One of the issues with my recovery from the hysterectomy is I was warned to not drive for three weeks after the surgery. As my abdominal wall heals, I could be unable to hit the brakes with any force in an emergency. Also, something I'm cognizant of only in retrospect is how stunned I was left by the anesthetic of major surgery, as well as the four days of post op morphine. I would have been a menace! So, I still have another week where I am relying on Fuzz and friends for transport.
I was getting a lift downtown from a friend after we attended an Overeaters Anonymous meeting yesterday morning. She had to make a deposit at the bank and we were waiting in a line for a drive through ATM. "Geez, I feel like I'm at McDonald's" she said, with a shiver. Drive-thrus come up frequently with us compulsive overeater types. Next to delivery, they are a great way to have a binge without exposing ourselves to public scrutiny, and we often pretend that we are ordering for our huge extended family, as opposed to our huge extending selves.
Sorry, that was a bit of black humour to mask the real pain and insanity of this disease. I used to do it --- one of my favorite tricks was to buy a little at each of three different drive thrus in one afternoon---but I rarely do a drive thru for anything but the bank any more. No, wait, Fuzz and I would go to the Dairy Queen a couple of times a week for a soft ice cream last summer. I hear rumours that Starbucks may be opening one near me soon, but what's the point of sitting in line forever while someone in front of me orders their triple- grande-nonfat-but-with-whip-cinnamon-dolce-latte? Oh, wait, that's me.
Yesterday in the car I started to laugh, and said to my friend "Imagine, if we could go through the fast food drive thru and deposit the food!" How about one day a month, I could go through Tim Hortons and pelt them with a percentage of all those donuts I inhaled, or give McWhacko's back all those triple cheeseburgers on styrofoam buns? Completely impractical, but oh so catharctic.
I found this picture in a New York Times Style Magazine
Women's Fashion feature. Just when I thought that we had finished with the Heroin Chic, we get this. Just Too Scary.
I have a friend Monique (not her real name) who has been in Overeaters Anonymous just a little bit longer than I, over 3 years. She is around 50, with a quiet yet enjoyably subversive sense of humour, which is probably why we get along so well. She was speaking at the 1 year “birthday” of another member last week. Fuzz brought me to the celebration, one of my first outings after my operation. My concentration was not so great because I couldn’t quite get comfortable in my chair, but one thing Monique said still sticks in my head. She said, “I can now have boundaries in my relationships, and I have boundaries in my food”.
Boundaries in relationships are so hard for me. I didn’t learn good ways to open up to people and yet keep myself safe. In my family, people didn’t have relationships, they took hostages. When I got into a relationship, I made myself a sacrifice to that relationship. My brain and needs went out the window. Generally, I would throw myself out into the world as much as I could stand in my best imitation of an extrovert, and then retreat and protect myself from all those scary people and feelings with a nice security blanket of food. Recently, I’ve been trying to change that pattern by working those 12 steps they talk about in all those programs, examining my behaviour in relationships. At the same time, I’ve had to develop healthy boundaries with my food.
For instance, cheese. I used to have a thing for cheese. It would call my name from its little chamber in the refrigerator. My parents always had a special cheese drawer in the fridge, it was so special, it needed its own throne room, the royalty of the refrigerator. Even the processed slices seemed special, in their little individual wrappings, handy for eating right from my hand, or plunking between buttered white bread for the ultimate in creamy, bland comfort. Ever notice the similarity between a cheese sandwich on white bread and a cozy, protective made bed? (Any doubt as to my sanity just went out the window, didn’t it?) Anything in blocks was lovingly shaved off in thin thin slices, again, and again, and again until a half pound would disappear in the space of an afternoon.
Because it was so tempting, I rarely bought cheese after starting OA, unless I had it planned for a special dish. It just seemed like more trouble than I needed. Then last December, I bought a panini press, and panini sandwiches seem to demand a bit of cheese to get kind of melty with other savoury ingredients. So I thought, hmm... would it be ok to have a little cheese in the house for it? Fuzz, being a normal eater, would enjoy it, but not devour the whole block.
