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February 6, 2006

Bill, I Believe This Is Killing Me

Or: How To Get Your Friends To Support Your CR Practice.

That line from Billy Joel's "The Pianoman" has jumped out at me ever since the day I gathered my two closest friends and explained to them that I was actually going to try CR. It was a scary moment: most of the social time I spent with my two closest friends included eating and drinking, and I knew that the changes I made with my beginning CR practice would effect them as well. Not splitting a high fat appetizer, not ordering margaritas, not grabbing a bagel with cream cheese for all of us on the way into work... problems! I knew I couldn't hide or gloss over my new CR practice, so I had to face the possible conflicts head on.

The biggest difficulty in approaching the topic of CR with friends aned family is that changing your lifestyle, when your previous lifestyle mirrored that of your friends and family, is an implicit attack on their way of life. If eating gak isn't good for me, it's almost by definition not good for you. So if I change, doesn't that mean that I think you should change? And how dare I tell you to change???

Think about it: isn't that what's at the heart of most of your conflicts with friends and family over CR? If you're doing something different with your diet, you're sending the message that what they're doing isn't okay. And to be honest, most of us think the standard American diet ISN'T OKAY! No wonder friends and family often react with anger, indignation and attempts at sabatoge.

Here's how I got out of that dilemma with my closest friends. I made it very clear that while the way we had been eating was killing ME, I provided lots of outs for them to *not* change their lives, while remaining in close relationship with me. Of course I would prefer that they change their lives as well, but I knew that the best I could do for them was to save myself and set the best possible example. Engaging in open warfare over their choices would only have led to conflict, making it more difficult for me to stick to my new CR program.

Take, for example, my best friend Jeff. Jeff is super-athletic, has never been out of shape, can eat a bunch of gak without gaining weight, and can drink me and everyone else I know under the table and still feel fine for the rest of the day. I, on the other hand, blow up like a small blimp in a business suit if I eat like that. I get tipsy from one drink (though back then I could hold my alcohol much better -- all that extra weight soaking it up, I guess.) Jeff is married already, and has been as long as I have known him. I was single at the time I started CR, and had finally faced the fact that I didn't really want to date when I was overweight.

So my approach to making it clear that my lifestyle changes were not a judgement on Jeff was three-fold. 1. I pointed out that while he could eat all he wanted and still like the way he looked and felt, I obviously could not, and I was getting pretty darned miserable about my weight and the other physical signs of aging I was seeing. 2. I simply could not consume as much alcohol as he could without destroyiing my liver in short order. 3. At the rate I was going, I was never going to have the energy to get out and date, which meant an eternity of listening to me complain about it.

I made it very clear that this change was just about *me.* It wasn't a rejection of him, or of all the fun things we did together. In fact, I pointed out that I planned to continue going out to eat, and in the beginning I didn't change my out eating habits much at all -- I just focused on keeping my quotidian diet so low calorie that I could eat more when I went out and still stay on track. I switched out mixed drinks for red wine, and cut out bread. But other than that, I continued to eat "normally" when out at restaurants... and back in the days when I was eating 800 on weekdays, you can believe my weight dropped even with weekly excursions into the land of ad lib eating.

Jeff was pretty darned supportive. We started to meet for drinks at places where we both liked the red wine, instead of the Mexican margarita house where the nachos are free at happy hour. We began to go out for meals to places with a good salad bar. He thought it was pretty nuts that I developed a crush on a man I had never met before and had only read and seen pictures of, but I explained that I was in a transformation process, and unwilling to distract myself from the task at hand with dudes, and he figured that as long as I was happy, that was fine. I was no longer complaining about being single, as I had a long term plan to attract a genius boy, so I was much more pleasant to be around.

My friend VLC was another good example of a friend who was supportive of my transition to CR. She's a healthy eating, working out type herself, and is very interested in nutrition, so she was more than willing to eat healthier when we were together. Together we raided hotel vegetable trays, argued with waiters about leaving off the cream sauce, and split scallop dishes at restaurants. She listened to me rattle on for hours about MR, quoting every brilliant little thing he had to say on-list, and she even encouraged me with helpful thought experiments like, "Imagine MR in nothing but this Hello Kitty bath towel." With motivation like that, it was easy to resist the errant piece of bread.

