SELF DENIAL IS A BLESSING - EAT WHAT MAKES YOUR BODY FEEL GOOD

DR GRAHAM
Banana Island (with celery) is going well. I'm on day 12 and I've lost about 25 lbs of water weight, and no binge eating. I write Dr. Graham daily and he responds promptly and thoroughly. You know, this is going REALLY WELL. I'm very, very, (did i say very?) pleased with this whole deal. GOD, sometimes i make good decisions!

Dr. Graham is actually really great. I really LIKE him and am enjoying working with him immensely. He's not so jerky afterall!! (You may remember the "buy a wig incident" if you are a long term reader. I'm glad i could get over that and seek out his help).

HOW YOU LOOK AFFECTS HOW YOU FEEL
I'm super excited about where the next 3 months will take me. I'm looking better and better everyday, and, hell, that's important. You know, looking better is so important for one's own self-image and self confidence.

Some say, when you FEEL better, you look better. True, true.

BUT, when you LOOK better, you FEEL better, too. How you look affects the way you feel just as much.

THE CHOICE
For me, I've always had to control my food to control my life. Or rather, change my food to change my life. It's never worked the other way around for me. I've been to so much therapy. I've been to 4 Eating Disorder Units. None of it made me stop eating.

A good friend and I were having a conversation the other day about her struggles with food. She's been on raw, and she's been on regular food, and now that she's stopped eating raw, she's gone back to her favorite cooked foods with a new rebellious vengeance. She asked me what she should do. She was lost.

Based on experience, I related to her, I told her I saw two choices. "You can change your diet. Or you can change your life. You can go back to raw. Or you can legalize food - and embrace what you're eating now as the foods you must really want...and need, and just work on your life, like the Geneen Roth-ites do."

The CHANGE YOUR DIET way of thinking would be to get back on a plan, or get back on raw. You'll feel better, you'll look better, you'll stop fighting the inevitable, you'll be back where you should be. Often we don't do what's in our own best self interest.

OR you can WORK ON YOUR ISSUES by Legalizing Your Food...and 'change your life.' You can go to therapy. You can buy Geneen Roth books. You can legalize food and learn to stop feeling badly about everything you're eating that you love. You can learn to lose the guilt about your favorite foods, and just accept yourself. You can accept your weight, accept your desires, and just ENJOY, and live in PEACE and harmony!

The 2nd way sounds so right, so appealing. But, i've personally tried 5 trillion times to make it work for me....and it just hasn't.

CHANGE YOUR DIET / CHANGE YOUR LIFE
You know, often, changing your diet has TREMENDOUS benefits on your physical health and your emotional health and your emotional or mental issues, even on your home life, on your relationships.

Changing your diet can be enormously powerful.

Going raw, for one, can have a huge effect on how you feel, how you look, how you deal with life. The only way anybody could ever really believe this, is if they experienced it themselves.

My boss, Arnold, believes that if school children and criminals ate raw, there would be massive behavioral reform in schools and prisons. Arnold believes regular processed food causes crime and war and misbehavior as well as serious behavioral problems, not to mention is the cause of a plethora of physical, emotional and mental illnesses. This is what Arnold believes.

WOW....EAT WHAT YOU WANT!!!! BUT I DON'T FEEL GOOD....
Geneen Roth teaches us to legalize food (eat what appeals to you without rules), but she RARELY addresses a person's HEALTH.

What if most of what we're eating....is making us SICK? Sure, we might overcoming binge eating, but be stuck with heart disease, diabetes, and Crohns disease and chronic obesity. Yes, we may overcome binge eating, but still be very fat, and sick.

When i was working on legalizing, i had some heady times enjoying food and frolicing to and fro. Yes, it was wonderful. But, i wasn't losing weight, my ankles were constantly swollen, and I had horrible reflux.

I know my mother is struggling with food making her sick. She has reflux and hemmorhoids from eating solid food again. And I'm so frightened that something is wrong with her surgery area. She has foot and ankle edema again, and the bottom of her belly/the top of her vagina is swelled and red. Also, her drain leaked from her belly yesterday. Something is not right.

