I just returned from the national American Horticultural Therapy Association conference. In those four days, I think I ate more carbs than I have in the last four months: French fries, roasted potatoes, chocolate cake, hard cider, red wine, and a shared crème brulee. It was quite a shift from the way I’ve been eating at home, and I felt it--for example, on Day 2 when it was harder for me to do the laps in the pool that had been relatively easy on Day 1. So I’m pleased with my new way of eating; I missed it while I was gone. Since it’s been a couple of months since I launched my Potato Project, in which I seek to eradicate the skloodge around my middle, I wanted to organize and share my thoughts about it.
General thoughts:
*I favor measurable goals, but I haven’t been weighing myself because I kind of hate doing that. I was thinking that I could just do a visual accounting, but that’s been elusive. Some days, it seems like I’ve made huge progress; other days, it looks like nothing has changed. So I’m going to start measuring myself around the middle, which is the target area anyway. Because I know myself, I’m going to shoot for midriff measurement about once a week. This allows for some data collection (and hopefully encouragement!) without obsession.
*I have been rigorous about not eating sugars and grains (except these past four days), which was my major goal. and I’ve been selective about eating fruits, allowing all kinds of berries and an occasional portion of a peach or melon that someone in my vicinity is eating. But I’m definitely eating a lot less fruit than I had been. This is good because one of the things you learn quickly as a cancer patient is that sugars—the simple kinds you eat directly and those that are converted easily from grains and other high carbohydrate foods—are taken up immediately by cancerous cells. They feed on sugars, the bastards. When you’re scanned to see if you have cancerous tumors in your body, you are injected with a sugary liquid that is combined with a radioactive substance. In my experience, you chase that with a giant tumbler of sugary drink. All that sugar--with the radioactive material—gets picked up by cancerous cells. It’s a reliable, accurate way to visually represent cancerous tumors because the tumors gobble up the sugar immediately, before other cells can get to it, and then there it is—a picture of the radioactive, sugar-loaded tumor--on the scanner images. So avoiding sugars, grains, and other high carbohydrate foods means I’m taking care of my post-cancer self in a fundamental way that I have not been very successful with in the past.
*My daughter’s birthday fell in this two-month period since I began the Potato Project. I found a Paleo recipe online for a chocolate cake made with almond flour and sweetened with a little fruit-only raspberry jam and a tiny bit of maple syrup. Another daughter baked it. It was very good.
*I’m practicing intermittent fasting and finding it pretty easy to eat only in a severely compressed time window. I don’t do this every day, but I’m doing it reliably two to four days a week. On days that I work at the mental health rehabilitation center, I eat in the mornings because my work is so physical and I don’t want to get hungry while I’m working. On many other days, I wait to eat until sometime between 11 am and 1 pm. (I’m not draconian about this; if I feel hungry in the morning, I eat.) Then I’ll be done eating for the day between 6 and 7:30, depending on a host of variables. There’s some research that supports this practice as a weight loss technique.
*I have substituted Lily’s brand erythritol- and stevia-sweetened chocolate for my usual favorite chocolate bars. I’m not entirely convinced about this. I’m thinking if I make a commitment to go really dark with the chocolate, say 85% or more cacao, I’ll sufficiently limit my sugar intake and I’ll be able to feed my chocolate habit for a lot less $$$ than Lily’s costs. Lily’s allows me to be pretty purist in my avoidance of sugars; that’s the one big advantage.
*While I was away at the conference and indulging, I noticed that healthy fats were the dietary item I missed most. If you’re not eating bread, and thus not buttering it, you don’t have many opportunities to up your fat intake in a situation like I was in—hotel stay, conference menu. At the conference awards dinner, our table had a single small plate with a few, wee butter rosettes on it. Honestly, I would have used ¾ of that butter on my potatoes and carrots, but then others at the table would not have had any for their rolls and bread. Every time I eat at home, I’m adding or cooking in butter, ghee, olive oil, heavy cream, avocado, coconut oil, coconut cream, etc. If I have a cup of green tea, I add coconut milk to fat it up. I think the fats I’m eating make the intermittent fasting possible because they have a lot of staying power. The combination of eating many more carbs and far less fat while I was away at conference had me feeling hungrier more frequently, with a spikier up-and-down energy cycle. There are a lot of variables here that I’m not controlling for—the effect of the time zone changes, flying, getting less sleep and less good quality sleep, for starters—but I believe the lack of healthy fats had an effect too.
