I Won’t Pretend It Wasn’t A Problem
September 11, 2009
On Monday I spent eight hours in the kitchen baking 7 different varieties of cookies and double batches of each for a total of 500 cookies, more or less. No joke. Our dining room table was hidden under plates, piles, and stacks of cookies. It was….a beautiful thing to see.
I had a blast! It’s been months since I’ve baked and with the exception of my annual gingerbread house bake-off when I bake and assemble 30-40 of them for the children at church to decorate at Christmas, it’s been years since I did something like this. I shipped four boxes of cookies to friends, took a tray of cookies to my plastic surgeon whose office is one block from our front door, sent a tray of cookies with D to work, and still had plenty to load off on some friends who came over for dinner that night.
But there was a problem. For all my resolve to not taste any of them, I did. I’m not a big lover of all things cookie myself. For me, it’s all about the dough. And the little bits of chocolate, toffee, coconut, and nuts that are tossed before baking. Those little bits of goodness that so easily manage to find their way from bowl or cutting board into my mouth are my undoing. If I just sat and ate cookies it would be easy to add up the damage but given it was in dabs and morsels, it’s a little more difficult to calculate. My best guess is I ate about the equivalent of 6-8 cookies over the 8 hour bake-a-thon.
Could it have been worse? Oh sure. For every time I popped a nibble in my mouth there was five times when I said no, but that’s not the point. The point is that I don’t want to go down this slippy road of consuming calories that a) are empty nutritionally and b) are eaten mindlessly rather than with intention. If I eat a cookie, I want it to be because I make the intention decision to have one and then I want to take the time to enjoy it and be satisfied with that bite of sweetness. I want to know that I can occasionally bake treats for friends and family and when I’m done, have no regrets that I had managed my own behavior better around the food.
I use to weight 325 pounds. I now weigh 150 pounds. My body shape has changed dramatically, my clothes sizes have dropped from size 30 to size 10, my self-esteem has risen and my level of health, according to all the doctors, rocks. Only one thing hasn’t changed and that is that I remain a compulsive over eater. My years in Overeater’s Anonymous taught me that and my own personal history with food since I was a child only serves to confirm it. My baking adventure on Monday reminded me yet again that unless I work consciously and deliberately at doing things differently I will default every time to my compulsive eating ways.
So what do I do with this information? Never bake cookies or cakes or pies again for friends and family and church? Some people would say that’s exactly what I should do but I hope it doesn’t have to come to that. I love baking for people. I fell in love with baking standing at my Grandma’s side. She’d dropped spoonfuls of peanut butter cookie dough on the cookie sheet and I’d follow behind making crisscross designs on the top of each with a dinner fork. She’d slide dozens of chocolate chip cookies warm from the oven onto the brown butcher paper that lined her counter top and when cool I’d gather them up and stack them in her beat-up silver metal cookie tins. Never do I bake without thinking of my Grandma and every time it makes me smile because I know how proud she’d be of me and how she’d eat one of my cookies and act as though it was the best cookie she’d ever tasted.
But…if I can’t bake cookies without nibbling and tasting and “sampling” then giving up baking is something I’ll have to consider because I will NOT jeopardize all the work I’ve done to get to where I am. I love my health. I love feeling comfortable in my body. I love moving easier and more gracefully. When I add it all up, I love it collectively more than I do mixing cake batter or pressing a pie crust into a pan or making crisscross markings on the top of a peanut butter cookie. If I have to give up the one for the other than the baking goes. I just hope that doesn’t have to happen.
That leads me to this…how could I have done Monday differently? What plans could I have put in place that would have supported my resolve to not nibble away on empty, wasted calories? What can I do different next time? Here are some ideas I’ve come up with. Feel free to add some of your own because clearly, I can use all the help I can get.
- Limit the hours I bake at one time so that I’m less likely to get “worn down” by being around so much food for so long.
- Prepare any meals I might need on baking day ahead of time and then STOP baking, sit down at the table and eat.
- Keep a glass of cold water on the counter.
- Fill a glass with ice water and some nibble veggies like sticks of carrot, celery, or jicama.
- Chew sugarless gum. I thought of this toward the end of the day and it really did help to keep me from putting anything else in my mouth. Chewing cinnamon gum and cookie dough at the same time isn’t all that appealing.
- Remember the quality of life I’m enjoying that I never want to risk losing for a few sugary-fatty bites.
- And maybe it would help to have these two photos taped side by side on my kitchen cabinet within view…
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Posted in Body Image, Maintaining Weight, Weight Loss
September 11th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
And where are my cookies??? Ya hang out in the barber shop, you’re gonna get a haircut, as they say.
