A new year, a new..urg

Chicago in the winter, where I do even begin. Chicago, I am blaming you for most of my problems of late. Not writing regularly to the blog, your fault. Eating too much, your fault. Exercising half-ass-ly, your fault. Having a messy house, all you! So, in short, Chicago you are ruining my life!

I was planning on writing regularly with tips and/or ideas to keep in mind on the journey to a healthier lifestyle, but I feel like I have nothing but excuses lately (looking at you Chi-Town weather). This post unfortunately will not have any tips because honestly, I feel like I have lost sight of my path. Weather aside, I feel more lazy, sad, uninspired lately. Holidays are always tough and I definitely have the tendency to look back on my year and always feel failure. 2013 brought horrible events and actions, but it also brought redemption. Unfortunately, in to 2014 I still feel like am I falling short. I have not been exercising enough; I am not running very often and in place of running I just lift 5 lbs. weights for a few minutes (and that cannot possibly count for physical activity). I have been drinking a lot more and my food intake has not decreased. I know it depression that is affecting me lately, but it still doesn’t change the fact that I am having trouble with my goals. There is a quote on the internet (apparently from Jenny Larson), “depression lies” and it is the truth. However, what do you do about it? I am aware that most of my thoughts about myself are exaggerated, but how do you get pass all the negative thoughts and move forward? I get so suck on the “I am so fat, this isn’t going to do anything, so what is the point” that I won’t go out to exercise or see people. I have trouble pushing away those thoughts and then I start feeling guilty for not doing the things I feel I should (like exercising). My partner said you should acknowledge that you did wrong and move on to fixing the wrong, but I get so stuck on feeling guilty, ashamed, and sad because I did wrong in the first place. How do you stop succumbing to excuses? How do you fight when you are not a fighter? Why do thoughts leave me completely helpless? I wish I had the answers. Even now I find it hard to get pass missing my morning run and feeling like the cycle of inactivity has started. I am unable to be proud that I have not grubhub for food, that I have been cooking all my meals, that I have not ordered take out, I have not signed up for credit cards, and I have been spending within my budget (I have not been able to save, but I am not in the negative). It has been 2 months and while that is not a long amount of time I am still keeping those goals. Why is exercising and eating less such a huge problem? I found a recent post on The Bloggess that hit on the paralyzing nature of depression but I still have no answers (I highly recommend reading it though, http://thebloggess.com/2014/01/strange-and-beautiful/#comments). One commenter mentioned having “Bad Day Emergency Kit”, which sounds like a great idea and one that I need to have. So if anyone is reading, what is your Bad Day Emergency Kit? How do you get out of the funk?

Being Thankful and Rice and Bean Recipe

One of the exercises at group was to place your hands on a part of your body you loathe and practice gratitude to it. You were to inhale deeply and think of what that body part does without judgment. You were to think about how it feels to your touch. I practice this mediation if you will a bit ago as I was angry at me belly for being so round and in my thoughts, ugly.  This was a hard thing to do because I could not let go of judgments and could only think of how I hate having a belly. Today I am able to be thankful of it roundness and softness. My belly may not look good, but it processes food as it should, it is not in pain, and it helps keep me warm. While Thanksgiving coming around the corner, this will be an important exercise to keep me focused. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because it makes me so grateful to have my family and friends and of course there is the food. This holiday, the goal is to focus of the love and support of my family and not focus on just the food. Food will be eaten and my goal is to actually enjoy it and eat in moderation.

I also would like to share with you all my favorite recipe of all time: rice and beans. It is not a traditional Thanksgiving meal, but being Dominican it is really the only meal you will ever need. I have been using www.supertracker.usda.gov as a tool to help see my calorie intake and according to the site a 1.5 cup of rice and beans is about 381 calories. I use a ¼ cup of basmati rice and mainly use the bean “soup” as the main source of substance. I cook a rice cooker (I know, the horror!) since it is easy so I have not been able to get the right combination of rice and water to use brown rice. So without further ado:

Sorry I am not a good photographer...

