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Category: Food

Owning my food crazy

Trigger warning for discussion of dieting and food restriction.

I have a confession to make.

Over the last six months or so, I’ve lost a significant amount of weight.

It’s my first time that my weight has gone down since I jumped on board the fat acceptance train, and I feel great. I have more energy. My joints don’t hurt. I haven’t had a migraine in months or a back spasm in weeks. I can almost do a push-up and spent the weekend hiking up and down a mountain. I’m training for a large backpacking trip for next summer.

Oh yeah. And the reason I feel great is totally unrelated to the weight loss.

Here’s my story: about six months ago, I had a joint pain flare up that didn’t end. (Last year I wrote about the joint pain that I’ve been experiencing in my elbows, wrists, and shoulders since I was 18.) I was complaining about it to my physical therapist (I got a nasty ankle spring last October), and when I described the problem as tendonitis, he gave me a serious look.

“If you’re having bilateral joint pain in multiple joints, that’s not tendinitis. There’s either something systemic or something related to your spine. Go see a doctor.”

The doctor measured elevated inflammation markers in my blood. There was a scary period where we thought I might have a serious autoimmune disease (don’t worry! I don’t). I recruited a friend of mine who is a naturopath, and we started looking into diet-related options to explain the inflammation. I went on an elimination diet– the first time intentionally restricting my diet beyond keeping kosher and other Jewish dietary oddities, like fast days and avoiding wheat, beans, and rice on Passover.

It was pretty horrible. I became obsessed with everything I put in my mouth. The scary part was how easy it was for me to fall back into old dieting habits. I can’t have sugar. There’s nothing convenient to eat, so I’ll just skip this meal. How many calories am I eating? I’ll keep a food log. I was thinking about food all of the time.

I was still in pain.

The doctors still couldn’t figure out what was wrong.

I was so stressed, that I got a back spasm that didn’t respond to ibuprofen. The pain was so severe that I vomited.

I finished out the elimination diet completely exhausted and no closer to an answer than when I started. The rheumatologist had no answers. My naturopath friend had no answers. The only lead we had was that I’d felt better over Passover. So, as a last ditch effort, I tried following a “Passover diet”. No wheat. No rice. No beans. Mostly vegetables, eggs, meat, fruit, and fish.

Within three days my pain was gone. A nutritionist gave me a tentative diagnosis of SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. SIBO flares up with sugars, and starch in particular, so that explains why the Passover diet was so effective. Since starting it, I haven’t had any migranes or back spasms. I can wear a backpack for a day without pain. I can carry things up and down stairs. When I do a push-up, I feel my pectoral muscles working, not just pain in my elbows. I’ve had two periods in a row, after having maybe four or five natural periods over the last two years.

And I’ve lost weight.

I’m effectively following a low-carbohydrate diet, so it’s really no surprise. But that’s what people focus on. I bought new clothing and got a big “good for you!” from the saleswoman. I had an easier time hiking this year than last year, and my parents went on about how it must be the weight loss. When I order a salad instead of a sandwich, I get the side-eye from people who know that I’m pretty outspoken against weight-loss for its own benefit. Those haven’t been the hardest thing, though.

The hardest thing has been the re-emergence of my food crazy. I started weighing myself to make sure that I wasn’t losing weight too quickly, but the crazy that wants to know what my weight is every day, every hour, after I use the bathroom, after I work out. I don’t own a scale, so I can only weigh myself at the gym, but the thought floats into my head at random moments, for the first time in years. I started logging my food to make sure that I was eating enough, but I feel a compulsion to count calories. Every time I look for low carbohydrate recipes, I’m bombarded by dieting literature.

I’m not going to lie, the praise feels good. It feels sickeningly comfortable to be dieting, even if it’s unintentional. It’s so easy to wonder where my weight will settle out, and hope that it’s at a “normal” weight. It’s so easy to hope that I’ll fit into straight sizes. It’s so easy to feel like a “good fattie.”

So I’ve been trying to get comfortable with my food crazy. Instead of ignoring it, as I’ve been able to since I stopped weight-loss dieting, to identify it, look it in the eye, and say, “You lie.” To put it in a corner and check on it every now and then to make sure that it’s still there. Some times are harder than others. This weekend was particularly difficult, since my parents and brother have their fair share of food crazy. At one point, Mr. Shoshie pointed out that the two of us seemed to be the only ones who claimed to experience hunger. I checked up on the food crazy a lot this weekend.

