battle it down and remind myself that it's not necessarily a problem. Yet. Then I have to decide what, if anything, I need to do differently to make sure it doesn't become a problem - without getting sucked into Fear. Because when I get sucked into Fear, I start thinking crazy, extreme thoughts about how little to let myself eat, or how much I'm going to make myself exercise in order to "make up" for my perceived failures.

At our bi-weekly coached runs, our head coach Alfonzo Jackson always starts us out by giving us a pep talk and reminding us of the reason we train the way we do. Sometimes he also highlights current events that tie into our desires to make the world a better place. Yesterday, his message was simple: remember the people whose lives were sacrificed on 9/11 not by mourning and wailing, but by bringing more love and light into the world. Not to say that we shouldn't grieve their losses, but there's more to remembering them than just sadness. He pointed out that before 9/11, there was a much lower level of "us versus them" feelings within our own country. Since then, it seems like people who could be put into a "them" category have been threatened, ostracized, wounded, and had their rights unjustly taken away. Fear, leading us to do crazy, foolhardy, vicious things.

So here's my vow, and I hope you'll consider it too: I will pay more attention to Fear. I will not let it lead me blindly into snap judgments or thoughtless actions. I will not let it use me as a vessel to unjustly hurt myself or others. I will honor it when it's real, and soothe it when it's not. And I will do my best to show love to myself and others despite Fear's strongest intentions.

* You'll notice that Fear is capitalized in many places in this post. In keeping with the Narrative Therapy tradition, it's capitalized because in those instances, I see Fear as an outside force acting on me, rather than being an integral part of me. It helps me remember that I can control the impact I let Fear have on me.

Running 9 miles today

Today's the second half of two landmark trainings for me. I will be running 9 miles, the longest distance I've ever run in my life. The last time I ran 9 miles was 5 years ago, in early August 2006, and it was on that 9-mile hill run that I injured my IT band and soon after had to drop out of the training and the race because of how slowly my IT band was healing.

The first of the two landmark trainings occurred two weeks ago, when we ran at Redwood Regional Park in Oakland. I ran 8 miles that day, and the course was essentially one big hill. Four miles up, four miles down. I knew I would need to take it easy on the hills, especially the downhills which are particularly hard on knees. With the help of my friend and running buddy Christina, we took the course on with patience and completed the 8 miles in 2 hours and 20 minutes. We ran as much as we could, walking the steepest uphills and downhills and gently jogging the less steep hills, and when we rolled back to the start line I felt tired but good. And most importantly, I felt no hint of injury.

So I managed to keep myself healthy on the long hill run - good! Whew! What a relief! I've learned a lot about how to run hills since 2006, and you can't discount the dramatic change in my weight and base level of fitness as major contributors to my success this time.

Now it's time to conquer the distance half.

My goal is to get out there today and just relax into the run. I'm not going to push my speed - no pace targets for me today. I want to stay focused and in tune with my body, keeping conscious of my footfalls, posture, and form. And most importantly, I want to make sure attend to any area of my body that hurts in any way, and to have the guts to cut my run short if I need to in order to keep myself healthy.

Goal weight!

It's been a while since I posted. I apologize for that! I've been scrambling to keep up with everything that's been going on lately, with work, school, eating again (!), and training for my half marathon. Unfortunately, the blog slipped by the wayside. The good news is there's a lot of great both on the weight loss/eating and fitness front! Rather than doing one huge post, I'll break the news into smaller, more digestible bites. So first, an update on...

Weight Loss
The big news - I hit my goal weight!!! My original goal was 150 lbs. As I lost weight, I decided to revise it down to 140 because I wanted to be within the BMI range for my height - mostly because I never wanted a doctor to nag me about my weight again. But as I got lower and lower, I realized that 140 might be too low for where I am right now, in part because I have to factor in the extra skin that may or may not ever shrink back. So I decided to split the difference and call my goal 145. I reached that goal on June 20th. An even bigger accomplishment is that I've been able to successfully maintain my weight loss since that time. No creeping back up, just the normal 3-5 pound fluctuations!

