George Mallory and Inertial Eating

George Mallory is a famous mountaineer, best known for not only his attempt to climb Mount Everest, but his famous quote about why he wanted to climb it: “because it is there.”

How does that fit into my observations on dieting? Well, it’s not the mountain climbing element. It’s the quote. There’s been many a food item I ate too much of, and when asked why I ate so much, the answer was basically: “because it was there.”

I cheated on my diet today. It wasn’t a huge cheat. It was an experimental cheat. I cheated for three reasons…

1. I’d been very, very good for 10 days, and if you don’t cheat a little every once in a while, you’ll end up having a huge cheat and all the fallout it generates.
2. I’ve found, when I’ve lasted more than a couple weeks on a diet and things seem to be stalling, a little cheat is just the shock to the system my body needs to start the weight loss chugging along again.
3. With how low I’ve been able to keep my blood sugar numbers, and paring back my daily insulin intake by around 60%, I wanted to see how a moderate cheat with carbs would affect my blood sugar.

On the blood sugar issue, my numbers were stellar. On the others, we’ll have to see.

But I really tried to observe my eating behaviors as I sat in that restaurant. Aside from being a Mallory eater (“because it’s there”), I also consider myself a “inertial” eater. “Inertial eating” is based on a concept in physics that states: once you get an object moving, it’s going to keep moving in the same direction until some outside force makes it stop. So, basically, if you put food in front of me, I eat it and I don’t stop until something makes me stop. That something is usually one of three things: feeling very full, running out of time, or running out of food.

One thing I realized with this cheat meal was that I had to decide how much I was going to eat before I started and force myself to stop when I hit that point. That’s tougher than it sounds. It was a grilled prime rib sandwich with fries, and I had a scratch-off card (part of a promo the restaurant ran in December) that made it free. So a really tasty sandwich and it’s free, and I decided I was only going to eat half.

Now, if I was feeling all dietetic, I would have subbed tomato slices for fries, chucked the bun, and just chowed everything on the plate, feeling good about sticking to my low-carb committment. But this was a cheat and an experiment. So I got it on the bun and with the fries.

I decided to eat half the sandwich (cut it in half and picked a half to eat rather than starting eating and stopping somewhere around halfway) and no more than half the fries. So when I was done with half the sandwich and about 1/3 of the fries, I pushed the plate aside.

Trust me, it wasn’t easy. Having that half-sandwich sitting right there and not eating it felt somehow wrong. There was some part in me that felt like a dog on a leash, straining to get at that other half of the sandwich. And the fries called to me… not literally. I wasn’t having any french-fry hallucinations. But they were sitting there and I only ate about a third of them, and one or two more wouldn’t hurt.

But I wasn’t hungry any more. A half sandwich and a handful of fries got rid of the hungries. What they didn’t get rid of were the munchies. I was halfway to grabbing another fry when the waitress swooped by, saw the plate pushed aside, and asked “are ya done with that?”

“Yes, thank you.”

The restaurant offers you peanuts in the shell when you come in, then brings you these greasy rolls and honeyed butter after you order. I asked them not to bring peanuts and pushed aside the rolls without touching them. Normally I eat both, so I conquered the Mallory eating at the outset, but once the inertial component kicked in, I’m not sure if that last abortive reach for a fry was inertial or Mallory eating.

Either way, being this hyper-aware of my eating habits was not a common experience for me. Nor was quitting before I was either full or had cleaned my plate, whichever came first. These are things I need to train myself to do until they become second nature instead of feeling weird. But for now, they’re weird and this is what I’m going to have to work on as I come off the low-carb of the diet and onto the “eating smaller portions of healthier foods” phase.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 11:17 pm and is filed under The Diet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.