Yet, she delighted in a delicious hamburger for dinner at the rehab the other night, only to pay for it seriously when she was sick as a dog all night with severe stomach distress. Those fucking doctors told her she could eat 'anything.' The nurses dittoed, "She's on a solid food diet, she can have a hamburger." "Look, lady," I raised my voice, "Something is not right!"

Eating what you LOVE and what TASTES good (my mother moaned the whole time in pleasure) is not always best for you.

Geneen Roth RARELY talks about how to deal with physical (and emotional) reactions to foods. She merely talks about this wonderful FREEDOM of legalizing and how great you'll feel to stop dieting. Okay, it is freeing in one sense, but puts you in just another straight-jacket in another sense if all you do is experience negative physical side effects from 'eating what you want.' Is that real freedom???

I personally couldn't escape binge eating even when i was legalizing food. So, i felt like i was STILL imprisoned.

The legalizing bandwagon preaches ZERO SELF DENIAL. Icecream for breakfast? Why not?

But, you know what? Self-denial is not so bad. Self-denial for a pedophile is healthy. Self-denial for a gambling addict is healthy. Self-denial for a kleptomaniac is healthy.

My basic tendency is to want to dive in face first into a bucket of fried chicken. Self-denial is GOOD for me.

We all have some seriously negative stuff driving us. Who is always in charge of our decisions and choices? The Saint? Or the Sinner? They both live within us. Legalizing food is so complicated, first off, that by the time i would finally master it, I'm be 87 years old, and i'd most likely weigh 500 lbs from all of the failured attempts and binges i would inevitably have along the learning process, and i'd no doubt have a long list of health issues, as well.

EAT WHAT YOUR BODY WANTS
Newly, Roth seems to be changing her message. In WOMEN FOOD AND GOD, Roth now talks about eating foods that make your BODY feel good, not just your palette. Well, what foods make your body feel good?

Didn't your mother always tell you you had to eat your fruits and vegetables, that they were good for you?????

It's a good question, and one that a gazillion authors have written diets books on - What foods make your body feel good?

Roth proposes we go through an INVIDIUAL process to find this out for ourselves, sitting down when we eat, removing all of the rules, chewing, savoring, listening. Just eat what you want! And find out - "What foods make MY body feel good?"

Only ONCE in her book did she mention the plight of the diabetic.

Dear Mrs. Roth: "I love my cake and cookies. I cannot get enough of them! I finally feel so FREE to enjoy them since i stopped dieting. But, I'm a diabetic, and eating cake and cookies and icecream send my blood sugar skyrocketing and can put me into a diabetic coma and I might lose my sight or need a foot amputated and it might kill me. What should i do?"

Geneen Roth now says - Cake and Cookies do not make YOUR body, Ms. Diabetic, feel good, so, NO, you should NOT eat them, even though you enjoy them.

Wo, wo, wo, wait, a minute, what if you are like my mother - and the gluten in bread causes me gas and diareah, and the dairy of cheese causes me mucus and reflux, and flesh protein causes me indigestion and stomach pains, and oils cause my hair to get greasy, and soda makes me belch, and asparagus makes my pee stink, coffee makes me jittery. What's left?

My mother ate a tuna sandwhich yesterday, and an hour later, she ate a peach. Suddenly, she got terrible stomach cramps and bloating. "I can't eat peaches, they give me gas."

Actually, the culprit was her poor digestion of the tuna sandwhich that was still in her gut when the peach arrived, causing gas. It wasn't the peache's fault.

Calgon, Take me away! You would need a Doctoral Degree to figure out for sure what makes your body feel good, and you'll still be learning and asking yourself the same questions until your 75 years old like my mother.

Or you can just eat raw. And find out for yourself.

BANANA ISLAND IS A GOOD STARTING POINT
Banana Island is kind of neat, because it's a very long....experimental process in finding out what makes my body feel good. I get to see exactly HOW i FEEL eating bananas. For a whole week. How it FEELS to eat celery with it. For a whole week.

Next week, Dr. D will add a new fruit or vegetable. So, each week, i'll get to see how that new food makes me feel.

Hey, this WOULD be a totally cool process to go through with all foods, adding in regular cooked foods afterwards. Start out with bananas, a week of 'em. Move on to adding celery on week 2. And tomatoes on week three, etc...

