Food and Meaning

One thing about higher education is getting your mind tied in a pretzel every once in a while without visiting a psychologist. Perhaps studying psychology is a double dose?

Anyway, I'm reading Maslow's "Religion, Values and Peak Experiences" and he starts talking about false dichotomies and meaning and science and I realize that I'm so hungry at the end of the day because I feel like my day should have meant something. I hunger for fulfillment, spiritually. Not physically or emotionally or psycho sexually or anything else. In a way, kookie religion-based "diets" have always appealed to me because I need food to mean nothing more than what it is and I need to look for meaning outside the kitchen.

Stealth Thin, Stealth Fat and Point A.

I quit blogging here when I vowed to quit dieting forever. I've found that not dieting is in many ways harder than dieting was. The pressure to be thin is abated by the knowledge you are following society's prescribed guidelines for achieving that goal. You can discount the discomfort of being fat by knowing that you are stealth thin because soon, the diet is going to pay off big time.

Stealth-thin is a good way to describe how I've seen myself for many years. Ever since I first squeezed into junior sizes in college, I saw myself as formerly fat. By most standards 169 and 5'5" is still actually fat, but in my mind I'd lost almost 30 pounds and moved to "real" sizes and I was joining the Army so it was only a matter of time before the outside matched the inside. Even when I regained all the weight I lost and then another 60 pounds for good measure, I thought that I wasn't like other people I saw who were fat because I was carrying this stealth thin person around inside of me.

In truth, I think I had it backwards. Even at my lowest weight, I was still fat in the head. I still bought into the idea that I needed to be thinner to be worthwhile. I still reflexively judged other people based on their weight. I still weighed and measured food in my head and I still ate for comfort. You just couldn't see all the midnight trips to Denny's when I was working out for 10 or more hours a week with a teenager's metabolism. I still coveted the shape of other women's bodies. I still believed there was something unfair about how I was shaped as opposed to other people. (Egg cup on stilts has never been in fashion, ever.) No matter how thin I was, I was still planning for the day I could squeeze into a smaller size. I was still dissatisfied when I looked in the mirror and I still blamed my life problems on excess fat.

I don't think a diet can help me because the part of me that needs to lose weight is my brain. It is crammed full of useless, self-defeating ideas and impulses. All this time I've been mad at my body and trying to reign it in with my brain, when really my body has been fabulously supportive given the amount of abuse I've heaped on it. So now I am continuing my weight loss journey, but I will try to share how I am shaping my thinking. We cannot change what we cannot accept about ourselves. Many people have made the analogy that changing something you won't accept is like trying to plan a journey from point B to point C when you are at point A.

Here is point A: I'm fat. I work out 5-6 hours per week and if I miss a day or two of exercise or indulge my impulse for desserts and deep fried food more than once or twice, I gain weight. If I diary my food and mood most days and work out every day, I maintain. I am not restricting my food intake, but trying to make sure that I only eat when I'm hungry and stop before I'm over full. I'm working on the nutrition of what I eat without counting anything.

In order to reach my "ideal" weight, I would need to lose 90-100 pounds. In order to reach a weight I think is healthy, I would need to lose 75-80. In January I set the modest goal of losing 30 pounds in order to get under 200. I've lost -4 pounds since then, meaning I have 7 fewer weeks and 4 more pounds to go. I still think about dieting every day, and I'm still jealous of crash dieters.

First Vegan Thoughts

The first thing to be aware of with a vegan diet is that a surprising amount of junk food is vegan. Not cheese doodles or milk chocolate, obviously. However, most corn chips and salsa are vegan, kettle corn and caramel corn often are vegan, 99.9% of potato chips are vegan… you get the idea. Manufacturers of prepackaged snacks avoid dairy for cost reasons, so pita and pretzel chips, many crackers and other simple carbohydrate goodies are all "safe" for vegans. That doesn't translate to weight loss.

Obvious non-vegan junk foods? Milk chocolate, most commercial baked goods, and a shocking number of vegetarian products. I thought I was pretty safe with Amy's Soy Cheese Pizza but I failed to notice the warning that milk protein was used to make the soy cheese. It all depends how scrupulous you are about your definition of vegan. Later this week I will discuss the controversy over honey, which may or may not be vegan depending on which vegan you ask.

Things I wish I hadn't figured out because they tempt me:

Whole Foods non-dairy walnut baklava (yes, it has honey in it) is to DIE for. I'm seriously considering making a pan of baklava later this week just to get precise nutrition information.

