My newest truths about food and mood...

Okay. I know what they say. Diets don't work.

If you take the "t" off the word "diet" – what you have? Die.

Anyone who's struggled with his or her weight all their lives knows all these cutesy cliches. We now know our weight is genetically predetermined, but that doesn't help. We still have to lose weight to be healthy. Genes or no genes.

The bottom line is, if you want to lose weight to be healthy you have to consume fewer calories than you burn.

That means either continuing to eat they way you like and spending 23 out of 24 hours seven days a week working out ... or cutting back on calories. 

And if you want to live long, it helps to eat a healthy diet. As Susan, a friend and one of my regular commenters mused yesterday:

"Why is it that all the good things in life are fattening, and stuff like carrot sticks, eewww."

It's not fair, but as my psychiatrist, Dr. Bob, often reminds me: "Life isn't fair." 

So, I'm now on Day Six of my first week of Weight Watchers. I'm dieting. They call it a lifestyle, but not yet for me. Right now, it's a diet.

I know I'm not going to lose weight on a diet of toasted whole wheat baguettes slathered with sweet butter. Or egg white omelettes loaded with melted cheddar. Or chocolate covered almonds. I'm feeling a craving coming on. 

The point is I'm in the midst of changing my habits. It takes a long time.

A lot longer than they tell you at a Weight Watchers meeting. 

My friend psychologist John M. Grohol found a new source of information about changing habits "across the pond" at University College London – from scientific psychology researcher Jeremy Dean and his PsyBlog. 

In a recent post, How Long to Form a Habit? Dean says it takes on average –  66 days to change a habit – with no guarantee this new habit will stick. He cites a July 2009 study in the European Journal of Social Psychology. 

It's complicated. Depends on the habit. Eating habits are probably among the hardest to change permanently along with quitting smoking and giving up alcohol or breaking a drug addiction. (What's the difference between an addiction and a habit, I wonder?)

If I could abstain from food altogether, it would be easier than moderating what I eat. One chocolate covered almond is harder to eat than none at all. 

At Weight Watchers they tell you it takes 31 days to change a habit. Marty will love this news. According to Dean, we're in for another 60 days of struggling to change our eating habits. If I announce this at my Sunday meeting, I'll be pelted with two-point snacks.

Here's my problem. 

I take one (1) 200 mg tablet of an anti-convulsant called Epival/Tegretol/Carbamazepine twice daily to stabilize my manic tendencies. It works for me. 

I also take eight (8) other different drugs, including three (3) different immunosuppressants, to keep me alive with my transplanted kidney. 

My complex daily cocktails of drugs don't exactly ease the weight loss process. 

Monica, pointed this in a comment to yesterday's post: 

"It could be your med making you hungry. I gained 100 lbs. while on Epival/Depakote, and I met a man in a bipolar support group who had the same experience. He lost it all when they switched him to Topamax. Me, I'd manage to lose 20 or 30 lbs. but then I'd start a new med and gain it all back. 

"Since I started Truehope and got off all my meds my appetite has plummeted. I eat a fraction of what i used to eat. I just am not hungry all the time any more.

What works for Monica would kill me. I need my drugs to survive. 

We're all as chemically different as we are emotionally different.

I'm going to struggle to lose my weight and reach my goal, again. 

For 60 more days – to change my habits – and every day after that.

Life isn't fair. It's life. That's the point.

Speak soon.

Comments

[mjane]

it's actually perfectly healthy to be moderately overweight and it's also possible to be healthy and fat...

I've posted several studies about people in the "overweight" category living longer than those who are in the "normal" category. Which suggests the true normal is overweight...

I can find these links for you if you like....

I don't diet, don't believe in dieting and eat whatever I want. I'm lucky to like healthy whole food and I have no cravings for sugar...

If one eats healthfully and exercises weight really does not matter all that much.

here I found a couple of the articles

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/6303507/Fat-at-40-is-better-than-thin-scientists-warn.html

http://www.webmd.com/diet/news/20090625/study-overweight-people-live-longer

much of what we learn is based on fat phobia and a media and society worships anorexic like women. There is a lot of good stuff out there now about being healthy at all sizes and how unhealthy it is to obsess about weight and what we eat.

the book Rethinking Thin is quite enlightening too...by Gina Kolata...it's available on Amazon

and you can listen to a delightful interview with her on NPR

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11606653

It's time for lots of normal healthy folk to reframe their sense of what is healthy.

[mjane]

and the diet industry capitalizes on our hating ourselves.

[Sandy Naiman]

Thank you, mjane, for this very valuable and informative comment.

I know it will mean a great deal and be most helpful to women reading this post.

I wish it applied to me. Sadly, it does not.

All this is true, if you're reasonably healthy to begin with, but I am not.

