Can Eating Be More Than Just Eating?

Some time ago, I bought a little set of cards called "Present Moment Wonderful Moment" by Thich Nhat Hanh that can be used for meditation and pondering our daily lives. Along with the cards was a little book where he expands a little bit on each of the verses. I picked a card this weekend that really touched me and helped me see how eating can be a gift not only to myself but to others. Here is the verse:

With the first taste, I offer joy.
With the second, I help relieve the suffering of others.
With the third, I see others' joy as my own.
With the fourth, I learn the way of letting go.

Here is part of what he wrote about this: "Eating can be very joyful. I smile at it, put it in my mouth, and chew it with complete awareness of what I am eating - mindfulness is always mindfulness of something - and I chew my food in such a way that life, joy, solidity and non-fear become possible. After twenty minutes of eating, I feel nourished, not only physically, but also mentally and spiritually. This is a very deep practice."

I am only now starting to arrive at a point where I can pause before I start eating to become aware of my food. I have written down these verses and propped them by my eating space and will endeavor to find that moment to pause, so that my eating can be a gift to others as well as to myself.

Someone is Feeding on Your Anger

It's probably trite to quote from popular songs, but I got the new Sheryl Crow CD yesterday and here is this line in one of the songs that really struck me. It really got me to thinking about all the times when I have been angry about something small - not anger at injustice or genocide or unfairness or abuse - but piddly stuff like who left a dirty fork in the sink and so on. And so - who or what does feed on that anger? It's insidious. Also this: was that anger part of what I was feeding myself when I ate and ate and ate in my past life? And what do we do with our anger then - for the big stuff, we have to take action of some sort, pick your method, voting, monetary support for charity, writing letters, whatever you can do. For the little stuff, hmmm, my nemesis? Let it go then?

Part of what I think may be an answer for me - my daily gratitudes, which I do in my personal journal. When I started doing that last fall, it was in response to an article by Joanna Macy I read in Shambala Sun. Here's a link to my original post about this: link. Having a discipline of frequently expressing gratitude is a way of rejecting the mindset of feeling inadequate or not good enough because it forces us to look at the present and to see more than just the doom and gloom of our everyday tribulations. Sometimes it's hard work, but I find that if there is something that is troubling me or that I find irritating, that is where I can best point my gratitude that day.


Yesterday, I realized that I was angry about my work and how annoying it all was and that I didn't get to go to the gym at lunch because of a falsely generated sense of "urgency". But in the grand scheme of things where people are starving and towns are flooding, this is minor, very minor. So what was I feeding with my anger about my work?

Gratitude of the Day: I am grateful for having the means to pay for a gym membership. I am grateful for pop stars who sometimes sing something wise that penetrates the fog.

Emotional Eating - What are You Feeling?

In a conversation I had with a fellow overeater some time ago, we got to talking about emotional eating. She said a very interesting thing, which was that she had no idea what emotions she was feeling when she starting in on overeating or eating when she wasn't hungry, she just knew she wasn't very happy and wanted to eat something to make herself feel better. That comment has stuck in the back of my mind for all this time, and I thought I would see if I could offer up some choices. Of course there are a million different web sites out there that have lists of emotions, but here's one more such list. If you're not sure what you're feeling, is it one of these? Acceptance, Affection, Aggravation, Agitation, Agony, Alarm, Alienation, Amusement, Anger, Anguish, Annoyance, Anticipation, Anxiety, Apprehension, Arousal, Attraction, Aversion, Bitterness, Bliss, Boredom, Caring, Cheerfulness, Compassion, Contempt, Contentment, Courage, Defeat, Dejection, Delight, Depression, Deprivation, Desire, Despair, Disappointment, Disgust, Dislike, Dismay, Displeasure, Distress, Dread, Eagerness, Ecstasy, Elation, Embarassment, Enjoyment, Enthusiasm, Envy, Euphoria, Exasperation, Excitement, Fear, Ferocity, Fondness, Fright, Frustration, Fury, Gladness, Glee, Gloom, Glumness, Grief, Grouchiness, Grumpiness, Guilt, Happiness, Hate, Homesickness, Hope, Hopelessness, Horror, Hostility, Humiliation, Hurt, Hysteria, Infatuation, Insecurity, Insult, Interest, Irritation, Isolation, Jealousy, Joy, Jubilation, Liking, Loathing, Loneliness, Longing, Love, Melancholy, Misery, Mortification, Neglect, Nervousness, Optimism, Outrage, Panic, Passion, Pity, Pleasure, Pride, Rage, Rapture, Regret, Rejection, Relief, Remorse, Resentment , Revulsion, Sadness, Satisfaction, Scorn, Sentimentality, Shame, Shock, Shyness, Sorrow, Spite, Suffering, Surprise, Sympathy, Tenderness, Tenseness, Terror, Thrill, Torment, Triumph, Uneasiness, Vengefulness, Wonder, Worry Some of my favorite choices for emotional eating: boredom, worry, melancholy, longing, loneliness, shyness. It intrigues me somewhat that for me, the more pleasant emotions didn't make my favorites list, although I can certainly see that for some it could work that way, for example, overeating while having fun at a party.

Heh Heh Sometimes Praying Horse Has Fun

Or: Bovinus Mortimus, I Hardly Knew Ye

How Much Did I Actually Eat Before?

I weighed 278 pounds when I made my decision to change – I must have been eating millions of calories a day, right? Out of curiosity I thought I would plug in the numbers to see how many calories it actually was.