Dark chocolate? Often vegan. One example would be this Signature Dark Chocolate Mint Bar from the vegan-friendly Lake Champlain Chocolates. A search for "vegan" on the site produces a whopping 39 results. The dark chocolate mint bar has mint flavored sugar crystals that crunch and I've found one square (55 calories) to be extremely satisfying.

How to get started:

Go to Whole Foods or your local hippie Mecca and ask the first person you see who works there about vegan products. I tried this and it turned out I was talking to a vegan with 6 years of experience. I'll give more details later, but I was tickled by that incident and had to share.

Review of the "Jared" Diet

This diet is pretty simple. You don't need special tools or lots of time and energy. You don't have to know how to cook. You just need money and a bottomless enthusiasm for Subway subs. This is an ideal diet for bachelors, bachelorettes or anyone who wants to lose weight but isn't sure where they left their kitchen.

Cost:

For one person, 18 inches of Subway can cost as little as $6 per day. Baked chips and soda are extra and naturally, buy those in bulk if you are trying to save money. If you already eat a lot of restaurant meals, you may actually save money with Subway.

Nutrition:

As previously mentioned, the diet described by Subway and officially endorsed by Jared is actually 850 calories per day. However, several Subway employees have confided in me that Jared admits to a much more generous 1800 calories per day. While following my "Jared" diet, I ate a largish breakfast, a 6 inch sub or wrap with cheese and baked chips for lunch and a 12 inch sub for dinner. I started out with the low fat menu and branched out to low carb wraps and the occasional premium sub. I had a modest snack or even dessert a few hours after dinner. I kept calories between 1700 and 2000 and fat fairly low, although I ate a bit more protein than I imagine Jared did.

Nutritional recommendations:

Breakfast - eat it, duh. Oatmeal and fruit is classic and fast. A whey protein supplement is a nice short cut if you don't have time for eggs in the morning, although I won't lie about the taste comparison - eggs win.

Avoid dressings but add cheese - this is a low calorie plan and you are adjusting it up to your personal needs. For me, 1800 was still low enough that I lost almost 5 pounds. (Moving a two bedroom apartment concurrently helped but I don't recommend it.)

Switch Baked Lays for a different chip - I recommend Kettle Baked Chips or Quaker Soy Crisps in White Cheddar. Kettle baked chips are baked slices of potato, not reconstituted potato pap. I haven't tried a Kettle baked chips I didn't love. Quaker soy crisps are more rice than soy, but they do pack extra protein into this diet which gives the bready subs more mileage.

Eat fruit or vegetables in your after dinner snack to add volume.

Pitfalls:

Boredom - again, duh.

Cost - you could eat a sandwich at home for cheaper, but would you bother cutting up a cup or three of assorted vegetables to put on it? Me either, which made the money worth it in my life.

Final thoughts - this is a good diet for taking off a few pounds or maintaining during a move but would not work as a long term strategy unless you are actually employed by Subway.

Next time I will begin discussing my adventures in veganism, including the contentious honey issue, eating in restaurants (do you like salad bars?) and how to deal with the static you will invariably get for even playing at it for a week.

I've been somewhat remiss in updating due to the move, but I will be back on track this week. Meanwhile, please peruse this half-assed review of the Subway diet.

Really people, how hard is it to go to Subway.com and add up the contents of Jared's stomach as clearly listed on the site and in advertisements for several years?

One week, pre-results posting

This weekend I only got to Subway once per day, what with all the packing and visitors helping us with packing. However, as of this morning I was down to 219.2.

Five pounds in a week eating 1800 calories per day including 18 inches of Subway sandwiches. I'll post the exact loss tomorrow and some of the details, tips and tricks I discovered.

First Stumble

I wasn't depressed, or feeling down. I was feeling on top of the world, other than a few stressful issues that I was ignoring. Then the free sample girl hit me up with an offer of truffles.

300 calories later... wow, truffles are good. But my planned afternoon snack would have been better.

I can't figure out what might have caused this behavior, other than my old friend the Fear of Success demon. I weighed in this morning almost 4.5 pounds lighter than Monday. I was hoping to reverse the gain from last week's marathon restaurant excursion, but this is more than I hoped for and I started to be afraid this crazy idea might work out even better than my secret dreams. Naturally, I need to take some action to prevent emotional eating during the rest of the move and self-sabotage.

I started reading 100 Days of Weight Loss: The Secret to Being Successful on ANY Diet Plan by Linda Spangle yesterday, only to discover that it is (duh!) a workbook. So today I am busting out my hardly used 2007 journal and doing the first exercise, since if anyone needs to know how to succeed with any diet it's the person who is trying them all.