It's Not Your Stomach That's Fat, It's Your Mind: A List of Things I Thought I Couldn't Do But Did

I've pushed well past 100 pounds lost and could probably lose another 75 but it's been ages since I've felt overweight.

I'm a quarter decade into to my reclaiming of me and I achieved yet another goal, one that I barely even dreamed of achieving because it seemed so far-fetched. It's got me to thinking about all the things I thought I couldn't do but did, one by one over the last two and a half years.

Regular readers know that I believe obesity has more to do with one's mind rather than one's body. I'm sure everyone who has a severe weight problem is different but my experience has been one of finding out just how messed up my mind got. The fat person's mind develops an attitude of "I can't."

Why do people seldom take action on their weight? I think it's because they gradually change their thought process on the issue. How is it we never do anything even when we're faced with possible death? Could it be because it's like raising a loaded gun to our heads in super-slow motion over time? One millimetre per day over the course of years until we just start to ignore the gun we're raising to our heads?

Here is the list of "I can't dos" that I've knocked off through the course of my life-changing journey, in chronological order:

1. At 380 pounds, after many failures, I thought I couldn't lose weight again. I'm now in the mid-two-hundreds and feel like I'm 18.
2. I thought I could never go tobogganing with my kids. Wrong.
3. I thought my body wouldn't respond to exercise in middle-age. As long as you're alive, it responds at any age.
4. I thought I could never walk longer than fifteen minutes. I've gone on two hour hikes in the mountains.
5. I thought I could never get on a bicycle again. I've ridden hundreds and hundreds of kilometres. It's always been my favourite activity and I'm doing it again.
6. I thought I could never jog. I started jogging and soon got up to fifteen minutes and stayed there for two years because I thought I couldn't go any longer.
7. I thought mountain biking was for young people because the hills--the hills are deadly, aren't they? I trained for a mountain biking race and completed the course successfully dozens of times.
8. I thought I could never do strength training because it was too hard and not for me. I started this summer and I feel even better about myself than I did with just cardio.
9. I thought my fat body could never cross country ski. I must have skied more than a hundred kilometres last winter and had a fun winter doing it.
10. I thought I couldn't exercise outside in cold weather. I've exercised in the coldest weather and not been cold because I learned how to dress.
11. After thinking I couldn't jog longer than fifteen minutes, I bumped it up to twenty last summer. How crazy is this, I thought. Then I had a bad day and bumped it up to thirty to make myself feel better about a new achievement. Even crazier, I thought, surely the longest I'm capable of doing.

My latest achievement has been running my first 5K, then I did it again two days later. That's 50 minutes at my pace. My knees are fine, everything's fine. I'm dong it outside, not on a treadmill. Even after all the things I thought I couldn't do but proved myself wrong by doing them, I still thought I couldn't do this. Not until I just decided to do it one day. Then, and only then, did I realize it was possible. 

It's hard to change a broken mind. But whatever you think you can't do physically, question that thought and know that you'll never stop thinking you can't do something until you actually just go out and do it. Proving yourself wrong is so liberating! It's the only way the fat mind will believe.

You're worth getting off the couch and moving for. Don't listen to that voice in your head. S/he is dead wrong.

OMG! I Think I May Have Gotten In Touch With My "I'm Full" Signal Again!

I hate to jinx myself but I think I've been getting the "full" signal from my stomach lately and now all I have to do is listen to it.

It's been tempting to ignore it because it has come at unexpected times, like early on in a feeding. But I've been heeding it lately and expecting that I was wrong to do so, only to find that I did, in fact, have enough to eat (because I didn't get hungry again right away.) I always want to eat until my stomach is literally full and straining to contain my meal. That's the signal I've been using to stop eating rather than the proper "I'm full" signal which we learned about in Craving Change.

My job now is to get to know that signal and get to trust it. For me, I worry about getting hungry after the table is cleared and there's no more food around. That's been a long-standing problem for me. Having snacks around that I can eat if I do get hungry will help put me at ease. This all fits in with eating smaller meals in larger numbers rather than three big meals.

Try fishing around for your "I'm full signal" next time you eat. It might just be calling you but you're not hearing it.

I'll keep you up to date on how my signal-listening is going.

