Yes, But Why Does It Have To Be So Invasive

A week ago last Friday, I finally gritted my teeth and went and got the recommended screening colonoscopy that "they" want everyone to get when we turn 50. Yes, I procrastinated a couple of years. And of course everything went well and I got a clean bill of health.

I have to admit that I was more apprehensive about the day of fasting that's required beforehand than I was about the actual procedure or other prep. I have convinced myself that I go a little nuts when really hungry but it seemed to go just fine. Maybe just knowing that I couldn't and that it just had to be done made it easier. Also it's just a day.

The other thing that I have noticed in the last week since then is that I get fuller faster - or I notice my fullness more. Or I don't enjoy being really full the way I have in the past. Now, I've been just eating an extra bowl of salad to achieve this lately but still there's a marked preference for fullness, which is a leftover from the old stuffer days of eating. I haven't really been working on eradicating that preference but now I'm thinking that there's a little crack in the armor. We'll see. I don't know if that happened because that day of required fasting flipped a switch somewhere (I'm NOT recommending fasting by the way unless you have to do it for something like this, mostly I think the fasting craze a BS weight loss fad.) Maybe it's just because it took a while for my digestion to get back to normal and I'll go back to it? I think what I'll do, as an experiment, is to see if I can hold off on satisfying the urge for getting very full, even if it is just with lettuce and cucumbers that I do it with.

Ladybug Butts and Hunger

I've moved on from New Rules of Lifting for Women and am now working the original New Rules of Lifting programs, by the same authors. Anyway, I'm in one of the fat loss programs, which boils down to doing relatively high reps and short rest periods during the workouts. Also, keeping a slight calorie deficit, because really, if you don't do that there is no fat loss. So I'm feeling a little hungrier the last couple of weeks, the prospect of which caused my husband, the Dinosaur, when I told him about it and said we'll see if I can stand it, to inquire whether he would be able to. Ha! There are only four more weeks, she said through gritted teeth.

But of course, with being somewhat more peckish on a daily basis, comes the usual dealing with the mental and emotional issues of eating. Here is an example of some of the food-related BS my brain comes up with sometimes. After supper the other night, with a nicely full/satiated stomach, some needy part of me was insisting that I "had to have" a bowl of cereal. Not just a little bowl - a big full bowl of it. Excuse me? And where would that fit exactly into the aforementioned Full Stomach? Somehow the earth continued spinning on its axis when I passed on that suggestion and drank some tea instead.

Of Course We're Addicted to Food, We Have to Eat

I continue to think about hunger, having just come off a week of recovering from food poisoning (bad hummus, I think), of which two days found me with No Hunger at all. I then had a couple more days of very low hunger levels and found it really hard to eat much of anything and now, well it's all back to normal with me wanting to eat more than I really should.

Let me digress here by saying that during the initial throes of this thing I lost five pounds in three days, even though I did my best to stay hydrated. One of my friends called it Dr. P. Horse's Shit-a-Lot Miracle Diet, but that's really really cynical, just sayin'. My husband wasn't the least bit surprised, but he's always been aware how full of it I really am.

Back to the hunger conundrum. I realized that I was kind of liking not having the hunger drumming at me all the time and was complaining in my journal the day it all came back to normal about how I had been hoping that maybe this had finally broken the back of the addictive quality of hunger. And how disappointed I was that no, it hadn't.

I was on walkabout today, fiddling with my new camera (like the lock photo?), and thinking about Stuff and came to the earthshattering conclusion that we're supposed to get hungry. It should bother us, at least enough to get us to go scrounge around for some grub. Duh, because otherwise, we wouldn't bother to eat and as a survival tactic that's pretty lousy. Call me a slow learner.

Not that stuffing food till overfull and using it as a drug is a good way to go either. It's just that hunger itself isn't the enemy.

The Mystery of Hunger

The last week or so has been a state of wonderment about the mysteries of hunger, especially "real" hunger, the kind that's related to how much food is or is not in your stomach at a given moment. It never ceases to amaze me how variable my hunger levels are from one day to the next.

For example, some days, I wake up hungry and stay hungry all day and it seems I never quite reach satisfaction. One day week before last, my stomach was growling impatiently about 5 seconds after I got out of bed and I still had my hour on the treadmill ahead of me. Down girl! And I could definitely tell it wasn't just "want to eat", it was the real hunger deal.

Other days, the same amount of food overstuffs me. Last Thursday, I went through a not-hungry day yesterday. My breakfast filled me up and I pretty much stayed full all day, I ate some lunch, but didn't want to eat all of it (alert the media!). At supper, I got full right away and didn't finish it. I'm not doing anything different really from one day to the next. It's curious.

Of course, maybe it's always like this and I just never knew it. The fact is that the way I got so heavy to start with was because I ate a lot and never really let my tank get empty and didn't know what stomach hunger feels like. The whole time I was losing weight, I was pretty much a little bit hungry all the time, but that was deliberate and expected. Now that I've reached my goal weight and I'm working on maintaining it, paying attention to hunger cues and keying into what is going to be most satisfying and healthy is a bit of a learning curve.

For example, I was ruminating the other night about the old days of how I used to eat. Actually I was feeling a little sorry for myself about the fact that I couldn't eat as much of my pasta dinner as I wanted, which was just so tasty. And I got to remembering how "nice" it was when I could just eat as much as I wanted whenever I wanted and how I was always full and all. So after spending about 30 seconds in that thought pattern, called bulls**t on myself, because when I really remembered those feelings, it wasn't just full it was overfull and also full of shame. It couldn't have been that satisfying - otherwise I wouldn't have had to keep doing it over and over again.

So again, it still comes down to taking the time to prepare savory and tasty meals and focus on them as I am eating them so that I don't fall into the mindset of feeling deprived. I know what the healthy and appropriate quantities are, if only I listen to my stomach and its level of fullness at any given moment