But, as I get used to this new way of eating, it becomes easier. The food crazy is starting to get tired of yelling at me to count my calories and count my carbs and measure my waist. The food crazy is getting used to me leaving it in that corner. I can’t wait for the time when I can ignore it completely.

Drinking While Pregnant: Not The Worst Thing.

You can drink while pregnant and, as long as it’s done in moderation, everything is probably going to be ok. Or maybe it won’t be ok. Heavy drinking during pregnancy can cause serious health issues for the baby, and no one seems to know exactly how much is too much, so the current guideline is “don’t drink.” No drinking means no fetal alcohol effects. But it might also mean a miserable pregnant lady. And stress and miserableness can lead to a series of health issues as well, including miscarriage.

Dinner Talk

There’s a post up in the Times Style section this week about dinner table conversation, and how it varies from family to family. The author notes that at her childhood dinner table, the parents did the talking and the kids kept to themselves. In the Foer family, no one ever asked “What did you do today?”; instead, the Foer father, “a lawyer who served on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union, led his children in debates about economic policy and civil rights issues, but with an open ear: a conversation about Reagan’s Star Wars policies might lead to a discussion about “why we couldn’t build a giant shield over the United States out of Legos.”

Vegetarian in the Midwest

I was a pescetarian for 11 years, from the time I was 10 until I was 21. Luckily I grew up in Seattle, which is about as vegetarian-friendly as a city gets (and offers a lot of seafood options) — and then I moved to New York, which is still very veggie-friendly. But even there, I ate a lot of plain pasta or baked potatoes when out to dinner in group settings. My parents are also from Chicago, so we took regular trips to visit family in the Midwest, and on one of our drives through rural Illinois sometime in the mid 1990s we stopped, for lack of any other options, at a Burger King drive-though. I ordered a veggie burger, which Burger Kings had in Seattle. My parents and sister got hamburgers. When my burger came, I opened the buns, and saw that it was empty, except a slice of tomato and some lettuce. My dad handed it back to the cashier and said, “I’m sorry, I think you forgot the patty.” The woman, confused, said, “I thought you wanted a veggie burger?” And my dad, confused, said, “We did… we wanted a veggie patty. You know, like a gardenburger?” And the woman responded, “But if it has a patty it’s not going to be a veggie burger.”

Oh Sam Sifton, I will miss you as the Times food critic

Say what you will about Sifty’s preferences when it comes to dining — I tend to be pretty on-board with his recommendations, but there are have been a few that I think were slightly off — he’s one of the best good-review writers out there. Bruni wrote two of my favorite bad restaurant reviews of all time — hilariously mean, exactly on-point — but thinking up new and exciting ways to say “that was delicious” is particularly difficult. So I’m sorry to see Sifton go (unless Jill Abramson wants to call me up and offer the position, in which case Sam can’t clear out his desk fast enough). This piece about the highlights of restaurant criticism is exactly why I love the guy. A few samples:

All criticism is argument. Mine has been from the start that restaurants are culture, and that there is no better perch from which to examine our shared values and beliefs, behavior and attitudes, than a seat in a restaurant dining room, observing life’s pageant in the presence of food and drink.

Take an abysmal meal I had one night at Hotel Griffou, a warren of rooms below a town house on West Ninth Street: nasty, brutal and short. Worst of all was an entree of chorizo-stuffed squid that tasted of rubber and sawdust, as if it had been fashioned at a sex-toy factory. My guest pushed at the thing with his fork. It repelled his efforts.

Instead, my guest and I hustled over to the John Dory Oyster Bar, where April Bloomfield cooks a similar dish, but brilliantly. My guest was nervous from his earlier experience. But when he bit into the food, his eyes went wide and he started to woof that way that people do when they want to talk and they want to keep eating at the same time because it is so delicious. I felt a surge of love for the city that can provide such antidotes to misery, and so easily.

Sommeliers are as rare and amazing in the general population as albino squirrels.

It looked like an abscess, frankly. It tasted like godhead.

And he gives a shout-out to one of my favorite neighborhood restaurants at the end. Sifty, next time you’re at Frankie’s, call me and I’ll split the cavatelli and the meatballs with you.

People who should not exist

Guy Fieri

Guy Fieri. I mean, anyone who wears his Oakley sunglasses wrapped around the back of his head is clearly a waste of space (see also: his hair and his bowling shirts and ohmygod that goatee and basically everything about him). But he’s also an anti-Semite, a misogynist and a homophobe to boot. So yeah, fuck that guy.