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Can Diet Reduce Anxiety?
An apple a day… (source: pixel2013 on Pixabay)
Yes, I gained last week. I’m not thrilled about that, but I understand it. I’m taking steps, and that’s about all I can do. What I need to avoid is slipping into that obsessive state of mind many people struggling with weight can slip into, one that feeds right into my anxiety issues and undoes any progress I might make.
You might have the same problem, or similar issues. It’s a documented fact that mental health, anxiety in particular, can have a profound effect on the body. Our anxiety doesn’t just trigger a stress response in our bodies, but anxiety can affect our ability to sleep. Sleep deprivation affects hormone production, which affects weight gain as well.
It’s a double whammy. Tons of fun, literally in my case. It is essential to take care of your mental health as part of your overall health care plan. I know there’s a stigma associated with admitting you need help. There’s also a stigma associated with being as big as I am. Pick one.
Anyway, getting anxiety under control doesn’t have to be as daunting as it sounds. You may have a health care provider who prescribes medication. If that’s the case, and the meds work for you, great. Therapy can be helpful too. Meditation works for some people. If you’re in a position to minimize your triggers, that’s fabulous.
The thing is, when I mention anxiety I’m talking about a serious health condition, part of your body’s chemistry. One way you can help to take control over your body’s chemistry is to govern what goes into it. That is, change your diet.
Changing your diet won’t fix everything. It won’t take away the external stressors in your life, and it won’t change the patterns of thought that exacerbate your anxiety. Think of it as an extra bit of help, like a step up to find the next handhold on the rock wall.
I’ll be the first to admit I’m not always good about following the diet plan. I’m not only cooking for myself, and sometimes I get busy and can’t devote time to cooking. I just re-read the guidelines for extra motivation, right before I go to the supermarket.
What I can tell you is that I do feel better, and I gain less weight, when I’m following these guidelines. I try to avoid beef when I can, even though it’s on the “good” list. The great thing is that most of them are foods I genuinely like. Apples, dark green leafy vegetables, nuts, and asparagus are all foods I gravitate toward naturally. They’re all part of a natural, healthy diet.
It can’t hurt to try tweaking your diet this way, assuming your allergies and other dietary restrictions allow of course. It’s helped me, and it might help you.
Thanksgiving Shape
A corset (Source: ArtsyBee via Pixabay)
Yesterday was Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving has been my least favorite holiday for a good long while. There are a variety of reasons for that, and you don’t care about 90% of them. One of the biggest reasons I dislike Thanksgiving, though, is the scrutiny that I come under from “helpful” family members.
I know I’m not alone in this. I know this because I’ve read more than a few articles from other larger women out there. Trust me, the “helpful” suggestion that we eat sweet potatoes to curb the sweet craving that we must all have doesn’t help anyone but you, when you want to feel superior.
And yes, I get that a lot. I don’t have sugar cravings. And sweet potatoes taste like sick. But obviously someone else knows my body better than I do, right?
Anyway. Because putting myself out there in the company of people who want to tear me down in the name of “helping” is stressful, there’s a certain amount of pressure to try to minimize how I look. A lot of that pressure is self-induced, but that doesn’t change the fact that the pressure exists.
I don’t own a single pair of nylons that aren’t “control top.” It’s hard to breathe in those things. I own waist cinchers. I have “shapewear.” Yesterday, as I considered what to wear for this annual ordeal, I pulled all of these things and more out of my bureau and considered them.
And then I put them back. I was going to spend roughly eight hours in a car. I was going to sit in uncomfortable chairs, argue with relatives (or try very hard not to.) I was going to chase children around.
Did I really want to do any of that with my ability to breathe, or move, restricted?
I wore a dress, but I didn’t try to minimize anything. I am who I am. Nothing’s changed it so far, but getting worked up about it has definitely made things worse. If they have a problem with my size, they will continue to be the ones with the problem.
I felt perfectly comfortable in soft, cool, breathable underwear that let me move and breathe. I was more confident when I was able to be myself than I would have been if I’d tried to squeeze myself into a mold that didn’t fit.
If your shapewear helps you to feel more comfortable in your clothes, or in your skin, then by all means wear it. If you just aren’t feeling it, leave it at home. It’s your body. Wear it the way you see fit. You aren’t answerable to anyone else.
Nothing Ventured, Nothing GAINED
Staring at this will be helpful. Really.
I haven’t posted in a little while, and there are a couple of reasons for that. One is that I’ve been running myself absolutely ragged lately with my regular job. My deadlines caught up with me in the worst way, I had no childcare, and I had no time for anything. As a result, I gained weight.
This isn’t supposed to be a “weight loss” blog. I’m supposed to be on here talking about getting back to “healthy,” whatever that means for me now. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to be svelte, and I have to accept that.
