The fact that you have to make the promise shows that you have a problem. I’ve never had to promise not to take another drink because I don’t care much for alcohol. It makes my headache worse and I’ve never thought the buzz was worth all the calories. There’s a bottle of vodka that has been in my freezer since July and it will probably still be there next year. That’s how I know I’m not an alcoholic. However, I have often promised myself that I will only eat half the meal at a restaurant and then eaten the whole plate. I’ve promised I won’t drive to the grocery store for ice cream, and then ridden home with a half-pint of Ben & Jerry’s. I’ve promised I wouldn’t eaten a lot of things and then I’ve eaten them anyway.

Which is why I have to say, “Hello, my name is Jennette and I’m a food addict.”

Last year I reviewed a book about food addiction and mentioned that I did not consider myself a food addict. One or two people commented, “Really? Are you sure?” I used to weigh almost 400 pounds. It’s not out of the question to wonder if I had a deeper problem than licking the beaters too many times. But things had been going pretty well and I had been eating really well and exercising and I didn’t think I had much of a problem with food.

In the past year however, my life has spiraled out of control in interesting ways, which has made me want to eat. Food is my drug, Kroger is my dealer and I’ve definitely been using. I’m still not sure if “addict” is quite the right word. The term “compulsive eater” might be a better description. I’ve definitely felt compelled to eat. I’ve wanted to eat chocolate in a way that is more powerful than just a desire for something yummy. I’ve wanted to eat when I’m not hungry. I’ve wanted to eat when I know it will make me gain weight or cause me health problems, and I’ve done it anyway. I’ve wanted to eat in some primal way that goes beyond just the need for survival.

When I’ve resisted the urge, it’s been hard. Very hard. I’ve sat on my hands in restaurants. I’ve gone to take a nap because I know I won’t eat in my sleep. I’ve manically gnawed on celery in an attempt to fill me up so I won’t eat an entire batch of muffins. Many times the only reason I haven’t eaten seconds is because I know other people will notice. I’ve looked at the half-eaten meals on friends plates at dinners and realized they don’t have the same need to keep eating that I do. I’ve realized I’m a bit different.

I’ve been reading All In My Head, a book by Paula Kamen about her fight with chronic daily headache. When speaking about the disease of headache she quotes Susan Sontag who says, “Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.” That can certainly be said of obesity. I think it’s true of addiction too. I don’t know why I am the way I am. Perhaps someday in the future they’ll be able to reprogram people’s brains so they don’t feel these destructive compulsions. All I know is that I have a screwed up relationship with food and I probably always will.

I know someone out there will now suggest I should go to Overeaters Anonymous. Thanks for your concern and for the suggestion. I’m glad there are programs out there for food addicts that have helped many people, but OA does not seem like a good fit for me at this time. As long as I avoid certain trigger foods or keep those foods in my trunk (like the bagels and honey that are freezing in the parking lot as I type), I seem to do ok. I only hit serious trouble when my life goes out of balance in other ways and in my sadness I reach for the Ho-Hos. But I can still recover from that by going to the gym and eating well for several days afterwards.

For now, it’s just enough for me that I can say, “Hello, my name is Jennette and I’m a compulsive eater.”

What’s changed? I know I can handle it now. When I was first learning new habits I was worried that any deviation from my plan could knock me off course. I wasn’t ready to knowingly indulge in pies and cookies. It was too early. But I’ve been doing this for awhile now and I know that eating a pumpkin roll and Italian Crème cake and the richest fudge brownie in existence for lunch one day is not going to doom me to a life of obesity. It will make me feel sleepy in the evening. It will cause me to gain a pound or two. And it will definitely make me think, “Woah, I cannot eat like that all the time.” But it’s also a lot of fun. I enjoy eating and I’m never going to apologize for that. There are only 3 or 4 times a year when I am surrounded by so many delicious desserts and treats. I have to take advantage of it when I can.

My philosophy towards the holidays this year has been, “Eat whatever the hell you want and just go run later.” Or as my older brother put it, it’s just easier to lose the weight afterwards than to try to resist. I’ve got to agree with him on that one. Maybe that won’t be true when I’m in my 50′s, but give me two or three weeks here and I’m sure I can get rid of whatever I’ve gained. While it was lots of fun to eat whatever I wanted for the past three days, I sure am relieved that the holiday eating season is now over for me. All that sugar makes me enter an altered state of existence where I feel lethargic and spaced out, almost like I’m on drugs.