September 11th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Oh Anita, I really relate to this specific conundrum (my new word)!
As someone who has a certificate in baking and pastry and worked for 6 years selling chocolate and pastry ingredients to hundreds of bakeries, I can personally tell you – IT’S REALLY HARD to have your cake and eat it too (ha ha). Over those 8 years that I was in pastry school and working as a rep, I gained about 20 lbs. I heart baking more than ANYTHING. Yet, I really have to reserve it for special occasions….because I have no self control around things like cookies and their evil doughs. I bake challah once a month for Communion. YOU KNOW what I’m talking about too. It makes TWO LOAVES. I have vowed to bring one to church and give the other as a gift to a friend. If I have it in the house I will smother it in Nutella and eat every last crumb. I only bake when I’m asked to or if I need a special gift for someone who would appreciate it. I switched to making fudge at Christmas because I simply don’t care for it (I know, I’m a freak). I often bake things for people that I don’t care for – such as cheesecake or oatmeal cookies. I NEVER, EVER do marathon baking sessions like you did…it’s just an accident waiting to happen. However, when I do bake, I THROW THE BOWL IN THE SINK IMMEDIATELY and squirt soap all over it so I won’t lick the bowl. I also like to make cookies without noshable ingredients in them because then I won’t pick. Also, cookie dough containing molasses tends to taste icky so I make gingersnaps a lot. Why is that gingersnap dough is so foul but the end product delectable? Oh well.
I don’t know if any of this helps, but there was my two cents.
September 12th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
As one of the blessed recipients of your cookies, Anita, all I can say is: “Suck it up and keep making and sending me more cookies.”
No, but seriously: As I sit here before my plate of cookie crumbs I can’t help but reflect upon the truth that I don’t care if you get fat again, if that’s the price you have to pay for making and sending me more cookies. Remember when Christ on the cross said, “It is finished”? A lot of people don’t realize it, but the actual Greek for the word “it” in this case is “THEY.” What he was saying was “They ARE finished.” He was referring to some cookies he left baking at home. In fact, most modern Biblical scholars agree that one of the OTHER reasons Christ came back after he died was to finish mailing out his cookies to his friends.
I think there’s a lesson there for all of us: Never, ever doubt that it’s right to bake and mail cookies to John Shore. Ever.
Now go, and bake some more.
September 13th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Susanna—> I suspect you noticed my grin from ear to ear this morning leaving the communion table. Yes, I was rejoicing in the grace at the table but the smile was ALL about that bread! Sigh. It sounds like we’re definitely on the same page regarding baking….and as to gingersnaps, I have the same effect when making all those gingerbread houses….one bite of dough and I’m done.
September 13th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
John—> Thank you for the Greek translation. I was always confused and somehow dissatisfied with the more orthodox translative work. Now that I know Jesus was talking about cookies it’s all become so clear to me and has taken my faith to a whole different level. No, but seriously….
September 15th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
i’m not saying that i can relate…i’m just saying that i bought a whole package of cookie dough and none of the dough made it to the oven…whoops…
seriously, though…i find that it’s helpful to just not keep things in the house that are readily consumable (see above)…if I can eat it without cooking it, I will…and like you said, keep drinking water…i think it creates sort of a false sense of “fullness”
November 17th, 2009 at 9:11 am
I love your new blog, Anita. Just journeying in to some of your older posts that I missed and discovered a thread for “compulsive overeating”. I attended OA back in the late 80′s and was “clean” for white sugar for over a year, then a holiday arrived and that’s “all she wrote”. I looked at swooping in on fragments of food like, say, a dropped on the counter grapes as a duck goes for that bread crust and snatches it up. For that year the only control I had was because God helped me be faithful to a commitment to abstinence. Now it’s November 2009 and my eating has been pretty much empty calories for a long long time. My blood sugar is up and I’m trying desperately to get some control back. Finding this portion on your wonderful new blog has been a real blessing. I so couldn’t bake all day and not “look like a duck”. I’d swoop in on the fresh sweet smelling cookies and they would never make it to the neighbor for whom I baked them. Thank you for being so honest in your weight loss journey. It’s a real inspirations. I have subscribed to your RSS feeds and look forward to checking in daily to see what pearls of wisdom I can find. I just have to keep “picking them up and putting them down” I guess and keep reminding myself of those first three steps, “I can’t, He can, I think I will let Him!” God’s blessings on your new blog adventure. And thanks.
Katie (aka Hisown_01)