Nutritional Progress . . . Sort Of

Generally, I seem to be in one of my upswings. I hesitate to be too pleased about it, given my interminabale cycle of progress & decline. Still, my weight pleases my nutritionist compared to my stupid low 6-8 weeks ago. I've gained 1-2 pounds since that lowpoint.

She's happy about much of my behavior too. I've been cooking a lot more in the past few weeks, getting just a bit more ambitious in the kitchen, using protein shakes and Extendbars as snacks and not as my sole source of nutrition for days on end.

I'm demonstrating greater flexibility. When my mom & dad visited, I did a good job of going with the flow. My nutritionist and I decided ahead of time that I would trying "going off-plan" for the week or so that my parents were in town. The goal was to follow the lead of "normal eaters" and not get uptight about counting out servings, even if that means that I went "over" or "under" on certain days. She assured me that, if someone is nutritionally stable, she won't become unwell if she, say, gets a few too few dairy servings one day or a few too many carbohydrate servings another. If such plan deviations happen occasionally in order to preserve a little social harmony, then it's okay. The counterpart to this strategy was that, since I would be (and did) a lot of restaurant-dining, I would have to suck up the fact that popular portion sizes are usually inflated. Part of going with said flow was that I couldn't carry a measuring cup around with me, you know?

(Aside: my own "ideal" eating looks a little strange. Most adults don't seem to sit down to meals that look like mine do when I am eating in the way that my nutritionist approves. I generally eat portions that--though technically proper--look very tiny compared to what often appears on a 21st-century American adult's plate. Yet, at a given meal, I eat a wider variety of foods than would often appear on that plate. Carbs, protein, veg, fat, fruit, dairy--all portioned out in tidy little piles.)

I did rather well with that experiment, evidently. My parents are, indeed, understanding dining company; that surely helped. Again, it wasn't the aim for me to eat that loosely permanently, but rather to test my attitudes and behaviors. It was an experiment in flexibility, adaptability. You know, the sort of thing that people without eating disorders do without a second (or third or fifteenth) thought.

"How do we maintain this level of progress?" my nutritionist asked this week. Sensible enough question. Yet, I had to admit that part of my success during my parents' visit and even the weight-gain plan that preceded it after my end-of-the-school-year low had a lot to do with the feeling that I was involved in a PROJECT. It was an EXPERIMENT. An ASSIGNMENT. My mind does well with such things. I think that this might actually be a key to the meteoric-gain-dangerous-loss cycle of the past couple of years. It's not a solution, but at least it's a novel insight. As my nutritionist put it, I "gain weight like an anorectic." That is to say that I tend to approach weight gain (when I must) in much the same way that I otherwise approach weight loss, i.e. I determine a neatly defined set of goals, then I'll do anything short of the commission of a felony to meet or exceed those goals. I'll cheerfully suffer for the sake of a very specific goal. I take a certain masochistic pleasure in enduring pain in order to obtain some objective measure of delimited success. It's not tenable in the longer term, and the metrics of achievement must be tightly circumscribed. In effect, I get a quasi-anorectic fix from gaining weight when I have to.

With this insight in mind, I have to ask myself how to break out of this mode of thinking, lest I condemn myself to a lifetime of "the cycle." Granted, living with that neurosis-powered, e'er-swinging pendulum is better than dying from flat-out, balls-to-the-wall anorexia. Still, it's an unkind life sentence.

This, kids, is why I still have a nutritionist and a psychotherapist.