Forget eating perfectly. Embrace your mistakes.

I love Bridget Jones's Diary. The narrator is so feisty, funny, and frank. She's endearingly imperfect with a strong dash of sass. The first chapter, January -- An Exceptionally Bad Start, simultaneously cracks me up and sends shivers of uncomfortable recognition down my spine. That list of hers, minus the alcohol, looks a lot like what I might have eaten regularly in the old days.

Fortunately, around the time I decided to kick binge eating, I had a realization that slowly changed my food journal from Jonesian to cheering. As it turns out, the main reason I had such a lack of restraint was my guiding principle. It was, Eat perfectly.

Perhaps you're familiar with this mantra. It involves dining on whatever you consider to be healthy, morning, noon and night, even when out with your friends, in the middle of winter, when you're starving, or plain sick and tired of the monotony of no-salt, no-butter, no-cheese, no-chocolate meals. And when you give in to the voice in your head whispering "Just have one (insert your forbidden food of choice)," which you invariably will when you're hungry, tired or bored enough, you say to yourself, "That's it. I've blown it. Now, I'm going to eat as much of the good stuff as I can, consequences be damned. I'll get back on track tomorrow."

In my case, when tomorrow came, I would wake up stuffed, mournful and ill-tempered. One lapse in self control would lead to at least another day's worth of unbalanced eating as I gave myself the gears for being such a glutton and moped about my expanding waistline. Sometimes, the episode would trigger weeks' worth of nutritional carnage, particularly when I thought about how little I wanted to go back to a lifetime's worth of bland and boring food.

So, what did I realize, and how can it help you? Just this. Eat perfectly is a terrible mantra. It's utterly unrealistic. No one eats perfectly all the time. No matter how good your eating habits, you are still going to make nutritional choices you wish you hadn't. It's natural, normal, and completely human. Since this is the case, why not accept it? Forget eating perfectly. Instead, aspire to eat well, and turn your nutritional mistakes into learning opportunities.

The next time you have a minor food fiasco, have a chat with yourself. What did you do that you wish you hadn't? Be calm and curious. Say to yourself, "That's interesting. I wonder why I made that choice." Then, think about the choice you wish you'd made instead. What could you do next time to act and eat in a way that will keep you healthy and happy?

Ah, happiness!

Bill Cunningham in action:)

One of the best possible things you can do for yourself anytime, anywhere, is to pay attention to what's going well in your life. The more you can see the blessings around you and the things you're doing well at, the better you'll feel. The better you feel, the more you'll enjoy life. The more you enjoy life, the easier it will be to make positive changes and (not incidentally:P) to kick binge eating disorder.

With that in mind, I thought I'd share some of the things I'm grateful for today:

• a neighbour made me a hot toddy because I have a sore throat;
• a dear friend got married!
• I ran into my dad on his way home from a party;
• my sister-in-law called me with a great idea for my twin brothers' birthdays;
• the sky was clear and blue, and the sun shone all day;
• the silhouettes of the trees and wild grasses in the setting sun, and the twinkling lights at dusk, took my breath away;
• Fran taught Sunday morning yoga and she's finally recovering from her neck injury;
• espace musique was playing great French holiday tunes; and
• a friend introduced me to style columnist Bill Cunningham. If you need a shot of happiness, watch one of his videos. He takes such delight in life, and has a wonderful, old voice with an accent that's to die for.

What about you? Did anything happen today that you're grateful for? Think back on it and enjoy it! If you'd like, share it here. I'd love to read about it.

Ground zero

It's funny. Each time I start this entry, I want to tell you about the thought patterns and habits you can use to beat binge eating disorder, and each time, I find myself writing about the day everything changed for me -- the day I decided I would get better. Rather than discard tens of versions of the story, I've written you the lightest account of it that I can, hoping that you'll find comfort and encouragement in its lines.

It was spring 2003. I was working on a Master's thesis in French language and literature. I was in over my head -- if I told you what I'd set out to do, you'd start laughing, and with good reason, at the sheer ridiculousness of the project -- and therefore not making much headway. My eating habits were appalling: I alternated between eating next to nothing for as long as I could, watching desperately for any sign of weight loss, and scarfing down more food than I care to remember.

I looked awful. I felt awful. And my once-shining academic star was fading. I didn't want to leave my apartment. I didn't want to run or bike or swim. I couldn't bear to buy new clothes. One day, the only pants I could find to wear were my once ginormous (though otherwise very nice) turquoise-and-plum plaid flannel pajama bottoms!