Ifi’s Awesome Rice and Beans

1 teaspoon olive oil

1 small onion

2 cloves of garlic

1 small potato diced

½ large bell pepper (any color will do)

1 can of chicken broth (veggie broth works well to)

1 can of black or kidney beans (Goya is my favorite and this can be done with dried beans but it takes much longer)

1 packet of Sazon

1 tablespoon of tomato paste

2 tablespoon of fresh cilantro

For the rice, I use rice cooker and put a dab of oil and a pinch of salt to a ¼ cup of rice and ½ cup of water.

First heat your saucepan and while that is warming out dice the onion and garlic cloves. Put the teaspoon of olive oil in hot saucepan making sure the pan is not too hot (if oil evaporates it is too hot). Coat the bottom with oil and add diced onion and garlic. Sauté under medium heat for about 2 minutes or until translucent. Diced the potato and add to onions and garlic. Sauté potatoes for about 5 minutes. While sautéing the potatoes, cut the bell pepper into strips and then add to the pot.  Still working with the medium heat, add the broth and the beans. I let them do their thing for 5 more minutes to get the potatoes softer and to absorb the favors. At this time, I like to raise the heat and add the tomato paste and Sazon. Bring to a boil for an additional 10-15 minutes then bring to a simmer until ready to serve. That’s it!

Staying on track

My theme for this week is focusing on staying on track and not getting distracted by fear and thoughts of failure. Last week was a difficult week for me in terms of mindful eating. While I have not binged, I was not proud of the amounts of food I was eating. Also, two weeks ago when I weight myself I found that I have lost 10 pounds within the last 3-4 weeks. I knew I would not be seeing such a drastic change last week, but I still wanted to see more pounds shed. That did not happen. I have maintained 205 pounds, but I haven’t lost anymore. In my mind I felt like a failure. I have not been ordering Grubhub, I have been biking to work every day in this horrible Chicago winter. I have been running 2-3 times a week. I have been volunteering at a cat shelter to distract me from destructive behaviors, but still I feel like I have failed. Yesterday I did not even want to write a post because I did not want to think about my feelings of not doing enough. As I look back on my daily journal entries I found there is a strong correlation between feeling like I am not working hard enough and eating carelessly. All my good work the previous week on eating mindfully gave way to eating emotionally, which lead to eating more. I wrote that on Tuesday of last week I was ¾ done with my meal when I felt physically full, yet I kept eating. I am not quite sure why, but I think I was looking for some comfort. So I continued eating.

In my eating group, the concepts of physical and emotional hunger were discussed. Physical hunger is when your body is in need of nourishment and emotional hunger is when your mind is in need of nourishment. I think most over eaters use emotional hunger as means of discerning if we need more food or not. This is a very difficult thing to me to internalize because it is very difficult for me to distinguish emotional hunger from physical hunger since I have been using emotional hunger to guide my eating habits. I found that eating slowly and taking breaks between bites helps me focus on whether I am physically full or not. Last week, I just did not do that. I ate quickly and did not take the time to savor my food. I found that I have a sense of panic when I eat quickly because I feel that somehow the food in my plate will disappear and I would be left hungry. I have no idea why I would think that, I live alone and the only one who would eat my food is my dog, Godiva. Even she would have to be pretty brazen to steal food off my plate while I was still eating it.

So, this week my main goal is to stay positive to stay on track. In times of distress, it is very easy to get let negative feelings guide your thoughts, but it is rewarding and healthier for you to work harder and focus on the things you were able to accomplish. Eating less is a long journey; it is not something that will happen overnight. Losing weight also takes time, hard work, and infinite patience. What sabotages weight lost often is giving up too soon. Even if no weight is lost, being able to eat healthy and eat moderately is a huge accomplishment that does affect health in a positive way. It might take a lot of little steps to accomplish that goal, but those little steps are infinitely better than throwing in the towel and going back to destructive habits.