Ok. Well... if I were to buy the cheese, what would keep it safer? How about some boundaries? Fence off the cheese? How about, I can have a measured amount, and only as part of a meal as opposed to for snacks? I tried it last week, bought a small block of very old cheddar and tried a ham sandwich with a scant 15 grams (about a half ounce) of the cheddar. It made a fine sandwich on some grainy bread with some hot mustard, and it seemed to work.
Weighing may seem extreme to some people, but for me, it’s the boundary that works. Just as I can have pasta if I measure it. I love pasta, but it’s too easy to go overboard on. If I can say, ok, I’m having 375 ml of spaghetti tonight, then the hard work is over, that’s the boundary drawn. Now, I’m not perfect about this. I often have an extra nibble while cooking, but I don’t sweat the nibble. I don’t need perfectionism to take over here. People nibble, as long as it doesn’t become an extra meal, it’s all right for me. But I'm not nibbling on the cheese. Thank God, I'm not a mouse!
That’s where I am today.
It's true. So much of my life was spent in a difficult search for clothing that fit. Not to mention finding anything over size 14 that didn't make me look like an old school Italian widow was impossible. I was resorting to wearing men's XXXL t-shirts and pants for much of my clothing. By the mid nineties, it was getting easier, as someone finally seemed to be listening, maybe because there were more and more heavy people screaming for clothes. But it was still so limited, especially here in Canada.
Excuse me for a flash of anger: I remember shopping with a friend and being utterly bored out of my tree. She didn't seem to understand why. Why????? Imagine being in a clothing store and not one single item in that store would fit me. Scarves don't count, and I was never very good at them, despite the fact that many heavy women use them as creative camouflage. They became devious snakes when I put them on, always twisting themselves into unflattering nooses or slithering away on me.
So when I moved to NYC in 1999 and found Lane Bryant, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say I was ecstatic. It was cheap, befitting the budget of an art student, came in colors and cool patterns and they had jeans that could fit and say, yeah, I'm big, and I'm gonna flaunt those curves, baby! They even had lingerie in hot colors! Race seemed to enter into this equation: I noticed that a large portion of the clientele were black. I also realized that men who were giving me "hi there" looks or little flirty comments on the street were black. In the interest of being clear, I should note that I was down from my top weight while I was living in New York, and ranged between a size 18 and 22, and felt less self conscious about being out in public.
Once I went below size 14 I couldn't shop at LB any more. I felt a bit rootless, as if I had lost a dependable friend. Of course, now I can, as Frances Kuffel says, "pass for thin" and go into most any clothing store and find something that fits. Yeesh, I can even buy clothes at Costco, one of the most unyielding, unforgiving, one-size-sort-of-fits-only-the-average-but-its-cheap-so-shut-up retailers in existence.
Oh mercy!! It just struck me: Costco is my Lane Bryant now. My brain hurts.
Ok, I should be showering, so I'll make this quick. Regular writing is one of the pluses of this convalescence, but Fuzz has offered to drive me to my community choir rehearsal tonight to help with my boredom. I can sit and sing only as much as I feel up to.
Sheila brought up a good point in her comment on Whew. Overeating is sanctioned, unless it makes you gain weight, and that's why so many become bulimic (overeating usually in secret and then doing something to oneself to "get rid of" the food, by purging or abusing laxitives, or fasting for a long period), and that's a whole other thread I'd like to get into some time. It was quite a revelation when I discovered just how much I had in common with bulimics and anorexics, and indeed have exhibited many of those behaviours at one time or another. It was just always less frequent than the bingeing or overeating so for years it never entered my mind that that might be what I was doing.
Now, I don't know if it actually happens as much as I think, as I am convinced the world revolves around me, but it seems that when you are overweight, people scruitize everything you eat in public or even put on the conveyor belt at the grocery. Around the age of 10, I vaguely remember my mother, in some irritation, telling me to stop eating while her family visited. I was surprised, because I didn't think I was eating differently than usual, but whether or not she meant it, I got the message there was something to be ashamed of. I was already learning the dieting dance by that age, so I knew to be ashamed of my appearence.