Interesting. Turned out to be 2300 calories a day to maintain that weight at my age and height. Guess how much I’m eating now, approximately? About 2000 – 2100. Not that much of a difference really when you look at it from a daily maintenance perspective.

However, I wasn’t exercising at all and I ate a lot of sugary and just generally unhealthy stuff. And even now, if I weren’t exercising a fair amount almost every day both on the treadmill and at the gym lifting weights or going out hiking, my maintenance calories would be just under 1600 per day.

More numbers – how many extra calories did I eat to gain all that weight? I know that somewhere in 1994 or so, I weighed 155 pounds. So I gained 123 pounds in 12 years. Supposedly, you have to eat an extra 3500 calories to gain a pound (and restrict by the same amount to lose one). So I ate 430,500 extra calories to do that, in 4380 days. That’s something slightly more than 98 extra calories a day on average.

To me this just highlights the need to vigilance and care. I already know that I have a propensity for gaining weight, and I have a lot of fat cells that are just waiting for some extra calories to show up so they can grab onto it and store it.

So now, in order to maintain, I know that I must

1. Pay attention to what I eat. This is why, even though it may seem obsessive, I still count and log my calories. It keeps me honest because I love food so much it would be ridiculously easy to start justifying overeating again. And the food I eat is as healthy as I can make it, with only the occasional straying off the path for a gooey treat.
   
2. Get as much exercise I can in a healthy, safe and fun way. I have a desk job where I sit on my butt all day, so I have to stay focused and dedicated to this. If I don’t exercise, I have to restrict my calories down to my estimated maintenance level.
   
3. Weigh myself on a regular basis. Again, I personally consider this a key factor in my own maintenance because it makes it impossible to lie to myself. It’s a number and it keeps things objective.

Metabolism and You: Some Numbers

BMR: something interesting I’ve learned about metabolism while trundling along my weight loss journey. There are various methods of calculating what your metabolism is probably doing if you can’t afford or don’t want to go through lengthy or costly metabolic testing.

Here’s the idea – you want to know approximately how many calories you burn on any given day by taking your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) and adding in your typical activity level. Once you have a pretty good idea of that, you can figure out how much of a caloric deficit you want to create by eating somewhat fewer calories than your total burn. A calorie deficit means that you are setting the stage for weight loss. If you don’t want to lose weight, but instead maintain your current weight, you’ll want to eat around the same calories as you burn.

The BMR calculation produces a number that tells you how many calories you would burn if you did nothing but stay in bed and breathe all day – no activity at all, just how many calories you would need to continue existing. There are a number of calculations and online calculators, and I’m sure each has its proponents, but suspect that for most of us they’re going to come up with numbers fairly similar.

You don’t want to eat fewer calories than your BMR because if you deprive yourself below BMR, your metabolism will slow down so that you burn less – a double edged sword for sure. This is where regular exercise – both strength training and cardio – can help, by increasing your BMR. Exercise also just makes you generally more healthy and fit and boosts your ability to burn energy.

Here’s a link for more info about BMR: Wikipedia Link. This BMR calculation uses metric measurements, so if you need them, here are some converters for pounds/kilograms and inches/centimeters: Pounds/Kilograms and Inches/Centimeters

This is the BMR calculation for women that I’ve used to calculate my own BMR, as an example. Figure out and plug in your own numbers to see what you’re burning.

655 + (9.6 x weight in kilograms) + (1.8 x height in centimeters) - (4.7 x age)

655 + (9.6 x 65.77089365) + (1.8 x 166.116) - (4.7 x 51)655 + 631.4005 + 299.0088 - 239.7 = 1345.7093 BMR

This weight in kilograms is 145 Centimeters is converted from 5' 5", age now 51

For men the calculation is somewhat different:
BMR = 66 + (13.7 x weight in kilograms) + (5 x height in centimeters) - (6.8 X age)

If I were male, my calculation would look like:
66+ (13.7 x 65.77089365) + (5 x 166.116) – (6.8 *51)66 + 901.061 + 830.58 – 346.8 = 1450.78 BMR

Using the multipliers for activity level:
1.2 multiplier for sedentary
1.375 multiplier for lightly active (light workout day)
1.55 multiplier for moderately active (probably a typical day for me)
1.725 multiplier for very active (if I really push it)

These are my estimates for burn at different activity levels:
Sedentary burn: 1615
Lightly active: 1850
Moderately active: 2086
Very active: 2321

And if you want to do it the easy way, here’s a link to an online BMR calculator.

What Do You Really Want? Maybe Not Food

Here is a great idea I read about recently for working with emotional eating.

As emotional eaters, a lot of our desire or desperation for food is really related to our desire for something else. For example, we feel lonely and reach for food to make us feel better. Our true desire here is for friendship or companionship or a loving relationship. Or we’re bored so we eat, but what we really want is some excitement or something to do that we find stimulating.

The idea is to make a list of what we really want in our life, five items or so. Write it down, memorize the list or carry it in our purse or wallet, and when we recognize that we want to eat when we’re not hungry or we’re overeating (ready to dive into a bag of cookies), we can look to our list of wants and see if what we really want is one of these items rather than food. If so, then rather than mindlessly eating or stuffing down our feelings with food, we can take some meaningful step toward meeting one of our goals or manifesting a true desire.

Here's my list as of today:

1. A strong muscular body and good health.
2. Financial stability with some level of security in knowing that I can retire comfortably.
3. A positive move to the ranch.
4. A loving relationship with my husband.
5. A creative outlet, or many creative outlets like writing, blogging, art work.
6. Close friends who can be trusted to support me and to whom I can offer support that is appreciated.
7. A method of generating income that is creative, interesting and fulfilling.