The Writing Diet — Interesting Food for Thought January 20, 2008

In an effort to get more healthy this year, and try to deal with my weight issues, I’ve been reading a number of diet-related books lately.  Obviously, there’s no shortage of them, so the trick is to find what is helpful, vs. what is mostly annoying.  I made the impulse decision to purchase The Writing Diet by Julia Cameron earlier this week, and even had a bit of time over the last couple of days to start reading it.

It’s not really so much a diet (although there is an eating plan in there that’s not so bad as they go) as an approach for dealing with food issues.  That is, you can use the principles espoused by the book with any eating plan that works for you.  While I haven’t yet started to apply the book’s lessons, I think there’s some good stuff in there.

The basic premise of The Writing Diet: Write Yourself Right Size is that you’re often eating for emotional reasons, or because of long-established unhealthy patterns.  So by writing instead of eating, you can bring those emotions to the surface, where they lose the power to compel you to eat.  Following the techniques in the book is also supposed to help you address the unhealthy patterns regarding food you’ve established, through a series of writing exercises.

There are a number of techniques adopted by 12-step programs, and anecdotes that illustrate how people have implemented the suggested tactics.  Recently, I read the book Intuitive Eating, and it seems pretty similar, in that the techniques are designed to get at the root of why you eat unhealthy foods and sabotage your efforts to lose weight.  All of the common self-delusions and rationalizations are there and will sound familiar to anyone who has attempted — and failed — to lose weight in the past.

I have so many things I want to implement in my life right now, and so little time.  Life is a massive to-do list, and the hard work of self-improvement often takes a backseat to just living.  But I do hope to implement some of Cameron’s techniques and see if it makes a difference and/or boosts what success I’m already having so far this year eating healthy.

And the three-way lightbulb starts flashing over my head January 2, 2008

I often read news articles and go “ding! ding! ding!” or tap my nose using the Charades signal, but I really had a wow! moment tonight when I read this New York Times article:

A Clutter Too Deep for Mere Bins and Shelves

I’m sitting here in an apartment that is filled to the gills right now — with crap.  I’m really scaring myself, wondering if I’m on the verge of becoming a crazy cat lady.  (I do have the world’s most beautiful kitty — only one — but I digress.)

Could all the crap I’m keeping in my apartment be related to all the crap I’ve been putting in my body lately?   Is hanging on to all the stuff, and hanging on all the pounds, an attempt to shield myself from the world, and all the life changes it has thrown my way in the past year or two?  Holy shit, yeah.  I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before.

I realized it in the micro- sense, of course, when hanging on to — or acquiring more of — individual items that are otherwise useless, but which come with a sentimental value attached.  But I never thought about it more broadly.  But when I do — it’s more than curious how all the neat freaks I know are skinny.  And the slobs with the disorganized offices, cars, homes and lives…well, you do the math.  It’s true even in my office:  the person with the immaculate office is the super-skinny vegan.  (Let it be said that I have a clean, organized office at the moment, but only because I moved offices last month, and had a little time before the holiday break to finish off the organizing I started prior to the move.)

I’m now starting to wonder if I have considered a basic level of untidiness a virtue only because the other people I knew who were also cluttered were people I gravitated towards because of their weight issues.  And having just returned from my parents’ home — let’s just say I come by it honest, this retaining everything that might potentially be of value someday — but my mom has struggled with weight problems all her life too.   My household habits were an issue with my skinny ex-husband, and not a big deal to my not-skinny ex-boyfriend (although he would help me when I freaked out about the condition of my place, much like he would try to be supportive when I freaked out about all the weight I gained (40 pounds) while we were together).  Now I see that not all these things are coincidences.

I’ve postponed exercising at home because I would have to move too much stuff in order to have room to exercise (or because the carpet needs vacuuming so badly I would most likely worsen my health — not better it — by performing Pilates on it), and then there was the time I missed my exercise class because I had misplaced my keys and couldn’t leave the house until it was too late to go.  That was pretty embarrassing — it wasn’t hard to come up with a less lame excuse that time.  And every move I’ve ever had to make has been an expensive nightmare for me and my friends, because I wouldn’t face packing and organizing my stuff until the last minute, which meant I just moved the clutter from one place to the next.  Again — now it all makes sense.

So how to tackle this one?  I could hire a professional organizer, like they talk about in the article, and I’ve thought about it. But paying for the therapist, and the exercise classes, and the organizer starts to add up.  I might just consider it another set of rules I don’t want to live by — I’m a rebel eater that way too.  I’ve learned my lesson — no trips to the Container Store.  (Besides, I already have lots of empty bins that could be pressed into service — that example really hit home.)

I’m thinking crap loss goals, in addition to weight loss goals, might very well be appropriate.    I’ve forced my apartment to hold a lot more than my skeleton can carry (thankfully, I think) so pound-for-pound won’t make much of a dent.  So maybe activity goals (similar to exercise goals) would work better:  I’ll plan to spend a hour decluttering the way I would rack up gym time, picking a different area of concentration (kitchen, bedroom closet, mail and bills) each time, just like switching from weights to cardio or from abs to glutes.

Since I read the article on January 2, there’s still time to tuck it into my New Years’ resolutions.  It’s the unholy trinity:  money, weight, and stuff, but now I better understand how interconnected they are for me, I have a chance of coping with it.I don’t know what scares me the most — facing my overweight self, or my cluttered surroundings.  I am looking forward, however, to getting rid of multiple layers of crap — internally and externally.