A question from Overworked
Frank, I am wondering how you deal with stress eating? Or maybe since you left the White House beat, you don't have any more stress in your life :).
Despite a very high pressure job with excruciating deadlines, I have been doing pretty well with my eating over the last year by signing up with one of those gourmet diet home delivery services. I don't have to worry about shopping or cooking and the food is actually pretty good.
But when I get really stressed out, like say tonight when I just got home from the office at 1:30 a.m. and still didn't finish all my work, all restraint goes out the window and I start foraging for snack food (just polished off two muffins and had a few snacks before I left the office as well).
Do you think you would have ever lost the weight if you hadn't left the White House beat? I have a job that is somewhat akin to the White House beat in terms of stress and deadlines, although at least it doesn't involve the constant travel. Sometimes I despair of ever actually coming out on the other side of this eating problem as long as I continue to have this high stress job.
Your thoughts?
Answer:
That's a really smart question, re the White House beat. And I obviously don't know the answer. I think I would have lost SOME weight: I was really, really tired of being heavy and of feeling so self-conscious about it that I skipped and missed out on a lot in life.
But key to the rapidness and success of my weight loss at the time was greater professional flexibility, more free time, less stress.
I kept the weight off, though, during the first months of my subsequent assignment in Rome, when I was definitely feeling the stress of a new set of responsibilities, of learning the language, of getting up to speed on the Vatican, of being away from longtime friends and forced to make new ones in a hurry. I noticed that I did some more overeating in those months, but I balanced it against more exercise.
In my own case I don't know that I'll ever stop the occasional pig-out, or ever shrink my meals down to the optimal size. So when I go overboard, I try to pay for it with extra exercise. In your high-stress job, you might not have time for that.
I may have moved past the White House beat, but I still work a lot. In recent years I've logged many, many work hours -- I wrote the book without taking a leave from the restaurant-critic job, which is absolutely a full-time job -- and yet I've kept my weight down, by always carving out the time for exercise, no matter what.
But certain things did fall by the wayside as a result. I visited siblings less frequently than I would have liked. I saw nieces and nephews too seldom. I didn't pay adequate attention to people I was dating. And so on. And the fact that I've chosen not to have children --- that frees up time, as well.
As I typed all of that, it occurs to me that something's always got to give. You can't ever have it ALL. And those of us who struggle with appetite and weight may have to give up something -- the high-pressure job, a jam-packed social life, family visits -- to get the down time or the hours of exercise we need to combat work stress and stay fit. Though we have another option, too. We can readjust our fitness goals and make them more reasonable and attainable within the context of all of the other demands on us.
To come full circle, I think I would have lost some of the weight that I needed to if I'd continued covering the White House and politics. But I don't think I would have lost as much weight, no. And the challenge in that case would have been to accept and to be comfortable with myself at the weight I did reach. Part of the effort we make needs to be to let go of the tyrannical ideals that are held before us, and that we hold ourselves to.
