From Food to Feast - The Second Transition: Responsibility

The Second Transition:  Responsibility

The transition from chapter 2 to chapter 3 is in this line: “It is my fault.”
The key word here is fault. 

As a psychologist, I have come to dislike this word.  Too many people believe “fault” means “placing complete responsibility for my actions on the person who showed or taught me how to do this unproductive behavior.”  

Here’s an example of Jennifer’s (not her real name) mistaken, fault-finding thinking:  

1)          I just got really upset with my husband and ate a bag of potato chips.

2)          Whose fault is that?  Who taught me how to eat potato chips when upset?

3)          When I was a child, every time my mother was upset, she would eat potato chips.

4)          I learned how to eat when upset from my mother.** 

5)          Therefore, it is my mother’s fault that I eat potato chips when upset.  

Here’s the good news: the thinking above does reveal who contributed to Jennifer being in the hole. 

She is absolutely clear that her mother gave her misleading information, demonstrated unhealthy patterns, and told her lies about food, health, appearance, and the magnificence of her body.  

It may be your college cross-country coach, fitness magazines, or an ex-girlfriend: if you are serious about learning more about your relationship with food, it is wise to learn who and what shaped that relationship.  Knowing how you got into the hole helps you make sense of the past and wisely consider your options in the present.  

Here’s the bad news: Jennifer’s thinking hides an important truth about her present and future.  What’s the mistake?  

Jennifer assumes that the person who helped her get into the hole (her mother) is a necessary part of getting her out!  

No mater from whom you learned your unwanted, painful, unproductive habits, one thing remains true: if you are the one in pain who wishes things were different, that means YOU are the person who is in the hole.  That means YOU have the responsibility (that is, the ability to respond differently) to get out of the hole.  

This is true even if you are certain someone talked you into the hole. 

This is true even if you are certain someone pushed you into the hole. 

If I could restate Nelson’s poem, the line “It is my fault” would read “It is my responsibility.” 

Save yourself years of misery, resentment, and bitterness:  do not assume that the people and/or situations that contributed to you getting into the hole are necessary in order for you to get out.  

You can get out of the hole even if the other person is deceased, distracted, or out of your life.    

You can get out of the hole if the other person doesn’t believe s/he had anything to do with you being in the hole.

You can get out of the hole even if the other person doesn’t think you’re in a hole!  

I invite you to re-read Nelson’s poem (below), consider the difference between fault and responsibility, and explore the questions:  

Who and what contributed to me being in the hole? 

Whom have I been holding responsible for getting me out of the hole? 

 - Dr. Ndiya Nkongho

Dr. Ndiya Nkongho is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Atlanta, GA.  Her website is www.boldquestions.com.  She is an athlete who trains at BTB Fitness.  

**Notice that eating chips when you’re upset is just a pattern—it’s not inherently good or bad. A pattern only becomes a problem when you become dissatisfied with the results.  The moment you decide the pattern isn’t taking you to your desired destination, then the pattern has become a problem.  

Holiday Recipe Sharing

The holiday season is upon us and we have a choice in how we behave, what we eat and in what (and how much!) we drink over the next 6 weeks. With some simple planning and a polite offer to bring a dish to your holiday gatherings, you can make it through the holiday season well fed, yet still healthy.

 
Some great resources for holiday dishes:

Whole 30 Approved Thanksgiving Recipes
Bacon Butternut Squash Souffle
Carmelized Onion and Sausage Stuffing
10 Paleo Thanksgiving Sides from The Clothes Make the Girl

Post your favoriate paleo-friendly holiday recipe(s) below!

From Food to Feast: Awareness

The First Transition:  Awareness 

The transition from chapter 1 to chapter 2 is in this line: “I pretend I don’t see it.” 

The key word here is pretend. 

Pretending means that, on some level, you know the difference between the pretense and truth.  You may pretend you don’t see the “holes” (painful, repetitive situations) you get into around food.  Or you may be perfectly aware of the holes and yet pretend you don’t see how spending time in that hole impacts the rest of your life.