I can tell myself all of those things, but nothing quite drives away that shame when I see the numbers inching up on the scale.
I know what happened. It’s not hard to figure out. I sacrificed sleep to meet my deadlines. I spent a whole week going to bed at 4:30 in the morning, and getting up at 7:30. I know my body. I know my history. Every time I’ve gained weight, it’s been when my sleep has been disrupted.
And it’s very easy for me to sit here and say, “Okay, well, I’ll just make sure my sleep doesn’t get disrupted then.” Some things are under my control. Sometimes we have to make choices in life. When it comes down to losing our job or losing some sleep, we tend to choose to put sleep off. We can always make that up later, right?
Being so busy also had an effect on my diet. That didn’t have as much of an effect as you might think, but it certainly didn’t help. What dining out, and choosing faster and more convenient options, did do was make me feel awful the whole time.
For those of you who were curious about that aloe water remedy, I lost track and forgot to make the stuff while I was on my sleep-deprived bender. I’ll get back on track this week. I’m sure you’re all shocked that it hasn’t helped so far, though!
So. What can I do to try to make sure that doesn’t happen in the future? (I’m not here just to bewail my ever-expanding waistline. I do have an action plan, believe it or not.)
- Set better boundaries for work and home life, so I can avoid sleep deprivation for the next book and the next deadline.
- Use better discipline so that I don’t have to scramble at the last minute to meet my deadlines.
- Prepare dishes ahead of time so that healthier foods are equally as convenient as trashy foods.
- Make more time for rest. This seems counterintuitive, but I get more work done more efficiently when I’m better rested.
- Get better hydrated.
- Find more time to exercise. I focus better when I’ve moved my body.
Aloe Water Remedy
Aloe plant
I’m back from my convention, and I’m all settled in. I’ve had a chance to weigh in, and I’ve gained four pounds. It’s concerning, but not entirely unexpected. I know what steps I need to take. I’ll outline them below, but I also want to talk about something else I’m trying: the aloe water remedy.
What is the Aloe Water Remedy?
The Aloe Water Remedy is something I found in the great black hole that is Pinterest. You can find the original video here.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “But Jaye – aren’t you trying to get to a healthy point ‘for you’? I’m ninety percent sure trying random potions concocted from Internet videos isn’t exactly helping you get there.”
Ah. Yes. About that. I never promised you I’d be rational.
But look. I’m trying this so you don’t have to. At least you can see how I’m handling the remedy before you try it, right?
So the article describes this as containing ingredients you “probably have already.” The voice in the video has an Indian accent, and maybe most Indian homes have pure aloe juice on hand. I live in Boston. I don’t have aloe juice on hand.
You want to know who has aloe juice on hand? Amazon. They’re a monopoly, but they’ve got what you need.
The other ingredients were easy to come by. Okay, I’ve run out of honey due to poor planning and poor inventory control on my part. But I’ll be fixing that on Friday.
Basically, you mix the drink. You drink the drink. You go about your day.
I’ve been doing this for four days now. I know that aloe is supposed to have diuretic qualities. I couldn’t say if it’s having much of an effect. It’s supposed to “aid digestion,” which is usually a euphemism. So far it’s had an opposite effect on me, but we’ll see how things shake out over the next month. I’ll definitely keep you posted. I can tell you the taste is fine.
Other Issues Surrounding Gain
I haven’t been able to move around as much as I’d like. I’m dreadfully behind on work, which means my butt’s been in a chair instead of on the bike. I did get my 10,000 steps in on Halloween night, which left me unable to move or work. I don’t think I’ll be doing that again.
Sleep also hasn’t been coming to visit as easily. A lot of that is the result of stress. Again, I’m dreadfully behind. My child care has skipped town, so that’s been an issue. The end result is I’m staying up later to do work, which means I’m getting 4 – 5 hours of sleep instead of 7 – 9.
And we’ve already talked about how sleep affects me.
So I’m concerned, and I’m making more of an effort to get to bed. I’m working hard to stay asleep too, which is a huge issue.
So I’m working to correct my course. And I’m trying something new, just to see if it works. I’m not putting all of my hopes on it, but I don’t lose much by trying it. Hopefully I’ll be able to carve out some time for the exercise bike next week.
Vital Vitamins
Vitamins and pills (source: Pixabay)
One of the things I’m trying to do right now is to get control of my health. I want to get to a place where I can feel comfortable in my own skin. I’ll never be back to “svelte” but I want to get back to some facsimile of healthy. One factor that touches all aspects of health is diet. That brings us to the question of vitamins.
