Letting go of TV: The relief this is bringing

Right off the bat I need to clarify that I have not completely stopped watching TV.  But in recent months especially, I have finally made good on my desire to drastically cut down on my TV watching, and hope to keep this trend going.  TV, like excess food eaten compulsively, stopped “working” a long time ago, and in itself became this bizarre “no, that’s not quite it, <switch the channel>…no, that’s not it, either, <click>….etc.” addiction.  You know that image of the rat persisting in pushing the button to get the pellet, even though the pellet no longer comes out regularly, only once in a great, great, great while?  That’s pretty much the point I’d reached with TV.  I don’t know if the programming that’s on has shifted enough so that there’s just not a whole lot of options that interest me….or if it’s that I have changed enough that my mind just can’t get “sucked” into that “zone” when watching (maybe a little of both?), but I sometimes think my ED and TV habits fueled each other in a peculiar way, especially as both stopped working for me.  It’s like I’d get so frustrated that I couldn’t find anything to watch while eating (the two for me went hand in hand), that I would eat more…..and the more I found that excess food, even what I would call those “big ticket item” foods, didn’t succeed in putting me in that “zone,” the more I kept reverting back to the same stupid reruns or movies that I once found extremely gratifying to watch.  It was a horrible habit cycle to be caught up in, especially since I stopped being able to experience that temporary satiety I was so desperately seeking.

So a few months ago I finally said “Enough!” with TV.  Watching TV during the day has not even been a temptation for years — too busy with work — so no issues there.  But where I’m vulnerable is in preparing my evening meal, watching TV while eating dinner, and then keeping that drone of the TV on as “background amusement” for the rest of the evening.  I remain eternally grateful that we agreed to not have a TV in the bedroom, so thank God once we’re in bed there’s full sanctuary from TV there.  But those evening hours were a problem, for many reasons.

Initially, I simply unplugged the kitchen TV and set it down on the floor.  Easy enough.  I then brought a portable radio/CD player in the kitchen, and used it for mealtime (I still like to have some music or talking at that time, at least most of the time).  If I found a good podcast, I’d pull my computer into the kitchen and listen to that during the meal prep and dinner.  I also began to try timing dinner so that both my husband and I could at least spend part of that time together.  Our work schedules, unfortunately, often leave us having to eat separately, so rearranging things so that at least 3-4 times a week we have that dinner time together has certainly helped.  Amazing how enjoyable it is when you can actually talk to someone during the meal — DUH!

The change in me just from this one action has been profound.  I think the landscape of TV has a more powerful influence on my thinking than I like to admit.  I mean, I’ve always been only too aware of the bombardment of images that create a “beauty ideal” against which I can’t possibly compete (because they’re not real, in the sense that these images are created with the help of lighting, makeup artists, hours spent on hair, post-production magic, etc.).  And as you can probably sense just from the tone of my description, I’ve also been extremely vocal about it.  I think my favorite is when you watch a TV commercial for some outlandishly rich food, and you have a woman who looks like a runway model, popping the item into her mouth with this carefree smile, followed by a facial expression typically only produced, say, when you’re receiving a delightful neck rub.  So NOT reality, and yet there must be some part of me that absorbs that message and uses it as a weapon against my better judgment!  But I think there are many other, more insidious, effects from watching TV.  I don’t even know where to start with them, partly because I think there are so many, partly because I probably can’t fully comprehand them all.  All I know is, without TV, I swear it’s like I can feel my mind “breathing,” as though somehow having TV is like having to breathe in a smoke-filled room.  You can do it, and maybe from time to time you get a reprieve by stepping outside or sticking your head out the window (and even then you’re still stuck with the particulates in your lungs from breathing in that smoke), but there’s this sutle suppression, even suffocation that keeps you from really feeling the health of a full breath.  Yet if you get out of town and spend a week outside in fresh air, you feel your breath just opening up, and even the air looks clearer.  This is my best description of how I feel without TV.

