WHAT'S UP?
Cindy Maddera
"Snowball #365"
I haven't really talked to much about my Jawbone Up since I got it. Someone asked me weeks ago if I liked it and I just kind of shrugged and said "sure". I really only use it to track steps and sleep. I'm doing well over the recommended 10,000 steps a day and I mostly get in eight hours of sleep a night. There's an option to enter extra workouts and food, but mostly I don't bother. My extra exercise is just more walking and I forget to put in my yoga time. I never track my food or water. It just seemed too much, too time consuming. Also, I didn't care. I eat super healthy most of the time and I'm not a big snacker. I eat three good meals a day and that's it. Sometimes there's ice-cream or a cupcake, but to be fair that happens few and far between.
Last Thursday, I received an email from Jawbone talking about how easy it is to enter your daily food now because they'd made some improvements. I shrugged and decided to enter in my Thursday food intake. By the end of the day I'd eaten 750 calories. I thought that seemed kind of low and the next day I was talking to Talaura about it. I told her that I was pretty sure I'd entered it in wrong. Then I told her all of the things I'd eaten and she said "no....that's about right." Walking just 10,000 steps a day burns about 2,000 calories. I am not eating enough calories. This explains why I have not lost any weight. Well, three pounds. I've lost three pounds. I smacked myself on the forehead for being so dumb. Then I started thinking I might have an eating disorder. Has my obsession over clean eating morphed from healthy to dangerous? And why does it always come down to food with me?
I mastered the art of pushing food around on my plate as a teenager, thinking that if I just didn't eat, I wouldn't be fat. Then in college, I didn't care what I ate because someone was always ordering a pizza and I always wanted to eat pizza. Also, every time I ate something in the cafeteria, I'd get sick to my stomach. Eventually this started happening with some of the fast food places we visited on a regular basis. I figured it didn't matter what I ate then as long as it stayed in my gut for more than ten minutes. Things got a little better when I had access to a kitchen and did more cooking, but we were also poor. That meant lots of spaghetti, anything I could do with a whole chicken, chili, and stews. Chris and I both gained a lot of weight entering graduate school. My answer to this was more exercise and less food. Still eating the same stuff, just less. I lost some weight. I thought this is as good as it will get and moved on.
Cut to the Food Revolution where documentaries like Food Inc. changed the way we looked at food all together. I dropped animals, with the exception of seafood, completely from my diet and ingredient lists couldn't go higher than the number of fingers on one hand. Organic all the way. Our grocery bill was astronomical, but I didn't care. I would bankrupt us in this new obsession to not eat poison. And this led to more weight loss and eventually I was a size I never remembered being before. Suddenly I was determined to stay at this weight no matter what. Then I didn't and gaining ten pounds this time was more emotionally devastating than the fifty pounds I had gained in graduate school. How could I possibly adjust my diet any further? Maybe I wasn't exercising enough? I AM DOING MY WHOLE LIFE WRONG? Those ten pounds might as well have been fifty. It might as well have been a hundred pounds.
When I turn forty, I want to be the kind of woman who doesn't care about this stuff. I don't want to stress and worry over every bite taken or not taken. As I sit wondering where all of that comes from I realize that we are constantly being bombarded from the minute we are born with what we should or should not eat. Eat this. Do not eat that. Today the best thing you can eat is this. Whatever you do never eat that. It will kill you. You eat that roll and you'll get fat. Julia Child died at the ripe old age of ninety one and she ate butter all the time. Calories be damned. I want to be able to say the same. Right now I'm working on balancing and finding that sweet spot of getting enough calories while eating the right things. I've added greek yogurt to my oatmeal and a snack of nuts between lunch and dinner.
I'm still waiting to see what kind of woman I'll be at forty.