To conclude, I want to share a story about my friend. Yesterday, one of my friends finished an Ironman completion. The Ironman is a race that consist of 3 mile swim, 110 mile bike ride, and 26 mile run. In other words, a race for crazy people :). This was my friend's third attempt to finish the race and yesterday minutes before the 14 hour cut off time, he finished. He has worked so hard to do this and even thought he did not finish the other two times, he did not give up. He did not get distracted from his goal, he just kept working, kept training, and kept thinking positively. I can't imagine how he feels right now, but I do know his journey is so inspiring, so mind blowing. Many people doubted that he could do it, but he did it and that's just lovely!

The journey begins

Very recently I was diagnosis with an eating disorder known as binge eating. It is weird to be diagnosis with an eating disorder that is not bulimia or anorexia. Fatness is seen as a sign of weakness, laziness, greediness.  Not to mention the ill health effects that comes with being fat. I never considered myself to have a problem with over eating or that I even binge because I have anyways been pretty active and while I have always considered myself to be overweight, it seems that my physical weight in the past was healthy. It wasn't until a couple years ago that I started to realize my obsession with eating. I could never get enough. I could never be full. I was never satisfied. All I could think about was what I was going to eat that day and everything else just didn’t matter. The need of food was so intense I started taking out credit cards so I could fed myself. The stupidest part is I was spending outrageous amounts of money on the takeout website Grubhub. I rationalized to myself that I was not gorging on fast food and that takeout was “better” and “healthier” for me because I could order salads and sushi. I would spend from $25-$100 on a single meal for myself. Of course if I did go for the “healthier” food options I would always cancel the healthy aspects by ordering so much. For example if I ordered Japanese I would order a sashimi plate, which in moderation is healthy, but then I would order 2 maki rolls usually with mayonnaise and some appetizers as well so I would be full. I didn’t cook at home because it was time consuming and I found I would eat all the food I had brought within a day. I figured that if I kept was fringe empty I would be eating less. That of course was not logical and my Grubhub spending got so out of control I some maxed out all my credit cards. Worse of all, I took to stealing credit cards from those I loved the most.  I pretty much destroy the trust of those who love me and who I love back in order to not deal with my over eating in a constructive way.

Many would ask, how come you didn't just stop? That I don’t really know. I think part of it was not wanting to deal with the problem, wanting to not deal with problems I didn't know how to solve. The other part was the immediate comfort food brings me. Unfortunately, the comfort is always followed by the shame and guilt of being out of control, with makes you want to eat again to be comforted. Then there were the days in which I tried not eatin

g at all to make up for the gluttony and the feelings of being out of control. Those days would always lead to binging and thus failure, failure to control my fat lazy unmotivated body. It is hard to see how your actions affect others when you are too busy shaming yourself and then trying to avoid working with and confronting your problems of eating beyond your means and stealing to cover up the problem.

Things started to improve when I finally went to a weight therapy group. The most important thing I took from that experience is to be compassionate to yourself and confront your problems instead of avoiding and hiding. Being compassionate is the hardest thing to do especially when you have done such horrible things to yourself and others, but I think the point of compassion is to guide you to a path of betterment instead of the one of destruction that shame and guilt bring. I think compassion lets you be able to find solutions and motivate you to be a better you. I think this makes sense seeing that while I was hating on myself, the only solutions I was able to come up with were not those of stopping the bad habits, but those of continuing to dig into a deeper hole of awfulness. Maybe negative thinking also makes you forget that there is more than just you in this world. Negative thinking just picks at an already infected sore. Compassion seems to bring hope into the equation. But of course, it is so difficult to think that you are worthy of hope when you have brought those you love into that pit of destruction. I find it interesting that in my current situation the thing that is the hardest to do is not eat less, but is to be compassionate to myself so that I don’t think I need to use food to comfort the challenges in being a better person. It is moments of self-pity that I feel the urge to overeat and to spend money to buy food. It is in feeling bad that I lose focus on what I can do instead I find myself only thinking about all that I can’t do.