Awareness is the antidote to all forms of pretending.  As your awareness grows, pretending you don’t know anything about the hole gets harder and harder to do. 

Awareness with food is getting your body and your mind in the same place, at the same time, doing a single thing. 

These two tips may strengthen your awareness around food:

1. Establish physical clarity: when your body is eating, allow it to do nothing else.  If your body is cutting into a steak, spearing some broccoli onto the fork, and then raising the fork to your lips, then that is all your body should be doing.  Your body, when eating, should not drive, walk, text, watch TV, sort the mail, fold the laundry, read, conduct a conference call, or do anything else that is unrelated to eating.  

If/when this seems both really dumb and impossibly difficult, get curious!

How did you decide that eating was so ________ (Trivial? Dangerous? Boring?) that it needed a side activity to make it tolerable? 

2. Get your mind to the meal: when your body is eating, invite your mind to be present for the occasion.  If your body is seated at a table eating, why not invite your mind to be there as well?  Instead of dreaming about your next vacation, reminding yourself to pick up the dry cleaning, worrying about the overdue TPS report, or wondering when your brother is going to get his life together, gently bring your mind back to what your body is doing: eating. 

If/when this seems both really dumb and impossibly difficult, get curious! 

When your mind notices the temperature, texture, and taste of your food and pays attention to how your body feels as you eat, what changes about the experience of eating?  What do you like/dislike about having your mind show up for the meal?

I invite you to re-read Nelson’s poem, consider the tips on awareness above, and explore the questions:  

What have I pretended I didn’t know about food?
What do I gain, and what do I lose, when I admit I see the “hole” before I fall in? 

Ndiya's Corner is back! "The Street"

AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN FIVE SHORT CHAPTERS
|by Portia Nelson

I

I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in.
I am lost…I am helpless. It isn’t my fault. It takes me forever to find a way out.

II

I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don’t see it. I fall in again.   I can’t believe I am in the same place. But, it isn’t my fault. It still takes a long time to get out.

III

I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it is there. I still fall in…it’s a habit.  My eyes are open. I know where I am. It is my fault. I get out immediately.

IV

I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it.

V

I walk down another street.

*********************************************************************************

What and how you eat changes and is changed by your physical health and appearance, your emotional experiences, your financial situation, your work habits, your spiritual beliefs, and your relationships with others. What you do with food is a part of, not separate from, the rest of your life.

Any intimate, honest conversation about food is eventually going to touch upon how you live the rest of your life, and this is an unavoidable, sometimes challenging, potentially enlightening truth.**

In this series, I am using Nelson’s poem to explore the chapters we experience in our relationship with food. Moving from one chapter to another requires us to develop a particular character trait that will show up and shift the ways we think, feel, and act around food.

Moving from chapter one to two, we develop awareness.

Moving from chapter two to three, we develop responsibility.

Moving from chapter three to four, we develop foresight.

Moving from chapter four to five, we develop courage.

Moving from chapter five to one (what, you thought the new street wouldn’t have holes?), we develop willingness.

Let’s begin the conversation…are you in?

**Instead of an intimate, honest conversation about food, you may choose a superficial one instead. You may also decide to avoid this conversation altogether. Your call.

Baby got Back!

Jonathan has treated us to another installment of his supreme knowledge. So, here it is: 

Lets talk about the back this time.    This is an area of the body that a lot of people have a irrational fear about, and I would like to alleviate that right now.  There is only one type of tissue that is in the spine that is not in any other orthopedic area of the body and that is the disk.  Otherwise, just like the ankle, you have the same type of muscular structure, tendons, ligaments, bone, cartilage, and nerves.  You can strain, sprain, and break these structures just like an ankle, and just like an ankle, it will heal with time.   However, the disk is a little different. 

I always explain the disc with the same analogy… its like a jelly doughnut. 