I wouldn’t describe my feelings about such indulgences as “guilt.” I felt guilty about stealing a granola bar from the grocery as a child. I felt guilty for not cuddling my guinea pig enough in the years before she died. I felt guilty about damaging my brother’s copy of Catch-22 and trying to stall him until I could buy a replacement copy. The way I feel about eating a lot of food is not guilt. It’s vigilance. It’s something I’m aware of, something I know I need to take care of, but I’m not going to beat myself up over it. It’s the same way I feel when my laundry has piled up and the number of clean panties I have left is serving as a countdown to the point of no return. I just can’t go commando and I’m not going to turn my underwear inside out. Yet, I’ve never felt guilty about not doing my laundry. And I don’t feel guilty about eating a lot on the holidays, not as long as I take care of it later.

The one thing I might do differently next year is to tell myself to limit it to only a couple indulgences. That way I’ll end up eating several indulgences over what I intend to, and end up eating about as much as I’m okay with. It’s like telling someone who is chronically late to be someplace 15 minutes before you really want them to be there so they’ll actually get there on time. This year I told myself to eat whatever I wanted, and holy cow, I really did. I gave myself an inch and took a mile. I doubt anyone in my extended family cares what I eat at those gatherings, but if anyone is monitoring my food intake they must be really confused as to how I can eat like that and lose as much weight as I have. I usually only see them at the holidays and those are one of the few times I eat like a maniac.

Except for the part with the three pints of ice cream.

Don’t worry, I didn’t eat them all in one night. I still have some restraint. But when I stare into the vortex of uncertainty, I like to imagine the swirling vortex is a chocolate marshmallow Pinwheel cookie and then I devour it whole. Twelve times.

I’ve read a lot of blogs over the years and I’ve always felt bad for the bloggers who gain weight when their life takes an unexpected turn – be it divorce or unemployment or moving. I’ve read along and sympathized, but secretly I was glad it wasn’t me and that stress-eating happened to other people. I told them to knock it off and that eating cookies would not solve their problems. For the most part I believe that, but honestly, the cookies did help a little. So did the ice cream. They made me feel good for several minutes when I wasn’t feeling all that good.

They did not solve my problems, though. Ultimately they could have caused more problems if my pants had stopped fitting. I was amazed that my jeans could go from being a little loose to being a little tight in just the course of a week. I’d never really dedicated myself to hardcore stress eating like that any time in the past few years. But I wanted to do the “wrong” thing because I’ve done the “right” thing for so long. As much as I like that I can run and skip and jump, I have to admit I really like eating too. It’s fun. It’s almost a hobby. When I was pigging out, I knew I was making bad choices, but I didn’t care. I always tell stressed out people not to overeat, but it’s much easier to tell someone to drop the chocolate bar when you are not personally worried and anxious. I always seem to forget how stressful stress is. The word “stress” is so overused that the actual impact of the feeling gets detached from the word.

My time of stress also coincided with my cold, so I felt like the weight I lost due to illness was a gift card from my body redeemable for ten pounds of bad eating. Only, I really need to stop now. Hear that, self? Stop with the overeating, already! The stress is gone and while your life is slightly different now, you don’t need to be buying candy bars at Walgreens in the middle of the night. I need to take up knitting or something to keep me busy in the evenings when I have an urge to eat everything in sight. I need to stop buying binge foods like cereal and breads. I need to get back into my humdrum, health and fitness routine. Everything was working fine before! Why can’t we go back to before? Life was so groovy then and I had my own happy theme song playing on an infinite loop.

But sometimes life changes. Or your theme song gets switched. It just does. Your average day today is not going to be your average day fifty years from now. You have to roll with it and make healthy living a part of your life no matter what. I have the advantage that I know what to do to lose weight, I just have to do it. I must adapt to survive. And having three pounds of pumpkin puree in your freezer is not an excuse to eat an entire pumpkin cheesecake. Well, it’s an excuse, just not a good one. I suppose this is just part of the never-ending battle, sometimes you lose, sometimes you win, but you just have to keep fighting even when your sword looks like a cake knife.

Meme Rules:

1) Post these rules before you give your facts

2) List 8 random facts about yourself

3) At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them

4) Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged

I’ve spilled my guts on this blog so much I sometimes feel like I need my own biohazard waste bin to clean it all up. But here are eight health and weight-loss related things about me that you probably did not already know.

1) I don’t care if artificial sweeteners kill me, I’m eating them anyway

I know some people don’t like to use aspartame, sucralose, saccharin or any of those sweet, sweet, chemicals that end in –ol (sorbitol, xylitol, malitol, etc.) because they are concerned about having three-headed babies or growing a sixth finger. I don’t care. I will be the guinea pig who drinks diet soda every day for 30 years so we can determine if all those modified molecules actually cause cancer. You’ve got to die of something. If it’s going to be death by artificial sweetener, so be it.