Now, I’m still working on striking a balance.  From time to time, I have gone ahead and “tested the waters” — turned on a favorite TV show (typically one that’s been recorded) and let it play during dinner, especially on days when I get home quite late and feel that need for “brain candy decompression.”  But most of the time, I end up turning it off halfway through, as it’s just not doing the trick at all.  I think the more I stay on this path, the more I will move from even needing to think about turning to TV — if that’s what I want (right now it is).

As for after dinner, I don’t really watch TV anymore, but I can’t impose this on my husband, who still enjoys a few select shows and the occasional Netflix instant download.  So for the most part, I simply turn my attention to something else while TV is on.  I do sometimes ask him if he wouldn’t mind our not having TV on at all, and he’s been extremely gracious in obliging me when I ask.  If he really did want to watch something, of course I would let it go, but I think much of the post-dinner TV is just another habit, which is why he has no problem turning it off.  And truth be told, sometimes it’s nice to pop in a favorite DVD and let it play while we work on our evening activities.  There are a couple of travelogues that we both love, and have seen so many times we could lip-synch the presenter’s commentaries, but for some reason, we still enjoy having them on.  I’m not worrying about that — this is an experiment to improve the quality of our lives, not to get a “perfect report card” for “no TV watching”!

I hope to keep going with this.  Knowing how furiously addicted I was to “those same shows and movies” for so long, it’s required some creativity to find other outlets, more gratifying outlets, to take the place of TV.  But I think I can continue to build on this.  The thing that’s helping me is realizing that these reruns are the past.  The past is done.  If I want to continue to move forward with my life, to become whoever it is I’m becoming, I have to let go of the past, which includes clinging to the same shows that have long since expired for me.  I have to trust that I will continue to find new sources of amusement, and that they are not likely to be TV but something else.  It’s actually exciting, like a whole new adventure of discovery!

And best of all, no crummy commercials to have to fast-forward through!

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“Eureka, it works!” Finding new ways to rechannel “binge” energy into other activities instead

If you’re suffering from binge-eating or compulsive overeating, I feel obligated to post this for you, now that I’m genuinely experiencing what I’m about to describe.  I know how MANY times I used to honestly wonder how I could possibly find alternatives to bingeing, when no matter what I tried, it seemed the pressure-cooker would build, until finally I felt like I had no choice, I had to release that pent-up emotional energy somehow!  And truthfully?  I probably would have kept going, albeit with the incremental improvements I was still making in certain aspects of the behavior (sometimes so incremental I think you’d have needed an electron microscope to detect them), had it not been for one nagging development:  it stopped working!!!  No matter what I did, I could not jump back into that “zone” of escape.  DRAT if I remained stubbornly in the same emotional state I was trying to temporarily migrate out of, only now I’m eating all these calories and absolutely miserable knowing the damage this would render only hours later.  The worst of both worlds!

So you could say the final straw was this loss of being able to do the presto-switcho.  Suddenly there was no point.  And of course, I tried this a few times before I had to conclude the frustrating (looking back life-saving) reality:  My. Eating. Addiction. Had. Expired.  Never saw it coming.

In any event, that’s when I began to take seriously the plan of finding out avenues for stress release, and measures that would reduce the build-up of that stress in the first place, and put them to action.  I had no idea if they would work, but I gave them a try with the assumption and hope that they would.  My attitude was, “What could it hurt?  It has to help somehow.”

And now, with a period of time under my belt and a sense of growing perspective, I can honestly say YES, they WORK!  I think much of it comes down to, you have to be honestly ready to want to stop the behavior.  I “wanted” to stop the behavior for many years, but deep down I think what I really wanted was to stop WANTING to do the behavior.  Meaning, I wanted to stop FEELING TRIGGERED.  But of course, that’s wishful thinking.  Extinguishing triggers, at least for me, has been a process, not a “one day I woke up and they were gone!” phenomenon.  So it turns out, what I needed was to reach that willingness to face a life without bingeing or compulsive overeating, and all the fears and panic and grieving that came with it, before I could then even think about truly reconstructing a life without it.