When I was an adult, I could do things like closet eating, and even go to the extent of creating stories like "Oh yeah, I'm buying these bags of cookies, a litre of ice cream and bucket of fried chicken because my family of 6 is having a party" when I was actually going home to eat as much as I could before Fuzz came home... I know a guy through OA NYC who says he'd rotate his evening purchases through local delis and tried to give the clerks the impression that he was a party planner for adolescents!
Honest, I don't know how many times I went through drive-thrus doing an act of ordering a couple of meals or a dozen donuts, making it sound like I was trying to remember what a bunch of people had told me to buy. In reality, the clerks probably could care less, and if they didn't, why do we care anyway? Oh, that is an interesting aspect of our problem, actually... no, I'll write about that, later, later.
Ok, ok, I'm feeling pain!
Just enough when I get up to say, "that 20 minute walk was a little too much". Uncle!
Guess I'll just have to sit in bed with the laptop and coffee. Alas! Another day without dusting! What shall I do? Oh, the agony! Actually, if I want agony, all I have to do is try to decipher my Corel Painter 9 programme.
Oooh, wonder if there is anything new on stuffonmycat?...
This not driving stuff is a drag. I've got just under 2 weeks of that left, and I'm getting progressively more bored, but soon I think I'll feel strong enough to actually go in to town with Fuzz in the morning and be able to spend time hanging out and get to a meeting or lunch with a friend, blog at starbucks, stuff like that.
I spent 20 minutes walking at a gentle pace (around 3 kph or 2 mph) on my treadmill tonight. After that, my abdominal muscles felt as if they were being pulled up by some invisible puppetmaster. But I was less light headed than I had been after only 10 minutes, 2 days ago. I lay down on the couch with an ice pack on my tum and watched a sitcom, and when that was finished, I rose from the couch with nary a thought for my abs, they were aching that little even if my lower tum's still pretty puffy.
I got Fuzzboy to measure the incision along my bikini (ha!) line last night, it's about 19 cm (7 1/2 inches). Wow, that's long! Pretty respectable, in my humble opinion, that I feel this good 12 days after the hysterectomy.
But then, maybe I have a high pain threshold. I got an e-mail from a friend who I saw at the Saturday OA meeting who said I looked as if I was in some pain, which surprised me. True, I did a fair amount of squirming in my chair, just wasn't able to get completely comfortable and was feeling tentative about pulling something, so I moved gingerly. But I didn't think I was really in pain. Then I remembered that one of the residents in the hospital said to me I seemed to have a fairly high pain tolerance because I wasn't using much of my morphine pump. Compare the discomfort to some painful cramps I've suffered and that was a walk in the park!
I've read somewhere that addicts have a low tolerance for discomfort. I disagree with that. Some forms of discomfort, like physical pain and crazy behaviour in our families, we are too tolerant of for our own good, particularly women. But I think we are then vulnerable to overload and that's where we vent or seek comfort in manipulation of our eating.
Binge eating is much more socially acceptable than binge drinking, right? I was damned if I was going to be a drunk like my dad, but the other day it struck me that in my parents' home, the candy was kept in the same cabinet as the liquor!
Yesterday was my first outing since coming home from hospital a week ago. I got Fuzz to drive me to an Overeaters Anonymous 1 yr celebration and then we went out to lunch with some of the people from the meeting.
It still freaks me out a bit, going out to eat with people from my overeat disorder support group! I wonder if everyone is, like me, checking out what the others order? Likely, I should ask someone. Then Fuzz and I did some food shopping, but I opted for the motorized scooter the store provided because I was pretty tired by this point and just standing or walking slowly is surprisingly hard right now. It was good to have an OA event be my first time "out" - it is such a supportive atmosphere.
My stamina is pretty good for 10 days after abdominal surgery. I cooked some dinner (nothing elaborate) with very little pain and was able to forget for short periods that I was recovering. But then I would go, hmmm, time to sit down... still, that's a lot better than it was only a few days ago.
This morning I woke up, not exhausted like I thought I might be by my big day out, but feeling physically something close to normal with just a few extra aches and pains. I realized I was a little depressed. Sunday often depresses me. I realized how much a relief being sick over the past days has been. I had been given permission to be completely on a mental holiday, enforced by the pain killers and anaesthetic fogging my brain. It was no worries, be happy and stoned, just be, kind of like those little bunnies in Curse of the Ware Rabbit, my favorite movie this week. Hey, those bunnies too also eating machines albeit vegetarian ones... coincidence?