*(I do not intend to sound whiny about the food at the conference. The produce was consistently very good and very fresh, the menus were balanced, and Good God, everything tastes good when someone else cooks it and cleans up after it.)
Besides the food angle, I’m trying to come at the Potato Project from three other directions to maximize the likelihood of success:
*Sleep. I’m trying to get more, better-quality sleep, which is clearly huge in terms of general good health but also apparently plays a big role in successful weight loss. Having lowered cortisol (stress hormone) levels at night before bed seems to correlate to better quality sleep with fewer incidents of waking. Some research seems to suggest that eating in a compressed time window, as discussed above, not only helps with weight loss, but lowers blood levels of cortisol before bedtime, making healthy sleep more likely. My big fail in the Better Sleep Department is that, often, I’m still looking at my cell phone or my laptop two hours or less before hitting the hay. It’s often a moment in the day when I feel I can catch up on some stuff, but I’ve gotta figure out a way to wean myself so I don’t get exposed to that blue screen light that screws up your sleep hormones right before I knock off.
*Exercise. I started doing two pushups in the morning after I get out of bed. That feels like about how many I can do right now. I wanted to wedge a small habit into that moment in the day that worked core muscles. I choose to move forward in faith and believe that there are core muscles in my abdomen, although now they’re obscured by pudge. Swimming at the hotel pool during the conference was divine, and reminded me of how good I feel after swimming. I’d still like to figure out a way to do it consistently, even if it’s just once a week. I had wanted to add in a weekly 8- to 10-mile hike, but that has not happened. Yet. October is busy, but I haven’t given up on this. I continue to walk the same beloved wooded path most mornings with Ivory. Generally, my goal here is simply to add in more opportunities for pleasurable movement. Mark Sisson, who developed the very well thought-through Primal Blueprint diet and fitness guidelines, is a big proponent of weekly sprinting to turbocharge weight loss. He recommends 6 to 8 30-second all-out sprints with short breaks in between. You can run, bike, swim, whatever, as long as you put in that all-out effort for those short bursts. I’m not doing this, but I like having a secret exercise weapon in my back pocket.
*Mindfulness. I use a meditation app called Headspace, which has a lot of one-off meditations, but it also has 30-day sequences, including one on Mindful Eating. We focus on our breathing for most of these guided meditations, but the facilitator also offers ideas about how to start tuning in more to one’s eating habits. One thing he suggests: Notice your breathing right before you’re about to eat, especially something you’ve been craving. Is it shallow? Deep? Another suggestion is to rate on a scale of 1 to 10--where 10 is ravenous and 1 is completely sated--how hungry you really are before you eat something. I’m finding that certain circumstances—driving or working on my computer, especially—make me want to put something in my maw and chew, repeatedly. (Potato chips would really fit the bill here, but I’m not eating them anymore.) Basically, when I’m in this mode, I’ve found that I taste the first and last bites of things, but the in-between parts are often more mechanical, with me just shoveling something edible, over and over, into my mouth. So it’s clearly not about hunger.
This is a process, a long one. It’s about trying to do things a little better incrementally that (hopefully) will cumulatively pay big positive health benefits in the future.
There’s a documentary on fasting included in Amazon Prime with commentary by Dr. Jason Fung and other researchers and clinicians that have seen positive effects from the practice. It’s called Fasting:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B07DPVLQ1R/ref=atv_dl_rdr?autoplay=1
Here’s a link to Dr. Jason Fung’s primer on intermittent fasting:
https://www.dietdoctor.com/intermittent-fasting
Here’s a link to a study that suggests that an early, compressed eating window raises cortisol levels in the morning and lowers them at night, improving subjects’ circadian rhythms, thus increasing the likelihood of good sleep:
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/11/6/1234/htm
Mark Sisson, mentioned above, has a blog post about women and intermittent fasting. My take-away: For postmenopausal women, it’s probably a useful tool to at least try out. Here’s the link to Sisson’s post on women and IF:
https://www.marksdailyapple.com/women-and-intermittent-fasting/
Here is a link explaining Sisson’s thoughts about sprinting:
https://www.marksdailyapple.com/benefits-of-sprinting/
And here’s Mark Sisson’s actual sprinting routine on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXMyl7kw1gY