At night, I lay in bed and pinched the rolls of fat that encased me, willing them away. Somewhere underneath all that unwanted flesh was the athletic girl who'd swum an hour and a half a day and could run cross-country races without any training other than pool workouts and Sunday morning runs with Dad. How I missed her!

One night after a particularly cringe-worthy binge, I awoke bathed in sweat. I couldn't seem to cool off. My heart was racing. My insides felt like they were about to burst. It was the absolute worst I'd ever felt in body and mind, and I wondered whether I'd need to go to emergency. But I didn't want to. Anything but having to own up to what I'd been doing to turn myself into such a wreck. At that moment, I knew with absolute clarity that I would either die or change. And I didn't want to die. I had simultaneously hit rock bottom and found my ground zero.

Today, it's a sunny December Saturday in Vancouver. I'm writing to you from the other side of BED, a healthy, happy woman who spends hours in her kitchen and keeps ice cream in her fridge and chocolate in her pantry. This afternoon, my girlfriends and I are going to bake Christmas cookies, and I'm not even slightly worried about being left to my own devices with a small army of delicious cookies. I know they'll be safe.

If I can do it, then so can you. Be of good cheer.

Want to stop bingeing? Start tracking your meals

In my last post, I wrote about the benefits of journaling and how it can help you beat binge eating disorder. Today's post is about meal tracking and why it's one of the best and easiest ways to transition to healthy eating.

What is meal tracking? That's easy: it involves logging your daily eating patterns. It's not something you do obsessively, recording your meals down to the last crumb. It's important be honest about your eating habits, but details aren't necessary. A rough outline is fine. The name of the game is to get back to enjoying regular, everyday portions at regular, everyday mealtimes.

How does it work? I used a wall calendar with large squares for each day, an assortment of pens, markers and highlighters, and even some star stickers. This made meal tracking seem like a game. Every night, before I went to bed, I'd get out my supplies and calendar and make a quick record of my meals that day.

First, I'd write "B" for breakfast, "L" for lunch, "S" for snack and "D" for dinner in the day's square. Then, I'd write the number of blocks I'd eaten (a brilliant concept borrowed from Barry Sears and his book Enter the Zone)  next to each letter. For example, B 3, L 3, S 2, D 4. The total blocks I wrote in the lower left-hand corner. It looked like this:

Luckily, you can do the same thing and achieve great results without knowing anything about blocks. If you've eaten a normal-sized breakfast and lunch (the equivalent of my three blocks), give yourself a check next to the "B". If you ate more than you wanted to for your snack, but you didn't binge, you could give yourself an upward-pointing arrow (the equivalent of, say, my six blocks). If you don't want to think about what you put down the hatch at dinner but are acutely aware that it involved far too much ice cream, part of a jar of peanut butter and a package of cookies, use an "X" as shorthand for the binge.
 

Your goal is to finish the day without a single "X", at which point you can give yourself the satisfaction of highlighting the date in green. If you can get through an entire week without a single "X" -- seven beautiful green days -- you give yourself a star. And so on.

Naturalmente, you can go as high- or low-tech as you want with meal tracker.

Journaling, and why it's awesome

Back in the blackest days of binge eating disorder, I started a journal. Since my early teens, I'd filled notebook upon notebook with story ideas, sketches, and photos that caught my eye, and loved it.

But journaling was different. It was a BED breakthrough, my first one. I discovered the release that comes from telling the truth. I wrote about the hurts bottled up inside me; the fears I couldn't bring myself to share with anyone else; how angry I was with myself for my behaviour; and how desperately I wanted to change. It was quite something, the things that flowed out of my ballpoint pen tip and onto the paper.

Sounds depressing, you say? Okay, I admit it. It does sound that way. So far. But it isn't. Journaling is DIY psychotherapy. It's cheap, easy and effective. You can do it anywhere. All you need is a few minutes and a cell phone, computer or piece of paper. There's no obligation to journal daily. Better still, no one's looking over your shoulder to make sure you're using spot-on punctuation or perfect spelling. The questions you ask don't have to be fancy, either. Here are a few easy ones to get you started:

• Why do I have BED?
• When did it start?
• How does it make me feel?
• What triggers a binge?
• Are there warning signs I can look out for?

