You Can't Always Eat What You Want...

You Can’t Always Eat What You Want…
Or can you, and at what price? This blog should not have been so difficult to write. I can listen to clients speak of their food issues all day and it isn’t especially painful to hear. I have also been to a few OA meetings with a friend, years ago, but I just didn’t get it. In other 12 step programs the person just stops doing the behavior. Alcoholics try not to drink, gamblers stay out of casinos and private parties, and sex addicts don’t solicit sex acts. But people who have food issues cannot choose to just not eat. If your issue is anorexia, you will die faster by not eating. If your issue is overeating, starving will backfire on you. The body will slow down and conserve what fat you have, so weight loss is not the result, not for a while anyway.
What’s the big deal about food anyway? We all have to eat, so why not eat what makes you happy and just go on about your business? You may well get away with that behavior into your twenties, or if you are male and have always been a thin person with a quick metabolism, that may work well into your fifties. If you are happy eating healthy foods in healthy amounts then you probably don’t have food issues, unless you develop some sort of allergy or intolerance to foods. That isn’t what I want to discuss here. I well know that undereating, binging, purging, starving are the other side of the coin of eating too much of the wrong foods, and are more similar than different, but I need for this topic to be about overeating and making unhealthy choices.
There is nothing fair about having the type of body that likes to hold onto weight and gains it easily. Genetics are usually a factor in that, as well as the nurturing we receive in the form of food. How family meals were treated when you were growing up is very important in helping us form our own concepts about the value of food. Some children always had to clean the plate at every meal, regardless of whether they liked every food choice on it or not. We were encouraged to eat, but not bullied about food. My Mother, God bless her, would let me have a peanut butter sandwich if the family dinner was liver and onions, meatloaf or any number of other meals that I didn’t like. I was a finicky eater then, and that is still true today, although I choose from a wider spectrum now than then. I was a skinny kid until puberty. Puberty was ready for me long before I was ready for it. I was in no way prepared for all that fleshing out, softening and other bodily changes that at the time I would have been much happier to skip altogether. I resented the ways in which my male friends began to treat me differently, in the same way that I resented my body turning against me and morphing into something strange and even monstrous to me. I spent those years from grades 5-10 always wishing I could drop those 5-10 unwanted pounds.
Somewhere at about fifteen or sixteen I leveled out for awhile. I still wanted to drop a few ponds, but I could deal with it. At eighteen, newly married and moved to Waco, I started what would be my 2nd flirtation with physical fitness. I got to a weight and level of fitness that pleased me. I still liked way too many fatty foods, fast food, salt, soft drinks, but I stopped eating meat. We didn’t eat meat for about 3 years. I did eat eggs and dairy, and a whole lot of beans. At 20 I got pregnant with Dana, and stayed on the ovo-lacto diet lifestyle throughout pregnancy. I was an Avon lady in Waco, and I walked my territory every week, into the 4th month of pregnancy. Then Frank graduated from technical college and we moved back to Abilene. It was the heart of summer in NW Texas, and I stopped moving around, did very little walking or anything else, but try and keep cool in front of the old swamp cooler we had in our tiny house. I wound up gaining 50 lbs. during the pregnancy. It was in no hurry to come off either. I had some post-partum depression which my husband was clueless about. He didn’t want anything to be different, still wanted to party with his friends and be a kid. I enjoyed our friends too, and as I had never had much to do with nutrition, the weight wasn’t about to budge.
Dana was born in November, and the following January we moved to Burnet, TX. Looking back I see that he was restless, even with his education and skills, he was just a kid in the eyes of most employers and he never got enough hours to do much more than subsist. His parents arranged for a job interview near where they lived, and he got the job. I stayed in Abilene as long as I could, just Dana and I. I didn’t want to move. My best friend was here, and pregnant also, and my Daddy lived here and we had a little house and I just did not want to move again. The seeds of discontent had been sowed after the 1st year of marriage and going into year 3, I actually would have stayed alone in that little house, but I desperately wanted Dana to have a two parent home, so I moved to a bigger house and a bigger salary to live on in the small town of Burnet, TX.
