Overeater's Anonymous & Food Addiction

Food addiction is just like any other addiction, and we addicts are always subconsciously figuring out a way around the diets that we are trying so hard to follow. Your brain knows that if you spend an hour on cardio, then you can eat an extra helping of your favorite food or engage in some other diet-cheating.

I had been going to several different Overeater's Anonymous meetings and I am not sure what to think of OA. The first half hour is spent reading from various texts. Each meeting I have been to has a moderator who is the officially sanctioned OA representative in charge of that particular group. The moderator tells people when they are violating any OA rules (such as mentioning Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Slimfast, The Biggest Loser TV show, protein bars, or any other dietary foods, favorite gyms, exercise programs, etc.). If you mention anything that is prohibited by the OA rules, the Grand Poobah will immediately shout that OA does not permit discussion of anything outside OA's own writings (which have all been nicked from Alcoholics Anonymous).

"Cross-talking" is not allowed. That means that you cannot interact with the other people or ask them any questions. So each person can give a two minute speech about losing weight, but not how they are doing it. If someone says something that you want to ask about, you have to wait until the meeting is over and hope you remember; and that the person has the extra time to talk about it.

The only thing that everyone is allowed to say in OA is "Thanks to OA, I have found spiritual salvation and surrendered my addiction to my higher power." If you stray from that basic message, the odds are that you are violating the OA rules and the Grand Poobah will shout you down. Should I just go to the meetings until I figure out what the method is to their madness? Will this uber-discipline help me lose weight? Many people have benefitted; am I just looking at OA the wrong way?

Injuries and over-training

Over two weeks ago, I was feeling randy (ha-ha) and had a lot of extra energy. It was one of those days when I felt like I was turning back the hands of time and emerging from the time machine as a twenty year old. So I went to the gym and got on the Precor Cross-Trainer (which is pictured here) which is a lot like a ski machine on ramps. Your legs move up and down, but you are moving your legs forwards and backwards, which leads to a certain amount of grinding your hips forward once you get tired. Anyhow, I did 80 minutes without a break, and the next day my left hip was hurting.

Since I was doing between 120-180 minutes every day on the elliptical trainer and/or the cross-trainers, the next few days the more I used my legs, the more my hip was hurting until I was walking around with a limp. So I finally realized that in order to lose weight, I have to shut my mouth because I can't spend two or three hours on the machines every day to burn up the calories that I am scarfing down.

After a day or two of just doing 30 minutes on the machines, my hip started feeling better, and I have been doing just 30-45 minutes at a time; though some days I get to go twice or even three times to the gym. It seems like as long as I am not going past 45 minutes at a time, the hip feels fine. Training is good, over-training is bad. Have you ever had any kind of training or work-out injury? Could you have prevented it? How did you deal with the injury?

Salvadorean Pupusas

On Saturday we went to the South Dade Flea Market; past Cutler Ridge and near Florida City. It is only open on weekends, and it has dozens of shops that are manned mostly by Mexican and Caribbean vendors. There is a main building, and then outside of it there are dozens of large trailer-sized aluminum sheds lined up and each one has a store inside of it. At the very outside of this Flea Market are the folks that just have their merchandise on tables out in the open. Some of them have vinyl tarps strung over their sections to give customers some shade. It is usually interesting to walk around the Flea Market. You get to see many interesting people, some funny things, and occasionally you might find something unique. Some vendors have plants at good prices.

The main reason that my wife likes to go there is for the roasted corn and the pupusas! She lived in El Salvador for a few years when she was a little girl, and she remembers fondly going out to dinner with her family. Her favorite Salvadorean meal was pupusas. I like them with curtido, but my wife and my daughter like them plain.

A pupusa is a stuffed corn-tortilla which is very similar to an arepa, and both are cooked and served flat like pancakes, not lumpy. Pupusas are hand made using the corn masa (maseca). Pupusas are served with a spicy coleslaw called curtido on the side. There are two types of curtido. One is the spicy coleslaw and the other is the spicier coleslaw with diced carrots, onions, and jalapenos. Pupusas are also served with standard Mexican salsa sauce and/or the much hotter green pepper salsa. Pupusas are stuffed with either a soft Salvadoran cheese called Quesillo; chicharrones paste (ground fried pork rinds); refried beans; loroco (loroco is a shrub flower bud from Central America); or repollo (I don't know what that is, but it tastes pretty good). The fried pork rinds and the refried beans are each ground into pastes so that they can be stuffed into the pupusas. There is also the pupusa revueltas, which are pupusas made with any combination you choose of cheese, pork, refried beans, loroco, or repollo.

