Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

I received this comment on a post last week:

• Starling Fitness » My Symbiont Part 3 of 3

Nicky Says: June 3rd, 2009 at 9:08 pm

Hi Laura! Your 2006 video made me sad – I felt so bad for you. I hope every day today is not as much of a struggle.

I noticed that you actually use food as a reward for when you exercise…do you think that perhaps a non-food reward would help decrease your obsessional thoughts about food more effectively?

I’m also very concerned about your statement, “If I have a perfect day, I spend some time with a good friend either on the phone or in person.” Two issues – first, the focus on having a “perfect day”. You should feel good even if you have a “pretty good day.” Perfectionism is the route to self-hatred. Second issue – you need to reward yourself with positive social interaction WHETHER OR NOT you had a good or “perfect” day. Positive social interaction may be even MORE important after a “horrible” day – it can help you take better care of yourself the next day!

Good luck – and be good to yourself!

Nicky,

Thanks for the comments and email. Honestly, I still struggle, even after all these years.

As far as using food for a reward, the beast inside us is an animal and not even one that’s as smart as a dog. Food is an incredible reward for it and has helped me have less obsessed thoughts. I make sure the food is healthy, but it’s a great bribe.

For me, a perfect day includes eating all the things I’m supposed to eat:

• Five servings of fruits or vegetables
• Two servings of dairy
• Two servings of protein
• Two servings of healthy oils
• Whole grains
• Six glasses of water
• A multi-vitamin

It doesn’t mean that I have to stay within a caloric limitation or even stop a binge. I just have to feed myself a minimum of healthy food every day. It’s a pretty liberal definition of “perfect,” so there is plenty of wiggle room for me. It’s a little easier to achieve and less likely to cause self-hatred.

Thank you for all the positive comments. I really appreciate it!

Laura

I’ve talked a lot about retraining the beast within me. If you haven’t read the entries, here they are:

• Starling Fitness » My Symbiont Part 1 of 3
• Starling Fitness » My Symbiont Part 2 of 3
• Starling Fitness » My Symbiont Part 3 of 3

Sometimes it’s like I’m having a conversation with myself and it’s a war within me. Having a year of perfect days is harder than I thought it would be and easier than I thought it would be. Just when I think I’ve got it down, it gets hard again and I have no idea why. This commercial from Nike is JUST what I needed right now.

Next time you find yourself face to face with the beast within you, remember this commercial and those fateful words:

I’m done with you!

Leave your old self behind.

This applies to keeping on running when I want to stop and it applies to eating when I’m not hungry or eating food that I KNOW is going to start a binge. I’m ready to retrain that beast inside of me to do what I want, not what is easy or gratifying.

Via: Twitter / Sue B: Great post on overcoming t …

Yesterday I talked about cupcakes and how the easiest way for me to eat them is to not eat them. If that is confusing, take a moment and read yesterday’s entry:

• Starling Fitness » How To Eat A Cupcake: DON’T

What if I really WANT a cupcake, however?

If I really want a cupcake, I can eat one whenever I want. That is the most powerful reason why it was so easy for me NOT to eat those delicious cupcakes a couple of weeks ago. I knew that I could have one if I wanted, but the thought of eating them stressed me out so much that I didn’t, even though I had plenty of calories left that day to afford one.

Every time I read a diet book that goes into scolding mode about what foods I can and cannot eat, it sends me into a binge. Even if I’m not planning on following that diet, I will start to WANT to eat foods that I never wanted to eat before. If I read a book that told me pickles were bad, I would suddenly want all sorts of pickles: dill, bread and butter, kosher, and sweet. You call it a pickle and I’d want it.

Won’t eat it is VERY different than CAN’T eat it. One is control imposed on me by another person. The other is a CHOICE. We all prefer to have choices. A prison is a prison, no matter how gilded the cage.

For me, eating healthy is about having infinite choices and fulfilling them. The minute I start limiting my choices, the animal within me rebels and craves only those foods I am denied. Ironically, I don’t need to eat foods to consider them one of my choices. I just need to give myself permission to eat them. All of this makes very little sense to me, but learning how to deal with the way my mind works will eventually set me free.

Photo via: Nicole Lee

You are looking at some of the most delicious cupcakes in Salt Lake City. They were provided by The Sweet Tooth Fairy at a geek event I went to a couple of weeks ago.

They were beautiful and lovely, but I had absolutely NO desire to eat them.

Surprising, really, considering my eating patterns, but they didn’t appeal to me at all.