My mom was a source of unending support and encouragement. Having recently lost 70 pounds on Weight Watchers (that's three and a half Kieffers, and ten Philomenas!) she knew how much better it felt to be healthy. She listened with enthusiasm as I made every new discovery, and enjoyed many a CR-friendly meal at my house.

My father and step-mother were also supportive, which was really fun because we had fought over food issues for years when I was a lowfat vegan and they were doing Atkins. As I started to eat more lean protein, more unsaturated fat, and fewer carbs, we found ourselves eating just alike for the first time in years! I knew it was a revolution when my step-mother and I ordered the same chicken Caesar salad at one of our favorite restaurants.

I had other, less happy friend interactions. One of my long time good friends and co-workers was not happy with my CR lifestyle. She told our other co-workers (I found out later) that I was anorexic, and she used to look at what I was eating for lunch and say, "That's ALL you're having?" Meanwhile, she'd be eating a large vegetarian hoagie on white bread with stuffed grape leaves on the side, and she wasn't happy with her weight. She finally told me that she didn't want me to talk about CR with her. Our friendship never quite recovered, though there were many other factors leading to us becoming less close.

The saddest of my friends lost to CR stories was my closest friend from high school, who had fought a gruesome battle with anorexia, including six years in and out of the hospital. She couldn't believe that CR could be anything other than an eating disorder, and she said that since I had had eating issues in the past (like almost all white women my age, but anyway) I shouldn't try it. She finally decided that it wasn't healthy for her to see me. I'm still really sad about it, and I hope someday she changes her mind. I never had an eating disorder like hers -- thank the Goddess! -- and while I had some crazy dieting days back in high school (like everyone, but anyway!) I seemed to have miraculously recovered from all such things upon reading Susan Faludi's Backlash my freshman year in college. When many years later I started to fall victim to the Standard American Diet and see signs of declining health, just being non-anorexic wasn't enough. Learning self-control and self-discipline around my eating issues and focusing on health and longevity instead of weight was an incredibly healthy process for me. I hope that someday my friend is able to resume our once-close relationship.

What amazes me about my friends who accused me of being anorexic is that they never expressed the slightest concern about my health, mental or physical, when I was rapidly gaining weight, eating gak, getting sick all the time, suffering from terrible insomnia, and indulging in one more margarita than my liver really needed. That, I suppose, was just considered normal. A woman starts to gain weight approaching thirty... well, that's just what everyone does. But a woman begins to lose weight and pay close attention to her nutrition -- she must have an eating disorder!

As my CR evolved, I found that I became closer to the people in my life who were supportive and grew away from those who were not. I just wasn't interested in people who attempted to sabatoge my new eating habits. I also wasn't interested in people who tried to sabatoge my self-confidence. I was developing a new attitude towards life, one in which I valued my own health and happiness just as much as I valued my work or my friends. As Harriet Learner says, when you change, people in your life will demand, through their words and actions, "Change back!" The people who wanted me to change back gradually faded out. The ones who supported me have become even closer friends.

CR is for most of us a very empowering process. The very act of taking control of something as basic as your diet gives you confidence in every other realm of life. I am still in the middle of this process, and expect to be a work in progress for the rest of my dramatically extended life. There have been speedbumps along the way: Buddhists bearing tequila, carb-outs at dinners with old friends, forgetting to soak my wheat bran because I've gotten so used to having a man to do it for me (I really sound like a slave-driver, don't I? He soaks the wheat bran, makes my lunch, makes my tea, takes out the trash... I just keep him barefoot, though not pregnant, in the kitchen! In my own defense, I do the majority of the housecleaning and cook almost all our dinners!) But there have been no roadblocks that I couldn't, with some work and some support from my true friends, navigate my way around.

Having body confidence and an abiding sense of health has given me the courage to do lots of things I never would have considered before. The connection isn't always obvious: how has CR made it possible for me to take up meditation, fall in love and join my life with someone Orange, and wash the cat food cans as soon as I open them? Body confidence is a lot of it, but there's something more. It's confidence in my ability to do what I say I'm going to do: to make a vow and keep it.

No, I'm not going to quote Don Henley again. But you know I'm thinking it.

Now about that low-carb tortilla and half-salt...

Posted by april at February 6, 2006 6:57 AM

Comments

Posted by: Matt - UK at February 6, 2006 9:14 AM

Posted by: April at February 6, 2006 9:18 AM

Posted by: Curious at February 15, 2006 3:20 PM

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