In any event, I don’t want to tangent too far, other than to say, if you’re reading those self-help books or going to a therapist about cognitive-behavioral type strategies, namely those that include finding alternative rewards or stress-releasing activities as a way to displace your bingeing, I’m here to give you hope that it can help you.  Hang in there, it’s better than I ever imagined!

Since example often gives better clarity than the general, let me share some of the activities I’m currently finding particularly soothing — ones that honestly I look forward to way more than the idea of compulsive eating:

• Taking a long, warm, leisurely shower, with fragrant soaps and shampoos, closing my eyes and feeling the water flowing over my body.
• Doing stretches on my back while listening to a favorite podcast.
• Doing yoga in my exercise room, in front of an open window.
• Taking a short walk, not in the “fitness” sense, more in a leisure mindset.
• Making a cup of my favorite tea (by the way, for those times I have eaten too much — yes, they still happen, just nothing like it was — I have found great success in curtailing my eating by taking a “tea break” in the middle of the meal).
• Setting the coffee maker on timer, and putting my favorite inspirational book on the kitchen table the night before, so I have my coffee and morning literature ready to go for when I wake up.
• Doing crossword puzzles and other mind games.
• Wearing my headset when I grocery shop, zoning out to music or a podcast.
• Listening to music or the radio while taking a long, relaxed time to prepare our meals.
• Wearing nice clothes that feel good on me.
• Stopping and taking some deep breaths, looking outside or around wherever I’m at.
• Making the bed and tidying up the house, not in a punishing, “must get this done” way, but in an, “It’s so nice to be in a clean environment” way.

The list goes on, but you get the idea.  These things may do nothing for you, but they’ve proven their value beyond my wildest dreams for me.

Now I realize that eternal vigilance is the game here; I can’t think I’m “done” and can coast from here on out.  For starters, I’m still progressing, and experimenting to determine what’s helpful and what isn’t at the moment.  I have to know this isn’t the end of the story, but I’m actually excited — curious — to see what’s going to happen next!

Bottom line:  it’s wonderful to see that some measures — the very ones that I avoided for years because they struck me as too simple or somehow I just “knew” they would never work (somewhere I’m sure I had tried a few, half-heartedly, no doubt “proving” to myself of their futility) — REALLY DO WORK if you work them!

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The frightening caloric total, how did my body ever handle it?

Just out of curiosity, as I wrote in my journal today, I fished my memory to the best of my abilities and wrote in gory detail a list of the foods I’d typically consume when choosing to succumb to what I used to call a “Junk Food Binge.”  That was my code for anything goes, no food is off the potential list, no attempt to observe or even define certain boundaries (funny how when removing any boundaries always seems to lead to junk food and not, say, “the all-melon binge” or the “any flavor of kefir I want binge”).  I’ve always been aware of the staggering calories I must have consumed, as I still count calories to this day as part of my food plan.  In fact, counting calories is so second-nature to me, by now it’s actually more comforting TO count calories than to try to eat without having that automatic awareness be part of my selection.  Yet, it seems part of my bingeing was rooted in the need to say to heck with rules, and I kept myself mostly ignorant on how much I was actually consuming during these episodes.  “More than 3000” is about as far as I wanted to think about it.  Until today.  Yow.

I’m seriously frightened by what the sum total must have been at my worst.  My poor body, when I think of the load I caused to so many of my organs and systems, it breaks my heart and makes me sick.  At the same time, I don’t know how my body managed to handle it without the degree of weight gain you would have expected.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m very active, have always been involved wth athletics and have always been vigilant about jumping back into serious clean eating following a binge.  Even so, surely these measures alone could not have negated the mass ingestion, at least that’s how it seems in hindsight.  I mean, my weight is pretty much the same as it was back in those days, and I can promise you, my net totals over a typical week or a typical month are nowhere near as high.  I exercise pretty much the same, so no change there.  How do I explain the disparity?

