The Productivity Problem

There is a part of me – the creative part – that is okay with spending the day staring at the ceiling and letting my brain empty of all the noise. There is another part of me – the part that likes to eat – that needs to pay the bills and so must actually produce some work for my contracts once in a while.

I work for myself, from home, doing contract work. It’s heaven. Except when it’s hard.

It can be very hard when I’m struggling to be productive, and I know the only thing that will push me into the zone where I will get things done is if I go drink a big glass of coke and eat a huge block of cheese. The boost will push me along far enough until I can get into the zone and get shit done.

But in the meantime, I’ve just digested 10 tsps of sugar and a whomping 500 + calories of cheese (estimation because I’ve never been able to figure out what a 1 inch cube of cheese really looks like, but I’m pretty sure I just ate five times that amount).

I’m reading Salt, Sugar, Fat by Michael Moss and I just spent the whole morning reading about how Coca Cola is engineered to make me drink it. I resolved to be stronger. I resolved to use my educated understanding of the chemicals and how they interplay with my brain to stop drinking coke. And then I went downstairs, poured myself a glass, and sat down to do some work.

Addiction.

Is there a 12 step program for sugar addiction? I imagine there is. If they included a workshop on productivity without chemical enhancements, it would be gold.

I think I could overcome any addiction as long as I didn’t have to use my brain at all during the withdrawal period.

 

Sweet Slips

Yesterday I kept my word and counted calories. I ate 1500 more than I was supposed to. The stupid thing was that I forgot to eat lunch, so most of those calories were guacamole and chips when I realized how hungry I was, and then we had bison  burgers with goat cheese for dinner, which was delicious, but the cheese was too many calories again. The thing is, I’m a bigger fan of eating less of the good-for-you things that are high in calories than of cutting them out entirely. Things that are bad for you, it’s easier to cut those out, or at least restrict them to cheat days.

Today I took a friend to an event called Empty Bowls, where you pick a bowl made by a local potter and then you have soup (donated by local restaurants). The soup was fantastic. My friend has some mobility problems, so I got up to get her some desserts and tea at one point, and when I got back she offered me the meringue on her plate. I thought to myself “Oh! I can eat that – it doesn’t have any gluten in it!” I was half way through it before I remembered I also wasn’t eating sugar. Luckily it was a very small meringue so there wasn’t any major harm done, but the funny thing was how easily I completely forgot my own rules. This isn’t the first time that’s happened. A few weeks ago I stopped with a bite of a biscuit in my mouth and had to spit it out because I’d forgotten I wasn’t eating gluten.

Apparently reducing gluten and sugar intake will improve my memory. I wonder how long it will take for that to kick in!

 

 

Mood Swings

Last week I gave in and ate three cookies. I’ve never been  much for moderation. They were gluten-free cookies, so at least I’ve stuck to it on that point.

The next day I felt very out of sorts. I was grumpy. Anxious. Angry. Moody. I chalked it up to hormones and we went out to dinner and a movie. We were going to see the Hunger Games and I was excited, having looked forward to it for weeks. But I was so grumpy, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I wanted to silence, by any means necessary, all the other inane people standing in line with us. Especially the guy in front of me who wasn’t saying anything. What was his deal??

I decided that since I’d looked forward to the movie so much, I would treat myself and have a pop. I stared for a moment longingly at the Yogen Fruz, but the line was too slow and I decided just to go with the root beer. Bad choice. The root beer was unsatisfying and I kept thinking about strawberry frozen yogurt all night. Actually, I’m still thinking about it because they had a sugar-free version.

I drank half the pop and didn’t want the rest. The movie was amazing and I was cheered up for the ride home. But the next day, all the anger returned. I was a grumpy, moody, weepy mess.

I’m not entirely sure that the correlation equals causation, but it was noticeable that after I went back to not “cheating”, I started feeling better again. I’ve been a bit more even keeled the last few days, and every time I think about eating sugar, I think about how miserable I felt on Saturday morning and I decide to wait. Just in case. It’s even made me question whether I will in fact cheat and have dessert at Easter. I may just make some of my chocolate truffles with maple syrup (which, oddly, doesn’t seem to have the same effect – or at least not to the same degree).

Food affects your hormones and your mood. How, exactly, is a different question. But I’m beginning to see a link between sugar and feeling miserable, and I’ll take happiness over candy any day.

Good Alternatives

I have discovered that cutting out major food groups like gluten and sugar (sugar is a food group in my experience, whether the Canada Food Guide admits it or not) requires creative replacements. In order to manage my cravings, I’ve had to come up with treats that are like the better of two evils. I mentioned already that one of my weaknesses is cheese, and while I do try not to eat the entire block in one sitting, sometimes I’ll eat the cheese to avoid eating the cookie and I figure at least if I get a bit chubby, I won’t have osteoporosis.

Other brilliant things I’ve come up with to manage cravings include making sugar-free buckwheat pancakes. My partner found a great recipe online, which if I can find it, I’ll post here. It involves whipping the egg white and folding the egg yolk into the rice milk…brilliant. They are the fluffiest pancakes.