When I'm physically well, I feel deep shame that I can't control everything. No wonder I get into the food. I want to turn my brain off! Food is such a lovely relatively socially sanctioned pressure valve. Feeling stressed? An elegant dinner cooked or enjoyed at a restaurant. Also a cure for lonliness. Eat with a friend. No friend? The food can be my friend.
The obesity is just a symptom, it's not a disease on its own, but it can lead to other diseases and boy oh boy that killer shame.
Imagine, if I could just eat everything I want and not show it, I twould still be in the same crazy place, and I speculate that I would be dirt poor, having spent my last cent on food. Maybe even in jail. Take the fantasy to its logical conclusion.
I have this therapist. Much of the time he's a pain in the butt, but now he's been offered an appointment at a university in Calgary so I will miss him. It's a running joke with him how much his clients hate what he tells them but end up agreeing with him because he's right, and the thing he always seems to be parroting at me is the phrase "shame and control, shame and control" and I thnk that may be the key here. When I am sick I don't feel I have to control everything: my life, my loved one's life, that of my oa fellow sufferers (I got a call from one yesterday evening -- she was in pain and wanted to binge and I so badly wanted to FIX her!), and jeez everybody in the freakin world.
Yes, I am the center of the damn universe, get used to it. So when I'm physically sick, it's actually a relief from my fevered brain. I want to take a vacation from my it. That's where addictions come in so handy. How does one take a mental vacation healthily? Mediation? Ugh. That's so virtuous. Actually, and this makes me queasy just suggesting it because it sounds so pollyanna to me, but OA meetings often feel that way to me. Something to do with that feeling of being very understood by fellow sufferers. That terrible lonliness is relieved. And we even laugh at this shit, because it is so absurd and yet so true.
The trick is how does one find relief enough to have a life without becoming lost in the escape?
Here is my desk these days. As you can see, my capable assistant, Miss Boo, is vigilant about keeping my spot warm while I freshen up - note extra large coffee cup in the now empty cereal bowl. Apparently my appetite is back! When I settle back in, her job seems to be competing with the other laptop for space. For shame! We must get a king size bed so she's not so cramped! I used to have a labrador retriever, and I swear she took up less room than this 8 pound cat...
Recovery from the surgery continues slowly. Of course, I'm impatient. I'm bored and housebound, forbidden from doing any housework that requires lifting or sweeping. That about leaves folding laundry but not lifting the basket, dusting and who wants to dust in a half renovated house. I can't even start a fire in the woodstove. Logs are too heavy for another week or so. I have the concentration skills of a gnat. Crossword puzzles and solitaire just seem too hard. I've started this post 4 times only to go so far off topic I have to start over. I walked for 10 minutes and now I'm light headed. I feel like howling in frustration!
Rats. Scared the cat away. At least I can now unfold my legs. Of course, I'm hungry, but have resisted the siren call of the muffins.
Ever heard of HALT? OA acronym for
Hungry
Angry
Lonely
Tired
and I'm learning that when one or more of those are present, I'm in danger of eating something, or a quantity of food that won't be healthy for me. The harder thing is having the self awareness to "halt" and recognize that's what driving my hand to the fridge, or the steering wheel to McGreasy's. Of course we all want to eat when we are hungry. To me, the Hungry here is when I'm over-hungry, when I've put off a meal or a healthy snack for too long. I'm a diabetic in remission, and when I get too hungry, well... let's just say Fuzz keeps count of all his fingers to make sure I haven't gnawed one off.
The others are more subtle and require developing some habits to recognize. Writing helps. As I look back at my day I'm thinking, of course I'm lonely. Fuzz is at work. I've been talking to people on the phone, but I'm not allowed to drive for another 2 weeks, the gym and my running group are forbidden for another 5 weeks, and I have no friends within walking distance. I can't get to an OA meeting or even Starbucks, because it's all in another town. That's it, I've got to get out this weekend, if it kills me... or Fuzz, because like it or not, he's driving me.
