Journal Entries for Week 34
Cottage Cheese at 10:30 a.m.
I can't remember whether, in the finished book, I included an observation I'd made in an early draft that people who say, "I forgot to eat!," are like space aliens to me. Forgot to eat? I have periods when I don't eat for many hours, but I'm very, very aware those hours are passing. In those situations, I can always give you the exact NUMBER of hours that have passed since I ate.
But today was one of those truly mad days when I came as close to forgetting to eat as possible. From 5:15 a.m., when I woke, to 10:30 a.m., I literally had no time to eat. None. What little food I spotted as I zoomed through the morning was not what I should be eating, and the food I should be eating was not in my path.
At 10:30, though, I made myself eat the best alternative around. Because what I've learned---and what I talk about in the book---is how dangerous prolonged and extreme deprivation is. It's the gateway to a heedless binge.
I dipped into a bodega of sorts and got some cottage cheese. I'm not a cottage cheese fan, not at all, but I needed to quiet my stomach, I needed to dull my hunger pangs, and I wanted something in the protein category: slow-release nutrition, as it were, instead of a sugary thing that would leave me happy for 20 minutes and, another 20 minutes after that, even hungrier than I'd initially been.
At 2:30 p.m. I finally got something real: a chicken salad sandwich, with huge chunks of chicken and a restrained measure of mayo. It tasted amazing in the way only something that's answering a period of too little food can taste amazing.
Note: the specificity of the above timeline is part of this post's point. I know when I have and haven't eaten. When you're food-obsessed, you always do.
To Sweat or Not To Sweat
Time magazine recently did a story questioning whether---and how much---an increase in exercise helps chronically overweight people shed pounds; I recall a New York magazine story on the same topic a few years back. It's a perennial, coming up again and again. And during my first few days of interviews for "Born Round," I've been asked about it.
I have to say: the studies confuse me. When I look at my own life and my own ups and downs, and when I look at the lives and weight fluctuations of the people I know best, I see evidence that exercise really DOES matter.
It certainly matters for those people who STAY thin, but clearly have the potential to be heavier. And maybe what the studies are saying is that people who've been overweight for a very long time have a body so accustomed to that stage--I'm flashing back here on those old biology-class lessons about homeostasis--that they will indeed up their eating proportionally with their exercise, if they're latecomers to the whole exercise game.
I myself wasn't chronically overweight, though from age 32 to age 37 I was at least 20 and as many as 80 pounds overweight, with the 40- to 80-pound excess lasting more than two years. I was in chronic fluctuation, at least from age 20 onward.
And I can say without doubt that whenever I look back on a slim period, there was a lot of exercise going on. Whenever I look back on a heavy period, there wasn't. One of the main ways I've avoided gaining much weight in the seven and a half years since I dropped from 270 to under 200 is exercise. I concluded when I dropped that weight that I'd never, ever been able to lash myself to regimen of under 2,000 calories a day, and usually had trouble staying anywhere under 2,500: I love to eat! But I COULD do the kind of sustained, intense exercise that probably bought me wiggle room of anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 calories a day.
That example is no doubt instructive for some people, but not for others. We're all different. What's most important--the conclusion I come to, and point out, in the book--is that each of us is honest with himself or herself about what's worked in the past, what hasn't, etc. Each of us knows his or her own history and body better than any study. That's the point.
What to Do with a Ravenous Kid?
A mother who is apparently familiar with my story, perhaps because she read "Born Round," recently wrote:
"My seven-year-old son eats constantly. He is growing (out as well as up) but, to be honest, he just loves food. I dont want to give him a complex but what do you do when he is begging for a snack 30 minutes after supper? What could your mom have done differently, if anything, to ward off your eating?"
Because a lot of parents face the challenge of a child who eats too much and is gaining weight in a way that's unhealthy and could wind up causing the child unhappiness, I thought I'd share much of my response to her:
"I don't know that one answer fits all, or what would have been better for me . . . You could tell him that you feel bad that he's hungry so soon after dinner, and suggest he eat a bigger dinner to avoid that, and then make the expanded portion of the dinner something relatively healthier and lower in calories than the snack would be.
"You could tell him in a very non-appearance-related, non-judgmental, flat tone that you think that so much snacking isn't 'healthy,' without using the word 'fat,' and say that in your interest to encourage healthier eating, you'd like to strike a deal with him whereby if he wants a snack within two hours of the end of a meal, it has to be x, y or z: stuff that doesn't include ice cream, cookies, etc.
"What I think you must NOT do is ban those things from his life entirely and demonize them. You can try to make clear that this isn't about the intrinsic evil of those foods or about their caloric load; it's about the importance of balanced, healthy eating. I think language is key, and it's vital to frame the goal as healthier eating, not eating that will avoid excess pounds and help him look better per se.
"We're such an appearance-conscious society that whenever anything gets framed in terms of staying slim or staying attractive, then the impulses prodding us toward actions in conflict with thinness and conventional physical beauty get suffused with so much anxiety that we can go off the rails.
"Beyond all of that, are you setting an example for him by not snacking a lot yourself, by exercising with apparent enthusiasm and enjoyment, etc? And, without making your home an ascetic, fraught environment that makes him crave 'forbidden' foods even MORE, are you making sure there's a preponderance of healthy alternatives around? It stands to reason--and experts say--that children emulate their parents' eating and dieting and exercising behavior as they do so much else. My story suggests that: Mom's eating adjustments were often odd rituals and fad diets. And thus mine were too."
I want to add a few quick things that, in my hurry to make sure I sent her a response before getting sidetracked by other tasks, I didn't put in.
She notes that at 7, he clearly loves food, really loves it. I'm assuming she means in part that he has a big appetite, but also that food exerts a sort of special pull on him. If that's so, I wonder--an open question--if making food a BIGGER part of his life, and not in terms of quantity, might be constructive. Let me explain: I found that when I started writing about food as a critic and hunting down the best this, that and the other, it was a bit easier (though still not easy!) to restrain the sheer volume of my eating than in the past, because I'd channeled my food obsessions in a different direction. I was fixated on food quality, food adventures, etc. Discernment replaced a purer, more banal gluttony, and in that way, I think I moved a bit closer to the Western European attitude about, and approach to, food. As I describe in "Born Round," it helped that I turned this corner in large part while living in Italy and observing how quality trumped quantity there.
Can that logic and dynamic be applied to a child? If a food-fixated kid is encouraged to help shop for the food and cook the food and try this and that and the other, can the "one more cookie please please please" requests be diminished?