That was the day that I realized that I don’t actually like cupcakes. It has taken me forty years to finally come to that conclusion. Sure, I like the flavor. I like the frosting. I like the cake.

It’s the cup that I don’t like.

Cupcakes are top heavy and awkward. I have to get frosting on my fingers while I try to take off the cupcake liner or I have to risk a bite of paper if I don’t remove it. The frosting is usually piled too high at the top to eat appropriately with the rest of the cake, so I end up with some bites with too much frosting and others without any. They are simply impossible to eat neatly.

When I attended that geek event in Salt Lake City, the delightful catering included platters and platters of gorgeous cupcakes. I looked at the table of food, and all I could do was stress out about how to eat one of those cupcakes. I was in a room full of people that I barely knew peppered with people who I knew really well who were desperate to introduce me to all of their friends and I was stressed out about a CUPCAKE!

In desperation, I decided not to eat.

Suddenly, the weight of all that beautiful catered food was lifted from my shoulders. All those people I was introduced to asked me if I had tried a cupcake and I said, “I’m not eating cupcakes today.” They accepted my words and most replied, “I shouldn’t be either.”

I watched them struggle with the cupcake liners and the frosting and the top heavy creaminess of it all and I breathed a sigh of relief instead of feeling left out.

This is AMAZING for me. It’s like one of those breakthroughs or A-Ha moments everybody talks about. Food stresses me out and sometimes it’s just easier to NOT EAT IT! If you had asked me that morning how to deal with the mess of eating a cupcake, I would have written you a bullet list on how to eat a cupcake without splurging too much or making your hands too messy. I wouldn’t have even considered not eating it. It just wasn’t an option

So, the answer to the question of how to eat a cupcake is: DON’T.

The simplicity of it all could just knock me over with a feather.

Photo via: Crystalyn Life Images

I loved this BRILLIANT speech by Joachim de Posada at the Ted Conference. This video is less than six minutes long and worth every second, especially the funny clips of four year old children trying their best not to eat a marshmallow.

A study at Stanford put four year old children alone in a room with a marshmallow. They were told that if they could last fifteen minutes without eating the marshmallow, then they would get to keep it to eat and get ANOTHER one. Two out of three children ate the marshmallow the second the door was closed. One out of three children were able to wait the fifteen minutes in order to get the double reward.

Fourteen years later, Stanford tracked down the children from this study and rated their success at school and socially. The children who were able to last the fifteen minutes without eating the marshmallow were FAR more successful in life than the others. They were able to delay gratification to get a better reward.

Delaying gratification is what eating healthy and exercising is all about. We are willing to eat simple and healthy food and sweat a little bit every day so that we can get the better reward of being healthy, slim and strong.

The next time you’re tempted to eat something that you know isn’t healthy for you, think about Joachim de Posada. The next time you’re thinking about blowing off your daily workout, remember that little girl who ate the middle out of the marshmallow to make the researcher think that she hadn’t eaten it. The only way to have a svelte and strong body is to do the things that svelte and strong people do.

Don’t eat the marshmallow. You deserve so much more.

Yesterday, I talked about The Digital Diet, which is changing your photographs so that you look slimmer. I stated that this technique isn’t a good idea because it clouds our view of reality. If we can’t accept how our bodies are right now, then how can we change them?

But sometimes, we NEED to cloud our view of reality.

Sometimes we can’t remember what it was like to be thin, or in my case, I didn’t ever feel thin, even when I was. In that case, I needed a photograph to tell me what I was shooting for. I needed something to use for visualization for a goal. Now, I could have used an old photograph of myself and slimmed it down using the Digital Diet techniques, but there is another way to create a goal photo and that’s Face Swapping.

This video gives you an example of how face swapping can be done using Photoshop. I suggest you mute the volume unless you like The Beastie Boys.

That video looks great, but it isn’t a very good tutorial. Here are two videos that are GREAT tutorials, but their finished effects weren’t that spectacular.

I used the techniques in the Tom Cruise/Jennifer Aniston video to make this photo of myself. I look at it for a couple of minutes every night before I go to sleep to visualize my perfect body and how I’ll feel when I’m physically fit.

I’m actually incredibly embarrassed to show my goal photograph here. I’ve used this particular one for a few months without mentioning anything here on Starling Fitness, but having something to work toward is really helpful to me. I’m actually MORE embarrassed to show this photo than to show my before pictures. I’ve never gotten to goal, so this photograph gives me an idea of what it will be like to be thin (and about five inches taller).

