Category: Feeding The Pastor

Hi Babies,

You may already know this. You may have already figured this one out. But bear with me, because your Faithful Blogger here is a bit slow on the uptake.

Eating sugar may actually cause pain. Not just in the form of crashing lows after the short-lived burst of energy it provides, but actual “oh me achin’ bones” kind of pain.

At least I’m pretty sure it does for me.

I have noticed that, as I age, I have some days that are just plain achey. Bones or joints or muscles ache and it’s very unpleasant and difficult to get the day started in a positive fashion.

If you read up on inflammation, which is the new medical buzzword for why we get sick and dead (well, not that new), you will learn all about how the crap we eat causes it.

For me, sugar is a big culprit. For you, it might be gluten or nightshade vegetables or certain additives or the poison that is Diet Coke. We’re all label readers these days, aren’t we! But there’s so much crazy stuff in so much of what we consume, we really have to be. This is the best book I have read yet about how the food industry is working really hard to addict us all to poisonous garbage food.

For me, straight-up sugar in the form of dessert type items is sheer poison. I just have to avoid it. I can do a little now and then, but processed sugar — even the organic, “bla bla bla this isn’t so poisonous we swear on a stack of Michael Pollan’s books” products — it’s all just sugar and it all accumulates in my body very quickly and makes me creaky and sore and achey.

Any white flour products function just about the same way. Which makes sense, because all of that stuff metabolizes pretty fast as sugar.

It’s a big bummer that so many yummy foods that we reach for for pleasure and comfort in times of stress should turn out to be little pain bombs waiting to be released in our bodies, but they certainly are in mine and they may be in yours, and I wanted to share what I figured out in the hopes that it might be a useful insight for some of you, my lovely pigeons.

Here’s Dr. Weill’s Anti-Inflammatory Diet. I always liked that guy.

Be well, darlings!

Raise your hand if you’re an emotional eater or a compulsive over-eater! Raise your hand if you’re trying to learn how to eat normally!

Bet a heckuva lot of hands went up, amirite?

Now, notice that I did not say “trying to lose weight.” There are so many who struggle to eat well and sanely who are not heavy. Certainly any glance into a clergy gathering will inform the most unscientific observer that we are an OverEating People, but the struggle to feed oneself in nourishing and loving ways is an issue that spans body size spectrum. Not every fat person is addicted to food and not every slim person is a healthy eater. *tight-lipped finger wag*

I found this woman’s work spot on in terms of what I am trying to accomplish with the help of a hypnotherapist and listening to Mindful Eating CDs daily. It’s hard work. I am undoing years of habits. I have to pay careful attention to my body signals and I still get confused between hunger and tiredness. Even when I do eat slowly and mindfully, I sometimes don’t realize until a half an hour later that I ate too much. It’s frustrating and I feel sometimes like I adopted a very complicated animal this past fall (when I started hypnotherapy)with whom I have yet to become comfortably familiar in order to care of in a natural, intuitive way. It’s like when I first adopted my dog, I was always looking at my Beagles For Dummies guide to figure out how to handle the simplest things about his care. My ex-boyfriend and I were such nervous dog parents! I’m that way with myself and food right now in my life: a little hyper-vigilant but hopeful that the relationship will get much easier. I have a lifetime of arguing with myself about eating and it will take steady, calm attention to eating normally before it all becomes second nature.

Church life is centered around the table fellowship and that’s a wonderful thing. Breaking bread together is cherished and ancient way of being together in community. Food is love, food is gratitude. Food is life. I love a good church potluck. I love cooking and often cook for parishioners, making soups or baked beans while praying for them. I like knowing that the people I’m feeding are going to ingest my prayers in the form of a nourishing meal.

But I am also trying to recover from compulsive over-eating, and I am starting to more actively enlist the support of parishioners in that goal. It’s as simple as letting people know where I’m at. I have been on diets and food plans before, but learning to eat normally is different: I eat whatever I like, but just until my hunger is sated. That’s not very much food at all but it’s very easy to over-eat when I’m socializing or distracted. As you know, when you’re with church folk, you’re both socializing and at work, and distracted. I am learning that I have to think about table fellowship in a different way. Instead of looking forward to an opportunity to feast, I have to think about the people, rather than the food, as the feast.

Continue reading “Congregational Support For Recovering From Compulsive Over-Eating”

HI doll babies!

I just saw this jaw-dropping video about why you can’t trust the calorie counts on packaged foods. I mean, I have never taken a label to be the gospel truth but I certainly have purchased those tofu sammies in the health food store as a low-cal, low-fat lunch option. For hell! Double the calories listed?

And of course we’ve all known for a long time that manufactured muffins are the work of Satan. If I want muffins I bake my own.

This gives me a perfect opportunity to share some of what I’ve been doing to change my compulsive overeating habits, comforting and entertaining and rewarding myself with food and getting over dieting mentality monkey mind.

I hate to call what I am doing “portion control” because there’s no control about it. What it is is a program of virtual gastric bypass hypnosis and staying really attentive to hunger and satiation signals. I had the Virtual Gastric Band inserted on the imagination/subconscious level by a hypnotherapist in August and I listen to one of the support CDs every day (or most days). I don’t think about food as my issue any more. What I think of as my issue with weight management isn’t calories or portion sizes but the relationship between my stomach, brain and spirit.

My commitment is to eat three small meals a day and reasonable snacks. To drink water, because my body often confuses thirst with hunger. And to eat mindfully, chewing every bite and being attentive to satiety.

I am losing weight and dealing with all the emotions around releasing food as my primary form of mindless entertainment, but what I really really really really extra much love is that I am not counting points or calories or being asked to think about food choices at all. When I was on Weight Watchers, I hated the emphasis on points, as it just fueled my compulsive overeating because I was always trying to figure out what I could “get away” with eating for the fewest points. “Oh wow, I can have this huge plate of green beans! Woo hoo!” Well, no I can’t. I can eat as many green beans or anything else I feel like eating until I’m full, and that happens really fast with a small portion.

I have to admit that it’s a bummer sometimes eating slowly and paying close attention to satiation signals. I love eating so much, it feels like, “That’s it? I’m done?” But yes, for that meal I am done. And then I have a second panicked thought out of my reptilian, addicty part of my brain that shrieks, “BUT WHAT IF I GET HUNGRY AGAIN IN AN HOUR? WHAT IF I GET HUNGRY AGAIN AND THERE’S NO FOOD ANYWHERE TO BE FOUND? MAYBE JUST ONE LONE WOUNDED MASTADON AND I DON’T HAVE MY SPEAR WITH ME?”

Then I have to calmly respond to my reptilian addict brain and say, “Well, if you become dangerously, life-threateningly starved in a few hours I bet we can probably find you some food before you perish. Also, you could always just have a snack, or even a little bit more of this food we just ate.”

Thus I walk across stepping stones out of compulsive overeating.

My hunger signals go haywire sometimes. That just happens. And when it does I am still capable of eating a footlong Subway sandwich in one gobbling sitting. Mostly, though, it’s the urge to snack for purely recreational purposes that I have to stop and think about before I do it. My program of recovery from compulsive overeating is about letting go of recreational eating, and that’s the hardest thing about it.

Now that I know not to trust the calorie counts on my favorite snacks (although home popped popcorn is my number one choice, always), I think it will be easier to stay committed to the major work, which isn’t about how many calories I have consumed in the course of a day but whether I ate past satiation or put food in my body for purely recreational purposes.

By the way, I cook constantly now and prepare almost all my own food. It is amazingly helpful for craving management when you hardly eat any processed foods.