Overcoming Overeating

I don't think I've delved much into my thoughts on dieting and such. I am trying to change my eating habits to align more closely with Nourishing Traditions, but I am not trying to lose weight.

Not to say that I wouldn't be pleased if I lost weight. But the fact of the matter is, due to my first diet back in 1993, I cannot even consider the thought of dieting without going on a compulsive eating binge.

I did the diet thing, ate low fat and did body building, using free weights. I was about 20 pounds overweight at the time. I lost back down to 123, which was my pre-pregnancy weight, and I then proceeded to torture myself for the next four years, trying valiantly to stay on the low fat diet. Do you know that if you eat lowfat foods, they are often filled with sugars so that they have any taste to them?

To my recollection, prior to this "diet" I did not have any issues with food. Donuts didn't sing to me from their shelves, begging me to eat them. Ice cream didn't demand that I eat the entire half gallon at one sitting. These are things I began to experience when I deprived myself of food. And the GUILT. The guilt over indulging in these FORBIDDEN foods.

Finally, I came to the opinion that I had to stop depriving myself of any kind of food. As I recall, the first book I read on the "no-dieting" theory was The Ten Habits of Naturally Slim People. There are a lot out there, but I finally settled upon practicing Overcoming Overeating (not to be confused with Overeaters Anonymous -- two VERY separate theories!). I have been working on this "theory" for at least ten years now, and steadily gaining weight as each year went by.

I feel that I spent most of my life slender. As a child, I was so thin that our pastor was concerned about my health. She suspected that I had anorexia. She prescribed malted ice cream shakes for me in the evening to get my weight up. In a few years, she would manipulate my mother into sending me to live with her (indeed, for the same reason!) and once there, she tried to force me to eat as much as her adult sons who were all taller than 6 feet four inches! When I began my first job to help support her financially, I was walking many miles each evening, a housekeeper in a mall. She demanded that I eat four candy bars every single night, to keep my weight up. And these candy bars had to contain "dextrose" -- not just SUGAR, mind you, but glucose, as that is what I was deficient in, according to her. I tell you, I HATED Baby Ruth bars. They are GROSS to begin with, and they were one of the few that contain dextrose.

Under her careful supervision, I still couldn't gain over 10 pounds. I also decided that weighing 135 was too heavy for my body, as my feet began to hurt. So over the course of a year, I lost that 10 pounds, simply by eating less food at each meal. I still ate anything I wanted, and had no guilt over eating any kind of food. I maintain that I had a fairly healthy relationship with food. Up until the low fat/body building diet.

So I've spent years trying to get back my healthy relationship with food. I can eat sugar, and I can eat fatty foods without twinges of guilt.

But then I learned about Nourishing Traditions. At first it was really hard to read the book because of course, it suggests that we refrain from eating certain foods. Things I've already known all along. But the good thing is, I seem to be at a place where I am able to avoid some foods, without getting triggered and setting myself up for cravings.

Sugar of course, is very bad for our bodies. But, contrary to many popular diets, fat is not a bad thing. Some fats are, the partially hydrogenated ones, but others, like lard, butter, olive oil, coconut oil, are not. Butter is practically a health food according to NT! It was actually harder for me to repair my relationship with fat, than with sugar. But now, I can eat butter with wild abandon. One of my favorite breakfasts is a fried-in-butter hamburger patty, or a butter-fried chicken breast, a zucchini squash and eggplant cooked in that butter. MMMMMMmmm.

The really nice thing is, I am for the most part, eating whatever I want. I am not doing NT 100%, for a couple of reasons. 1) I can't yet or I'll get triggered by the deprivation 2) It's an expensive way of eating. One of the most important recommended food is raw milk, and that is one of the most difficult foods to get hold of, considering that it is illegal to sell raw milk in many states in the US. And we are raising some of our own meat. I am gearing myself up to get my garden going in the fall, gophers or not! I'm going to beat them yet.

I found Nourishing Traditions through a goat list I'm on. Some people who own goats got into goats for their health. As I'd mentioned earlier, NT freaked me out a bit at first, so I just drank my raw milk and didn't worry about much of the rest of it until I got more concerned about my thyroid function.

One of the main indicators of hypothyroidism is a low basal temperature. I take my temperature each morning at 2:30am for Fertility Awareness. So I know that my temperature is under 97.5°F more than half of each cycle. I finally worked up my nerve to see my primary care physician, who tested me and when the results came back "normal" as they more often than not DO, even when you have hypothyroidism, he determined that I was "depressed" and offered me anti-depressant drugs. AGH. I told him in no uncertain terms that I was NOT depressed, and if I were, I would see a counselor first, not just start popping pills.

That's okay, I don't want to take allopathic medications anyway. So I started looking around on the Internet and found a blog where a woman was talking about following a book called Eat Fat, Lose Fat by Mary Enig and Sally Fallon. I knew who Sally Fallon was... she is the author of Nourishing Traditions. As it ended up, Eat Fat, Lose Fat is written in an easier format, and more to the general public. NT is actually a cookbook, and kind of "out there" really nutty-crunchy as we called the real earth mamas that attended the daytime La Leche League meetings. We whispered to ourselves of meeting those other mamas, who didn't shave their underarms or legs! ;-) LOL, I turned into one of them eventually.

EFLF was a lot easier for me to read. And I was desperate to help my thyroid. I started avoiding a lot of foods, and taking supplements. In the process I discovered that as long as I take 2 Tablespoons of coconut oil each day, by upper back doesn't stiffen up when I'm sleeping. I used to have excruciating pain in the morning. No longer.

So this is getting really long. I'm sure you've long since passed out there in front of your computer. At least I'm not fonting on about my puppy today. ;-)

I have learned some very important things about food. Many people don't get to eat live, nutritious foods. Our bodies need real food, some fermented, some raw. When you only eat dead food, your body pays the price for that. Here is a guy that lost a lot of weight eating by Nourishing Traditions. If you are interested, click to read more about Real Milk and Nourishing Traditions.

Until next time.

Categories: nourishing-traditions, ponderings