I didn’t know anyone there, except for my in-laws, who lived 15 miles away on Lake Buchanan, and Frank’s first cousin Kevin, who worked near where we lived. We lived in that house until Dana was around two years old. I managed to lose the weight sometime in her second year. I think it happened chasing a toddler around all day. Plus I went back to work. I worked at a small private day care where Dana also attended, so we were in the same place monday through friday. I also realized a lifelong dream. I started taking classes at the Austin Community Movie Company, a grassroots organization where classes were taught in everything from screen acting to screenplay writing. I immersed myself into that world, and it became my life. I worked m-f, took care of my precious baby girl and started my first beginning screen actor’s classes on saturdays.
I loved that lifestyle with all my heart. I think it made up for my unsatisfying marriage. I still wasn’t eating nutritious foods. I was an uninspired cook, and we had gone back to eating meat, smoking, and really only exercising when we would go to his parent’s house and waterski on Sundays. And then the unthinkable happened, a family doc discovered a disparity in Dana’s lungs. It wasn’t anything he was familiar with, or prepared to probe, so he sent us to a pediatric lung specialist in Austin, Dr Allen Frank. He was a gift from God. He bonded with Dana, she trusted him and he loved her. She was diagnosed with a lung issue, a birth defect is what he believed at the time, so a few months later, a lobectomy was performed. They removed the lobe off her lung and told us all would be fine. Of course it was not. Another 3 months down the line and she was diagnosed with a rare form of lung cancer, and 2 years of chemotherapy was the treatment protocol.
That was a difficult period, to say the least. My husband coped with alcohol, and became a full-blown alcoholic. I left my day job, as Dana could no longer be around children and their germs, and took a night job as a bartender/cocktail waitress, in the private club attached to the Highlander Inn Hotel. Drinking and eating the restaurant food became a regular routine. So did eating diet pills to maintain weight. I moderated my drinking, because I could, and my husband obviously did not, so somebody had to be a responsible adult parent. That is not to say that I presented model behavior, by any stretch of the imagination. I started and stopped smoking numerous times during those years. Mostly I didn’t smoke, had quit right after Dana’s diagnoses of cancer.
During this insanely turbulent time, remember that I was only 22 years old myself, I continued to take acting classes, and at one point took voice lessons from the awesome Kimmie Rhodes. One of my few regrets in life is that I didn’t stay with those lessons longer, but I was so emotionally ill during that period that many of my decisions were questionable. One of the things I did right was to also drift into amateur body building. I was still so desperately trying to fill the hole that my failed marriage had left me with, and most of those efforts were not healthy, but bodybuilding was a Godsend of sorts. I had returned to that old pattern of always needing to lose those 5-10 lbs. and yo-yoing accordingly with my weight. 
Fast forwarding to years later, divorced, remarried and pregnant with my second child, my son, Mason, and it was déjà vu. I gained 50-60 lbs. with him also and have never made it down to pre pregnancy weight. Many fad diets, flirtations with different eating styles, and the weight increased to needing to lose 45-50 lbs. instead of that measly 5-10. I know much more about nutrition, spurred to learn by high blood pressure, high cholesterol, chronic pain from the degenerative disc disease, and other nagging health issues. I got on the Weight Watchers band wagon, and have experienced some of the first healthy weight loss ever. I have a long ways to go, and I still have problems on the weekends staying with my number of points. I still want to eat what I want to eat, and struggle with portion control. Eating to live and not living to eat is still a challenge. This is so not the end of the story for me. I still use food as comfort, as love, as emotional rescue, for so many things that aren’t really about food. I have belonged to a health club for years, and I stay active with water aerobics and a group exercise class. I try to stay motivated and dodge between the cracks left by depression episodes. I try, being the key phrase. I try.