Great Winnie the Pooh Comic Strip

This is how I feel about dieting - I've been trying my whole life to "be like other (thin) people and have failed.

Here We Go Again

In the past month I've sampled 4 different weight loss plans. My weight had gone down a few pounds AND up a few plus one on each plan. I've eaten as low as 600 calories in one day and as high as 2000 calories, both my daily requirement for the plan I was on at the time. Yes, I gained weight on 600 calories a day. I'm ending March 2 pounds heavier than I started it.

I keep promising myself I'm going to put a stop to this insanity.

Again.

So this morning I unpacked my Overeaters Anonymous literature again and spent my laundromat reading time looking over old Lifelines. OA may not be perfect, but it's the best thing I can think of right now.

Although I said I was going back to strict McDougall, it was more like 50-50 instead of my usual 90-10, and my body is paying for it with all kinds of aches and pains, blood sugar dips, brain fog out the wazoo, and now my blood pressure is higher than it ever was. I had a nice McDougall soup for dinner last night and every 2 hours had to get up to hit the bathroom. At 3:30am it hit again and I rolled over and stood up and WHOA!

The room started spinning!


I immediately sat back down and started to panic, even though this has happened to me in the past, and thanks to my very sensitive inner ears, will happen again in the future. But at the time, the tailspin of panic sent my blood pressure soaring to 210/104, stroke levels. I eventually calmed myself down enough to go to the bathroom (or else I would pee in my pants and panic me even more) and got back to bed, but by then sleep was out of the question. By 4:30am the dizziness was completely gone, my pulse rate was back to normal, and my chest no longer felt as if were going to burst open from the force of my heart beat. It was at this time I got out of bed and checked my blood pressure and got that reading - who knows how high it was back when my head was spinning?! I've been checking it every hour as the morning goes on and the last reading was back to my normal of around 140/70. Whew!

But what, besides rising too fast, caused the BP to go - and stay - that high? My money is on yesterday's bad food choices, as there were more bad than good ones. For breakfast I finished off the hash brown patties that were in the freezer. That was 6 patties. With about a half cup of ketchup, and not a lower sodium variety, either. Lunch was a balogna and cheese sandwich, and not a lower sodium version of the lunch meat. Dinner was a little something called Paul's 2-Cup Soup from a post on the official McDougall forums that I made with no salt added tomatoes and salt-free broth, thank goodness. But to go with the soup I made a loaf of white flour potato bread that got not just buttermilk powder in it but 4 teaspoons of butter. And because veggie soup and white bread digests fast, when I was hungry again a few hours later I had myself a banana with peanut butter.

Now, why is my blood pressure sky high? Do I really need to ask that question?

Breakfast today was my old-faithful oatmeal & raisins with some brown sugar mixed in. Lunch will be veggies, rice and garbanzo beans with some McDougall Right Foods pea soup poured over the top. Dinner is going to be a McDougallized version of Nava Atlas' Pasta Twists with Cauliflower and Spinach, using California Blend frozen veggies (cauli, broccoli and carrots) instead of the plain cauliflower, and no spinach, mainly because I was positive I bought spinach but the freezer ate it sometimes between Saturday and today. My son was happy about that because he really doesn't like spinach all that much. And if I want a snack tonight, well, I'm thinking of making another banana bread. Maybe this time my husband will leave enough so we can have it more than twice.

I keep saying I have to treat my food plan as if it were medically prescribed, like my thyroid and asthma meds. It's the only way it'll sink in to this swollen throbbing brain.

I need to make healthier food choices. This sinus infection is because of all the dairy I've been eating lately, and although I know dairy does this, it tastes so good and is so addicting I can't help but eat it. It's got to stop.

And my blood pressure is going up again from all the meat and salt I've been using. Again, I know these things affect me this way, so why did "God lead me" to these foods? Is it as I wrote in an earlier post, that my God is the mean and vindictive one? Must be.

I'm taking back my will and going back on a mostly McDougall food plan. If I keep eating the "God directed way" I'll die of a heart attack before Easter.

The Thin Within book calls this decision "Phase 2." I call it a return to sanity, that it wasn't God but the devil that drove me away from my former healthy eating habits and into the world of unhealthy meats and fatty foods again.