But the best is yet to come: once you get through the bleak stuff, you'll start to see and think more clearly. You'll start recording your successes, what you're grateful for, the strategies you'll use to cope the next time the urge to binge strikes.

Try it. You'll see. Journaling is awesome.

Binge eating disorder

Once upon a time, I was a competitive swimmer -- not a particularly fast one, though I worked my tush off in practice and swam as hard as I could at meets. There was a pretty sweet upside to six days of practice a week: I could eat mounds of spaghetti swathed in parmesan cheese, followed by an impressive bowl of ice cream every Friday night, and never, every worry about getting fat. I have three dearly beloved brothers, all younger than me, and I ate just as much as them.

Not only that, but I hardly had to train for cross-country running competitions because my swimming practices were enough to guarantee strong legs, good lungs, and an enviable VO2 max. And I was strong, healthy, with nicely toned muscles, and as slender as I could wish (though admittedly so geeky that it rather took the edge off these advantages.)

The trouble started in earnest in second-year university. As a competitive swimmer, and later as a runner, when I was bored or anxious, food was my drug of choice. Fortunately, I wasn't a particularly bad offender at the time, and since it didn't affect my waistline, it seemed perfectly harmless.

Then, on a three-month trip to Germany just before second-year university, I gained thirty(!) pounds. I defy most people to manage a weight gain like mine in so little time. Those months were three of the longest I've ever spent, not because of the family I stayed with, which was magnificent, but because I was alone with my thoughts.

Until then, I'd been able to shut out disagreeable thoughts about my sexuality. It was hard work, but doable, especially when I could distract myself with school, athletics, family and friends. In the northern German countryside, there were far fewer convenient distractions. The thoughts I'd kept at bay for so long
burst out of the proverbial closet door, menacing, malfeasant, and intractable. They ignored all hints, all remonstrances, all direct injunctions to go away and leave me in peace.

The fact is, I was prone to falling for women and ruthlessly distanced any guy who had the misfortune to show signs of interest in me. Realizing what this meant hurt. Badly. So badly that I wanted to die. I felt dirty, dangerous and utterly demoralized. How would I going to make it through all the lonely years ahead? How would I hide my secret so that no one would ever guess the truth? What were the chances I could get through life without ever falling in love again?

Alcohol was off limits, as were means of immediate relief of the lethal variety. This left one refuge: the fridge. In the three months I stayed with my kindly German family, I polished off pounds of cheese, cake, cream, bread and butter. Day after day, I snuck into the pantry and quietly opened the fridge door, looking for treats to soothe away my pain and guilt.

As you can imagine, it didn't take long for the results of my fridge forays, combined with a suddenly more sedentary lifestyle, to show. My clothes grew uncomfortably tight, my complexion changed, and I felt simply awful inside and out. Worst of all, I seemed to have lost all self control where food was concerned. I was always hungry because my insides always hurt, and food seemed to be the only thing that made the ache go away. And that's how binge eating disorder (B.E.D.) began for me.

Why am I telling you this story? Because many, many people suffer from B.E.D., and don't know what it is. Because I know how much hurt has to do with B.E.D., and that healing this disorder begins with accepting and loving yourself. Because before I explain how you can change your eating and thinking habits to beat it, I want you to recognize yourself and know that you're not alone.

Confessions of a recovered foodaholic

I haven't always been Ms. Slim. In fact, I spent about ten years of my life struggling with a food addiction followed by a meal malediction. Or, to put it in plain English, I had binge eating disorder (B.E.D.) for seven years and anorexia for four. To this day, few things give me the satisfaction of being slinky slim and *healthy*.

Believe me, I know this isn't all there is to life. But, but and again but, being fit and healthy makes life more enjoyable, while feeling badly about looks, weight or diet simply sucks.

In my quest for a cure for B.E.D., I soaked up all kinds of information that helped me to go from meaty and miserable to slim and trim. Recovering from anorexia taught me about the importance of love (and proper portion sizes!:)), and showed me how beautiful curves can be.

I aim to put my knowledge at your disposal, and hope that you'll learn from my successes and failures. If you happen to be suffering from either B.E.D. or anorexia, perhaps this blog will give you a push in the right direction. If you've never had either dread disease -- which I fervently hope -- and simply want to learn more about eating for pleasure, good health and, perhaps, a better figure, I'll do my best to supply you with tips and tricks you can put into practice and the odd tried and true or brand-new recipe.

