At What Point Is the Stress Too Much?

A highly stressful job plays a huge role in many of the challenges I face, including eating and weight. There are many many things about my job that leave me completely depleted in more ways than one at the end of a crazy week. A highly demanding and perfectionist boss, inflexible deadlines that must be met no matter what, insane workloads, long hours, and frequent travel, are just a few. At the end of many days, even though I know it would make me feel better, the idea of exercising and cooking a healthy meal is the absolute last thing I care about. Collapsing in a coma on the sofa with whatever is easy and just tuning out the world is all I can manage. Unfortunately, that's not so good for either my health or my lacking social life.

But, there are also a lot of positives about my job. As a management group, we are very supportive of each other. We laugh all the time, though it's often in a if you don't laugh you'll cry sort of way. But still, there's a real camaraderie between us that helps you get out of bed each day. I'm well paid for what I do and I have excellent benefits, much better than I've seen at many other companies. And in very uncertain economic times, though there's no such thing as a sure thing, I've got about as close to job security as a person can have. Having grown up in a household where financial security was non-existent, this is probably one of the key drivers for me. I don't need to be wealthy. I don't need to show off with fancy clothes or cars or big houses, but I need to know where my next paycheck is coming from. I need to have enough money in the bank so that if my car breaks down, I don't have to worry about how it's going to get fixed. I need to have enough for the occasional splurge, like a massage or a pedicure. I need to not be afraid to answer the phone or open the mail because it might be another bill collector. I need that more than I need just about anything else because there's no safety net. No spouse that can take care of things for a while, no parents or grandparents that can help out if I get in a bind. No one can look out for me, but me. So I can't let my guard down for a second. This job affords me that financial security that is SO important to me and for that I am very grateful.

But, I do find myself asking more and more in recent years at what point I should say enough is enough. When is the stress of this lifestyle no longer worth the price? That I don't know. Because true, money's not everything, but good health insurance and not having to angst over every nickel and dime is pretty close to everything for me. Because I've been there and I'm not going back. If I could figure out a way to have the security this job brings without the stress, I'd be there in a heart beat. I just can't figure that out right now. And, there are changes coming about in my company over the next year that may well result in tremendous changes for me. Too early to know whether those changes will be for the better or for the worse, but I'm hanging in there to see what happens.

What I really need to do in the meantime is just figure out how to manage stress that's not going to go away anytime soon. Sure, there are things like yoga, and meditation, and eating better and taking good care of myself, blah blah blah. But seriously, there just aren't enough hours in the day. I don't know how to fit it all in. The pace also makes it really hard to be mindful when I eat, and that has been a struggle, too. Because sometimes I do actually think about it and I'm too exhausted to care. Other times, I realize days have gone by and I haven't given the slightest thought to what or how I've eaten. I've just been on autopilot.

In the grand scheme of things, these are not bad problems to have. I'm not losing my house to foreclosure, I haven't lost my job, I don't have to wonder where my next meal is coming from, I'm not trapped beneath the rubble of a devastating earthquake, I'm not dodging bullets or car bombs. There are so many things in the world that are worse than having a well-paying but stressful job. I really have no right to complain. Still, I need to learn how to manage things. Because there's no point in having so many blessings if you can't even enjoy them.

September's Gonna Be a Busy One

Real life is taking over somewhat this month. Hectic hectic hectic time at work. Managing personnel issues amongst my staff (all I will say about this is the things you learn about people when you manage them! I'd be better off not knowing these things!), plus we are being audited at the end of the month and my bonus this year depends on us getting a good result. So needless to say, I'm putting in some long hours these days. Well, longer than usual, and that's saying something for a workaholic!

From an IE standpoint, the hardest part is just trying to focus on it at all. It's SO easy to just let the events of the day take over and to find that another day has come to an end and I haven't spent even a moment thinking about IE! On the plus side, I'm not eating excessively. Well, not excessively in the sense that I'm bingeing or eating tons of junk food or snacking incessantly. I seem to be pretty much sticking to the three squares these days (sometimes two). But each meal is still bigger than it should be. But I'm just trying to get through the month these days and fit in some of my reading when I can and not obsess about shoulds and shouldn'ts. Will continue to post as I can. Hopefully you'll bear with me!

On an unrelated note, here's my realization for August: I don't like fresh figs. Dried figs? Good. Fresh figs? Bleh. It's not a flavor thing; it's a texture thing. Shame, really, because they're awfully pretty. But I just can't do 'em. But that's a fresh realization courtesy of my fabulous local farmers market. Only wish I'd realized it before I shelled out $6 for a pint of local, organic figs, most of which, unfortunately, ended up in the bin. Oh, well. Live and learn.