2) I watched TV constantly as a child, but now, not so much

I was a complete TV addict as a kid and through high school. In 4th grade we had to track our watching habits and I think I watched at least 30 hours a week, more than almost anyone else. I honestly didn’t think I could live without cable, but once money got tight in college and the credit card debt started piling up, I canceled my Comcast subscription and surprisingly I did not miss it that much. I still love TV. The best stuff on TV is better than it has ever been before. I carefully select the shows I watch, just like I am picky about what I eat. Of course, we also didn’t have the Internet back then, so maybe I’m just spending time reading blogs now that I would have previously spent watching The CW.

3) I was thrilled the day I learned I could order pizza online

I used to have severe phone anxiety. For several years in middle school I didn’t answer the phone at all. I hated a required journalism class in college because I had to call up strangers and ask them questions. I would get nervous and fret and stare at the phone for at least 20 minutes before getting up the nerve to make the call. Even now, I still prefer to e-mail strangers, but I can answer the phone and can call people without throwing up first. I always hated ordering pizza though because I was scared to call the pizza place and go through the ordering process. (Yes, I know this is bizarre and weird, but as I said yesterday we all have our own personal weirdness going on.) In college I was searching the Papa John’s website for the phone number of the closest store and discovered I could bypass the stressful “talking to strangers” process completely by ordering online, thus making it easier to eat an entire box of cheese sticks than ever before. It was awesome.

4) I licked the frosting off the cake

I wrote an entry last year about an episode of Desperate Housewives where a fat girl at a birthday party was accused of licking the frosting off of a birthday cake, even though a thin person had done it. I bemoaned how horrible it was that stereotypes like these persisted, that the fat people of the world were not necessarily out to lick the frosting off of your birthday cakes. Except, I totally did that. I don’t remember whose cake it was, either my own birthday cake or a cake at some family function, but I remember I once stuck my finger into the gooey puffs where the frosting met the cardboard bottom of the box and licked that buttercreamy goodness up. It was awesome.

5) I am not a weight-loss role model 100% of the time

The same week I so effortlessly avoided eating the apple pie at work I also went home and ate two bowls of oatmeal and a batch of sweet potato muffins. As I was pouring the water into that second bowl of cinnamon and sugar and dried oats, I thought to myself, “This is not behavior becoming of a weight-loss success story.” And I stuck it in the microwave anyway and it was really good. I knew what I was doing and I did it anyway. I don’t always mention this stuff because this isn’t a food diary and I don’t feel a need for “forgiveness” or “confession” that much anymore when I overeat. I ate too much. I shouldn’t have done that. Oh, well. I’ll try not to do that tomorrow. But I’m not perfect, people, and it feels a bit odd when people congratulate me for having such control over my eating these days when it’s only true maybe 95% of the time.

6) I don’t think Spanx are all that uncomfortable

Spanx are a body-contouring undergarment that help smooth out your body and make you look thinner. I always hear about how uncomfortable they are, like a modern-day corset, but when I wore a pair I felt fine. Maybe I needed a smaller size to completely cut off my circulation and turn my thighs blue?

7) I still have some photos of fatter versions of myself around the house and it doesn’t bother me

I do have some no-good, horrible, fat photos that never fail to make me cringe. These are not on display. However, I also have some fat photos where I am neatly groomed, well attired, smiling and with my family. These are on display. Ironically, I have far less shame for my morbidly obese self now that I am no longer morbidly obese. However, if we were ever to take a more recent family photo I would probably replace them since they would be more up-to-date and I do enjoy looking thin in my photos.

8) I am one of the Nursing Online Education Database’s Top 100 Health and Wellness Blogs

Okay, this is not so much a fact as a way to thank the NOED for linking to me and to point out a list of 100 health and wellness blogs. It’s an annotated list too, which means it must have taken forever to put together. I was recently putting together some footnotes and it was a horrible, draining, tedious process that made me glad I am no longer in school. However, the list is a good place to start if you are looking for more health resources online.

I’m not going to tag anyone because I am a daring rule-breaker, but if you want to run with these, go for it. And if you just want to run, period, go for that too! Just remember to stretch first.

From the optimistic, “What’s that hanging around my cloud? Oh, it’s a silver lining” perspective, it’s cool to know that I can maintain my weight by doing what I’m doing right now. I know there is a lot of debate in the fatosphere and the scientific community about whether people are genetically doomed to be fat or if you can do anything about it by manipulating your environment. I’ve only lived in my own body, so I can’t speak about anyone else with 100% certainty, but I know that when I show up and do the work, I get paid. Fifty percent of success comes just from showing up.

