Metamorphisis

Three weeks raw and I feel a bit like I am being made over. My ideas about myself, they way I walk on the earth and nutrition are all changing. Some days I feel somewhat overwhelmed about it all. Big picture, I want to try to live as consciously as possible, but I find I’m falling short of my ideals. Slowly slowly I’m going to try to change.

The changes I’ve made recently:
• Buy from the markets and bulk foods and REMEMBER to bring my own containers and bags
• Make big batches of food for the week – prepare in advance as much as I can
• Try to encourage others to eat more fresh fruit and veg and explain my reasons for going raw
• Buy as many ethical products as possible, if in doubt, even if it’s a supplement, I won’t buy it
• Try new foods and ways of preparing raw foods – completely different to conventional recipes
• Eat consciously, not out of boredom, social situations or peer pressure
• Say no to stress by not taking too much on board at work and in my relationships
• Keep a journal of moods and foods to discover patterns of what my body does and doesn’t like
• Start supplementing with whole foods: bee pollen, maca, MSM, slippery elm, silica and include a wide variety of fruits, veggies, nuts, seeds and fats.
• Eliminate processed foods including refined sugar, bread, pasta and packet foods and eat whole, fresh ingredients only

The most difficult thing has not been switching to raw surprisingly! The diet part is easy. It’s the mental shift I wasn’t prepared for. Trying to reconcile myself with what my husband eats has been hard! We sat down and had a talk and he agreed to try to be more aware of his nutrition, which is a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, I don’t think he really cares about his health as much as I do. When he’s hungry, he eats whatever is fast, which is a problem. The worst part is, he’s a personal trainer, you think he’d understand! He’s got a genetically very lean body, so he’s never had to worry about gaining weight, but then complains when he gets the flu and I don’t or he’s dead tired and I’m still full of beans. I’m hoping my example will eventually make a difference. We’ll see. Very frustrating in the meantime!!

I love the energy I have now! I can have all my lovely fruits and nut butters, fresh salads, creamy avocado and yes.... Chocolate! Yesterday someone at the office commented ‘Have you lost weight? You look good!’. I was surprised as I haven’t been weighing myself, but I’ve lost 3kgs and my skin is clearer and softer than it was before. Wheeee! How cool when people notice! Then I can get on my little soap box and share! hehe

Anxiety, food and mood

Image courtesy Feedage.com

Coming from an eating disordered background, sometimes I get anxious about food. No, make that MOST of the time I'm anxious about food. Food, weight, my body image, the way others perceive me, how I measure up in my looks, personal life and work. I'm constantly feeling inadequate, weak-willed and inferior.

Interestingly, I recently did a diagram of the way I was feeling and contributing factors. I was feeling sad and unworthy and the reasons that came out of my head had a lot to do with how I feel other people rated my looks. For some reason I equate being 'thin and attractive' with being 'successful, popular, accepted and worthy of friendship'.

This is NOT a normal conclusion. In my childhood when Mum was in one of her 'happy and high' cycles (she suffered from bi-polar disorder) she would buy lots of clothes rapidly lose weight and entertain lots of friends in a whirlwind of social activity. She was mad and happy, popular and exciting. When she plummeted to incredible lows, she would gain weight, stay in bed for weeks or months, see no one and tell me she wanted to die. That was a big factor that helped shape my views about myself and how I feel about the way I look. Another factor could have been the social circles I was in as a teen and young adult. At least three of my friends openly discussed their eating disorders and dieting habits and tips. Then there was the 'popular' girls. Older than me, trendier and much, much skinnier. They were the 'cool' ideal that I was usually excluded from that I constantly wished to be. If only I could be thinner, they would like me more. If I was thinner they might want to talk to me or tell me about their new boyfriends.

For reasons unknown to me, I have carried these unreasonable ideals around like old suitcases my whole life. When my husband says "You really like Such-and-such, she's a big girl, do you think you wouldn't be friends with her if she got any fatter? Do you think if she lost weight you'd like her more?" I can see weight has nothing to do with it. I KNOW that my friends couldn't care less if I was 10kgs lighter or heavier!

That being said, my diet over the last six months has done wonders for my mood. When I don't eat I get anxious, moody, paranoid, I sink back into my comfortable quagmire of depression. Not-eating feeds my anxiety, my body needs food to regulate my hormones which in turn, regulate my moods. It's like a vicious cycle of self destruction. So I've been eating three meals a day plus some snacks and I feel so much better. More able to cope with day to day stresses and problems. I've cut out sugar and alcohol altogether (except for the occasional party or anniversary) and cut coffee down to one or less a day.

Here's a sample of my daily menu:
Breakfast - 2 free range eggs scrambled with parsley and a grilled tomato or eggplant
Snack – handful of almonds or a piece of cheese
Lunch – fish and salad
Snack – handful of almonds or a piece of cheese
Dinner - protein and steamed or stir-fried veggies or salad (protein will usually be eggs or tempeh)
Dessert - a baked apple with cream or natural Greek yoghurt (my one fruit and only sugar fix! mmm)

It is helping me so much to feel stable and NORMAL again. On advice from my Naturopath, I'm also supplementing with cod liver oil, B2, magnesium and Coenzyme Q10. Has anyone else discovered better moods through regular meals and lower carbohydrate intake? I'd love to hear what worked for you.

Emotional Freedom Technique

Photo courtesy Rita Thompson

Robyn (my naturopath) is always telling me to use the 'Emotional Freedom Technique' or EFT to help with my anxiety. The problem is I am a sceptical neurotic. She taught me how to practice it myself, at home, whenever I'm feeling anxious, worried or tempted. It's also called tapping. The site all about it is here. (You can download a free manual and watch a video to learn more about it.)