Reaching my goal weight has led me to be in a body I never even dreamed of. I have never *ever* been at a healthy weight as an adult, so I had no idea what to expect when I finally got to my destination. While losing weight, I have also been increasing my fitness to epic proportions (for me anyhow! LOL), which has also changed my body in ways I couldn't imagine. I can feel bones in places that I never knew I even had them, my face looks remarkably different (and consequently the family resemblance to my sister and Aunt Joanne has never been stronger), and I can fit into the Mythical Size 6.

I remember once, when I was a teenager, I had a person offer to help me lose weight through hypnotherapy. He was certain he could help me, and I vividly remember him saying, "I think we could even get you into a size 8." I think he was trying to be encouraging, and at the time I was about a size 16 so I probably should have been excited to hear him say that. But all I remember thinking was, "But I wanna be a size 6!" Maybe that was society's influence talking in my head - there certainly is a lot of pressure for women to be small and wear smaller sizes - but for whatever reason, the size 6 got implanted in my brain. At the same time, though, I never believed I would actually get there. I didn't think my frame was physically small enough.

Goes to show what I know. The day I tried on a pair of size 6 jeans and zipped them up (only *slightly* feeling like a stuffed sausage), I literally cried in the dressing room of Ross Dress for Less.

So I've dropped from a size 24/26 down to a size 6. After training for my half marathon (and if my loose skin shrinks back up) I might even fit a size 4. Time will tell about that one. I don't feel the need to fit into a 4 the way I coveted fitting into a 6. I've learned in a very visceral way that my frame is much tinier than I ever thought, having been fooled by years of wearing extra cushioning. My brain is still working to catch up with my actual size - I still have a self-concept of being bigger than I actually am - but that's normal with rapid weight loss, and will pass with time.

The most important thing to me, even beyond staying in the Mythical Size 6, is maintaining my fitness and my ability to be active. The pounds fluctuate, there are good days and bad days with food, and sizes shift depending on water fluctuations and time of the month. But to keep running, and to continue to feel like the person I am on the outside matches the person I feel like I am on the inside, that's what goal weight is all about for me.

Preparing to transition

For the past three weeks, I have known that I will be transitioning back to regular food beginning on Monday June 13th. I have gotten slowly closer and closer to my goal, and decided to transition on June 13th even though I will not exactly be at my goal because I wanted to make sure I had a full month of eating "regular" food before beginning my pre-doctoral internship on August 10th. The transition process takes four weeks, and each week a new food or set of foods is introduced so that my body can slowly become acclimated to digesting solid food again instead of just the shakes.

I have very mixed feelings about going into transition. On one hand, I'm extremely excited. I am very close to my goal, and I know that with the remaining time I have on the shakes with the weight loss I will have during the transition period itself, I will be at my goal in no time. However, the part of me that has found great comfort in not having to worry about what to eat or when to eat it or even having to prepare food is very nervous. It's very easy to think it's been three hours, it's time to eat again, pull out a shake, mix it, and drink it down. For the past year, my routine has been that simple. With the introduction of food back into the equation, I now need to think about meal planning, grocery shopping, and time for food preparation. I also need to think about planning food that can be easily packed to travel with me during the day so that I am never without the food I need to sustain me. Right now, this feels very daunting.

In my waking hours, I notice my anxiety in little ways. Being aware of food on a more heightened level is one, and an underlying sense of buzzy anticipation is another. I even experience this anxiety when I'm sleeping. Fears and worries about transition have crept into my dreams, and have made it difficult for me to have a solid night's sleep for easily the last week and a half. I have nightmares about eating the wrong food or regaining the weight so quickly I can't stop it from happening. I just hope that I can find a routine to settle into that allows me to keep myself satisfied and with the proper nutrition to keep myself nourished without becoming crazy or obsessive about eating and food.

Recording a personal best for the mile… again

Today was the first Team in Training track practice, and in today's track practice, I reached another milestone. A huge milestone.

