July 10, 2008
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All kinds of weather
According to the extended weather forecast on Weather.com, except for a slight chance of rain of Sunday, my entire hike next week should be clear and dry and seasonably warm. If that holds up, it will be great and make it just that much easier.
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As for the book I recommended yesterday, which I still recommend for anyone struggling with emotional eating issues, it has been pointed out to me that losing weight is a simple matter of eating fewer calories than one burns.
That’s pretty much true and I know it. Off the top of my head, I can tell you the calorie count of nearly everything in my kitchen. I can tell you the average number of calories most common exercises burns, too. My issues don’t stem from a lack of knowledge of nutrition, exercise, and physiology. And that’s true of most adult fat people, from what I understand. We know more about food than most ‘normal’ weight people. That’s because we tend to be fat and food obsessed, whereas naturally thin people don’t bother to learn that stuff because they don’t ‘need to know.’
Emotional eating is a whole different issue. Emotional eating (aka food addiction) is when eating has become a unconscious compulsion to eat comfort foods without regards to physiological need. It’s driven by psychological issues – much like other addictions – and it’s complicated by the fact that over time the body grows accustomed to…
1) consuming large amounts of food and continually expects large quantities to fill it’s stretched stomach and counteract the insulin it pre-emptively releases, so that it’s actually painful to eat less, and
2) reaching for comfort food as a response to negative emotions while the emotion is still at an unconscious impulse, before it has risen to the conscious level (you did know that something like 90% of your brain activity was unconscious, didn’t you?), therefore not only preventing you from feeling the emotion but preventing you from even being aware that the emotion was triggered, which makes it all the more difficult to control, catch, or counter.Kinda like a mosquito bite – you don’t even know you’re bitten until after it’s over.
Anyway, any event, relationship, or circumstance that has the ability to trigger negative feelings has the potential of being an issue around which a person can develop addiction or food issues. The book helps the reader narrow down exactly which issues are her trigger, which aspects of her life she needs to change, and what ‘normal’ behavior is as a marker for comparison.
Despite having read many books on the topic before, I’ve learned a lot about myself reading this book and I expect to be able to take another giant step forward in my relationship to myself and to food because of it.
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And now for something completely different… OMG! I’m glad they’ve finally cleared the Ramsey family in the case of poor JonBenet, who was murdered in 1996. But OMG that poor family. And Patsy died without ever any peace of mind about what happened to her daughter. It’s all so sad.
Comments (2)
The best “diet” book I’ve ever read that actually served me well is called The Underburner’s Diet by Dr. Barbara Edelstein. Dr. Edelstein spent most of her career studying eating disorders and how the body processes the fuel we feed it. She came up with a lifestyle change that helps you eat the right foods, get the right amount of energy, and tells your body not to store it as much. I gotta find my copy again and get back on it. It’s very sensible in the recommendations and isn’t built on the deprivation that so many of us seem to think we have to live with. Unfortunately, it’s now out of print, but you can find plenty of used copies on Amazon and other used book sellers. I recommend it highly.
The media feeding frenzy around that case was revolting, and has been replicated over and over since then.