 

There is a disk between every vertebrae of the spine except for the top two.  For simplicity purposes we will talk only about the lower back region.  The inside of the disc is a viscoelastic substance (one that has both principles of liquids and solids) called nucleus pulposis.  Think about it as having the consistency of half dried toothpaste.   It is surrounded by a significant amount of annular rings.  They are similar in structure to ligaments and an intact disk looks like the picture in the upper right hand corner, this being a view from the top.

So now that you have this image of the jelly doughnut in your spine, think about someone taking his or her hand and gently pressing on one end of it.   Where does the jelly go?  It goes to the other end, right?  The disk is no different.  If you sit down, bend forward, deadlift 250lb, etc… the bones on each side of the disk tilt and push together on the front of the disc, pushing the disk material backwards toward your spinal nerves.  This is where those annular rings around the disk material come in.  They prevent the movement backwards, just like the bread in a jelly doughnut.   Unfortunately, if you do this constantly with no rest eventually these rings start to fail.  And we all do it constantly.   Remember, that sitting is the same strain, and society has most of us sitting for hours at a time.   This is why disk bulges are mainly a white-collar job issue.  Nothing is worse for this problem than sitting in front of a computer 10 hours day.  Now take that same guy who has been sitting at a computer all day drive him to the gym and have him do 50 deadlifts the last 20 with bad form because he is tired.   I’m sure you can see where this is going. 

Another problem with this particular issue is that the inner 2/3rds of the annular rings that are supposed to protect us from this problem don’t have a nerve supply, so you wont even know you have a problem until the last one breaks.  This is how people “throw out their back.”    It was not picking the sock or a bar off the ground that did it.  It was the 1000 things you did leading up to that one event.   And at that point it is too late, I would highly suggest going to see somebody for this, because if you let this cascade you could meet a surgeon eventually. A good Physical Therapist (we aren’t all good, like not all chiropractors are bad) can easily fix it, but it may take up to 6 months if it is bad enough.  Think of it like a cut on the knuckle (tired of analogies yet?), if you keep bending it the cut never heals, same thing with disk bulges, if you don’t stop putting pressure on the front of the disk, the annular rings will never repair themselves. 

So on to prevention.   The prevention of these is simple and quick. 

Rule 1: avoid flexion of the lumbar spine as much as possible in all that you do.   Bending forward is not a bad thing, it is just that we do it so much and without a counter balance of extension shortly after.  So if you actively try to avoid it, such as air squatting to pick something up instead of bending at your back, you may save yourself trouble later

Rule 2:  bend backwards, bend backwards, bend backwards.  Very simple concept here, extension of the lumbar spine takes pressure off the annular fibers in the back and reverses a disc bulge.  Such as these exercises:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNvcGehL0v8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpNP93-lFIk

or something as simple as working on the computer while laying on your stomach at home.

A couple of nice random facts about back pain because my main goal in all of this is for you guys to understand how not to hurt yourselves and a large part of doing that is responding to inevitable injury correctly.  These are common misconceptions my patients have so I wanted to throw them out there: 

- MRIs do not detect pain.   A study gave radiologist 350 MRIs and asked a yes or no question  “does this person have pain?”  it was 49% accurate on a 50/50 question which means you might as well flip a coin.   The point here is back pain treatment is based on symptoms and not images, but images can be used to confirm a diagnosis. 

- which brings us to fact 2.  According to literature there is no one type of treatment for back pain.   Don’t go up to someone with back pain and say oh my back hurt once and I did A, B, and C and it went away, because A, B, and C may be extremely dangerous for that person.  Take chiropractic manipulations for example.   They are great for conditions like SI joint dysfunctions (and I will do them for that and a couple of other things), but if you manipulate a bulging disk, you could cause that person immediate and permanent harm.  This is an extreme example but you get the idea.

- and lastly, do not push through pain with any injury, it will more than likely not end well.  Especially if it is back pain that started going down the leg.  Seek advice.

As always, I am more than happy to answer questions posted on the blog. 

Thanks,

Jonathan