I have a love/hate relationship with food. I love it, but it hates me.
"Hi, my name is ME and I am a stress eater."
For some psycho-babble reason, it seems to make things feel better for that split second. I realize therapists all over the world are crying out, "Replace that feeling with something that actually makes you feel good. Activities that make you laugh, blah, blah."
I manage to think long and hard before I stress eat, so I'm making progress. I try my best to drink a large glass of water or leave the room completely; however, sometimes that spoonful of peanut butter mixed with another spoonful of dark chocolate chips just TASTES awesome!
Since I don't enjoy exercising (on purpose), I have to monitor what I eat closer than non-stress eaters do. Plus I have low blood sugar issues and my families genetics SUCK! Due to genetics I now have, and will continue to have, cholesterol problems. Yes, I do realize that a small amount (30 min everyday) of exercise would cure most of my problems, but it's the motivation I lack. Once I'm exercising, I'm fine, I even enjoy it!
Recently, I went full-on vegetarian (okay, so not full-on, I eat fish and dairy/eggs - so I'm a pesky ovolacto Unitarian or something) so that adds another hitch in my food monitoring. Also, since I don't eat meat I now have low iron levels to worry about. Not usually a problem, however being a woman, evidently you pretty much deplete your iron stores on a monthly basis, yay! But how much iron do I need? What if I eat too much iron? Ugh!
This is how I came to have an appointment with a dietician. Other than the fact that I've been monitoring the wrong things and my genetics suck, it was actually a great appointment. If your insurance will pay for it or you have a YMCA near you (ours has a dietician), I recommend consulting with some sort of nutrition specialist. (**For those of you with spelling OCDs: dietician and dietitian are the same thing, I looked it up because Google said I spelled it wrong.)
After browsing through the multitude of handouts, I am actually doing a decent job eating healthy (aside from the stress thing). Getting rid of meat in my diet is actually 1/3 of my battle with cholesterol; dairy and genetics are the other two-thirds. My real struggle comes from the fact that I evidently monitor and eat the wrong fats.
DISCLAIMER: I'm not and never will be a dietician so go see one for yourself, because you are not me and may have different diet and genetic suckage to deal with.
One of the many handouts explained the whole saturated/unsaturated fat business in a way I understand...it had pictures! Plus, I added the all-important arrows indicating what the different fats did to my cholesterol. My dietician helped explain the LDL and HDL thing.
HDL is good stuff, it helps gets rid of the LDL which is the nasty stuff that sticks in your arteries. I'm still lost on triglycerides, but that is because mine seem to be fine so we didn't touch on that.
Basically your natural oils (olive, peanut butter & nuts) help increase your HDL and decrease your LDL. Fried stuff, we all know is bad, but it's BECAUSE it lowers your HDL and raises your LDL. Ah HA! I'm not very good at, "Don't do that, it's bad for you!" I need explanations and reasons for things I should do.
Avoiding fats altogether is bad too (did not know this) because good fats are needed to raise your HDL. If you don't eat them, no matter how "healthy" your diet, genetics come in and have a SUCK parade all over your healthy food.
Now I get to do what I hate to do, count calories! Ugh! It's more the vitamin, fat and iron levels I am monitoring, but I still hate it. If anyone has any recommendations for free apps for an android phone, I'd love the help!
Also, if anyone has any recommendations for vegetarian, healthy snacks that I can use for my stress eating I would love the help! My go-to snack is peanut butter with dark chocolate chips added, horrible, I know...but oh SO GOOD! Working on my stress eating will be a whole different post, so let's not go there!
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