Whining and Dining, or, Why I Can't Eat in Restaurants

Hello friends.
It appears that my close acquaintance ED is trying to creep back into my life.
And, just like the ex-boyfriend you didn't want to see in public on a day when your hair was frizzy & your sweatpants were on, ED showed up and caught me by surprise--naked and wiping the sleep out of my eyes.

You see, I had to go out and buy a new pair of pants. My old ones no longer fit over my thighs or my ass. This is not a good thing.

So I stepped on my scale on Friday morning, and apparently I now have 20 pounds to lose if I want to get back to my happy weight. I haven't been this heavy since I left Columbia University in December of 2006. 

At almost 150 & a size 10 in jeans

Me, crushing Patrick with the freshman fif--uh, twenty-five.

So what does this have to do with eating in restaurants? 

Well, let's start with a show of hands: how many of you are familiar with the principles of or actually practice Clean Eating? 

I got onto the Clean Eating bandwagon almost two years ago now, when I was doing some research on Jamie Eason. I ended up picking up a copy of Oxygen Magazine, which sounds like it has something to do with that obnoxious women's television channel, but is actually a fitness & muscle magazine for hardcore gym rat women. (It's not as hardcore as Muscle & Fitness Hers, which is another of my favorites, but I like it because it does have a ton of really great nutritional articles on top of being unapologetic about pushing resistance training and muscular bodies for women.) 

Can you believe this woman is over 50??? Tosca is a huge, huge inspiration.

Oxygen is published by Robert Kennedy, and his wife, Tosca Reno, is an over-50 fitness model AND the author of the Eat-Clean Diet series. Now, while the English major and former magazine copy editor in me wishes that her editors would be a little less forgiving in publishing her articles & books as written, I think the principles & science behind eating clean are too important not to talk about. 

So do me a favor: either leave this blog for a second & go to your pantry or, if you're reading this at a red light on your mobile device (for shame! pay attention to the road, silly!), pull up at your local Publix & go to any aisle not in the periphery of the grocery store. Then I want you to pull out any packaged food & read through the list of ingredients. Check to see if there are a) more than three ingredients listed, b) any ingredients whose names you cannot pronounce or c) simple sugars or starches in any incarnation. If you could answer "yes" to at least one of those things, then the food you're holding is not clean. 

80% of fitness is eating clean. That's not to say that you can sit on your ass all day, but as long as you eat nothing but egg whites, you'll get thin. You have to combine a super-tight diet with resistance training and high intensity cardio in order to gain muscle, lose fat, or just get truly fit.

I cook all of my own food. I sometimes spend up to 7 hours on my days off preparing chicken breasts and ground turkey and tilapia and sweet potatoes and oatmeal and quinoa and egg white omelets for the week. I eat tons of vegetables and low GI fruits.  But because I've completely damaged my metabolism (more on that another day), I'm still packing on pounds. 

I also eat 6 meals a day, each at 2.5-3 hour intervals. So going out to eat is really difficult for me. Not only don't I have control over how the meals are prepared or what meals are even offered, my timing gets thrown off, and I usually end up having to wait long past my mealtimes and then getting so ravenous that I'll eat anything and everything in front of me. 

In the last four days, my grandma left for Chicago, one of my sisters came home from college for the weekend, one of my sisters left for a trip to Poland, and my family celebrated father's day. All of those events heralded the communal partaking of food...which was difficult beyond belief for me. 

Now, there's NOTHING wrong with eating clean. In fact, that's how we all SHOULD be eating, all of the time. But in today's culture, those of us who DO eat clean are considered abnormal. I don't even enjoy eating out anymore anyway...there is too much salt and fat & sugar in prepared foods, and I can even taste the difference between a salty restaurant dish and one I prepare myself. But either way...

Eating out means a loss of control--and eating disorders are all about maintaining as much control as possible. Eating disorders can arise (or at least mine partly did) out of a feeling that the rest of the world was nothing but chaos. If we can control the way our bodies look & feel or the way our food is prepared or when or how....then maybe we can avoid spinning totally out of control. 

So this is why I don't eat in restaurants. This is why I have trouble spending time with my family. This is why I don't go on dates. 

It's not a fun place to be. But when I try to go out of my comfort zone, the old panic sets in...and now that the scale AND my pants are telling me some ugly truths, it's even harder to let go and just try to be normal for once. 

So there's that. 

Anyway...more later. I'm off to work. 

Kaila