He also made me some chocolate truffle cookies by melting squares of unsweetened bakers chocolate in a pan, adding a few tablespoons of maple syrup and then mixing them together over the heat until they start to solidify together. Drop them onto wax paper and press an almond into the top, place in the fridge for ten minutes and voila! Delicious, chocolatey truffle cookies with no refined sugar. Maple syrup is thought to actually contain minerals that are good for your liver, and everyone knows that chocolate is really good for you.Plus, this takes less than ten minutes and is guaranteed to satisfy any chocolate craving without all the added junk. Interestingly enough, when I eat processed chocolate, my skin always breaks out, and when I eat this chocolate, it doesn’t.

I’m still working on managing calorie intake, and I know I need to up my exercise plan, but I’m really excited that finding alternatives isn’t as hard as I thought it would be.

Dirty Little Secrets

I keep thinking about cheating. On my diet that is. But then I remember I’m not on a diet, I’ve simply changed my eating habits.

I’ve gone back to eating cheese, and now cheese is the number one reason I can’t stay under 1800 calories per day. Even with exercise, I eat so much cheese that I’m always over budget. Cheese! Dammit. I love cheese.

Aside from that, I have successfully gone three weeks with no gluten (except for the time my brother-in-law forgot and cooked the fish in flour…) and no refined sugar (except for Tyler’s birthday when I made a gluten-free cake, had a slice and stayed up all night…). The fact that these are the only exceptions are big victories. Oh wait, there was also the time I realized there was no good replacement for ketchup so I ate it anyway with my…wait for it…grilled cheese sandwich.

Big victories. I have given up gluten, theoretically for good, and I’ve given up sugar and committed to at least three months without it and the possibility of a permanent extension, at least until such a time when I think I could control the cravings. Ha.

The bigger victories have been the times I’ve stared at the candy that I stashed in the freezer, or the gluten free cookies I bought when I thought that sugar would be a temporary elimination, and I think “no one would know…it wouldn’t matter! It would be my dirty little secret.” And then I turn away, and eat cheese because I would know. I would know that I’d cheated and failed. This isn’t a victory calories wise, but it’s a huge victory for me, for now. I am gaining some control over my addiction to sugar. This is the first step towards avoiding diabetes.

Sugar Cravings

I feel a little bit better today. My head is still a bit wobbly and my stomach still a bit nauseous. Today after lunch my intestines were unsure about the whole procedure and were a bit cramped. However, I enjoyed my lunch of chicken, arugula salad, hummus, carrots and olives. It was tasty and nutritious. My main goal is to eat lots of greens every day, especially while I’m not eating red meat, to keep my iron levels up. The arugula is spicy and delicious, and I squeeze a bit of lemon juice onto the leaves instead of salad dressing and it’s really delicious.

The hummus has been a life-saver for sure. Whenever my energy is down, I just eat some carrots or celery with hummus, and I feel full for longer than if I’m just eating veggies. I’ve been eating a lot of fruit too. I know that some people think that fruit should also be on the give-up list because it’s mostly just sugar as well and because anything that sparks an insulin reaction can lead to fat-storage, it’s not a good idea to overdo it on the fruit. However, I cling to fruit during these times as my only source of sugar. As someone who considers myself a recovering sugar addict, the fruit keeps me from going completely nuts when the cravings kick in.

Today, I’m full-on craving candy. I know myself well enough to know that the first few days of a detox are painful physically, but it’s once the physical symptoms start to abate that the mental games begin. I have to find strategies for resisting sugar.

Some evidence suggests that sugar is a highly addictive substance, even more addictive than cocaine. I have no trouble believing this, as sugar has always held an incredible pull for me.

I have always had an addictive personality, and several years ago my binge drinking led to my body rejecting alcohol. I gave up all alcohol for three years. More recently, whenever I drank, it was usually in moderation and with a more concentrated mental awareness of what I was doing. But it was always a risk that I would slip into enjoying drinking too much and I would start to binge. The thing that helped was that most people now know I don’t drink a lot, and most people don’t make a big deal of it any more.

My goal is to create the same situation for myself around sugar. I need to let people know that I no longer eat sugar. I need to create a mental, emotional and physical response to sugar that is negative enough that I won’t cave and eat it when it is in front of me, or in response to someone else’s guilt or feelings about food (such as the all-too-common idea that food is love and therefore if I don’t eat your brownies, it means I don’t love you). In order to create these associations, I focus on the way eating sugar really made me feel. Not the pleasure of the taste, but the low energy, the hang-overs, the weight gain, the mood swings, the poor self-esteem, the lack of concentration and motivation – all of those negative side effects that drastically reduced my quality of life. And if that doesn’t work, I create an association closer to the above comparison – I imagine myself snorting sugar up my nose. An image which grosses me out intensely, and draws more specifically the comparison between addictions – those considered acceptable and those considered unacceptable in society, but both of which can have devastating consequences, including death.