bottoms up

so i was cleared to try alcohol in advance of my sister's wedding last weekend. it's supposed to be a year from the surgery, but i asked for special dispensation about three weeks shy of the one year mark. dr. b and sophie (his PA) granted me permission, warning me to go slow and that i would get drunk fast. they suggested one drink. partly, it's because gastric bypass patients tend to have a lower tolerance for alcohol post-surgically. that's partially because we absorb ethanol at a faster rate because the tiny stomach dumps the alcohol directly into the jejunum which has a large surface and absorbs the alcohol quickly. also,  we a) weigh less and b)haven't had a drink in sooo long.

drinking presents challenges - no sugar, no carbonation. so there goes wine and champagne, my two drinks of choice before (really only sad to see champagne go...). so vodka seemed the answer. can't mix it with tonic or soda, or juice...diet snapple it is. so last wednesday night, i tried a half of a shot of vodka mixed with some diet snapple. i definitely got that initial taste of tipsiness on the fast side, but it didn't escalate quickly at all. i felt fine. and it was fun!

so for the festivities surrounding molly's wedding, i sipped vodka. i didn't have diet snapple handy, so i mixed it with a little crystal light and water one night (that was good!) and with water and fresh lemon juice the rest of the time. i actually think it's probably a good thing to mix it with water and lemon juice because it sort of goes down slower than something that tastes like candy. 

mitchell was a little nervous and watching what i drank pretty carefully, but overall, i enjoyed having a couple drinks, and i look forward to doing it again on appropriate occasions :) 

i didn't feel like i got particularly drunk, and it didn't make me want to eat a lot or the wrong things, which i'm very pleased about. i will be very sure, though, to manage my drinking habits...i am well aware that so many weight loss surgery patients experience cross - addiction and addiction transfer, and i have to be mindful about my susceptibility to that. if i find myself looking forward to a drink in the middle of the day, i have to be committed to getting off that train.

i also have to manage my tendency from long ago to want more and more of what's making me feel good (as in: pizza, lo mein, sandwiches, cigarettes, coffee, alcohol...can't i feel that way about the gym?) i need to get used to enjoying the feeling of being a little buzzed and not wanting to feed it with more alcohol that will make me uncomfortably, and perhaps dangerously, intoxicated. i guess i'll be working on it at the same time as i get used to tasting a little bit of something and having that be enough. they're more than a little connected.

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(don't) eat your wheat(ies)

alright, so last week, with the help of my nutritionist adrienne, i decided to eliminate the following from my diet: yeast, wheat, gluten, flour. seems extreme, i know. 

over the last several months, i'd started to experiment with whole grain breads. then as i got more comfortable with trying them (even outside my own home!), i moved to whole wheat breads occasionally, when whole grain wasn't available. i found a "no white" bagel and test drove that. and i can not tell a lie... there were a few stray times when i tried white bread. like, challah roll on the table at the diner bread. you can see where this is going... i also tried pizza. true, there was also the whole wheat pizza from skinny pizza, a wonderful improvement to takeout, for sure. but here's the problem. every time i drove by that wonderful improvement, i wanted pizza. not so wonderful.

i noticed a similar phenomenon when i flew down to florida to be with my mother in law for a procedure she was having (she's fine). in the amazing terminal 5 at jfk, i needed to pick something up to bring on the plane. (no blue potato chips for this girl). i chose a hearty looking turkey sandwich on multi-grain bread. i ate it in three different sittings, and it was highly satisfying and delicious each time. i felt like i had hit the jackpot - here i was, sitting on plane in ONE seat, between strangers, armrests down, tray table down, out of my mind on xanax...okay, i digress...but the point was, i was being a NORMAL person, eating a sandwich and wrapping up the rest for later. who IS this person?

this person is ME. the same one who weighed almost 400 pounds a year ago. because the problem is that that night when it was time for dinner, i ordered another turkey sandwich, this time on whole wheat bread, and i ate the whole thing. did it weigh more than 6 ounces? probably not. but the fact of eating an entire turkey sandwich in one sitting scared me. when i woke up the next day, all i wanted was bread. it's that thing about carbs...we learn and relearn the same lessons over and over, don't we?

at the airport coming home, waiting for my delayed flight in the rain, anxious and tired, i ordered tortilla chips and spinach dip as my dinner. BAD SCENE. i knew right then, with every delicious bite, that i had gone down a bad road;  i had been on a bad jag and that it needed to end. almost the way you might look at confession, i saw adrienne and i told her everything. and here's what she said. she said "this is a whole banquet room you don't need to go into, you just don't need to go there. this is a dark and dangerous road." she also said "if you know something about yourself, just accept it."

that struck me. on one hand, i think she's so right. i agonized for the first couple post-op months trying to understand why some weight loss surgery patients swore off carbs and others thought it was okay...i needed to be told what to do, and there was so much guidance out there that it netted out at nothing in a way, making me feel really lost and on my own. what i arrived at eventually was that the people who swore carbs off generally felt they slowed their weight loss, but also that they were trigger foods and that they were, habitually, too close to what made them fat in the first place. i figured as long as i could monitor that, i should go forth and eat carbs responsibly. why? two reasons really, and maybe they're not that different.

1. i like carbs and wanted to eat them.

2. i fear extremity - i think i am afraid to say "i don't eat carbs" (though i know that's an oversimplification, as vegetables are carbs, etc) because if i say that, then it seems like a gimmick, like something with an inevitable failure date, like a diet that just begs you to cheat.

so while adrienne's directive to know myself and accept it feels good and simple on one hand, there's this other part of me that fights it...i want to be able to be moderate. i don't want to have to say that i don't or can't eat certain things...i want to believe i have enough control over myself to live in the gray area, or that at least i can work towards that as a goal.

then, i continued the discussion with carrie, my therapist. she shed an even different light on it...she said "how could you go through this process and not try pizza? you have to give yourself that experience, so now you did it and you're done." she also shared her own experience about eliminating bread in her own life because it makes her feel better, and it makes her lose weight. it's a choice. it's not that she CAN'T eat bread, it's that she's choosing not to. in some ways, THAT is the moderation...it's knowing that while you COULD eat something, for whatever reasons, you're not going to. 

although i've never experienced a "honeymoon period" in this process the way many people report, i guess in some ways, the honeymoon is over when fear doesn't stop you from eating certain things anymore. at first, i never would have dreamed of eating bread (especially white flour bread!) because i'd be afraid it would make me sick. when you know it won't, that's when the real work comes in. it can't be about fear anymore, now it has to be about strength. 

so for today, my strength is coming in the form of the decision NOT to eat my wheat(ies). and it's an evolution, as all of this is. as my old weight watchers leader said, "i don't know about tomorrow. i'm not there yet." but i have to say, today, it feels kind of awesome to walk by the bread aisle at the grocery store and just know that there's nothing for my there - that's not my aisle. it's freeing not to read every label, hoping to see a magical permutation of numbers that would allow me to have a piece of something...fiber, net carbs, sugars, etc. i just don't eat those things right now. period, the end. and on a side note, i haven't been feeling particularly hungry, i've been having a true sense of fullness almost all the time and i've lost 5 pounds in the last week.

another side note...i love how a trifecta of very strong women - nutritionist, therapist and weight watchers leader - are helping me to navigate these waters. if i were having a bat mitzvah again, i'd definitely be calling them up for a special candle :)