August Update: A Roller Coaster and A Light Bulb

A challenging month this time. Have been up and down and all around the roller coaster. Days of feeling inexplicably great followed by several weeks of feeling not so great. Have been resistant to working the steps. Not particularly wanting to either journal or even question whether I’m hungry, let alone satisfied when eating. After work, have been chomping down on crunchy snacks with a vengeance, and I don’t doubt there’s some significance in that choice of foods. Work (without a doubt one of the biggest pressures in my life) has been a challenge in many ways that are probably best not to go into in too much detail. But the one thing I can fairly safely say is that it and has, without question, been a major contributor to my generally foul mood over the last couple of weeks. But the long and short of it is that work can trigger intense feelings of failure in me that end up turning into a doorway to brooding over everything in my life that isn’t what I want it to be. Not fun. To top it off, I’m up four pounds from when I started IE. Argh.

But while reading Christie’s great book club discussion on Chapter 3 of Women, Food and God over at Honoring Health, I had something of a revelation. I’m not sure that all of it was new, but pieces came together with a crystal clarity that I’m not sure I’d experienced before. In the discussion of this chapter of the book, which deals with bolting to avoid having to feel your feelings, Christie asked two questions that resonated with me, first was “what emotions are you afraid of feeling,” and second was “did your childhood or parents play a role in how you feel about using your voice now?” In pondering these, I realized that there are times that I feel profoundly lonely and that I hadn’t really been willing to face or feel that before. And the major factor in that loneliness is the lack of people in my life from childhood to this very day that are open to me expressing or sharing my feelings. As a result, I’ve become very reluctant to be open with others because I have experienced so much disappointment in this area.

There’s more to the story, here, but I’ve rambled on enough for tonight, so I’ll expand on this on another day. But I think that the realization is progress and I’ll take that. And for what it’s worth, I wouldn’t say my mood is back to 100%, but I am feeling better than I was. So I’ll take that, too.

Taming My Inner 5-Year-Old

In recent years while dieting, I often used the analogy that my inability to stick to plan was like a willful 5-year-old throwing a tantrum. I told myself that I needed to discipline that five year old and “force” her to just behave and stick to the rules. I’d berate myself and try to just white knuckle my way through whatever it was I was struggling with, but it rarely worked. And really, should that have been a surprise? I’m not a parent, but I’ve got enough nieces and nephews and godchildren that I know that bullying a 5-year-old is rarely an effective way to get her to do anything, at all.

Today, out of curiosity, I checked out the Supernanny website to see what England’s most famous nanny recommends for children throwing tantrums. The first thing I discovered is that the Supernanny website is apparently run by a bunch of different “experts” and apparently has no little input from the actual Supernanny. But those quibbles aside, here’s what the experts said about tantrums.

Causes of tantrums:

• Frustration
• Hunger or tiredness
• Wanting something the child can’t have
• Wanting independence
• Over stimulation
• Attention seeking
• Emotional overload

Hmmm, these all sound pretty darn familiar. Diets frustrating? What, all the time spent preparing calorically perfect meals, figuring out what I can and can’t eat, and following the long lists of dos and don’ts? How could that be frustrating? Hunger? Yeah, when wasn’t I hungry when I was dieting? Tiredness? How could I not be tired when I was starving all the time? I had no nutrition for energy! Wanting something I couldn’t have? Yeah, food!! Wanting independence? Who wouldn’t want independence from all those rules? Over stimulation? Well, let’s see, read this book, log this food here, do this exercise at this time and log that and calculate the calories burned to figure out how much I can eat and figure out the exact calorie count of everything that passes my lips and get enough sleep and drink 10 glasses of water a day and eat 5 fruits and veggies, but don’t eat too much fat salt, sugar, or anything white, but blah, blah, blah. No, that’s not over stimulating at all. Attention seeking? Well, an invisible fat person would never want attention, would she? And finally, emotional overload? Yeah, if I’m stuffing down my feelings with food while also constantly telling myself how fat, disgusting, and undisciplined I am, there is probably a bit of emotional overload going on there.

Seems like the question here is how could my inner 5-year-old NOT be throwing a tantrum when I’m on a diet?

So, what does Supernanny (or her minions) have to say about solving tantrums? Well, there were a handful of tips, but here are the ones that particularly struck me:

Solve the problem before behavior deteriorates. Yeah, dealing with the emotions before I start stuffing my face with food to quiet them might just be a bit more helpful, on many different fronts.

Offer choices. Choices are nice. I’ve always been a tad rebellious. The minute you impose a boatload of rules on me, the minute I want to do the exact opposite. Having choices about what *I* want and what *I* need and not just blindly following what some “expert” dictates, might make me more amenable to engaging in healthy behaviors.

Use positive words. Big one here. No 5-year-old ever flourished by being told how terrible she was. Treating that 5-year-old with kindness and respect even when she’s melting down is probably more effective than screaming at her and threatening her with punishment. And truth be told, while that kind of treatment may have resulted in compliance for a short period, each time my 5-year-old just came back angrier and more defiant than before. So, that apparently doesn’t work too well with anyone.

So what’s the lesson here? Treat your inner 5-year-old just like you would a real live one, and you’ll probably be a lot more successful all the way around. I’m going to give it a try. My inner 5-year-old is smiling at me right now.