Recipe alert: Braised cabbage with beet and apple

And no, I'm afraid this post isn't about borscht.:)

Last night, I had a dinner party. It was great fun: my parents brought a beautiful, fresh green salad -- complete with crisp escarole lettuce from Santa Barbara Market -- and my mom's matchless home-made French dressing. My good friends Daniel and Lizzie brought a lovely, light Merlot from their most recent batch, courtesy of Neighbourhood Winemakers on Davie St.

My guests were nice enough to rate me well in the delicious and nutritious departments yesterday night, and ask me to share my braised cabbage recipe. Here, both for the cabbage converts and the veggie skeptics among you, is a new sweet-savoury contender...

Braised cabbage
a.k.a. delicious, low-GI, mostly veggie side
Serves: 5+
Inspiration: Fresh Juice's fall recipe for honey-mustard roast pork tenderloin with braised cabbage

Ingredients:
2 tsp olive oil (I used extra-virgin coconut oil because I felt I had to try my newest oleic acquisition:))
1 red onion, peeled, halved and thinly sliced
1 apple of any variety you choose, except Granny Smith (too tart), peeled and thinly sliced
1 beet, peeled, halved and julienned
1/2 red cabbage, halved again and thinly sliced
2 tsp apple cider or red-wine vinegar
1-2 T maple syrup
1 C water
1 T miso paste, mild
salt, pepper, fennel seeds, caraway seeds and dill, to taste
sprinkling of whole peppercorns (optional)

Preparation:
1. Heat oil in Dutch oven, large pot or saucepan.
2. Add onion, apple and beet slices. Cook, stirring, until the onion softens (5 to 10 mins).
3. Stir in remaining ingredients.
4. Put lid on pot or saucepan.
5. Bring mixture to boil.
6. Reduce heat, cover and simmer until all ingredients are tender (20 mins to a half-hour.)
7. Taste and alter seasoning as your taste buds and creativity suggest.
8. Guten appetit!

Recipe alert: Curried pumpkin seeds

And since we're all in agreement on how great pumpkin seeds are, I thought I'd share a recipe with you, courtesy of my foodie friend Catherine, who found it in Patricia Well's book, Salad as a Meal - Healthy Main-Dish Salads for Every Season. It's easy and delish. Give it a try!

Ingredients:

2 cups hulled* pumpkin or squash seeds

1 T curry powder or gomasio

2 T tamari or Japanese soy sauce

Preparation:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. In a large bowl combine everything and toss to coat evenly.
3. Spread seeds in a single layer on a baking sheet.
4. Place in oven and roast, shaking the pan from time to time until seeds change colour to toasty brown and begin to puff up and pop (8-12 mins).
5. Store in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 2 weeks.

How the heck do you hull pumpkin seeds? The answer is right here.

Why pumpkin seeds should be your next guilt-free grocery splurge

This is a short post -- a test post, actually -- and the plan is to give you a reason to try pumpkin seeds and/or pumpkin-seed butter.

Why should you add pumpkin seeds to your repertoire? Well, besides the fact that they're enchantingly green, and taste great toasted and sprinkled on salads or over oatmeal porridge, they have some unusual health benefits. For one thing, they're quite effective in helping with bladder control, a problem shared by many, if rarely discussed.:) Dr. Gifford-Jones recently wrote a fascinating article about the research on this topic.

Secondly, they pack a good wallop of tryptophan, an amino acid that's necessary for growth, helps to regulate your metabolism, and makes it more likely that you'll sleep soundly.

Thirdly, as I was perusing the nutritional label on a jar of pumpkin-seed butter, wondering whether I was willing to shell out (pun intended) more for this oddly enticing green goo, I realized that it was less fat-dense and more protein-dense than peanut or almond butter. Sold!

Since I love all nut butters and tend to eat more of them than is strictly a good idea, this was exactly what I needed. I'll expand on this concept in a later post and explain why the macronutrient (carbohydrate, protein, fat) composition of foods matters and how understanding this nutritional shorthand will keep you slim and healthy for life.

If you're still on the fence, check out Dr. Mercola's short list of health benefits for which you can thank the humble pumpkin seed.

Add pumpkin seeds and/or pumpkin-seed butter to your roster. You'll be glad you gave these leafless greens a chance.