Ear Infections and Obesity Study

Did you read that news blurb about a new study that links a history of ear infections with obesity? As someone who did have many ear infections as a child and as an adult, and in fact had to have surgery to remove a cholesteatoma from my right ear, almost certainly as a result of a not fully-healed ear infection, I was intrigued by it, and did a little more digging. Quoting from a UPI article about these findings: "In one study, 6,584 people ages 16 to 92 responded to a series of health questions that determined their history of middle ear infections and their body mass index. The findings showed that those with a moderate to severe history of otitis media were 62 percent more likely to be obese." It all has to do with ear infections causing damage to the taste-sensing nerves which correlates to an individual then having a more pronounced taste preference for fatty and sweet foods. There also seems to be a correlation to increased obesity in children who had tonsillectomies. (I did.)

Fascinating. Obviously, we're all ultimately responsible for deciding what goes into our mouths, regardless of what our taste preferences are. But it is nice to know that maybe there are factors that make it just that much more likely to go down one path instead of another.

Perfect causation? Of course not. For me, it just underlines the requirement for me to remain devoted to healthy eating and exercise for the rest of my life. And that's OK, better than OK even.

Confronting Fear, Thoughts about Meaning

Goodness, it certainly has been a while since I've written a post for Praying Horse, I'm in the middle of writing a humongous document/manual at work (darn those paying jobs!) and haven't done much other writing besides my own daily journal.

(Pig picture from Project Gutenberg.)

I did write about a recent experience with confronting nature in all her awe-inspiring majesty, which ended up scaring the pants off me, during two close encounters with wild pigs. Obviously, everything came out OK, but what I've found fascinating is examining the stark contrast in the fear I felt while retreating from the pigs and the sort of undefined nervousness, or as one of my friends calls it, the "vague medium of anxiety", that I have experienced in the past on a frequent basis. I get it, that's what adrenaline is for, not for getting worked up about what someone else thinks about you, or whether your child is getting a B instead of an A in first grade, or whatever the issue du jour is. I'm starting to pause now when I get that quivery feeling - is this a wild pig, or is it a gruntin' ground squirrel? By no means have I sorted all of this out yet.

People I've talked to about it have said that I'm brave for going on hikes alone. Well, not really. It's just a walk, sometimes my husband doesn't want to go with me. I'm not going to stop doing walking just because he has something else to do. I'm also not going to start carrying firearms, as at least one person suggested. I will avoid the area where I saw them last however.

Also, I'm going to tell a story on myself here that for a few days after Pigapalooza II, I tried to figure out if there was some additional deeper meaning to it. I looked up wild pigs as totem animals. Etc etc.

This last weekend, I found a wonderful article in Tricycle Magazine, actually from the Spring 2007 issue, which we just received as part of our welcome for subscribing to the magazine, that more or less got me to pause a bit and wonder if I weren't indulging in the practice of Taking Myself Too Seriously. This is from an article by Lin Jensen entitled Wash Your Bowl: "To attribute meaning to an event or to a lifetime of events is an expression of dissatisfaction with things as they are. This is true of even the subtlest attribution. If I wash dishes as a practice in Zen mindfulness, I indulge my resistance to simply washing them in order to get them clean. I want the washing to be something more than what it is, and so I give it spiritual significance. I want my life to have meaning, and so I complain to myself and sometimes to others if what I do and what I am appears meaningless. Well, our lives are meaningless if we take meaning for a coherent narrative plot of some sort. When we strain to make our lives otherwise, we're merely telling ourselves a story. You and I don't manifest in the universe as meaning, we manifest as living human beings. We're not here to represent something else. We're here in our own right. A human being, or a garden hoe for that matter, is complete in itself."

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

The Book "The Rules of Normal Eating"

The book The Rules of “Normal” Eating by Karen R. Koenig, is another very useful resource for those of us who want to change our attitudes about food. The author also has a great blog that is aimed at both over- and under-eaters and all of us who have surrendered in the past to emotional eating. Typically I would run for cover when confronted with a book that used the words “rules” and “normal” in the title, but I was so impressed with her blog posts that I took the plunge and read the book.

Her advice is similar in many respects to what can be found in the book “Intuitive Eating”, which I wrote about here. The main thrust of "Rules" is that there are certain behaviors in which people who are normal eaters engage, and those behaviors are different from how an over- or under-eater approaches food.

To cut to the chase, the normal behaviors are (quoting from her book):

1. Eat when you are hungry or have a craving for a specific food.
2. Choose foods that you believe will satisfy you.
3. Stay connected to your body and eat with awareness and enjoyment.
4. Stop eating when you are full or satisfied.