Almost 16 years ago, my sister Glorianne saved my life by donating one of her kidneys. I was dying of "iatrogenic" Endstage kidney failure caused by Lithium toxicity. My psychiatrist at that time hadn't monitored my Lithium levels carefully and as a result of his negligence, I lost my only kidney.

After two years of dialysis, I had my transplant. It saved my life.

Kidney transplant patients are not cured when they receive kidney transplants – that’s a myth.

A transplant is a treatment. It’s better than dialysis. Different. But it’s no cure.

I have no natural or normal kidney function and kidneys are vital organs. Without their functioning kidneys, people will die within several days. It’s a very complex and much misunderstood, but extraordinarily vital organ.

As a kidney transplant patient, the rules are different for me.

I have to have very low blood pressure, very low and particular cholesterol levels. I take eight different prescription medications every day. Each week, I have to give myself an injection of a hormone called EPO. I have chronic anemia. It controls the production of red blood cells. The three different immunosuppressant drugs I take to prevent my body from rejecting my kidney have side effects and though they keep me alive, they cause problems. Chronic anemia is one of them.

The anticonvulsant I take to stabilize my mood causes additional problems. All these drugs interact. So, I am not exactly healthy though I don’t look unhealthy. I don’t smoke and I’ve never imbibed much alcohol, ever. I hate the taste. But that’s not enough.

I must lose weight and maintain a healthy, lower body weight to be a healthy kidney transplant patient.

Weight affects my blood pressure, which is high.
What I eat affects my cholesterol levels, which are also too high. I do not want to die of a heart attack, suffer a stroke or develop diabetes, so I must eat a healthy diet and exercise more. This isn’t easy for me.

I need to be motivated. Weight Watchers works for me. Facing that scale every week works FOR ME!

I do not recommend it for others. Whatever works for others is great.

I would love to be able to have the luxury of being fat and fit, but that will not satisfy my kidney transplant specialist who monitors my blood levels like a hawk and considers me non-complacent because I'm not taking care of myself.

I'm the kind of person who needs to be motivated and that WW’s scale does the trick.

Weight has been an issue for me since I was a girl. It became an issue after an orderly in a mental hospital sexually assaulted me. I was in my teens. I was there for observation. It was my first psychiatric hospitalization. I gained 60 lbs. in the six months following that hospitalization. Very common reaction. I built a wall around myself to keep men away from me.

This is a long story. I've written about it before and I'm not really in the mood to go into it now. I repressed the memory for 14 years and it came out in a therapy session when I was 28. It has permanently affected me.

At the same time, it's all the past. I cannot change what happened.

I choose to live in the present and do the best I can now. It is a recurrent theme in my psychotherapy.

I have a good life. A productive and meaningful life. I'm happy. Just too heavy. And not active enough.

So I'm working on it.

Actually, I don't hate myself at all. I like the way I look. But for health reasons I simply must lose about 40 lbs. And maintain that weight loss. Losing isn't the problem for me. I lose like a dream.

But maintenance is the problem because I love eating so much. I eat for comfort. I eat to break my boredom. I eat when I'm upset. I eat when I'm tired. I eat when I'm stressed. I eat when I'm overwhelmed.

I eat for all the wrong reasons.

My eating is a mental health issue.

[Carolyn]

My weight was never an issue. I was one of those disgusting people who could eat a scoop of ice cream and feel satisfied. Then Zyprex came and in just 2 months I gained 30lbs. I think it forever changed the way I felt hunger. So now, I eat routinely, and if something is out of routine like dinner with friends I choose my meal before I go so I can't impulse eat. I lost 20lbs. I don't know if I'll ever lose that last 10. I was 19 at the time, and I don't know if I can get my 19 year old body back.

What I did learn from making healthier choices is how food effects my mood. I get sad after eating a meal full of unhealthy fat. I never noticed until I did it only once in a while. A lot of sugar makes me manicish. Dieting helped me see the relationship.

Good luck at weight watchers! Remember though, you are you no matter what you weigh!

[Sandy Naiman]

Carolyn,

Thank you for your candid comments. Weight, or excess weight, eating habits and patterns are hugely complex and vary with each individual. I am not interested in having my "old" body back because it was "young" and I am not ... at least chronologically.

It wasn't ever any great shakes, either.

I find that body image is another major problem, too. How you see yourself as opposed to how others see you. So much depends on what you see through your emotional lens on life.

Self-perception isn't like a mirror or photograph. And don't you find that when you feel good you look better? Everything seems to mesh and you're in harmony – mind, body, soul, spirit.

It's health I'm after. Seeing those numbers drop – and not just on the scale.

We all have our demons, Carolyn. We all have our own ways of dealing with them and there will always be someone somewhere to tell you that "it's not good for you!"

Don't be too hard on yourself. You sound like you're in terrific shape to me.

Hugs,
sln