I can only speculate, and even then there’s really no point, just an interesting thing to ponder.  Does the body actually hit a point in which it simply can’t absorb more than “X” calories over a given period of time, so once I crossed “X” I couldn’t absorb any more?  Was I simply given the grace of a normal-weight body until I was ready to take action for my recovery?  Was I in fact still exercising more, and doing more restricting on my regular food days than I’m remembering?

Yet another reason why I’m so grateful to be at the point I’m at in my recovery.  I can only pray that I always remember how horrible, awful, panicked, miserable, depressed I was during that time.  How many times did I write the words, “So SCARED!” in my food journal.  How many times did I lay in bed, so sick to my stomach after ravaging it all night with sugar, fat and carbs, that the sound of my poor stomach wimpering (at least, that’s what it sounded like to me) made me cry?

Of course, on a lighter note, it’s still depressing, seeing how quickly those calories can STILL add up.  Anyone check the label on a can of nuts or a bag of trail mix?  Ouch!  Not fair.

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“Play the tape all the way through to the end”

I recently heard this piece of advice on the subject of staying on path with recovery, the idea being that if you find your mind toying with picking up your addictive substance or behavior of choice, and you find yourself falling into the “trap” rationalization of “I’ll just have one” or “I’ll just do a little bit” or whatever…..that you “play the tape all the way through to the end” in your mind.  What has happened every (or almost every) other time you have tried this?

I just love this!  I’m finding it’s a great — if sobering — way to keep myself grounded in reality, and not in wishful or magical thinking.  I’m also finding it a useful tool in other thought processes.  Like, the other day, I was out for a run, and found myself feeling a bit self-conscious (sigh, some body image issues are tough to die) about my legs.  Whereas they are normally very lean and muscular, if I’ve consumed too many carbs or too much sodium on a given day, I can see a “softening” to them the next day.  Given that my legs have always been my best feature, this distresses me, which is ridiculous, I know, and for many reasons.  But still, it does.  I feel more timid when I go out for a run, like somehow the world is noticing the momentary change.  I know, how self-centered can you get!  But now I’m using the “play the tape” cue to walk myself out of that thinking.  In the case of this run, while running I thought, “Gosh, I feel embarrassed about my legs.”  Play the tape some more:  Why?  “Because they’re softer today as a result of yesterday’s carbs and sodium.”  Play the tape some more:  And?  “And I feel like I don’t look as much like a runner to passing motorists and fellow pedestrians.”  More tape:  And?  “And….well that doesn’t really matter, does it?”  Still more tape:  Anything else?  “I can choose to make better food choices, such as reduce my sodium, which is probably better for my health, anyway, but more importantly, I need to stay focused on my work and being the person I was meant to be, which may include being at my personal fitness best, but thankfully does not include ‘being the most fit and buff runner people have ever seen.’ ”

Not the most impressive self-talk, perhaps, but it did change my thinking, so I’m calling it progress.  I’m definitely adding this one to my tool bag!

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The Endless “Tweaking” of the Food List