We each tried the three most popular pupusas, quesillo (delicious melted cheese); chicharrones; and revueltas (quesillo and chicharrones mixed together). The best part of the meal was that it started raining a lot almost right after we ordered the food. The cafe is an open-air area between a couple of aluminum sheds with a tarp over the pvc picnic tables and the kitchen (they are cooking the food on grills in a little area fenced off by mosquito netting). It is a primitive, humble setting, and yet it was cool and fun. The intense rain was blowing the plastic covers off the picnic benches, and drops of rain were falling through holes in the tarps, and there was a swirling mist of rain constantly spraying over everyone. After about fifteen minutes, we were served as sheets of rain pelted the Flea Market. I put a lot of jalapenos and curtido on my pupusas, as I figured that way I could stick to my diet (salad, vegetables, fiber) in spirit. The green jalapeno salsa took the meal past sinfully delicious. Eating the pupusas under the thunder storm was exciting, and we were laughing as the plastic covers kept blowing around. We were all wet from the rain, but it made that meal feel a lot more tropical.

By the time we had finished eating, the rain had almost stopped. We walked out to the parking lot and passed a little aluminum shed selling ice cream cones. Ice cream, the perfect way to top off any healthy meal! There were two little children tending the store, maybe five and six years old. The girl was getting the ice cream bars, and the little boy was collecting the money. Someone asked in Spanish, "Where is your mother?" The little boy responded, "She's not working today."

Adventures in Dentistry

This week I visited my dentist. She has made a difference in my life by saving my teeth from destruction. Back when I blimped up to the 420lbs. my teeth literally started falling apart. Maybe it was the sugar from too many Snickers bars? I had teeth that had cavities on the sides, at the bottom, in the middle. I thought I was going to lose all those teeth. In fact, I had been to see a couple of dentists who just wanted to knock them all out and put in a set of implants. They took a quick look and told me that for $25,000 or so they could start working. These dentists looked like bankers, and they had finance managers in their offices who drafted mortgage agreements and loan applications (no joke). At one office, I spent a couple of hours waiting to have my dental treatment agreement printed up and it was about fifty pages long. It was like a mortgage application.

Not giving up, I checked the provider list for my insurance and did not give up. I found a really nice dentist who did the standard x-rays, checked the teeth, and told me that it did in fact look grim. Some of those teeth had more than one cavity and they were hardly more than shells. But she was willing to work on them one tooth at a time. She was also willing to work with my insurance company. Wow. What an amazing attitude! A year later, and she has done the fillings on about ten of them. Some of those teeth had multiple cavities and required some amazing dental skill and dedication. It was painful, but watching my sick teeth become healthy teeth was like a miracle. Now I can smile again thanks to a dentist who cares a lot about her patients. Thank you Doctor! You are a great dentist, and a special person.

Diet Enemy #8: Bagels

I guess bagels are a lot like Diet Enemy #6, Bread, but for me, bagels are yet another will-power crushing substance that saps any diet momentum I have. This week my wife brought home a bag with a dozen bagels in it, not once, but on two different days. I probably ate fifteen or more of those two dozen bagels.

Isn't it a sin to throw away bread? Maybe it is my upbringing, but I always remember what I was told as a child: "Eat all your food, there are little children in Ethiopia who are starving and wish they could eat your leftovers." Nobody ever explained how eating all the food on the plate helped starving children in Ethiopia, but it always made me feel guilty if I did not eat everything. So seeing a bag full of bagels just brought back some kind of guilty feelings about the poor starving kids. After all, if they could be at my house, they would want to eat the bagels.

Does that kind of thinking sound funny and yet crazy too? Well, that is how an addict thinks. Any kind of addict will bend logic to make something that is wrong seem right. A food addict is the same. So I gained five pounds this week, but then I lost two of those pounds by Friday. That puts me at 307. I guess I should be honest and say that I really enjoyed those bagels.

Have you ever had a thing for bagels? Is there anyone who really loves bagels? Are they that good? Are they bad for your health?