She offers a series of exercises and suggestions for how to understand our level of hunger at a given moment, how to pick the foods that we find satisfying, feeling our fullness and satisfaction levels with a given eating situation and how to stay aware of our body and what we are eating.

In addition, the book stresses that emotional eating is rooted in our inability to tolerate pain and discomfort. She exhorts us to “learn to tolerate discomfort around food and let your mind and body respond authentically.” Since we’ve used food as a way of comforting ourselves and soothing our pains, be they emotional or physical, to heal that not-normal relationship with it, we will quickly run head on into the necessity of dealing with whatever emotions we were trying to deny/suppress/soothe with the food. We are going to have to dig into our beliefs about ourselves – our fears, our pain, our yearnings and our joys. The process can be joyful when your curiosity becomes engaged and you are starting to figure out what is truly satisfying and actually finding ways to create satisfaction, and not just with food.

I know full well that I have not yet achieved what could be considered “normal” eating, but I’m getting there. I still feel obsessed somewhat with food and eating and weight, and to some extent, feel discomfort about it all. However, at this point, there seem to be fewer hidden corners in my attitudes about food and since I’ve gotten to a point of awareness about my thought patterns regarding eating, I can call bulls**t on myself sooner rather than later. Mostly.

One of the most awesome pieces of advice in this book that I have been working on lately is paying attention to what we want to eat - whether it's a craving or just something that seems like it would be good. I had an couple of days last week where I was extra hungry (no, not hormonally induced, I'm pretty much too old for that) and I really had to sit down and figure out what it was that would scratch the itch. Turned out that a couple of tablespoons of almond butter fit the bill - a little protein, a little healthy fat, not too many calories and yet, so delicious. This weekend, since I have the house to myself, I discovered that I wanted the same thing for supper two nights in a row - pita pizza - and so I had that. It felt good and tasted awesome.

Do Horses Pray, or why Praying Horse?

I don't know if horses pray, but they certainly do have their heads bowed a lot! Except I'm pretty sure they're eating, not praying.

The reason for this particular post is to explain why I use the name Praying Horse. It is all based on a tattoo I gave myself for my fortieth birthday (fine, that would be 12 years ago) of a naked woman on horseback praying to the moon. I got it during a time when I was recovering from a relatively nasty horse wreck, i.e. I fell off and it hurt for a long time after, and wanted to celebrate my forgiveness for both the pain and the horse who tossed me off.

The image of has thus far resisted being captured via photograph but perhaps someday if I ask nicely enough, the pair will grace this page.

Food Reinforcement Genetically Related to Obesity?

I’m going to be writing about a book I’ve finished about normal eating, but while reviewing a blog post by the author of that book, I found a reference to something that gave me an ah ha! moment. She referred to a study that found a genetic component to the strong urges some of us have to overeat that may make eating more rewarding to those who have this component. (By the way, her post calls it a willpower gene, which I would have never used because I think there's will and there's willpower and they aren't the same thing, but that's for another post.)

Here is a quote from the first paragraph of the published article: “Eating is a highly reinforcing activity, and there are individual differences in the reinforcing efficacy of food that may relate to differences in eating and energy intake. In the same way that the reinforcing efficacy of a drug is related to drug consumption, subjects who find food highly reinforcing may consume more energy in an ad libitum eating situation than those who are low in food reinforcement.” Further, “ The reinforcing value of food is related to activity of the dopaminergic system. Food consumption increases brain dopamine levels in animals and humans.”

Evidently, this study found that those who find food highly rewarding tend to have a particular genotype. And typically, this means that they would be more interested in and more motivated to eat, and would then eat more.

If I were to guess, I would say that I have this gene. My husband and I are a classic example of the dichotomy between those who live to eat and those who eat to live. I, of course, live to eat. I love food, I love to think about it, talk about it, cook it and eat it. My husband is not like that – he eats to live. Oh, he likes food and enjoys the good taste and all and has his favorites, but if he’s not hungry he could care less and spends no time thinking about eating.

Not only that but given my family history of alcoholism and other addictive and obsessive behavior patterns, makes me inclined to think that this is a possibility. Am I grasping at straws to explain my own poor behavior related to eating? Maybe so. On the other hand, knowing that there may be genetics behind the problem takes the pressure off feeling like such a “failure” all those years for being fat. One of the biggest factors in my weight loss was in successfully (for the most part) getting a grasp of the emotional aspects of using food to soothe upsets and depression. Another big factor in conquering the overeating urge was exercise – because, of course, it turns on the endorphins, and makes you feel good. Just one more reason to get off our butts and go Do Something!

Note: the strawberry has nothing to do with the content of this post, it's just that I bought a new digital camera, I'm learning how to use it, and I'm imposing the results on you, lucky reader.