The True Hero

The True Hero

If ever there was a person who deserves accolades for being one of the strongest human beings while still attempting to lose weight, it is the person that does the grocery shopping, prepares the meals, cleans up after the feast was held, and either stays the same with their weight, or produces a weight loss every week.   I am not sure if my own journey of losing weight would have unfolded the way it did if I was still cooking for a husband, and 3 growing children.

It is very hard coping with two of the many factors that make a compulsive overeater eat: loving the people they are cooking for while at the same time resisting the temptation to overeat.    My own children still hope I will embrace flour, sugar and butter once again, and cook the holiday meals they still yearn for, but they also want me to continue on this healthy journey.  Today, I refuse to do all of that cooking and baking and then stand back and watch everyone else enjoy the fruits of my labor.  I am not the hero I described above; I am the martyr who assumed that I deserved to eat as much as I wanted to because after all, I did all the work!

What troubles me the most when I look back on past hours spent cooking and baking, was how eager I was to make hundreds upon hundreds of cookies and an over-abundance of everything else, partly so that I could feed my own addiction. Today I believe that no one overweight or trying to lose weight, should ever be expected to hang out in supermarkets or kitchens no matter how much they love you.    

 I was whipping up more than just calories and fat in my kitchen.  I believed I was bonding all of us together with foods from our ethnic background, and I was reinforcing holiday traditions. Each year my holiday baking became bigger and better than the previous year, and so did my weight on the scale.

My concession this year is to allow each child to pick his/her favorite cookie, and I offered to bake 1 batch for each child.  The three of them still can’t decide which 3 kinds they want; they never had limits on their requests in my kitchen before.  Each recipe makes at least 3 or 4 dozen cookies, so I think 108 cookies are enough for 3 people to divide. I never used this kind of logic when I weighed over 400 pounds.

There are people that can do all of that cooking and baking and not indulge in it, but they are not the food addict that I am.  Once I admitted to being a compulsive overeater, and more importantly, that it will never go away, I started making changes to help me cope with my problem; separation truly is the best solution. 

Last Christmas, my son that lives in the Bahamas invited us to join him on his island.  Here and there I saw a wreath on a door, or lights on a house to remind me it was a holiday, but there was no holiday food, no cookies, and we went kayaking that day.  

It is not feasible for any of us to run off to an island to escape the power food has on us.  But the other people in the family can reach out and offer solutions instead of requesting even more enticing food.   There are moments I now must clear my head and not think about how much my family wants the food, or how much my love for them is calling me into the kitchen.  I know as a single cook in the kitchen I am surrounded by many thoughts, desires and feelings; food is just one small part of it.