Using Photoshop techniques to give yourself a Digital Diet is a double edged sword. It can be kind of bad if you are using it for family photos to change history and further keep your head in the sand about your health and fitness. It can, however, be an amazingly powerful tool to help you visualize what you want from all this exercise and healthy eating.

Use your Photoshop Skillz wisely.

Update 05-29-09 3:09 pm: Braidwood has written an excellent entry in response to this one:

• Photoshop Yourself Thinner | Authentic Threads

If you don’t own Photoshop and don’t want to pay the $600 price tag for it, there is a great open source program available that can do almost as much as Photoshop for FREE. You can download it here:

• GIMP – The GNU Image Manipulation Program

I saw Stephanie Klein speak at SXSWi 2009 this year and because of it, I bought a copy of her book, Moose: A Memoir of Fat Camp. In the book, she relates the tales of being sent to fat camp every summer.

I really expected her experience to be similar to mine. Every summer, my sister and I were sent to Montana to stay with our grandparents. Every summer, we dropped weight because our grandma was starving us and sending us to so many active classes that our bodies had no choice but to get slim. I ended up scarred with bingeing behavior built right into my personality, but Stephanie’s experience with fat camp was completely different.

Instead of damaging her self-esteem, it seemed to help her be stronger. Here are some of the awesome quotes I gleaned from her book:

I’d heard it all the time, ‘Live in the moment.’ But if I did that, I’d weigh more than a dump truck. Losing weight wasn’t about the moment at all; it was about having faith in the future. It was about knowing there would be another meal in a few hours.
– Stephanie Klein, Moose, 2008

I already knew to eat clean and listen to my body, to only eat when I was in a calm mental state. Everyone knew. But when you’re fat in the head, it’s never about knowing the answers. It’s about living them. – Stephanie Klein, Moose, 2008

When we die, no one remembers us for what we weighed. Our weight isn’t etched into our headstones.
– Stephanie Klein, Moose, 2008

That’s the thing about being a former fat camp champ: when asked if I’d change my past if I could, I always answer no. The pain of being an overweight kid, the humiliation, make you think twice before ever cutting anyone else down.
– Stephanie Klein, Moose, 2008

There’s something almost perfect in the ugly duckling syndrome. Because a sensitivity is tattooed on a part of you no one else can see but can somehow guess is there.
– Stephanie Klein, Moose, 2008

If you have been looking for a good summer read, check out Moose: A Memoir of Fat Camp by Stephanie Klein. It was great fun for me to read and even healed my damaged soul just a bit.

The Diet Blog posted this message from their community forums the other day:

• Why do Skinny People hate Fat People?

I am over weight and I am a very friendly, kind nice person and I notice that when I go to church or to the store people don’t seem to want to be around me. I take care of myself I have very nice clothes and I get my hair done. I just don’t get why beautiful people can’t talk to or be friends with me. I know that I am fat & maybe I am ugly, but I just don’t understand.

I have noticed this behavior with some people, but it’s very rare. Some skinny people DO hate fat people, but they are the exception, not the rule.

So what is this woman experiencing at church or at the store? Did she fall into a den of fat haters, or is there something else going on?

I don’t know, but personally, I have found that if I’m friendly with people and expect them to treat me nicely, that’s usually how they treat me. That was true when I was fat and that was true when I was at my thinnest.

When I was in high school, I suffered from the disease, Blame The Fat. Everything that went wrong in my life, I blamed on being fat. I wasn’t even fat back then, but if anything wasn’t absolutely perfect, I blamed it on my fat. Junior year, I dated a guy named Sean. I liked him and it seemed like he liked me. He was a sophomore and we were both friends with Clark. We went to a dance together, but soon afterward, he broke up with me. I immediately assumed it was because I was “fat.”

After a month of starvation dieting, I was skinnier than ever, but Sean still didn’t want anything to do with me. Finally, I asked Clark if he knew what happened. Clark said that Sean didn’t like the fact that I was older and had a car. He felt embarrassed that he couldn’t drive me to the dance and that I had to drive them.

I sat in my desk in our Literary Magazine office and didn’t say a word. I was thinner than I had ever been in high school and Clark was telling me that my old boyfriend broke up with me because I had the gall to drive us to the dance. I imagine I must have frozen up for a second or two while I absorbed the information.

It had nothing to do with my fat.