For example, I recently read an article in Newsweek about the social networking site Facebook by Kurt Soller. The lead sentence was “I have three fond memories from my senior year of high school: the day I got my college acceptance letter, the day I graduated and the day I joined Facebook.” My first thought was, “Wait up, how old is this guy? We didn’t even have Napster yet when I was a senior in high school. Facebook is only a couple years old.” For a second, I was jealous that there was someone much younger than me writing articles for Newsweek. But then I thought, “Well, PastaQueen did you ever apply for a job at Newsweek? Did you ever try to get a journalism internship? Did you even study journalism?” The answer to all these questions is NO. In fact, I rarely ever read Newsweek. Upon deeper reflection I doubt an oddball like me would find any satisfaction working at a weekly news magazine for any other reason than to brag about it to other people. The reason I don’t work at Newsweek is because I never showed up. I never tried to get a job there. I didn’t do the work. If I did try, I may or may not get a job there, but we’ll never know because I have no intention of ever doing that. However, when it comes to weight loss I have done the work. I do show up. I haven’t lost much weight in the past couple months, but I haven’t gained any either. I know that for me personally, if I show up and do the work then I can maintain my loss.

My biggest problem lately is that I have been overeating in the evenings. I have been hitting the yogurt really hard. Live bacteria cultures beware, PastaQueen’s coming to get you! And then she’s coming back for your children! I’m not sure why I’ve been doing this, but my best guess is that exercising in the mornings makes me hungrier in the afternoon. I’ve thinking about eating a bigger breakfast and lunch to compensate. For the past week my strategy for stopping the evening pig-outs has been, “Well, just stop doing that,” but that strategy has been as effective as the troop surge in Iraq. Last night I cooked two pork chops, one for dinner and one for tomorrow. I got my Tupperware container out to put the other one away, but I took a bite out of it before I put it in the tub. Then I took another bite and another and hey, I’m almost done so why don’t I just finish the whole thing? I’m very good at rationalizing, but it’s very hard to justify a two pork chop dinner as a boon for weight-loss.

My best excuse is that I exercised a lot yesterday. I lifted weights in the morning and did Pilates when I came home. Then I decided to run 3-miles because it was so nice out, like Disney movie beautiful with the sun smiling at me. I half expected to run into an animated dragon at the second mile marker who would offer to be my friend. This means I exercised for at least 90 minutes, which is pretty much the limit for what I’m willing to put into fitness on a daily basis. I’ve read that some people exercise 3-4 hours a day to maintain their weight loss, but honestly, I’d rather be a bit chubby than to move that much. I’m willing to try a lot of things to lose weight, but if there’s a line, that’s it.

I will admit though, I have not been pushing myself as hard as I did back in the early days. When I moved here last year I would walk for an entire hour. Granted, I probably burn as many calories running for 35 minutes as I did walking for 60, but I could definitely push myself harder. I’ve gotten comfortable and I need to break out of that comfort zone. I’m reading about running plans and I’m going to make an effort to start training harder, especially since I’m running a 5K in two weeks.

Since my weigh-in numbers in my sidebar haven’t budged much lately, I decided to try for a quicker mile time. The fastest mile I’ve ever run is 9:30. My leg has been feeling much better this month and I’d prepared my body by running 3-4 times a week for two weeks before attempting my high-speed dash. Last weekend I gave it my all and sped down the trail from stone mile-marker to stone mile-marker, dodging dogs on leashes and couples holding hands without breaking through them Red Rover style. When I finished, I looked down at my stopwatch and it said:

Aaaarggh! Exactly the same number as my last best time. Nine minutes and thirty seconds. Well, at least I didn’t lose any speed when I took July off to heal. But damn, I would have loved to at least gotten 9:29. Next time I’m going to run the other direction down the trail because it’s slightly downhill. Time was not on my side, but next time gravity will be.

In other exercise news, my final tennis lesson was last Monday, and honestly I was relieved. I really suck at tennis, y’all. Which is probably funny for other people to watch, and humbling for me since I’m naturally good at other things, but I could not even serve the ball into the service box. Everyone else was getting much better than me and when we played games against each other I could tell I was dragging everyone else down. My hand-eye coordination SUCKS. It sucks so hard you can probably feel your face being pulled into the monitor right now by its intense vacuum force. You’re most likely reading these words with your right eye because your left cheek is stuck to the screen. There were times balls would pass right by me and there was no excuse for missing them. All those years I avoided team sports and athletics I also avoided creating the synapses and neural pathways in my brain that taught people how to hit moving balls. I’m sure if I practiced a lot (if I showed up), these pathways would be formed, but I’m not crazy enough about tennis to bother. I’m glad I stepped out onto the court, but in the future I’m going to avoid team sports because I prefer to just compete against myself. One of the reasons I like running is because it’s idiot proof and I only have to beat myself, not some ultra-marathoner.

And if all else fails, there’s always aerobic wedding dancing.