There was another obesity study that came out this week from the Canadian Institute for Health Information, most of which could be filed in the "You Get Paid to Tell Us This?!?" file, but one bit was particularly relevant to me, the part which suggested that where you live can influence your physical activity levels. Basically, it suggested that people in urban centers got more exercise than rural and suburban dwellers.
My 10 minute walk today was done on my treadmill. It was primarily was because the weather was bad, but I have walked a lot around my small town, and while my small town is picturesque, there is very little here of interest for me to walk for. At least I live in a town that isn't a maze of suburbia and has sidewalks except, interestingly, the commercial corridor where all the grocery stores are located is a pedestrian wasteland. Apparently nobody is expected to stroll there for a head of broccoli, but the mega bag of doritos is much more accessible! Ever notice that suburban convenience stores, as opposed to urban delis or markets, have few vegetables? We're soon moving to a larger city where there will be places that I can walk or ride my bike to, or a city center where I can park and then walk around. I seem to have developed a dislike for malls, but I'm still a sucker for Costco.
Walking was one of the ways I started improving my health when I was twice this size. At the time it was the only exercise that didn't give me the creeps. When you're heavy, you have enough trouble keeping your head up in public, because people seem to go out of their way to mock you. Going to the gym was scary (gym class torture flashbacks) but walking I could do, particularly if it had a destination.
I lived in Brooklyn for a time and could walk most days over the Brooklyn Bridge to my grad school in Manhattan, which was wonderful. Unfortunately, Manhattan also has an average of a 24 hour deli and 2 restaurants per block, it seemed. My eating then was often healthy, but also often degenerated into large quantities of my favorite binge foods. On the third hand, Manhattan has the largest concentration of OA meetings I've ever seen. I guess no matter where you live, the devil can get you if you're a sufferer.
Not a great day yesterday. I was having funny burning abdominal pain after standing for a few minutes and feared that I had overdone it the day before by doing such outrageous activities as rising from bed, sitting in the living room with visitors, and putting dishes in the dishwasher! I had to resort to the codeine and ice packs and I was pretty depressed that such little activity might have been too much for me a week after the surgery. In the evening I got a call from my friend Marie, an ICU nurse and someone who had her own incisional issues when she had a cesarean, and she suggested the burning was a reaction of nerves that had been stretched during the surgery. In other words, I might be having this pain no matter what I had done, which was a relief. Besides giving myself the permission to take the codeine when I need it, I am also learning to appreciate ice packs, besides for the ab, for my shoulder muscles which have been spasming, probably from being overused to shift myself in bed and also from being moved when unconscious from operating table to stretcher to bed. The things you learn...
Told you I was going to be obsessed with my abs! I actually wrote a post yesterday but it never got past the draft stage due to my mood --- it just fried any coherant thoughts I might have had.
I was damned if I was getting off the couch for the whole evening, so we needed something super easy for dinner. Fuzzboy popped a frozen President's Choice veggie lasagna in the oven and a cookiesheet full of the wickedly delicious and amazingly simple Carmelized Cauliflower that I found on Orangette's blog. It was so good, it was hard for the two of us to not eat the whole head in one meal. It more than made up for the lasagna's disappointing blandness and lack of any recognizable vegetables, except for a few - sigh - semi-soft carrot chunks. PC, hang your head in shame, would it really have killed your profit margin to add a vegetable or some herbs? Ever heard of nutmeg or basil?
For dessert we had a muffin and some Starbuck's decaf espresso blend. Thank god my coffee tooth has returned, it's been kind of weak since the surgery. The only coffee I could take was lattes and well, while Cinnamon Dolce Lattes are very yummy (Thanks Tiff) they are barely coffee. My running buddy Barb sent over these lowfat banana chocolate muffins as a get well present... it was sweet of her, but it's a bit of a double edged sword for me: really tasty and there's a dozen, which would have made about 2 snacks for me in the old days.