When she first showed me how to do it I had come to her in tears, angry at myself for gaining/not losing weight, feeling suicidal and hopeless. We did a tapping session and she had me measure my anxiety about gaining weight and my fear of eating on a scale of 1 to 10. I said my anxiety was a 20!! When we finished she asked me again, I rated it at and 8 out of 10. Again and it was down to 4. We kept tapping until all my fears had gone and I felt calm and in control.

I couldn't believe how much it helped. EFT makes you feel VERY silly, at first I couldn't stop giggling as I was imitating her tapping... but then I started listening to the things I was saying and realised I could let my fears go. It went something like this: "Even though... the thought of eating makes me feel out of control and guilty, and I'm afraid I'm going to get fat, and I feel like I need to hang on to my eating habits to have some kind of sanity, and I feel like I let myself down by eating, and if I stop these rituals I won't know what to do.... I accept and love myself." Then I'd exhale a really deep breath and relax. It was SO HARD to say those last words when everything inside me was screaming "NO YOU DON'T! YOU'RE A WASTE OF SPACE! A FAILURE! YOU HATE YOURSELF!" After about 5 or 6 repeats, I started saying the last phrase with some conviction. The fears I had been worrying about were what was making me fail and hate myself.

I've been thinking about it a lot and I'm going to start doing it daily. Every time Robyn calls and asks me if I've been doing it at home, I say "No, I just feel stupid" or "Oh, I forgot" or "It seems like a waste of time". (She puts up with a lot from me.) But looking back, it really did help me let go of my anxiety about eating. Actually, on that day I went home and ate lunch and dinner and started to nourish myself with real foods again. The day before all I had eaten was a diet coke. The week before I had eaten an average of 500 calories a day (I know because I kept journal upon journal of food intake, calories and exercise). After that breakthrough, I stopped my obsessive calorie counting, threw all of my diaries away and put the scales in the garage. I ate again.

Despite my initial misgivings, I'm going to ignore the sceptic inside with the loud voice jeering and caterwauling and start doing EFT myself. I'm going to focus on my exercise with EFT. We've been managing to do weights 3 times a week and I've been doing a walk/run about 2 or 3 times a week for 45mins. What's holding me back from doing more cardio? Laziness. I can't get out of bed (it's lovely and warm, the covers are so snuggly... just a few more minutes...)! Also my fear of getting sweaty and dirty. So I'm tapping on those things this week and I'll see if I can manage to step up the exercise a bit more. All I want is a little more intensity and a little more frequency, I don't want to overtrain, but I do want to get fitter, stronger and gain some serous Beyoncé Butt!

Has anyone heard of this technique? What are your experiences? Has it helped you to overcome an emotional hurdle?

Food and mood

Well I have to report that my IF experiment didn't go too well. If anything, it has fuelled my food anxieties and started pushing me backwards into the realm of ana. So here I am, over 30 days later struggling to regain sanity. It didn't help me reach my goals and improve my health, it made me obsess all over again.

The whole point of this blog was to prove that I'm bigger than this, I can let go of all my food fears and reach a place where I'm happy with who I am and well enough to deal with life's hurdles, not go diving for cover in the safety of an eating disorder!

So I've taken positive steps towards a complete about-face. I've been seeing my naturopath and she's got me on B12, 5-HTP, cod liver oil, chromium, glutamine, zinc and magnesium to help with my anxiety, insomnia and depression which seem to be working... thank goodness. I feel like I'm constantly popping pills! But I'll do anything to feel better. She's also got me on a muscle building diet (so I can lose fat and tone up easier) eating 3 meals a day plus snacks to help me regulate my hormones, which will help my anxieties and moods. NO SUGAR (arrrgh it's killing me), no grains or alcohol for the time being... at least until I start sleeping and feeling better. Here's a sample of my daily diet mostly protein and veggies:

Brekky: 2 whole eggs (scrambled) and tomato or eggplant
Snack: Handful of nuts
Lunch: Fish and big salad
Snack: Handful of nuts
Dinner: A Protein and steamed or stir-fried veggies
Dessert: Baked apple with natural yogurt or cream

I was VERY SURPRISED I haven't gained eating this way and it's triple the calories I was eating! At first it felt like a lot of food but I'm getting used to eating more, I'm trying so hard not to be negative about food and weight. I've stopped weighing myself because my naturopath does body fat analysis with a special machine, so as long as I see muscle mass go up and fat mass go down, I'll be happy. At the moment I'm 22% fat which is under optimal by 2kgs, but the worst part is I'm under on muscle mass by 4kgs!!! Gotta fix that or I'll end up weak, sick and with osteoporosis!

My next visit is in a couple of weeks so I'll fill you in on how things go, I'm really trying hard not to stress out about this, treating myself gently. I'm barely able to just get through each day right now! I still want to lose weight but I can't risk my health anymore. I'm hoping I can reach my goals in a wholesome way. As long as I get somewhere close to my weight when I was 20 (around 56kg), even if I never reach my goal weight, I want to be able to accept myself the way I am.

That's only about 7kg total, quite doable. If things don't change soon though, I'll go crazy! It's a fat loss diet I'm on, that has worked for hundreds of people of all ages, so I'm confident if I keep with it SOMETHING will change. I hate being ruled by food and obsessing about every single thing that goes in my mouth. I hate having a one track mind, like there's nothing else in the world to think about! I'm not creative, I'm bitchy, I'm anxious, depressed, an emotional wreck that can't cope with life... that is NOT ME!

So, fingers crossed... hope everyone out there is doing better than me and achieving their health and fitness goals. If you have any advice or encouragement it would be much appreciated.