Now if you choose, depart from Dr. Graham, and add in fish or bread or baked potatoes on week 10, and SEE, FEEL how it makes you feel. For a whole week. Just add in peice of fish per day for a whole week...and see how it makes you feel.

PROCESS BENEFITS FROM LEADERSHIP
Sometimes in only this last week, week two, i have gas. Well, I've added celery, so maybe celery is the culprit. So, is celery causing me gas???? How could celery cause me gas???? Dr. D doesn't think so. I know i had the biggest BM the other day after being so gassy for an entire day. Maybe the celery fiber is just starting to really clean me out.

I'm glad i have a Dr. Graham to help guide me.

In fact, this whole fucking thing with FOOD is so complex for some of us, some of us just need more guidance than others. I'm grateful to Dr. Graham.

I STILL WANT TO EAT IT EVEN IF IT MAKES ME FEEL BADLY
Sometimes the pleasure we receive from certain foods outweighs the harm they do to us. We make that choice. Consciously. Or subconsciously.

Remember my obsession with Seitan? Oh, my god, at Whole Foods last night there was this girl in front of me in the check out line who was purchasing a GIANT container of Seitan. Just looking at the container made me drool.

The truth of the matter is, when i was eating Seitan several times a day, my energy ZONKED, and i had terrible reflux and swollen ankles.

My aunt, who is now passed, suffered from Colitis. Dairy foods caused her severe distress. Yet she ate icecream nightly. Did the fact that she had 2 hours of diareah for pint of Ben and Jerry's stop her? No. The momentary pleasure of eating the icecream was more important to her.

And, we all know, I am fond of binge eating cooked stuff. I love it. It's pure unadulterated hedonistic pleasure, total freedom and rebellion, and a giant Superbowl party in my mouth. But, binge eating causes me obesity, relfux, edema, depression, over production of oil, snoring, strange rashes, food odor, vaginal odor, hemmorhoids, the list goes on and on.

Do you think the ladies in Roth's books even KNOW that their hemmorhoids are CAUSED by what they're so fond of eating??????????????

SIMLE RAW SEEMS TO WORK THE BEST FOR ME
I've always been attracted to raw. I've always been attracted to extremes. I've always had an out of control problem with binge eating. I've always had reflux laryngitis, and the long list of other things above.

Eating SIMPLE raw takes away my reflux, my snoring, my binge eating, my depression, my, my my, etc. etc. etc. (I still had LOTS of issues with reflux and binge eating with gourmet raw.)

Simple raw is alot of self-denial, which makes it seem unappealing and like a curse rather than a blessing. (And there is that stiggery wickett about my hair thinning on simple 80-10-10.)

Yet, yesterday, i sang, (using my new teacher's technique) on a finally squeeky clean reflux-free throat, and, fuck if i didn't sound like i should be starring at the Met TOMORROW.

I just can't seem to get rid of reflux any other way that by eating simple raw. Gourmet raw gave me reflux. But not bananas.

WHAT'S IMPORTANT TO ME? WHAT DO I VALUE? HAIR? OR MY VOICE?

TODAY I VALUE MY VOICE, AND FEEL LIKE THE SELF DENIAL OF 80-10-10 IS A BLESSING THAT HAS OPENED ME UP TO ANOTHER HUGE BLESSING/GIFT IN MY LIFE - MY VOICE.

OFTENTIMES, SELF DENIAL CAN DO THAT - OPEN US UP TO GREATER BLESSINGS, AND OUR UNIQUE GIFTS AND TALENTS ARE FINALLY UNLOCKED.

PERHAPS, IF WE ARE AFRIAD TO GIVE UP FOOD, WE ARE KEEPING OURSELVES IMPRISONED IN PAIN AND PLEASURE BECAUSE WE ARE AFRAID OF WHO WE REALLY ARE?

SOMETHING SPECAIL.

I THINK THIS VOICE CAN BE REALLY SPECIAL. BUT NOT IF I ABUSE IT. FOR ME, THAT MEANS SERIOUS BUSINESS. THAT MEANS.....BANANAS.

SOMETIMES THINGS THAT ARE THE HARDEST TO DO....ARE THE BEST FOR US.

xoxo michelle joy