Saturday, April 18, 2009
Fighting demons
Dear Food Diary,
Yes, I tried. And didn’t do so well. And tried again. And didn’t do so well. And now I’m paying the price and am back on the wagon.
Thursday actually started out as a better day: Tea. Water. Lite matzah with cheese. (OK, so that wasn’t so great, but the matzah was “lite”!) More tea. More water. A half-cup of cabbage/beef/tomato sauce mixture. A half-cup frozen cherries, zipped with a splash of almond milk with the Bamix. A little later, sauteed a cup of mixed seafood and a quarter-cup of green beans before heading out to the gym. At the gym, I realized that the entire day, I’d been anxious. Don’t know where it came from - could have been the deadlines, the work stress, the home stress, a combination of all three - who knows, but by the time I had finished my cardio and was somewhere between the first and second set, all I wanted to do was cry. And not just a little cry, but a big, break-down-and-weep like there’s no tomorrow cry. Of course, a gym isn’t really the place to have a melt-down, and it would have freaked out my trainer completely. So with a little pep talk from him about centering and going to my happy place, I managed to soldier through the workout, figuring that I’d sit in the car later and let it all out. But then I finished my workout and realized that I needed to get back home for the strata council meeting, so didn’t have any time for me, to process my stuff and my feelings.
I headed home, and was intercepted by my neighbour, who was also heading to the council meeting. She reminded me that they were serving food before the meeting; it’s standard procedure. I followed her to the meeting, mentally willing myself to be strong and not touch the food. You can imagine how long that lasted. I helped get out the cutlery and so on, and sat down, but the isolation feeling started to happen, and I could sense that the teary feeling was threatening to well up and spill over. So I took a plate and got some food. As far as choices went, I did the best I could, but it was Canadian-Chinese food, all with starch-and-sugar-laden sauces, and breading and coatings. Despite ignoring the rice and noodles, I knew, even as I was selecting bits and pieces for my plate, that I was being counter-productive. I deluded myself into thinking that, though I wouldn’t lose any weight, I would simply stay the same weight for a day.
What makes it so hard for me to stay away from food in group settings? It goes back a long ways, and the scars run deep. When I was a kid, I was the one at school who stood in the hallway during the national anthem, and didn’t celebrate any - and I mean ANY - of the holidays. No Christmas, no Hallowe’en, no St. Patrick’s Day, no Valentine’s Day, no birthdays. I was made to separate myself from the other kids in the school, particularly around holiday celebrations. So would come the day of a classroom celebration, and I’m sitting in the back of the class, unable to join in while everyone else played games, sang songs, and enjoyed the inevitable feast that accumulated from the collective class contributions. Now, I was an awkward kid anyhow - artsy, geeky, and smart - but this added social distance perpetuated by my mother’s misguided Christian fundamentalist religion was a sure-fire way to malsocialize a child. And the other kids - well, it was in the 60s, in the country, and let’s just say that a lot of them didn’t come from the most sophisticated of stock - were allowed by the teachers to torment me well beyond my tolerance levels. Bullying wasn’t a taboo, as it is now, and the teachers really didn’t have a lot of interest or patience for an awkward kid of a whacky religion. So the torment went unchecked, and I spent the next three decades getting horridly triggered. Triggered by “don’t touch the food when everyone else can” compounded with “being the outsider amongst the insiders”. Hate it, hate it, hate it. And I have managed to shrug it off, mostly. I attended a friend’s birthday party a few weeks ago and managed to avoid everything but a some veggie sticks and a bottle of sparkling water, while everyone around me indulged in pastry-wrapped savory appetizers and chocolate desserts. But every so often, my vulnerability gets the better of me and I succumb. And what made me kick myself was that on Thursday, the food wasn’t even worth it!
Net effect: Up 2 lbs. and now beating up on myself for not being stronger. I know that white-knuckle dieting doesn’t work in the long run, but sometimes I just have to dig in and white-knuckle it to make it through the day.