More adventures in eating
Feb. 1st, 2015 10:10![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
torquillThe saga continues. It takes me a couple of hours just to eat every day, even when I'm busy... on the days I have to catch up, I can spend most of a morning or an afternoon reading and eating. It's a time commitment I'm having to get used to.
I didn't eat enough yesterday (I was busy in the shop), and though I had some food close to bedtime, I slept badly and ended up awake around 5. By 5:45 I went downstairs and grabbed one of the bland granola bars... I surprised myself by wolfing it. Fifteen minutes later I was no longer sweating with cold feet, I was just warm, and I fell back to sleep for a few hours. I was still very hungry when I woke.
I'm trying to catch up today. Fortunately, a Superbowl party is really just sitting around and snacking with friends, so as long as I bring enough stuff that I can eat, I should be just fine.
I weighed myself again this morning. My weight varies from day to day, but it appears to have stabilized at about 106.4, one to one and a half kilos more than when I started. A half kilo of that happened in the first day, when I suspect a bunch of the food went straight into glycogen storage in the liver. Something tells me that I might add one more, but that's about it -- the whole point is that I'm burning all these calories, so there shouldn't be a lot left over for storage.
Amy's doing the hesitant "Please, sir, may I have some more?" thing right now. I'm wracking my brain to find yet another food that sounds appealing, while assuring her that yes, we can have more. It may be a while before I lose the cringing behavior. (Sometimes I find myself hunkering over my food like an animal who's worried someone else is going to snatch it.)
What all this reminds me of most is when Seanan enrolled in Weight Watchers to lose some of her excess weight, and discovered that she wasn't making the *minimum* points for each day, not by a long shot. Once she started eating more, a lot of the weight just vanished. She felt weird when doing check-ins with her group, stating that she was eating at least X amount every day, but she ended up much healthier. (She had never been taught how to eat, and with a druggie single mom who didn't shop regularly, ended up with views like eating a can of peas and a pack of saltines was enough for the day.)
I feel weird too, but I feel so much better that I'm battling the "this much food can't be healthy" narrative with determination. The norms our society has formed around food are so self-conscious it's hard for me to break out of the conventional wisdom of "less is more". Even the foodies making things like bacon-wrapped deep-fried turkey are presenting their efforts as acts of conspicuous consumption, defiant excesses; that just reinforces the narrative that one really shouldn't eat that much food/bacon/fat/meat. I spent a long time gravitating toward a generally low-carb lifestyle, and eating this many carbs feels unnatural. But I'll keep listening, and keep trying to beat the pressure.
I didn't eat enough yesterday (I was busy in the shop), and though I had some food close to bedtime, I slept badly and ended up awake around 5. By 5:45 I went downstairs and grabbed one of the bland granola bars... I surprised myself by wolfing it. Fifteen minutes later I was no longer sweating with cold feet, I was just warm, and I fell back to sleep for a few hours. I was still very hungry when I woke.
I'm trying to catch up today. Fortunately, a Superbowl party is really just sitting around and snacking with friends, so as long as I bring enough stuff that I can eat, I should be just fine.
I weighed myself again this morning. My weight varies from day to day, but it appears to have stabilized at about 106.4, one to one and a half kilos more than when I started. A half kilo of that happened in the first day, when I suspect a bunch of the food went straight into glycogen storage in the liver. Something tells me that I might add one more, but that's about it -- the whole point is that I'm burning all these calories, so there shouldn't be a lot left over for storage.
Amy's doing the hesitant "Please, sir, may I have some more?" thing right now. I'm wracking my brain to find yet another food that sounds appealing, while assuring her that yes, we can have more. It may be a while before I lose the cringing behavior. (Sometimes I find myself hunkering over my food like an animal who's worried someone else is going to snatch it.)
What all this reminds me of most is when Seanan enrolled in Weight Watchers to lose some of her excess weight, and discovered that she wasn't making the *minimum* points for each day, not by a long shot. Once she started eating more, a lot of the weight just vanished. She felt weird when doing check-ins with her group, stating that she was eating at least X amount every day, but she ended up much healthier. (She had never been taught how to eat, and with a druggie single mom who didn't shop regularly, ended up with views like eating a can of peas and a pack of saltines was enough for the day.)
I feel weird too, but I feel so much better that I'm battling the "this much food can't be healthy" narrative with determination. The norms our society has formed around food are so self-conscious it's hard for me to break out of the conventional wisdom of "less is more". Even the foodies making things like bacon-wrapped deep-fried turkey are presenting their efforts as acts of conspicuous consumption, defiant excesses; that just reinforces the narrative that one really shouldn't eat that much food/bacon/fat/meat. I spent a long time gravitating toward a generally low-carb lifestyle, and eating this many carbs feels unnatural. But I'll keep listening, and keep trying to beat the pressure.