My reaction to having one muffin was like when I eat anything, but magnified: The old dragon in me wakes up and roars "Moooore!!!" That's where I am so grateful for the discipline and repetition of working my OA stuff over the past 3 years. I was able to fold up the paper wrapper (after assiduously scraping every crumb off, of course) and say "yup, I feel like more, but it's not healthy to have another right now. Get used to it dragon." He went back to sleep, but then before bed I had another muffin instead of my usual yogurt. I did it with Fuzz, a normal eater, I didn't sneak it (I am the classic sneak eater). If I have more than one today, the rest of the muffins get banished to his staff room, where they will be devoured by hoards of drooling teachers in nanoseconds. The philosophic and spiritual support of my programme gives me this strength where I wasn't able to access it before.
I know there are some people who question my definition of abstinence from compulsive overeating when I eat an extra x, y, or chocolate, but it has worked so far. I find that by letting go of that rigid diet mentality and self punitive thoughts (ie "you shouldn't have eaten that") seems to work where years of either being "on" or "off" diets only made me sicker.
Works for me.
OK, home 2 days and recovering from Wednesday's hysterectomy with a mimimum of complications. I'm semi-mobile, shuffling around the house, albeit slowly, and I haven't ventured outside since being sprung from the hospital on Sunday. I am forbidden from driving for 3 weeks --who knew it took that many stomach muscles to hit the brakes? --- but maybe in a couple of days I can go for a little walk. On the other hand, my outing to the Costco Pharmacy on Sunday with one of those little electric shopping chair/buggies was a good demonstration as to why one should not operate heavy machinery on codeine! Drugs + the distraction of food samples, oh my! Nobody was seriously hurt, but there were a few shoppers fearing for the health of their knees...
I'll feel pretty good, climbing the stairs 4 or 5 times but then I get tired and achy and need a nap. Sitting up for longer periods is becoming easier, but my concentration is the length of the average luge run. My sentences run out of steam, and spelling suddenly is a new mystery. I'm catching up on The Sopranos but haven't yet got the concentration to read much more than a newspaper article, so I think this is the limit of my endurance for today. It's all temporary, and overall I'm feeling ahead of schedule for major abdominal surgery. I'm very grateful I was able to get into good physical shape before this because the hospital staff all termed my recovery as excellent. Now comes the hard part, being a patient patient.
I think that will be the biggest challenge for my food, coping with recovery time boredom and this creaky groany pain and fatigue. The heroic part is over, now comes the grind over the next month and a half or so. While I was in hospital, food actually took a back seat for once in my life, but of course, I was soon very focussed on eating healthy grainy stuff to get my digestive tract running again. Guess that's what it takes, not just for someone with food issues, but it was surprising to see that one of the greatest concerns of post-op recovery is digestion, or to be more specific hopefully without being too graphic: making sure that the stuff going in comes out in a timely matter!!!
Running on empty, time for some talk tv and um.... i dunno, somthing fluffy to read, likely in prelude to snooze. Lord, it's so dull, even herbal tea sounds like a good idea... Even decaf coffee seems a little too exciting for me yet.
Thanks for the supportive e-mails, I'll get back to you soon.
Hey,
I'll be offline for a few days after I have my surgery tomorrow, oops, no, it's now today, in about, ---shiver--- eight hours, I ought to be walking into the operating room... Hopefully, I'll be back by the weekend with a big scar on my abdomen and a few ruminations on body image since I think I'll be pretty obsessed with mine for awhile. Why not share the joy????
BTW, Cinthia (possibly the only person who actually reads this regularly) asked for my oatmeal recipe and I'm excessively glad to oblige, because, well, you already knew I was unbalanced --- suffice it to say that I've made sure the freezer is full of food while I recuperate. If Fuzz and I can eat all of it, I'll be surprised.
Clear liquids, then if I'm lucky, soft food and jello for the next few days????? Euuuuuu.... I don't want to think about it, so I'll give you the background on how I came up with the oatmeal.
I’ve volunteered for years at a local soup kitchen. Don't tell me you're surprised that I would volunteer working with food. Almost 10 years ago, one of my jobs was to drive the inmates who were close to their parole date on supervised passes to work at the kitchen. Rich was one of them and one of our better cooks. His family was Lebanese, and the first thing he would do when we got to the kitchen was brew some deadly thick espresso and start making breakfast for the staff. Most days it was oatmeal, adding whatever was on hand, ending up with a fragrant mixture of rolled oats cooked in milk and water, with spices, nuts and fruit. I don’t remember if the cardamom, essential to this recipe, was his idea or mine, but I’ve always loved it in Indian sweets like Gajar-ka-Halvah, which has little to do with ground almonds, rather it’s shredded carrots cooked down in milk until nearly all the moisture has evaporated, leaving a naturally sweet spicy mass that can then be chilled and cut in squares. I use Madhur Jaffrey's recipe for halvah, but admittedly add much more raisins and toasted almonds than she does, plus some toasted coconut. I digress, back to the oatmeal...
