This Throwback Thursday marks a milestone I’d rather keep behind me, but I have to own it. This picture is from July 2, 2014, the last day I used any tobacco product. But nicotine–that was another story, because once I gave up the cigars and all other tobacco products, I was chawing 4 tabs of Nicorette a day until exactly 90 days ago. The impetus to give up tobacco in 2014 was to get better health insurance rates. The impetus to give up the gum up in 2015 was to get a better life insurance rating. I know, doesn’t get more boring and adult than that, except for that chattering little squirrel in the back of my head who knows that nicotine is a wonderful, insidious drug.
I would love a good Dominican or Cuban cigar right now. Love one! But I have never back-slid. Not once I assure you. I can’t. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t miss it a little. Much, much less now, but still … People say that, and I assure you it’s pathetically true. I loved everything about smoking except for the fact that it smells like hell and yeah, it was killing me. That too. So I knew when I gave it up that I’d take a hit in the weight department. Amazingly, I’d lost nearly 100 pounds while still smoking—a good percentage of which I gave back to wean myself–first from tobacco, then nicotine completely. I’m not going to say how much I regained. Frankly it’s embarrassing. But I will say it was an “investment worth making.” I don’t regret it.
What I will also say is last week, I began another personal milestone. During my original weight loss including my therapy at the Eating Disorders Clinic at Penn, I kept a diet diary with a program called Calorie King. There are others, but this one worked well for me when I kept it. I assure you the most boring thing a writer can write about is your weight and the food and quantities you do and don’t consume. Last Thursday, I reopened my diet diary. Last entrance 6/27/2013. I began once again, the arduous, boring, sometimes humiliating process of recording food, exercise and weight. For those of you on the same path, I’ll relate what I’ve learned the hard way.
Exercise is only one-third of the puzzle. And probably not even the most important part.
See, I’ve never wavered in my routine of walking 3-5 miles a day. And once your bod gets acclimated to doing that, congratulations, you’ve made metabolic biochemistry’s ultimate devil’s bargain: You keep working out so you don’t gain weight – AS FAST.
And the older you get, the more this is so. If you are overweight and you’ve been sedentary, exercise will shave off that initial 20-25 pounds of excess baggage you’ve been carrying around, but you inevitably plateau again and once you do, you have no choice. You have to count calories. You have to measure portions. You have to tightly restrict the “foods you love.” You have to record. It’s the only thing that keeps you honest. Yes, it sucks. But dying of diabetes-related complications sucks more.
My deceased father’s 89th birthday yesterday drilled that home for me. Dad was never morbidly obese. But he was a big man. A big man who did not have much concern for the types of food he ate or the portions. He saw eating what he wanted, when he wanted as a birthright. And when my mom tried to control his diet by only cooking foods that were on his plan, he snuck snacks. There are many things about my father that I love and admire. This was not one of them. I struggle to not emulate the eating habits I acquired under his “tutelage.” I struggle also to reduce my meat consumption. I struggle to eat to live, rather than live to eat. I struggle to not “eat emotionally.” Coming from two Food=Love ethnic cultures, this isn’t just a battle. It is THE battle. Diabetes took my father down slowly, inexorably, one bad decision at a time, finally clawing away everything that made him feel like a man. It was horrible. Diabetes is horrible. I will not go that way. I am middle-aged. I have no illusions. Something else will take me, but IT WON’T BE DIABETES.
The most important lesson I retain from my therapy at Penn was the mindfulness training that lead to meditation and greater awareness of what I am doing to my body, putting in it and how that all feels. Not surprisingly, the diet diary is a critical component of my found then lost, and then found again mindfulness. Some future Thursday, I’ll come back to you and crow about how well I’ve managed to wrestle the beast back in its cage. Food and nicotine, like other addictions are not something you beat once and declare victory. I lost a lot of ground in the struggle to become a non-smoking, non-nicotine consuming, trimmer more mindful version of myself. But last week, I dug my heels in, shouted “enough” at my bathroom scale and have mindfully made a handful of steps in the right direction.
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