April's CR Diary

« MR on Saturated Fat | Main | Another Hazard of CR -- Stuffed Eggplant -- N&M Society Meeting »

January 26, 2010

What Works, What Doesn't

I can't sleep.

It's 3 am. I've been waking up at 3 most nights for the last while, but most nights I don't mind... I stay awake for a little while, lying in bed writing in my head or whatever, and then I go back to sleep till 4 or 5 or (gasp!) 6 on some really good days. I don't really mind waking up at 3 am if I wake up with particularly good thoughts, such as an entire chapter of the novel writing itself. But this morning I woke up feeling stressed out.

I was thinking about why I didn't sleep well tonight, and I thought of a few behaviors that help me sleep, and a few that don't. Now why you would take sleeping advice from an insomniac I don't know, but here are some observations that you can take or leave.

-- I sleep better when I don't eat past about 6:30 pm.
-- I sleep better when I do yoga every day.
-- I sleep better when I do cardio every day.
-- I sleep better when I'm on serious CR, but there is a limit to that because if I go too low I am almost high and can't sleep much at all, as during my ketogenic diet experiment. On the flip side, I need less sleep when my calories are lower.

Yesterday was a super busy day. Membership meetings at Temple at 7:30 am, 12 noon, 1 pm, 3:30 pm, 5 pm, 7:45 pm. Susie and I did a leaflet at 6:30, and I had a meeting with my organizing staff at 10:15. During Temple membership meetings, we see 700 - 1000 people, and they don't all come at once at the meeting times: they tend to roll in as they get breaks or can drop by, so it's a continuous stream of people. I was on my feet almost the entire day, and when I got home I was dead exhausted and really thought I'd sleep through the night. Tomorrow morning (well, this morning) is Jonathan's class, so that means 6:05 am train. Then I'm giving a pick up class to a co-worker whose blood pressure is up a lot from the stress of the Temple campaign. Yoga for relaxation: I don't think it's going to be what he thinks it's going to be, but the fact is, once you're on number 5 of the 12 sun salutations we do every morning, you've forgotten about whatever was bothering you. Then a full day of work, though luckily not all that long a day.

As I thought about my sleeping problems, my mind drifted into making a list of things that work and don't work for CR, or even for just eating well. While I am not very credible as an authority on how to sleep (beside the basic mechanics: lie down, close eyes, etc.) I do know a lot about what works and what doesn't for CR.

A few highlights. YMMV.

What doesn't work:

-- The punishment mentality: overeating and then trying to eat really low to make up for it. A lot of now-gone CR bloggers tried that. It both doesn't work and reinforces the mentality that this is something you're doing because you feel bad about yourself, not good. If you overeat, just go back to normal the next day, unless you're genuinely not hungry.

-- Replacing fat with carb. This is the single worst thing that I can do in my CR. I mean, other than replacing turkey and mashed cauliflower with 98% fat free canned ravioli, which I haven't done in a long long time.

-- Starting the day without a clear plan and clear goals. I find that I am much more susceptible to the "just one bite" trap if I don't have a very clear plan of what I'm going to eat going into the day. Even if it's just, "I will not eat anything with carbs in it other than low calorie vegetables," that's enough to avoid the biggest monster of all:

-- "Just one bite." The one bites I've had off friends' plates, of appetizers people wanted to share, of meeting food at nurse meetings, etc. have added up. And what's worse about just one bite is that it often turns into more than just one bite. For instance, I can not eat just one bite of a bagel with cream cheese. I've done it once or twice, in 35 years, but for the most part, if I eat one bite of bagel, I'm in it for the whole thing. Same with pizza.

-- "Last Night On Earth," a phenomenon I've named after a U2 song about heroin addiction (I think.) The idea that "Tomorrow I will start being really strict and will continue to be so for the rest of my life so tonight I will eat whatever I want and it will be okay." This may be the second biggest monster, or it may even win out as the biggest monster. Have you met it? I'd rather meet a plush minotaur in my bed in the middle of the night than this one.

-- The "I've already screwed up, so I'll start again tomorrow" monster. A close relative of the above. Often the direct descendant of "Just one bite."