When last winter I discovered how delicious (ie non gluey) steel cut oats were, I came up with this hybrid recipe. We eat it almost every day, because it has it all: chewy whole grains in the steel cut oats (think of brown rice kernels cut in half but with that great oatmeal scent), protein and healthy fat in the almonds, sweetness and tang from the raisins and dried cranberries, and the intoxicating aroma of cardamom (it really makes the dish) and other spices often used in Indian and Mid Eastern sweets. Steel cut oats and cardamom are easiest found (and usually cheaper in bulk) in health food stores, but the former is creeping into most large groceries. This recipe makes enough for 3 days of breakfasts for two. The molasses helps me cut back on the brown sugar I'm tempted to heap on top!
Mag’s-Nificent Oatmeal
4 ½ cups water
9 oz wt. (1 ½ cups) steel cut oats
½ tsp kosher (coarse) salt (less if you are using regular salt)
4 oz wt. (3/4 cup) each raisins and dried cranberries (or whatever dried fruit you like - my friend Marie didn’t have any dried cranberries so she added some fresh ones she had on hand, chopped apples would probably be great too)
½ tsp ground cardamom
big pinch each cinnamon & cloves
1 Tb. molasses or brown sugar (optional)
5 ½ oz slivered almonds (1 1/4 cups)
1. Bring water to boil in medium heavy bottomed pot. Add rest of ingredients, return to boil, then reduce heat to just above low. Cook uncovered, stirring 3 or 4 times, for 15 minutes. If oatmeal is really sticking, reduce heat or add a little more water. After 15 minutes, turn off heat, cover pot, and let stand for at least 10 minutes.
Serve immediately with milk/soy milk and your favorite sweet topping (optional, but who are we kidding, anyway?) or let cool completely and refrigerate until desired.
2. When cold, the oatmeal is firm enough to cut into wedges with a firm spatula. If reheating in bowls in microwave, one serving takes about 3 minutes on high, 2 servings about 4 minutes.
I've updated my link to the 100-Plus Loop to reflect its new location with Yahoo Groups. Beware, if you are reading their FAQ, because the address there hasn't been updated yet. If you're not familiar with it, it is a listserv for people who want to, or have lost one hundred or more pounds. I met a few of them at the OA region 6 convention in New Hampshire last fall. Tres cool, because now I can actually put a face and a voice to their posts.
In fact, the whole trip was cool. I travelled south in my minivan with 3 other women from my OA groups and we shared hotel rooms. It was one of the few times in my life that I laughed so hard, I thought I was gonna puke. It was a unique social situation, because these woman had heard all the stuff I blurt out in the groups, knew some of the most painful secrets and absurdities of my life and vice versa. So we were at a level of honesty that you usually don't get with many people beyond your closest friends. AND there was no pressure to overeat! When else can you get that when travelling?
Maybe if we do the classic middle aged lady thing with these chicks some day and do a cruise, we can find something else to do than inhale the buffet tables. There's gotta be such a thing as a spa cruise... hello Oprah?...
Forgive me for the Homer moment, but what do you expect of a compulsive overeater who loves foodblogs? Witness my link to Orangette's blog on the right. Follow the link at your own peril, I take NO responsibility for the results. In my defence, I will point out that she does a lot of good things with vegetables. Does this make me nuts? Sometimes, I am nuts. Actually, nuts is one of the foods that makes me nuts. I just can't take a few out of the dish at the party, so I avoid them for the most part. I saw a dietician a few times in 2004, just to see if I was getting the right nutrition. I also told her I was getting some pretty strong food cravings in the evenings. She looked at what I was eating and suggested I get more protein early rather than later in the day, that my body might be feeling deprived, causing the cravings. Nuts was one of the things she suggested adding as a snack for that early in the day protein.
