In which I confess to shortcomings and strive for contentment

This post is going to be part book review, part confessional, part reflection, so hang on to your hats!

I’ve been reading two books lately: Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project and Bethenny Frankel’s Naturally Thin. The first is for a book club I’m in, and the second, well, the second is part of a life-long struggle with my weight, my attitude toward food, and allergies. They dovetail together, oddly enough, as Rubin’s book is about making choices in your life to make yourself more happy, and Frankel’s book is about making different choices in your food habits to be thin (which usually translates to happiness on some level). I actually knew next to nothing about Bethenny Frankel before picking up this book (I know, I live on a foreign planet), so if you hate her, don't tell me about it.

On the one hand, Rubin’s book is an interesting one, because many of the personality traits that she struggles against in her quest for happiness are ones that I struggle against as well—irritability with my children, anger, the feeling that life is controlling me rather than the other way ‘round and resenting that feeling, etc. On the other hand, my main issue with the book is the amount of navel gazing that goes on. Elizabeth Gilbert bugs me for the same reason--as if we all have a year in which to drop our lives and go on a personal journey of discovery. To her credit, Ms. Rubin understands this limitation very well and states at the outset of her book that she is trying to change her life for the better as it is now. Having said that, however, I still struggle with the central tenet of her thesis, namely, a focus on personal happiness. As a strictly spiritual matter, I’m not sure how healthy it is to focus one’s life efforts on personal happiness. It is true that happy people are more productive, live longer, are better able to help others, and generally in a better place to pursue spiritual matters, but happy people also tend to ignore God because they feel they don’t “need” Him.

I know I’m definitely guilty of that tendency—when life is sailing smoothly, I’m less likely to pray, to focus my attention on working out my salvation and to generally stop cooperating with the journey of theosis. So I’m not quite sure what to do with Ms. Rubin’s thesis. Many of the things she sets out to do are quite admirable, and I would like to do those things, and be that person, but spiritual hesitancy aside, I also find the whole thing quite daunting and exhausting. I realize some of it is that she has a different family life from mine—she has two girls, one of whom is quite a bit older than my oldest, and she works full time from home. I have two little boys who squabble constantly, I’m home with them all the time, and I’m pregnant with another baby. While this pregnancy has been my best one so far, there is no getting around the basic fact that pregnancy is rather depleting and keeping up with two boys under age 4 requires a lot of mental and physical energy. That means there isn’t a lot left over for personal happiness projects like Rubin’s. So I end up feeling like I’ve failed at something before I even set my mind to try. I realize this isn’t exactly the point of Rubin’s book, and perhaps I will be in a better place to appreciate it when my children are older and I’m not pregnant or breastfeeding anymore. A happiness project such as she describes requires more than a little mental space.

The other area of my life that requires mental space is my diet. I’ve had a bad relationship with food ever since my mother gave my pre-adolescent slightly chubby self a second glance and put me on a diet. At age 11. I realize now that her reaction had far more do with her own body issues than with mine, but it set up an unhealthy pattern and gave me a fair amount of self-loathing when it comes to my body. I did gain a lot of weight at the end of college because of a on-going medical problem I was having at the time, and then it took several years for the problem to resolve, and for me to lose most of that weight, but many many bad habits, both of eating and of mind, were established along that journey. Having babies and experiencing all the body changes that go along with pregnancy, child birth, and breastfeeding have been mentally difficult for me.

And then there are the food allergies. At this point in my life, my diet is fairly restricted because of my numerous food allergies (which have grown worse with each successive pregnancy); I will confess that it gets me down a lot. I feel deprived all the time, and compensate badly. Sometimes I crave foods I am now allergic to that I used to eat all the time and I just think, for Pete’s sake, can’t I just have an egg? Pretty please? And because I can’t have the egg I really want, I end up eating a cookie, or another bowl of cereal and feeling frustrated with the situation and angry at myself for not accepting my limitations better. The allergy situation has also had quite a deleterious effect on our family meals, as there are now foods that I can only eat in rotation, or days that my system just can’t handle anything but Cheerios and milk, and so while I still prepare meals for my family every day, I can’t always eat the things I make. I hate the example that is setting for my children. It also means eating out has become a monotonous nightmare. I basically can eat burgers or steak when we are out, and I’m not really a huge fan of either on a regular basis. My husband recently received a very generous gift card to a group of trendy restaurants in our area, and we can’t use it on a date night because there is literally nothing on any of the four menus that is okay for me to eat. He was disappointed, I was disappointed; it was not a good moment. It’s not that I feel I am entitled to go out with him, but he really wanted to use the card for a special treat for us as a couple and we just couldn’t.

