My little sister, who unlike anyone else in my immediate family was petite and svelte from birth, has remained so throughout her life without any struggle, even after two pregnancies. She's just one of these people who, although she likes food just fine, seems to have a natural built-in tendency to eat just enough and then stop. However, she did once tell me this revealing story from the very beginning of her first pregnancy.
Seems she and her husband were over at a friend's place for a barbeque. Now normally Sis prefers to eat very light--salads, no red meat, et cetera and so forth. However, at some point in the party her husband looked over at her, and slightly startled, asked her, "Honey, what is that you're eating?" And Sis looked down and realized she was in the process of inhaling a humongous juicy hamburger. Apparently the pregnancy hormones had taken a vote without my sister's conscious knowledge, and decided grilled chicken breast was definitely not on the menu that afternoon.
Now this type of behavior does make perfect sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Just as in any other animal, there is a certain pre-programmed aspect to human behavior, especially around behaviors that are basic to species survival. And what could be more crucial to species survival than a pregnant mother receiving ample nutritiion to nourish the growing fetus inside her, to have the strength to go through the process of labor and birth, and to supply enough milk to feed her newborn? So of course hardwired behaviors would have evolved such as an "EAT LIKE CRAZY!" response to pregnancy, triggered by the hormonal and other biochemical changes associated with the onset of the pregnancy process.
Which explains why, when those same hormones gear up for the monthly dry run of the pregnancy system known as the menstrual cycle, many women hit that lovely little patch of PMS in which you suddenly want to eat everything that isn't nailed down (and a few things that are). But while this monthly urge to binge probably didn't cause all that much harm to early peoples, in our modern sedendary junk-food-ridden culture such monthly fress-attacks can definitely make a few waves. Especially when one is trying to maintain any sort of weight management regimen.
One of my favorite long-running topics over on The eGullet Society for Culinary Arts and Letters is entitled PMS: Tell it Like It Is. Your cravings, Babe. Here in this liberated space, mature sophisticated women who usually post about elegantly-plated morsels and the current produce at their favorite farmers' markets gleefully confess their monthly run-ins with the PMS "eat like crazy" switch. Each woman seems to have their favorite craves at these times, but the consensus seems to run pretty strongly to mass quantities of fat, salt, and carbohydrate. Chocolate and hunks of rare beef figure prominently, though bacon, booze, and Ben & Jerry's also have their champions. (Heh. If you peruse that topic over on eGullet.org, you will no doubt come upon some posts of mine--including several dating from before I went on this regimen. The one in which I confess to inhaling the majority of a large fully-loaded delivery pizza particularly sticks in my memory.)
As I said, how to handle such cravings in the midst of a serious weight-management effort is an interesting challenge, one that definitely gave me pause as I started my own little project in that vein. I have always had pretty strong PMS symptoms, but they really took off in my late 20s, after my last "success" at dieting down to goal weight the old-fashioned way. Not during the two years I maintained goal weight--quite the opposite, actually. For that entire interval, in fact, I had no period whatsoever; apparently, the medically-recommended weight I maintained during that whole time put me below the minimum body fat level for my system to menstruate. (Though it wasn't from my doctors that I learned this little fact; they themselves seemed clueless about it, and the ob/gyn they sent me to was no better.)
No, the nasty surprise came after I finally broke that diet and put on enough weight for my period to return. And boy did it ever return like gangbusters! I'll spare you the details of the new "improved" period itself--except here's a couple of hints: "OW!!!" And "damn, I can't be out of tampons again already?!?!?" More to the point of this blog, though: just as my period returned much nastier than it had been before it vanished, my PMS also ratcheted up by a few orders of magnitude. Suddenly I was getting a whole lot moodier at "that time" every month. I was bloating like a dirigible, and feeling like my breasts wanted to explode. And the urge to inhale the contents of the refrigerator went right through the roof. And I had no idea why.
It was only some years later, doing my own research to figure all this out, that I not only discovered the connection between my amenorrhea and excessively low body weight, but also that a well-known after-effect of such amenorrhea is major intensification of PMS symptoms once enough weight is put on to restart one's cycle. Once more, with feeling: gee thanks, docs, for not telling me about any of this shit (especially when all this info was right there in books; tell me again why I pay these people?)
Anyway, moving right along ... If my monthly visits from Aunt Flo weren't already gothic enough, I began to edge up into the age of perimenopause and things really began to get primitive. Suddenly Vicodin for menstrual cramps did not seem unreasonable at all. A whole new PMS sympton raised its ugly head: an increase in my arthritis pain as my period loomed closer. And all the already fierce PMS symptoms got even fiercer. This is the point at which I entered the realm of full pizza inhalation and similar monthly food insanities.
By the time I got to January of this year and finally decided to take my weight and health into my own hands, I expected that one of my biggest challenges was going to be when that ol' devil moon got full again. (That's not just another cutesy euphemism, by the way--due no doubt to some warped sense of humor on the part of the Menstrual Goddesses, my period seems to want to be in sync with the moon. In fact, its and my fullness tonight is what prompted the the subject of this post).
But imagine my relief when, as my first period approached, I found myself much less ridden by all of my PMS symptoms, including the compulsion to binge. I'm still not quite sure how that happened. There is some info out there suggesting that food regimens such as mine (low in fats, high in complex carbohydrates, spread out over several small meals throughout the day) can help relieve PMS symptoms, possibly because the high-carb diet ups the levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin, and the many small meals keeps the blood sugar stabilized.
Whatever the reason, the timing definitely suggests some connection between my new regimen and my new kinder gentler periods. I'm not retaining water nearly as much as before, my baseline joint achiness is no longer spiked upward right before a period, and while I do feel some slight urges to consume mass quantities, those urges are much easier to face down than formerly. Now it may be that I'm feeling less urge to binge simply because of the psychological effects of feeling so optimistic about how well I'm doing so far ... but given that I'm also not bloating like a dirigible or feeling like my breasts are going to 'splode, I'm pretty certain there is something biochemical going on as well.
And as for those urges to overeat that do exist? Fortunately, my food regimen includes a couple of handy pressure-release valves. One of those is the occasional preplanned splurge meal thing. Another is the permission, as the instructor of my weight management class puts it, to "party on vegetables" if I do want to assuage the consume-mass-quantities urge in some non-destructive way.
Still, in the old days neither an occasional controlled splurge nor a binge on broccoli would have done a damn thing to mollify the urge to binge. So I am massively grateful that, for whatever reason, things within me have changed sufficiently that I am no longer such a slave to the full moon.
You go, girl! You are an inspiration. Your scientific approach to healthy eating makes so much sense. I hope you are feeling proud, well and strong.
I've sent you a few emails, but for some reason, they are not showing up in my "sent" email box.. are you/have you got them?
Posted by: Julia | April 16, 2006 at 04:21 PM
Thank you! Yep, I'm feeling pretty good about how I'm doing--and comments like yours definitely are a part of that. :-)
But no, I haven't gotten any emails from you--bummer! When did you send them? Are you using the email link in the upper-right-hand corner of my blog page? How about giving it another try? The address is:
herself "at" mizducky "dot" com
with spaces removed, and "at" and "dot" replaced by the appropriate punctuation, of course.
Posted by: mizducky | April 16, 2006 at 06:59 PM