I have a kind of love-hate relationship with vitamins. On the one hand, I understand that the nutrients we consume are vital to overall health. On the other, it is super easy to get caught up in the numbers game where vitamins are concerned. Did I get enough of this vitamin today? Do I need to bump that one up, just a little bit? If I eat, say, spanakopita to bump up my iron, do I then move my fat intake too far in the other direction?
There are plenty of people out there, too, who want to “help” you to manage that process. There are services, apps, “communities” you can join. Some people find them helpful. My use of quotes here probably shows that I am not among them. I think most people who have any kind of obsessive disorder in their psyche will find those tools to be more harmful than helpful.
(I’m more grateful than I can express to the doctor who pointed that out to me. She freed me from searching for yet another service that wouldn’t work, and showed me why it wasn’t helping.)
Anyway, vitamin supplements sound like a great idea, don’t they? I took vitamins from the time I was a little kid. They were just a basic part of preventative medicine. Too bad studies don’t support the idea of multivitamins preventing much.
The best way for us to get the vitamins, minerals, and nutrients we need is from food. Our bodies just don’t absorb supplements taken in pill form as well as they do vitamins taken from the foods we eat. The issue comes when our diets become somewhat deficient.
That’s not necessarily a criticism. People whose diets lack one particular nutrient, or even several, aren’t lazy or stubborn. Some of them may be chowing down on fast food a lot of the time, but it’s not for you or me to judge them for it. When I was working two jobs and still barely scraping by, fast food was something I could eat while going from one job to the next. You do what you can with what you have.
And there are other people who wind up having trouble getting the nutrients they need for other reasons. All kinds of people have to cut some things out of their diets, for a variety of reasons. One of my closest friends developed a meat allergy as an adult – yes, it’s related to that tick disease – and now finds herself deficient in several nutrients. She has to supplement. I developed a dairy allergy at some point along the way. Yeah, I should be supplementing.
I just don’t like meat. Does this mean I should choke it down and call it a virtue? No. I can supplement.
Many Western people believe chugging back vitamin supplements will somehow cure all of our ills and prevent a host of diseases as we age. That isn’t proven by science. Eating a balanced diet and living a healthy lifestyle can mitigate some risks. Taking supplements can help fill in gaps, but it can’t substitute for eating moderately, in balance.
I do take a B-complex supplement, when I remember to do so. I’m not sure it helps with anything, but it makes me feel like it does. There have been studies that cite its efficacy with ADD and anxiety, although that’s still kind of inconclusive. I’m willing to try it, since my diet could be better and I feel like my symptoms are better when I take it.
I’m about to start taking an omega-3 supplement too. Vegan sources exist for this important nutrient, and honestly, I feel better when I’m consuming them.
Hopefully, making changes to my diet will help me get the vitamins I need to get back to health.
Traveling Fit
I’ve been
Big scary plane
traveling while trying to get in shape, and I’m not convinced this was the best plan. On the one hand, it’s good to keep the body active and moving while traveling, right? On the other hand, starting up a fitness regimen the same week that I go to a work conference is probably not going to work out well for me.
Today was the last day of the conference. In fact, I’m sitting around, killing time and waiting to catch a flight that’s already been delayed once. It’s as good a time as any to check in and report on my progress.
I’m pleased to report that I did make it to the gym. I’m less pleased to report that I made it to the gym exactly once. I felt weird going down to the gym in my workout gear. Also, people gave me some very odd looks as I got onto the workout bike with my Texas-sized self.
This is a large part of the reason I stopped going to the gym at home, actually. People didn’t want to use workout equipment near a fat person, and they let me know it. I don’t know if they thought I was contagious or what, but I guess that’s a post for another day.
Anyway, I still packed gym clothes for the trip, and I used them, so I’ll count that as a win. I also made a concerted effort to eat better while I was traveling. Those results were more mixed.
I didn’t have a car, or a kitchen. Control over my dining options was limited. The hotel did have a pub, and that pub did have a salad I enjoyed. I ate that salad, sometimes accompanied by a beer cheese soup, for at least one meal per day. Sometimes I ate it for two meals per day. And I didn’t feel particularly hungry, either, which is good.
At home, though, I eat a mostly vegetarian diet. Here, that would have eliminated almost all of my protein options. I also don’t cope with dairy well, but ate the beer cheese soup every day to get some protein.
At home, I drink my coffee blacker than a Goth girl’s wardrobe. Here, the only coffee option was Starbucks. They do offer plain coffee, but I’m pretty sure they filter their coffee through used gym socks. A person pretty much has to get a Froofy Coffee Drink ™, which means I wound up consuming a lot more sugar than I’m used to. Fortunately, they offer almond milk as an alternative to dairy in most of their Froofy Coffee Drinks ™.