Put those two challenges together and you get a pretty messed up food life. I’ve tried lots of different diets and approaches to food over the years, all of them frustrating on some level or another. My husband and I did South Beach together when we were first dating, but of course, he lost 15 pounds (that he didn’t need to lose—he is skinny to start with) and I lost 2. Yep, you read that right. 2. I didn’t like the food, I wanted to eat fruit and bread, I felt deprived and anxious all the time. I cheated on the diet when my husband was at work. My allergies weren’t as severe then, so I could eat many more foods, but the diet itself seemed designed to fail. We spent the early years of our marriage reading a lot about food politics (Fast Food Nation, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Dominion) and resolved together to change our basic approach to how we eat. We had already made the switch to whole grains and were eating more whole fruits and vegetables, courtesy of South Beach, but the other books helped refined our thinking about where our food came from, how much of it we consume, and in what season we were eating it. We now try to use meat as a flavoring rather than the main event of the meal. We eat more legumes and soups. We don't eat dessert regularly. This is not to say that we don’t occasionally buy strawberries or lettuce in January, but we do try to avoid it if possible. I think organic food is better than conventional, local trumps food trucked here from California or South America, and pasture-raised anything beats feed lots and caged hens.

Recently, my husband has been on a tear against sugar (well, more of a tear than usual). We watched Sugar the Bitter Truth together on YouTube, and I found it quite interesting, but even as I thought to myself, I should eat less sugar, I just found myself completely incapable of doing so. If anything, in a kind of perverse way, I’ve eaten more sugar since seeing that documentary, while the angry food noise in my head berates me with all the information I learned about the negative effect of too much sugar on the body. (I should add that I’m eating a chocolate chip cookie while I write this post…) I am trying to think differently about sugar, and have long tried to cut back, but it is an ongoing battle.

About the same time, my husband suggested that we might think about incorporating another set of food principles in our diet. I will confess, I was hesitant. It is hard enough for me to adapt recipes that taste good enough for us all to eat, and don’t bother my touchy GI system. He is a big advocate of More Vegetables, and virtuously eats many more of them than I do. He suggested that we try adding vegetables to various dishes I already make to bulk them out and make them more nutritious. Apparently, he read some study that said you eat 30-40 percent fewer calories in a meal that is bulked out this way than if given the same food without the added veg. I’ve read positive things about the Sneaky Chef, and had seen Jessica Seinfeld on a talk show at the gym a while back, so I was game to give it a try. After all, I didn’t need to add in a whole new arsenal of recipes; I just needed to learn how to adapt my existing recipes to incorporate more pureed vegetables. I ordered The Sneaky Chef’s How to Cheat on Your Man in the Kitchen, because I’m really more of a “man” type eater and thought it would suit my style of cooking better. I'm interested to try it out; I received the book yesterday and haven’t had time to crack it open because I’ve been too involved in reading Bethenny Frankel’s Naturally Thin book.

Which brings me to my final review. I have to say, I like this book. I’m not saying that her principles are novel, but her format is very accessible, and her tips and tricks are pretty useful. It is something I could see myself incorporating into my food life and actually finding some measure of success with and I’ll tell you why. What I really want out of my food life is for someone to just tell me what to eat. I know what I’m not supposed to eat, and I want a militarized type program. Eat this at breakfast, eat this at lunch, eat this at dinner, etc. I always think that if I can just stick to a plan like that, my food problems will be solved. I’m very intrigued by food delivery programs, but daunted by the cost, and put off by the sheer number of things on their menus that I can’t eat. The problem with my quest is that meal plans are hard for me to adapt because of all my allergies. So I end up with too few calories here, too many there, and just feel frustrated with the whole thing before I’ve even started. What makes Ms. Frankel’s approach different is this: she doesn’t tell you what to eat. She gives you 10 principles for thinking about food in a positive and thin way, and gives some food suggestions, including a few intriguing recipes, but she says repeatedly, if you don’t like this, don’t eat it. She talks about how food noise (the negative thoughts we have in our heads about food, or body image, or some combination thereof) can drown out our food voice, which is the voice that tells us whether we are hungry, and when to stop eating, and whether we really want to eat that or not. I think what I appreciate so much about her approach is that she gets at the psychological heart of dieting and food issues. I’m not saying that her approach is easy—nothing that requires change of bad habits is ever going to be easy, especially not at first, but I’m hopeful that I can give myself a mental food make over that will, in turn, affect my waistline in a positive way. I don’t need to be a size 2. I just want to like the silhouette in the mirror. Even if I don’t lose anything other than baby weight, I want to be healthier. Most importantly, I want to shut off the food noise in my head so that I can listen to my food voice.

It doesn't have to be a choice between these meals--

I can eat whichever I really want, but for the burger meal, don't eat it all, and don't eat it all the time.

Obviously, embarking on a journey like this while six months pregnant is a bit precious, I know. But my nutrition is not in a good place right now and I've yet to find a professional who can do anything but wring their hands and say things like "How do you live?" Not helpful, thank you very much. What I’m hoping is that I can make the mental changes she suggests and make the caloric shifts after the baby is born. I don’t dare cut back on my daily calories, not with the baby needing so much from me right now, but I do know that I can make better choices without deprivation. And better nutrition can only be good for the baby right? Hopefully my GI track will agree.

I think my main food goal is to get to a place of satisfaction. I want to leave a meal feeling satisfied. I want to feel good about my body when I look in the mirror. I want to be grateful that I’ve been so blessed in my home and my children, and that while there are many foods I cannot eat, I do not have to worry about the source of my next meal. I’ve lived like that, and it is no way to live. I need to learn, if not happiness, then contentment. And that is perhaps the hardest lesson of all.