-- The "I feel awful so I'm going to do something that makes me feel even more awful," monster. This is why it's so important to surround yourself with positive people who make you feel good about yourself. When I feel young and beautiful and healthy, my behavior reflects that. There's a fairly good test, for me, of whether or not I'm in a good head space re: body image. It has nothing to do with the mirror or the scale. It is as follows:

One of the workers at the meeting comes onto my twenty-something co-worker (who looks like a super model) and ignores me. I either:

a) feel depressed because I'm not 27 anymore and what if I'm past the point where anyone is going to look at me ever again except for MR who is wonderful and the love of my life but obviously hopelessly deluded by being in love with me all these years and also likes his food with very little salt and his vegetables undercooked which just goes to show that he has weird taste

or

b) I am simultaneously planning the biggest health care strike in Philadelphia in 20 years and plotting how to raise a few hundred thousand dollars to do a revolutionary study on low carb diets for diabetes patients (not my idea, RDF's, but my love/hate relationship with fundraising always leaves me thinking that given a few minutes I could come up with a hundred thousand dollars, and it's happened before so it's not that off the wall.) and I don't even notice that the worker is hitting on my staff member until I recognize that she really needs to be rescued so I create a distraction.

Obviously, choice B signifies a good space.

A CR friend and loyal reader, Agnes, was asking me about motivation. For me, I am much more motivated when I am intellectually engaged with the subject. That first year of CR is so exciting because you're learning everything for the first time. I have another CR girlfriend who is in first year euphoria, and it's a ton of fun for me to watch her obsess over macronutrient ratios. It's all so fascinating the first year you turn yourself into an experiment, with results both instant and long term. I've felt quite a bit of renewed euphoria starting to study this low carb stuff... it's almost like a chemical high, like you could shred up the papers and put them in some water and then inject them directly into my veins and zing! Better than all the drugs I've never tired, and only positive side effects... unless you are thinking about the fact that my car is now covered in them and my union president is riding with me to Scranton in two days so I'd better clean out the car. I remember how my mother used to say, back before she was as happy as she is now, "I may be depressed, but I can be a depressed person with a clean car."
There is really never a downside to cleaning out the car.

So on to what does work:

-- Have a plan, both for what you're not going to do but more importantly for what you're going to eat. For me, it's something like: pack protein and fat, eat them before eating any carbs, make sure enough veggies are on hand or accessible, have a back up plan if the gang goes out for lunch or dinner.

-- Hang out with people who are positive influences, both re: food and in general. Avoid people who aren't.

-- Recognize the danger of the food environment and plan for it.

-- If you screw up, don't freak out about it, but also don't let yourself off the hook too much.

-- Don't do CR media. Putting myself in a position where I got attacked for my diet, my lifestyle, anything I said about libido either pro or against (you should have seen the attacks I got on the CR Society list for my statements re: that most common myth about CR -- are these people from Victorian England??? I thought we had decided that sex was good???) started such a negative feedback loop in my head re: diet and everything. Maybe you could handle it. I can't. Not now anyhow.

When I look back, I can see the series of events that led me from being very happy in my CR and in general to some sort of existential despair. Most of the events had nothing to do with CR, but were things that happen to many of us at one point in our lives or another. 35 is a funny age. 33 and 34 were kinda awful but so far 35 is my favorite year ever. I strongly recommend it to anyone who hasn't tried it yet. I'd never trade the 25 year old version of me for what I have now. It just occurred to me that the 25 year old version of me who used to sit in her little single girl apartment reading nutrition books would jump up and down with delight if she could see the 35 year old version of me. "We did it!" she'd say scream, alarming the then two year old cat who would take her activity as an invitation to play and start to chase her feet. We're finally starting to *do* something re: diet and public health. Not sure quite what yet or quite how, but no question that the revolution is just around the corner, and I'm not the distant spectator I was for so long. Sure, the macronutrients are turned upside down in a way that would really alarm the 25 year old version of self, but like Madonna (thanks Agnes!) I am constantly re-inventing. And besides, "Don't Tell Me" is a much better song than "Borderline.:

Posted by april at January 26, 2010 1:18 AM

Comments

Posted by: Sie at January 26, 2010 6:54 PM

Posted by: Judith at January 26, 2010 7:10 PM

Posted by: Emma at January 27, 2010 2:58 PM

Post a comment

Name:

Email Address:

URL:
Remember Me? YesNo

Comments:

Preview

Post