A while back, I wrote a post about why I like to run, as well as why I want to run and improve at running. You can read that post here, but the gist of it is this: I had a horrible experience running a mile when I was in sixth grade. It was physically and emotionally painful, as well as humiliating. On that day, the mile I completed was somewhere around 13 minutes, and the 13 minute mile has been my bogeyman ever since.

About a month ago, I recorded my first mile that was less than 13 minutes, which gave me an amazing and victorious feeling. But like the final home run ball for Barry Bonds, my personal best had an asterisk next to it. You see, when I recorded that time, I was in an area where the mileage was not marked, and I was going downhill the entire way. So even though I had broken the 13 minute marker, I didn't truly believe it.

Today, however, was an entirely different story. We were running on a flat track. A standardized track where four laps is a mile. And I completed four laps on a standardized flat track in 11 minutes and 31 seconds.

I'm tearing up even as I'm thinking about this, because now I know in my bones that the 13 minute bogeyman has officially and truly been defeated. Like finishing my half marathon for the first time, truly defeating the 13 minute bogeyman makes me wonder what kinds of things I have always wanted to do but never thought I was capable of. It makes me wonder how much I'm limiting myself. The door has officially opened for me to dream bigger, go farther, and achieve dreams I never even dared to dream.

I am incredibly grateful for the help and support I have received from my husband, my friends, and my family to help me get where I am today. Particularly today, I am grateful to my dear friend Christina Coto, who ran with me this morning and encouraged me, while still reminding me to focus on my breathing and my form. Without the encouragement of people like Christina, this would be a much more difficult and lonely process.

The First Buddy Run

Today was the very first official Team in Training (TNT) Buddy Run for the summer 2011 season. I was a little bit nervous about coming to this Buddy Run because I am a mentor this year, which means I am responsible to make sure that the run flows smoothly and that all the participants are accounted for at the beginning and the end. I was also nervous because I have never done a Buddy Run at Lake Merritt in Oakland before, and have only run around Lake Merritt once or twice in my life, so I wasn't very familiar with the territory where we would be running. On top of all of that, I had my usual nervousness about whether or not I would be the slowest person running, and what other participants would think of me given my slow running speed.

Despite all these trepidations, I arrived at the Buddy Run site ten minutes early, and found the location where we would be meeting very easily. I was the first mentor there, so I was the welcoming committee for the various members of the team who decided to run with us tonight. I expected to be somewhat nervous about this part as well, but found that it went quite smoothly. All of the ladies who attended the run were very friendly, shared their names and a little bit about themselves, and soon we were talking about how the run would go.

The beginning of the run was fairly disorganized, I'll admit. Between my lack of experience running Lake Merritt, the injury to one of the other mentors who was supposed to be helping lead, and some confusion about how far people should actually run today, it felt pretty scattered. But we made it through, and we began the run - if little bit later than we would have otherwise hoped.

Sure enough, as soon as everyone took off running, I was in the back of the pack. But unlike previous run with TNT, I was not as far back as I have been. In fact, I was just a little bit behind the other folks in the group, a new situation, and one that I was quite happy with. Initially, I was running by myself, and found myself focused on attending to the surroundings and how the runners in front of me were doing rather than my own running experience. However, as I eased into the run, I found my body responding and relaxing. Then some of the gals in front of me slowed down. I realized with a start that although they had started out faster than me, I was in better shape for a longer run than they were. That was a revelation!

I caught up to them quickly, and struck up a conversation with one of the gals who looked like she was struggling a little bit. For the remainder of our time around the lake, she and I talked about training, my experience with TNT, and her questions about different ways she could move forward to get herself where she wanted to be. It was a great feeling to be able to offer her my experience and suggestions, as well as information that would help her move towards her goal.

It was also a personal accomplishment because I have very rarely run with other people, and when I do I usually don't have enough breath to hold up a conversation. But today's run was different because I was able to have a conversation with another runner while still running. Granted, I had to take a few deep breaths from time to time, and my sentences were a more choppy than if I were just having a normal conversation, but I was able to do it! Having the conversation with her helped the rest of the run pass very quickly for me, and I left the run feeling happy about how I did both as a runner and as a mentor.

What a great way to start!