My Surprisingly Difficult Halloween Experiment

On the morning of Halloween I decided I would not eat any candy of any sort until the morning after. I wanted to test my will power after so many Halloweens consuming thousands of calories of candy and feeling sick afterwards. I needed to experiment and learn something about myself. What I learned is disheartening.

I had an active day, one hour at the gym and a couple hours trick or treating with the kids, so I made sure I ate enough not to feel hungry. But I had a hard time not feeling hungry. It was like every cell in my body wanted some chocolate or chips. The candy in my house was ever-present on my mind. Touching it or thinking about it produced a physiological yearning for it. I got hungry knowing it was there.

Me and my kids (I'm a ghoul)

At times I felt like an addict trying to kick a habit, perhaps a little like a smoker on his first day of quitting. At worst I felt shaky or even slightly ill, and had to do breathing exercises to relax. At its best, I felt like I had made it through the worst and I could shake the cravings by sticking to my guns.

The next morning I had some of my stash (a couple mini bars and a couple salty snacks) and I expected to keep eating. My kids got sooo much candy in such a short period of time but they had no trouble giving it up. We ran out of the candy at our place and my son was enthusiastic about giving up some of his to give out to kids after he got home. That way there wasn't much candy around the house afterwards.

Old habits are hard to break. I need to start relearning my eating patterns. I can see it taking a long time.

The Problem of Halloween Binging

I had to be careful what picture I chose for this blog post. Many pictures of Halloween candy, chocolate in particular, set off a physiological response in me. I equate it to seeing a...I don't know, fertile member of the opposite sex. Something changes in you if your brain thinks they'd be genetically-suitable to assist you in proliferating your genes throughout the species, to put it politely. Perhaps your heart rate increases, perhaps adrenaline is released.

Chocolate does the same thing to me. Even if you are one of those freaks who don't like chocolate, you probably have an equivalent food porn. You look at that food and your whole body readies itself for it, wants to know how it's going to get it and how much of it it can have. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you don't have an eating problem and you can go home now.

Last night my family watched part of a documentary on child slave labour used in the harvesting of cocoa. I barely showed concern. I watched people on the streets of the UK being shown chocolate that may have been  produced with child labour and all I could think about was the sweet, sweet chocolate. When they gave chocolate bars to the African cocoa workers to try for the first time in their lives it was like heroin was entering their veins. Their eyes almost rolled back.

My impulsive and reckless eating tendencies are no help when I'm presented with chocolate Halloween candy. Years of telling myself it's okay to have more than one, or have more than ten, or keep eating until my stomach feels uncomfortably full have led to me being trained to do the wrong thing.

Retraining myself could take a long time and a lot of work but I did learn a few things in my Craving Change workshop that may help. Just being aware of this dysfunction helps. As along as I don't conveniently turn off my brain when I encounter chocolate, I should be okay.

We don't buy candy to give out on Halloween until the afternoon of. That's how much I can't be trusted. Who knows how many thousands of calories of chocolate I'm capable of consuming in one feeding frenzy but it's probably enough to add significant ounces of fat too my body and cause me to be sickly and moody afterwards. (Tip: My nutritionist only gives out candy she hates to eat.)

The other problem of course is the candy my two kids come home with. They're not very aggressive on Halloween and they still come back with a truck load of sugary treats. Two solutions I've heard involve limiting the amount they can eat and giving the rest to a food bank (although, when you think about it, even food bank users' children probably have lots of candy available to them from trick-or-treating.)

Throwing it out seems wrong but so does putting it all in your body. A dietician in the Globe and Mail wrote that you could celebrate Halloween Week by making up several treat bags with the days of the week written on them, hand them out one per day and discard the rest.

My kids are getting a bit older every year and a bit more aggressive in their candy harvesting on Halloween. I used to actually take some of the candy they brought back midway through their evening and give it out to other kids. A good idea, but it didn't stop me from binging on it or the candy it replaced.

And now a disturbing video I made of myself eating Halloween candy a few years ago. I can't remember if it's work-safe but I'm pretty sure it is (I don't want to watch it again to find out!)

Update: To test my fragile willpower, I'm not going to have one single piece of candy until I get up the morning after Halloween. I'm not cutting out candy completely, just for one day to see if I can do it. So far, I have a slight case of the shakes.