This Granola Life

Dear Proctor and Gamble,
I have used Noxema with great success for many years now. Recently though I took a look at the ingredient list and was shocked and amazed by what I found. You use gelatin in your product, not only is it gelatin but it’s bovine based gelatin, which is totally not cool since there’s plenty of plant based substitutes that you could use.
I can not in good conscience use your product anymore since the thought of smoothing the remains of an animal on my skin makes me want to vomit. Since vomiting after washing my face isn’t the way that I care to start my day I’ve been using plain old water and facial soap which isn’t working, at all, neither has any of the other face washy stuff that I’ve tried. So now my 28 year old skin is breaking out like puberty.
Thanks Proctor and Gamble, thanks a lot.
Jerks.

In other news I realized something monumental this evening. I’ve been eating ALL NIGHT LONG. Small snacks and tiny things, but still I’ve been grazing all night long. I realized this as I was poking through my drawer looking for something to snack on, and wishing instead that I was having a cigarette.

You see, I’ve stopped smoking. I didn’t necessarily quit on purpose, more that I’ve stopped smoking in an attempt to avoid dry socket after the tooth extractions. In an attempt to keep my mind off the nicotine cravings I’ve instead taking to stuffing food in my mouth. I’ve had so much water and tea that my eyeballs are floating and I still keep finding room for food. Knowing that I’ve been stuffing my face made me grab for something slightly less terrible than peanut butter and bread and cereal and yogurt and mashed potatoes. Instead I’ve been sucking the hell out of IceBreakers Restore mints and water.

I’m a little torn here.

I’m just relearning how to eat properly. I have to train myself to be mindful of what I’m putting into my mouth. Mindless grazing as a replacement for cigarettes is helping very little with that.

Do I deal first with quitting smoking, knowing full well that I’m not entirely committed to the idea yet? Or do I light up once I have the all clear from the dentist and focus on my eating habits then attack smoking once that’s under control?

In theory it takes three weeks to form a new habit.

I can take three weeks to get over smoking and very likely eat like a hog the entire time. Or I can take three weeks to control my eating, and take care of smoking later. Of course, later may be a year or two from now.

Oh, God, I just realized I’m attempting to rationalize my addiction. Maybe tomorrow when I go into town I’ll find some sticks to chew on, I’ve heard good things about cinnamon sticks.

I stepped on the scale this morning and found that I’ve gained 5 pounds in the past two weeks. Oops. Time to get back to working on that now that I’m no longer infected or medicated.

I’m finding it difficult to write posts. Not necessarily because I don’t have anything to talk about but because the topics that are on my mind lately may not be topics that I really care to delve into. I don’t know if I’m ready to come to decisions that I seem to need to make. However, I also know that I do my best thinking on paper (even though there’s actually no paper involved here) so I really do just need to jump into it and see where it goes.

There are about a million questions on my mind every day.

Do I want to stay here? Should I move into an apartment here? Who will be my roommate? Should I get a second job? Should I start looking seriously into moving away from the desk and into a more administrative type job here? Should I go back to school? On-line program or brick and mortar or brick and mortar’s on-line program? What will I study? How will I pay for it? What kind of profession do I want to get involved in? Where do I want to live? How ready am I to make decisions that will effect the rest of my life? What do I want to do with my life? What direction do I want to go in? Am I ready to “settle down”? Do I want to settle? Do I have to?

I’m coming up on a year here. I’m starting to feel anxious. Not necessarily about staying here, but more about staying here without direction. I’m oddly comfortable here, and can see myself, 5 years from now, still here. Which in itself isn’t a horrible thing. This is the first place I’ve lived where I can see myself longer term than 6 months. What is a horrible thing is that my 5 years in the future still living in the Canyon self that I see isn’t better off than I am now. I am in a rut, a beautiful, scenic rut, but a rut none the less.

I want to move (not necessarily physical location, more that I’d like some forward motion in my life) and do something, but I have no idea what I’m doing or where I’m going. For, perhaps, the first time in my life that bothers me. I want to make a decision, I want to say “HEY WORLD, I’M GOING TO …..” and then go and do it. The problem is that all too often I’ve said “I’m going to…..” and then done either the opposite or done absolutely nothing instead. For obvious reasons I can’t keep doing that.

I wonder if part of the problem is that I’ve taken most of my leaps blind. I tend to go places and do things with little to no information. I’d never been to the Grand Canyon when I moved here, nor had I been to San Diego, or Chicago, or Charleston. What if I made a well informed and researched decision this time? What if I thought it out and came to a decision based not on whims and fancies but on the pros and cons of the situations? What if I focused a decision not on the novelty of decision making but on what would actually be best for me, my life, my future and my health?

I mean I’ve already decided that I’m going to take a more holistic approach to my life right? Why wouldn’t that also apply to my decision making process?

I guess I’ve got some research to do.

For those that don’t know I live at the Grand Canyon (that’s in Arizona). I work at one of the concession run hotels in the park. During the peak season it’s an interesting job. I meet and work with people from all over the world on a daily basis. I’m exposed to a million different languages and a million different cultures. While the pay isn’t awesome the experience itself is and overall I’m pretty content with what I’m doing, which is rare for me.