Dumping the Diet Books

Yes, friends, it's time. Time to dump the diet books that is. Well, actually, time to donate them to charity. Seems a shame to inflict them on anyone else. I hate to think of some other poor woman (or man) inflicting the same kind of body hatred on themselves that I did when I was following any one of these. But that's my hang up. Someone else may be grateful to find the book they've been looking for at a discount.

So here's the roll call of misery:

1. Body for Life
2. Body for Life for Women
3. Champions Body for Life
4. Eating for Life - the Body for Life cookbook, because the fact that three of the actual diet plan books didn't work for me made me go, if only I had the recipes, that'd make the difference!
5. 100 Days of Weight Loss - It's "the Secret to Being Successful on Any Diet Plan." Yeah, that worked out well.
6. The Dish: On Eating Healthy and Being Fabulous - Autographed copy! Woo hoo!
7. The Great American Detox Diet - By the wife of Morgan Spurlock, the guy who did the film Supersize Me. Great film. But the vegan diet of punishment, not so much for me.
8. The Eat-Clean Diet
9. Flip the Switch - which instructs you, like many books, to lose the excuses and lose the weight! Because I can work full time while putting myself through graduate school, but clearly I'm weak-willed and undisciplined!
10. Ultra-Metabolism - The simple plan for automatic weight loss. Uh huh, that sure whipped my metabolism into shape. Not!
11. The Raw Food Revolution Diet
12. Raw Food Life Force Energy - All I can say about these books is that any person who can do raw food 24/7 is a far better person than I am. Go with god; you officially have a will of steel!
13. French Women Don't Get Fat - Punish yourself in a continental fashion!
14. The Way to Eat - Aren't they all sold as the way to eat?
15. Tired of Being Tired - because apparently, we're all fat because we have adrenal glands that are burned out.
16. Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy
17. Shape Your Life - from the editors of Shape magazine!
18. The Business Plan for the Body - Run your body like a CEO and be a size 2!
19. Marilu Henner's Total Health Makeover - because who else would I look to for the secret of health besides a washed up actress?
20. Our Lady of Weight Loss - Billed as "miraculous and motivational musings from the Patron Saint of Permanent Fat removal." Humorous, perhaps, but also kind of confusing. Guess I figured that if I could be wackier that I'd be thinner??
21. The Volumetrics Eating Plan - fill up on watery foods and finally be skinny! Actually, not all that bad as diets, go, but still wasn't any more successful for me than anything else.

It's a pretty good sized pile, when you look at it. Sad thing is, I'm actually surprised it's not bigger. But I've given away other books in the past. So, it's by no means representative of all the diets I've ever followed. More like all the diets I've followed over the last year (excluding online and self-created diet!). Some of them were wackier than others. Some actually had good information about healthy foods that I've learned from. But the common theme of all of them (for me, anyway) is that they represent the idea that I can't trust myself to eat in a way that is best for my body. That I need some "expert" to tell me how to eat, otherwise I'll be fat forever. I still don't know where IE is going to take me. But wherever it is, it hardly seems like it can be a place that makes me more miserable than I was while following every single one of these diet plans. It'll be interesting to see what I think about this post a year from now and whether or not I think that statement is true.

Feeling Good for No Particular Reason

Just one of those weird days when I feel good and there's no particular reason why. Even stepped on the scale this morning and found out I was five pounds heavier than when I started IE and it didn't phase me a bit. Besides, I'm sure it's at least partly attributable to all the salt I consumed this weekend at my cooking class. I will say that I discovered why prepared food is so full of sodium. No matter how much salt I added, the instructor would toss in a bunch more and stuff never tasted salty, it just tasted better. Salt makes everything taste amazing!

Anyway, it was a crazy day at work. My to do list never gets smaller, only gets longer. But for some reason, I just felt good today. I even went to the gym after work voluntarily and not grudgingly. That never happens! (And found a parking space just down the block without having to circle endlessly. That never happens, either!). The good mood fairies have blessed me today. I have no idea why, but it doesn't matter. I'll just be glad for it. Can't say that it happens all that often.

Cooking Class - Day Two

Another fun (and tiring!) day in cooking class. Today we continued cooking and the dishes were a bit more complex than the day before as we had more time since we didn’t start at the farmers market. I made a Mexican pork and tomatillo stew. It was a lot of work. It took about two and a half hours from start to finish, but I think it wouldn’t have taken so long on my own. Part of it was working in a strange kitchen and working around all the others. But it was all really fun and ultimately very tasty!

And it was a great group. This is the second class I’ve taken at this school and there’s something about getting people together to cook that really breaks down barriers and bonds you. There were a lot of laughs. And the best part is that at the end of each day, you get to taste everything that everyone made. For a bunch of novices, we did really good work.

My masterpiece! Pork & tomatillo stew with purslane and cilantro. Yum!

After hours of cooking, everyone gets to feast on the bounty!

A sample of everything everyone made. This isn't intuitive eating, but it sure was tasty and that's okay!

All in all, it was a really great day. And I'll take that!