Chris's Journey #40: Eating to Live and not Living to Eat

 I am almost three months out from the surgery and most of the healing has been completed. I am now in the middle of what I call the “New Normal”. I now no longer eat 2,500 to 3,000 calories a day. I eat between 800 to 1,000 calories. I promise all of you, that I am not trying to starve myself. I genuinely cannot eat any more than 1,000 calories a day. I feel pain throughout my body if I try to eat more. I work to eat a high protein, low carb diet just as my doctor told me to. It is difficult to do that sometimes due to carbs are easier for me to consume than protein is. But I fight hard to make sure I balance my food intact as best as I can. Here is the issue I fight every day. I still want to eat the same food and the same amounts that I did before the surgery. I do. I want to go to McDonald’s and order two double cheeseburgers and a large fry and cover it all in ketchup and eat it in less than 10 minutes. The only thing that stops me is knowing I cannot eat it all. Knowing that if I try to eat even a portion of that size, I will get sick…and I mean bad sick! So, I choose the route of not eating out and instead I eat in by eating pre-packaged foods that are single servings. I would like to fix healthy meals (or even just meals) for myself, but I cannot eat leftovers. Anytime I try to eat leftovers, I feel sick to my stomach or it just does not taste good. So I eat “fresh” food (fresh meaning just prepared food) and only that for each meal. Before the surgery, I ate 3 meals (sometimes just 2) each day and that was it. I very rarely ate snacks or “grazed”. I ate 2 to 3 very large meals every day and filled myself to the limit from those meals. 1000 to 1500 calorie meals were not uncommon. Today however, I graze. I eat 6 to 7 times a day, eating between 50 to 200 calories for each meal. By grazing I am able to eat just enough to last a few hours without hurting. By grazing I can feel comfortable and not hungry. Very rarely am I stuffed or full. I am almost always satisfied and not hurting. It is nice not to hurt after a meal. It is also nice not to feel exhausted after eating and wanting a nap. I prefer the grazing to my old method. I hope this habit stays with me the rest of my life. I do live with some fear about eating. I fear about falling back in to old habits and eating only large meals. Food is my drug. One of my best friends sent me a meme that says the following: “Food is the most abused anxiety drug. Exercise is the most underutilized antidepressant”. It was this statement that caused me to write this blog post. It hits home for me in so many different ways. I will address the food part of that statement. From the beginning of writing this blog (40 issues ago) I said I was a food addict. I still agree with that statement. I do not believe there will ever be a time that I am not an addict. This will be a fight that I fight for the rest of my life. I will always need to make the choice of eating healthy or eating something that could possibly make me fall back in to my old habits. I have told a lot of people that ask about food habits to not deny yourself of a type of food. Any time you deny yourself of eating something specific, it makes you want to eat it more. Go ahead and try it. Tell yourself you will not eat ice cream for a month and see what happens. You will be craving it non-stop, I promise. But for me, I have to be conscious of the fact that like an alcoholic or drug addict if I eat something (like fast food) even one time, that I probably will fall back to my old habit and eat all the crap that got me to be 481 pounds in 2011. That one time might destroy everything I have been fighting for the past three months. I live with some of that fear every day. The fear does not control me, but it is there. I hate that it is there, but it is there. Thank goodness I have a counselor whose focus is on addiction counseling. Thank goodness I have a support system that is amazing and loving. Thank goodness I have this blog where I have to stay honest with all of you and more importantly with myself. Thank goodness I am learning that exercise does make me feel better and I have a supportive friend teaching me how to work out smarter. Learning how to eat to live and not live to eat is the hardest battle I have had yet. It will be a battle I fight every day till my last day on this Earth. But it is a battle I want to fight. I continue to fight to take back my life. I continue to fight to take away the power that food has over me. I want to be a recovering addict. It has to happen for me to be healthy and to fulfill the amazing goals I want in my life. So every time morning comes, it is time to fight again. And because it is time to fight again, it is time to strap on my food armor because it’s another day and another battle is about to begin for me. And it is a battle I NEED to win!

Sincerely, Chris