At first I was leery of adding this rich snack. After all, I thought snacking had been one of my problems and I had lost over a hundred pounds by mostly eliminating snacks between meals. But I tried it, and besides, it was nuts! It started off well, but quickly degenerated into nutbrain. I tried unsalted. Nope, I started living for that quarter cup in midmorning which quickly grew to a half cup. I tried it in granola. Even bigger mistake. Crunchy and fatty and sweet and edible by the (ultimately) handful! Whoa Nellie! That was my last break in my abstinence from binge eating, 385 days ago. It was not a binge like my binges had been years before that, hardly a lot of food, but there was that horrible feeling of being completely out of control with the food and not really caring, what one of my OA friends called a "f*** it moment". I can still remember just snorfing down the granola, standing in front of an open cupboard. Eating standing up is always a bad sign. The Golden Globes were on and I was feeling very has-been and unglamorous (I hate you Una).
Gave the rest to Fuzzboy and said, "Take 'em to those ravenous hoards in the staffroom" and he happily obliged. Now, the only way I can do nuts is slivered almonds in my morning oatmeal, which I make every 3 nights to warm up in the morning. It is fabu, the best breakfast I ever had. But that is the only way I ever have them. Harder to eat oatmeal with one's hands, but not impossible, so don't tempt me, but the milk does tend to leak through one's fingers... The rest of the time the almonds live in the freezer. And when I add them to the pot of oatmeal, they are weighed. I have to admit I will still steal a Tb of them or so while I'm measuring them out, but it seems to stop there. It still feels like I am playing with fire. But am I nervous enough to stop eating it altogether? Not yet. I have eliminated potato chips, having had my brain leave my body and reside in a can of Pringles for one party too many, and I don't keep any crackers in the house beyond that flatbread that tastes like rye mixed with straw.
I may post the oatmeal recipe here some day, which makes me feel a little nutty. Yes, it's steel cut oats with dried fruit, almonds and spices. It is very tasty and good for one. But this is a blog about my eating disorder... eating disorder blog with recipes? I don't know...
Oh yeah: the other way I have nuts is a half whole grain sandwich with peanut butter for a mid morning or afternoon snack. 15 grams of peanut butter, no more, no less. I know. I weigh the damn thing, which is much easier than trying to measure a tb of the sticky stuff out. When you play with fire, you need all the safeguards you can get.
The longer I experience the joys of being a “normal” size and continue to struggle with the impulses to do things that are injurious to my emotional and physical health, I am struck by how certain feelings make me feel like eating when I am not hungry and/or eat things that aren’t good for me. Mind you, nobody enjoys a good greasy meal of french fries with gravy than I, but there are times when the moderation really feels in jeopardy of flying out the window.
Here are some of the emotions and events that make me want to eat, in more or less order of the strength of the resulting craving:
When I weigh myself and think I could stand to lose a few pounds! Nothing makes me want to eat more than this, which is pretty quixotic. I think it has something to do with the stress and fear aroused by this, and then my impulse is to eat to make myself feel better!
When I consider dieting (see above).
When I’ve deprived myself of food or gone long past my usual mealtime.
Angry or envious, which often boils down to simple fear that my needs will not be met.
When lonely or have spent a lot of time alone and want to remain a hermit (likely due to previous reason).
Having nostalgic memories of an old bad habit that I haven’t done for years— having a few too many drinks then going for late night takeout, getting the large popcorn at a movie (how in hell do people do that and then not eat the whole thing???), or plowing my way through a whole box, bag, or bucket of something...
Overtired.
Dehydrated.
Awake in the middle of the night for no good reason.
The awareness of what makes me want to eat can keep me from heartache when I can take steps to care for myself enough that I can avoid and/or work through these situations as much as possible. What really helps is the self awareness to realize that I’ve been in a situation before, and although it may feel like I’m in the grips of a powerful compulsion at the time, it really can pass, and amazingly, I will survive without eating. I am beginning to see that it isn’t so much an impulse to punish or abuse myself but is more related to a very deep, if quiet fear that if I do not treat myself with food, my wishes will not be fulfilled by anyone or anything else.