During the winter, though, my job becomes terribly boring. The international workers all go home and there are far fewer visitors to the park. During the off season I’ve been relegated to working the kiosk for the park’s trailer lodging. RVs come in looking for a place to hook up and I’m the girl that makes that happen. Unfortunately it’s an incredibly boring position to be in. The shifts are 10 hours long and the workload amounts to probably an hour or two of work a day. That leaves me with 8 or 9 hours of nothing to do.

I watch a lot of movies. I read a lot of books. I learn a little Spanish. I eat a lot.

Between 7 and 8 every morning I open the kiosk and have some coffee and some breakfast. At 8 the kiosk opens. I read through my blog feeds and mark some “To Reply” when I get home, while I listen to NPR. At 9 the NPR station changes from talk news to classical music so I flip on my MP3 player and listen to tunes while I either do some writing or take care of some more reading. Around 10 or so I put in my first movie of the day (I usually get through 2). At noon I eat some lunch and then at 5 I start closing things down for the night. This can take anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes depending on how much work there was to do.

I spend a whole lot of my day bored out of my mind. And when I’m bored I get “snacky”. I start poking around looking for something to do, and all too often that translates to “looking for something to eat”. So at 9 this morning, after having had a breakfast of eggs with a croissant and a granola bar when I found myself looking at my stash trying to figure out what to do I stopped myself.

“I’m hungry,” was the thought that drove me to looking at my stash, I was eyeing a bag of popcorn. I’d even started to reach for it before I made myself think about what I was doing. Am I really hungry? The answer is no. I’m actually still full from breakfast. I still feel the food settled in my stomach. I had a sip of coffee and sat down as the realization of what I was doing sunk in.

I was bored, so the first thing to do that came to mind was to eat something. Instead of picking up my Spanish text book and doing a few exercises, instead of opening up the PDF I have of my Linux text book and doing some learning, instead of going through the collection of movies I have here to watch I reached for food.

Food is not activity. Eating will not alleviate my boredom. I know this. I know that when I’m feeling snacky that just means that I’m bored and that I should find something else to do. But it was so easy to reach for the popcorn. It was terribly easy to ignore that I’m full (perhaps a little overfull) and to make the decision to eat more.

It’s living like this that got me to 300 pounds in the first place. If I’m ever going to get healthy I need to break the cycle, and start eating more mindfully and stop thinking of food as a comfort for everything that ails me. I’m just not sure that I know how to do that. So while I’m proud of myself for having not had a handful of popcorn I’m still depressed at the overwhelming thoughts about the situation as a whole.

The weight of compulsive overeating is terribly heavy.

I’m going to put in a movie now and try to ignore the fact that I’d really rather be eating.

With my recent dental problems, my not so recent surgery and the focus on health care/insurance in the Presidential campaigning I’ve found myself thinking more and more about health in general, and my own health more specifically. There’s a really brilliant post in Back in skinny jeans: Do you view your health as an asset or a liability? which if you have not already read, you should.

I admit to being the kind of young adult that ignored her health because I was young and my body was strong. I’ve suffered through infections, viruses and other ailments without the benefit of medical attention because I knew that I would get through it. I took, what I realize now to be, the path of least resistance with my health. I was an ostrich, head shoved deep in the sand, thinking desperately to myself, “If I ignore it it’ll go away.” And it does.

The problem with this approach is that while the illnesses themselves go away the havoc they wreak on the body does not. So I am now 28 years old and sans gallbladder. After tomorrow I will also be without some teeth. These issues, I imagine, could easily have been prevented had I been a more active participant in the health and wellbeing of my body as opposed to doing what was better (at the time) for my wallet.

This is a tactic that I can now see that I’ve taken in most avenues of my life. My family, my friends, my education, my emotional wellbeing, all of these things have taken a back seat in my life. Not because it was good or healthy to delegate these things to areas of my life where I don’t have to pay attention to them, but because it’s easier to walk away and ignore life than it is to stick around and deal with things.

It’s easier to not think about my life than it is to live it.

This is something that has to change. So tomorrow I will go to the dentist. Then once that’s taken care of I will go to a doctor and get a physical. Once that’s taken care of I think I’m going to sign up for the free therapy program that my company offers to employees.

I moved to the Grand Canyon almost a year ago with the intention of using the time spent here to better my financial wellbeing. I think that I’ve since come to realize that while my financial health is pretty important it’s no more important than the health of the other areas of my life that I’d also been neglecting.

A friend of mine, a very long time ago, sat down with me and discussed the importance of a holistic approach to life. She had just been certified as a Holistic Health Councilor and was concerned about me. I listened while she spoke but then blew it off as hippie nonsense. I wonder now how much damage I could have saved myself, physically, mentally and emotionally, if I’d listened to the wisdom of her words at the time.

You can not heal yourself unless you also heal your life, all of it.

The Diet Disaster

A recent post in CalorieLab (here: Survey Shows Dieting is Out) reported that fewer people are on “diets” then they were 10 years ago.

A survey of 26,000 American adults found that 29 percent of women and 19 percent of men said they were on a diet, compared to 35 percent of women and 23 percent of men who said they were dieting 10 years ago. But about 60 percent of people surveyed say they want to lose weight. Eighty percent said they both want to lose weight and improve their health, which researchers speculate shows that Americans are beginning to see that being healthy and being skinny are not necessarily the same thing. One third of those who were dieting said they came up with their diet on their own, while 9 percent reported “extreme” diets involving calorie or food-group restriction…

I’m not going to deny that I dislike the diet industry. (more…)