Sleep was a little bit of an issue here, although I think I got more sleep here than I do at home. I needed more sleep here than I do at home. Being around so many people, and being part of the attraction instead of being a guest, was difficult for someone with my level of anxiety. That took a lot out of me. Still, I was able to make sure I got more than six hours of sleep every night.
Of course, the whole sleep schedule didn’t take into account traveling here, or traveling home. I didn’t sleep the night before I got here, and I’m not likely to sleep on the way home. I think Monday’s going to be pretty useless, but we’ll see.
Either way, I love traveling. I’m looking forward to my next trip, when my fitness routine will be more established. I’m going to try very hard not to judge myself too harshly no matter what my results are from this week, and I’ll look forward to being better able to focus next week.
Let’s Talk About Sleep
Can we talk for a minute about sleep?
Kitten sleeping
So, sleep is something we all need. There are some folks who may need less sleep, but the human body needs sleep to survive. Personally, I suffer from chronic insomnia. I’m in treatment for it, and that treatment helps. Make no mistake, though – I need every bit of that treatment, from CBT to medication, to make sure I get what I need.
Why is that important?
The name of this blog is Former Fit. That’s because I was formerly fit, and now I’m not. (I just had a terrible moment where I tried to put on a brand new dress and failed. That’s a post for a different day.)
Every time I’ve gained weight, every single time, I gained during a time when I wasn’t able to get the sleep I needed. That’s not a coincidence.
There are other factors at play. I have a thyroid condition. There are some genetic issues involved. I have some injuries that stop me from exercising in ways I enjoy. But the severe weight gain has all come at times when sleep stayed as far out of my reach as a Yeti.
I’m working on that. Like I mentioned, I’ve been in treatment for my chronic insomnia. I’ve also been making an effort to get to bed at a reasonable hour. My smartphone has a “go to bed” function, which chases me to bed seven hours before I hav
e to get up.
Here’s the problem, and I’m sure you have the same problem. We all have a lot of life to get in the way of our goals, right? We have homes to maintain. And we have jobs. If we work from home, the line between work and home becomes blurred more often than we’d like. I work from home more often than not, and it’s hard to turn it off and go do things around the house.
When home is your workspace, it’s hard not to feel like you should be working when you’re at home, right?
And when you’ve got a big deadline breathing down your neck, it’s all too easy to say, “Okay, just this once, I’ll push it out and stay up a little bit later.”
I find I have to do that all the time. And I can pull it out when I have to. After all, isn’t honoring my commitments more important than sticking to a sleep regimen?
The thing is, sleep is kind of a foundation for health, for all of our health. Without it, we don’t heal. So I’m making more of an effort to get the sleep I need. And I hope you will too!
On The Bike
I’m not a big fan of the exercise bike.
I’ve had one for years. I’ve spent hours on it, and I’ve let it sit in the corner collecting dust for months at a time. I used to like riding a bike around my hometown, or in my old town where I had a relatively safe bike path. Riding indoors, and staying in one place, just feels like a sad metaphor for suburban life.
Bikes, without dust
I could probably ride around here, but to say it’s a little risky would be like calling a giant pool of gas a little flammable. I’m not quite ready to lie down in the cold cold ground yet, so my options are limited. As we lurch toward winter, they get even more limited, and so the bike becomes a necessity.
It smirks smugly at me from the corner of my workspace right now, just over my left shoulder.
The good thing about my exercise bike is that I can set limits. I can set the machine to run for half an hour, and after half an hour it will stop doing its thing.
The bike has been in dust collection mode for a while. This is probably not the best time for me to dust it off. I’m heading off to a conference later this week, which is going to wreak havoc on my schedule (and my resolutions.)
The thing is, something always comes up during the week. I’ve usually got three to four different projects going on at the same time. At least one of them is usually dangerously close to deadline. There is always something more important, something that needs more attention.
Let’s ignore the scare tactics around cardiovascular effects for a minute. There are other factors that play into cardiovascular disease, like your genes, and plenty of very active people wind up with heart attacks and strokes.
I have ADD. According to every piece of research I’ve managed to find, exercise is crucial to managing attention deficit disorder. It helps to even out the hormones and neurochemicals that keep us from focusing.
Because of the endorphins released by exercise, a workout can also help to alleviate depression and anxiety. These are both issues that I deal with. These are both issues that affect my work.
And finally, exercise at the right time of day can help people with chronic insomnia alleviate their symptoms. Insomnia is an issue I’ve lived with for most of my adult life. Disrupted or absent sleep has been present every time my weight has shot up.
Sure there’s always some pressing issue that’s screaming for my attention. Sure, it feels almost selfish or self-absorbed to block out half an hour to do something that focuses entirely on me, and not on work or family or something profitable.
Can I really afford to skip that bike ride?