I don’t know why the people in that woman’s church are stand-offish, but I am nearly certain that it isn’t because she’s fat. I could think of a half a dozen other reasons why they don’t associate with her.

• They get new people all the time who don’t stick around, so they don’t accept new visitors into the fold until they’ve stuck around for a year or so.
• They assume that someone else has befriended them.
• There is a committee that is supposed to fellowship new members, but it isn’t doing its job. The people who weren’t picked to be on the committee are bitter and angry. They think, “It’s not my job.”
• They figure she came to the church because she knows someone there.
• They are jealous of her nice clothes and perfect hair. They think she thinks she’s too good for them.
• She seems so shy and insecure that they don’t want to make her feel even MORE uncomfortable by making her talk to strangers.

The only way to know for sure is to ASK. Back in high school, I didn’t have the balls to ask my ex boyfriend why he didn’t want to date me anymore, so I asked his buddy. Now, as a grown-up, I’m perfectly willing to ask anyone to their face. Want to know what I find out? It’s quite surprising:

• I don’t hate you. I’ve been really preoccupied because my husband got laid off…
• You think I hate you? God, I barely even know you!
• Yeah, I hate you. You’re so loud and obnoxious. I wish you would just shut the bleep up.

Most people like me. Some people hate me. Not one person has said, “I just don’t like to be seen with you because you’re so fat.” Even when I’ve been at my fattest. It’s NEVER about the fat. It’s ALWAYS about something else. There are a very small minority of people who hate fat people, but they don’t have any where near the power over your life as your own mind and attitude. The next time it feels like someone is snubbing you because you are fat, catch yourself. You’ve come face to face with the disease, Blame The Fat. Don’t let it conquer your mind. Keep being friendly and open to everyone and you will open far more doors than a skinny butt ever could.

I am excited about this new book by Monica Seles. She was a tennis superqueen when a crazed fan stabbed her in the back in the middle of a match. Getting over the injury and her father’s painful death sent her turning to food. How many of us have had that same experience? I know I have.

She has written a book about her experience called Getting a Grip: On My Body, My Mind, My Self. Whenever I have the urge to binge, it helps to hear stories about people who have conquered it.

Here is her interview from ESPN:

• Bonnie D. Ford: Q&A with Monica Seles – ESPN

Via: Conquering Emotional Eating: Lessons from Monica Seles

If my digestive tract is a symbiont inside of me, how do I communicate with it? If there is a dumb animal inside of me that controls how much I eat, how do I tell it what I want? If there is a beast within me that makes me overeat, how do I retrain it?

It all made me think back to my dog, Sid. We adopted Sid as an adult dog from a rescue shelter. He came knowing a few tricks, but he didn’t know the most important three: sit, come and stay. How did we teach him those tricks?

• Positive Reinforcement: We gave him treats when he did things right. He usually did them right by accident, but when he did, we gave him a treat and LOTS of praise.
• Negative Reinforcement: We scolded him when he did things wrong. We withheld the treat when he didn’t do the trick correctly.
• Repetition: We spent HOURS and HOURS working with him. There were some days when we put his food in a bowl and doled it out a few kibbles at a time as treats to teach him what he needed to know.
• Mimicry: I’ve heard that some dogs learn tricks from other dogs. We’ve never been able to do that with Sid because he’s an only dog, but I’ve seen that happen with others.

The problem is, my symbiont isn’t a dog. Most importantly, it’s a lot dumber than my dog. How do I retrain the beast within me?

Animals want a lot of things. You can reward them with food, but there are a lot of things that the beast inside of me may be appeased with:

• Sex
• Food
• Praise
• Play
• Comfort
• Safety
• Community / Pack / Herd

Whenever I’m thinking about how to reward the beast within me, I look at this list.

I think it’s very important that I give the reward immediately after the healthy act. So, if I exercise, I eat some healthy food immediately afterward. If I choose a healthy dish, I immediately praise myself. If I refrain from eating dessert, I grab my Nintendo DS and play a fun game as a reward. If I have a perfect day, I spend some time with a good friend either on the phone or in person.

I realize that this is not a quick process. It took us MONTHS to train Sid how to sit, come and stay and he was only a two year old dog. My symbiont has had forty years of controlling my actions, so retraining it to do things that are healthy for me will take some time.

Thinking of my body as a joined species with my intellect as one and my digestive tract as the other has really helped me. There are times when I call Sid and he STILL doesn’t come. He’s just a dumb animal and needs a little more training. The same is true for my symbiont. I’m in the process of retraining the beast inside of me.