The World Is Spinning By

First of all, I'm sick. It started coming on a few days ago, that sinus yuckiness, the congested and fuzzy head, poor sleep. Yesterday it settled into a full blown sinus infection, complete with the aggravated tinnitus and weird smell in my nose. I'm also a bit on the dizzy side today. A double dose of dizziness - the changing air pressure always makes me dizzy and sinus infections do, too. I'm sitting here at the keyboard holding on because I'm listing to the left with these clogged ears affecting my equilibrium.

I took a deep breath . . .

and calmed down a bit. The more I read in the official Thin Within forums the more I see that many others have gone through exactly what I'm going through. For instance, the list in this thread would be identical to mine, except substitute "McDougall" for "Atkins" and "Foodmover" for "Zone."

And the feelings about not being deserving of a thin body that's in this thread looks very familiar - I probably felt this way for decades.

After yesterday's rambling post I spent a lot of time obsessing over "healthy eating" and choosing the "right" foods to eat, going as far as making up a pot of soup because I felt that was all I deserved to eat. I made plans to go back to strict McDougalling, heck, maybe even forgoing my pasta and going on MWLP to jumpstart the weight loss. Then I thought long and hard and realized I didn't want to go back on that food plan because it might lead to weight loss again, as it did once in the past when I followed the super strict form of it.

No, I wanted to go back on McDougall because it's an "eat to satisfaction" food plan and I could fill my stomach again. I like the sensation of being full, even if it is only veggies and rice. Thin Within eating leaves me hungry even after a meal because we're to stop at a 5 out of 10, eat only half of what we usually eat to start, to live in a constant state of hunger. To live the rest of my life with a level 5 being the fullest my stomach ever gets would be sheer torture. I would constantly be thinking of food and how much longer I have to wait until I finally get down to zero again so I could eat again.

This web page compares and comments on some of the popular diet plans out there, and the author has some harsh words about plans like WDW and TW:

Similar to Weigh Down, Thin Within tells members to only eat when they are hungry. The program tracks eating patterns based on a hunger scale where 0 denotes real hunger and 5 denotes fullness. The scale is a way to gage "God-given signals of hunger and fullness." There are no dietary restraints or forbidden foods uses.

According to Gerbstadt, fasting can be unhealthy especially for people who have diabetes and who have a history of binging.

"Food plans that don’t have you eating three to five hours is probably not going to give you a lot of energy – you’re going to have highs and lows in your blood glucose," states Gerbstadt.

"So, any diet that tells you to wait until you’re hungry and it happens to be in six to seven hours, you won’t be at your optimum whether you realize it or not. I’m not against the idea of waiting until you’re hungry but you should be within every five hours."

Because I do have a history of BED (binge eating disorder) and hypoglycemia, and because I can go 12 or more hours without my hunger hitting a zero (and because I feel hungrier after eating than before), I think Thin Within may not be right for me.

As I wrote the other day, I will continue to read the books and see where it takes me, but right now the tide seems to be taking me in a different direction.

Hit Me With A Clue Stick

Actually, I found out it's called the "club of condemnation" in Thin Within parlance. We're told not to beat ourselves up, but to "observe and correct" ourselves when we eat out of anything other than a zero-level hunger or fail to stop before we hit a 5.

But my God is not the flower-child, peace-love-happiness God of born again Christians. No, my God is the vengeful God of the Old Testament, the God who drowns babies, tortures Job and taunts Moses. This is why I had a hard time with Overeaters Anonymous, too. Ask God to help you? My God would toss me down on the ground, stomp on my head, and tell me to pull myself up and take care of my own problems, then like a Marine drill sergeant tell me to drop and give him 20 (Our Fathers, not push-ups in this case).

I spent the three day weekend following Thin Within - not eating until I hit a zero, stopping at 5 or below. I ate what I wanted to eat, including the cake my husband bought for Valentine's Day, even though I told him not to. "Trust God" and follow the rules? I broke the first rule and got on the scale this morning and saw I gained 3 1/2 pounds in the past 3 days. Yeah, this is the God I know. And I've spent the past decade trying to get rid of Him and accept the God within that Tao teaches.The more I read about Tao De Ching and the writings about Jesus Christ, the more I see that the writers of the Bible just rewrote a lot of the old Chinese writings to fit into a new religion, a new deity, just like they changed other pagan holidays and celebrations around to fit in Christmas and Easter with the pagan calendars.

What to do next? Continue along this track and trust that it all turns out right in the end? Trust God? Trust Tao? Trust Dr. McDougall? I already know I can't trust myself if weight loss is my goal.