One of the more sobering revelations of recovery for me is that it’s never truly static.  There’s a part of my mind that loves the idea of, “This is THE Solution, From Here on Out.”  In that regard, on some level I find the recovery from alcohol a bit enviable; if you’re of the total abstinence camp, then that’s it, you’re done (as far as pinpointing what it is you need to avoid).  It’s not like, “Gee, for now I’ll just have 4 ounces of beer after dinner, and maybe next month I’ll switch that to a glass of Riesling every Friday night.”  But with eating, there’s just no cut-and-dried, permanent definition of what I can and cannot eat — at least for me (ditto for behaviors, but that’s a tangent for another post).  Furthermore, the criteria on which these “cans” and “cannots” are determined are different for each person.  My definition of recovery includes keeping my body within a certain weight range, which means I may have to deal with more cravings or imposed choices with my eating than someone whose goal is to be more at peace with her food, and is more surrendered to letting the weight “chips” fall where they may based on that criteria.  I think that’s part of what makes listening to others’ stories confusing at times.  Someone who appears to be more “settled” in her eating habits, who doesn’t seem to fluctuate in what her food plan entails, may in fact feel perfectly comfortable at a weight range that wouldn’t work for me, and this allows her to perhaps be more relaxed about how much she’s eating, what she’s eating, etc.  It’s been my experience that the more precise one’s weight goals, the more meticulous one’s food planning needs to be, and the more likely that there will be times that satiety will have to be partly sacrificed for the overarching goal.  It’s just the realities of weight management, especially for a person who’s natural appetite is still quite high.

Anyway, with the above in mind, one way I strive to stay on top of my recovery and eating is to remain hyper-vigilant of constantly reviewing what’s currently working and what is not.  For me, this is more or less a daily process.  At the very least, I’m logging my food, the calories, etc., and in so doing, momentarily reflecting on my overall sense of how the day went, how it felt.  But I’m also frequently pulling out my personal food list, scanning it (partly for menu planning — i.e. “Oh yeah, that’s right!  I can have grilled zucchini!  Oh maybe I’ll make some with dinner…”), reflecting on how satisfied I am with my meals and their impact on my fitness, satiety, health and body shape, and determining whether some tweaking is in order.  There are foods that work brilliantly for me for a long time, then all of a sudden start to cause problems, at which point I’ll often remove them from the list temporarily.  Then there are those foods I have avoided for a long time, but that I’m momentarily pondering.  I may put those tentatively on the list, and see if this time around I may have better success in incorporating them into my plan.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, other than to acknowledge that, while this can feel tedious at times — I think my inner “recovery police” sometimes wants to take a cynical assessment of this.  Like, “Well gee if you were REALLY recovered, would you need to be doing this?” — I’m increasingly recognizing that for me, yes, I need to do this.  For my goals and how I define recovery, this isn’t just necessary, this is PART of that recovery.  To me this is part of the concept of “going to any length” in order to get and keep recovery.  If anything, it’s kinda cool, to see this shaping up.  I feel as though I’m watching the dust from the “big bang” of my recovery settling into something that has definition, shape, and substance to it.  If I must engage in this kind of constant planning and assessment, I’m OK with this!

I AM noticing one big challenge with all of this tweaking:   that of remaining fully honest when visiting and revisiting this list.  I think it just naturally comes with the territory.  Just as reviewing and honing this list has enabled me to find a delightful food plan that has worked extraordinarily well over the last couple of months — I love my food, I’m learning that the same process of exploration has led to some dead ends and wrong turns.  I find that I have to constantly ask myself if an item I wish to add is truly a food that should be part of my plan, even if only my “treat nights only” plan, right now.  Sure, there’s one quick way to find out the answer — add the item and then sit back and watch what happens.  Funny how it doesn’t take long for trouble to surface if that item is not fit to be on the list right now!  But who wants to go through that every time?  At the same time, I have to guard against being too cautious, too restrictive, as I’ve noticed that when I limit my options too much, there’s that sense of never being fully satiated.  When that happens, it’s possible that it’s not so much the food choices themselves, it’s that I’m not in the best state of mind — that is, I’m not operating with a mindset that says, let’s explore all the wonderful tastes, recipes and combinations provided by what’s on this list.  Or it’s possible that I’m narrowing my range so much that I end up doing more damage in noshing on a bunch of semi-satiating items, when to simply allow a little more leniency would have enabled me to have “the” item and be done with it.

Bottom line is, it’s a constant dance!  I’m hopeful that as time goes on, I’ll continue to master the steps. 

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