I have metabolic syndrome, do you?

I learned about metabolic syndrome for the first time in an article by Andrew Weil in Time Magazine. Here's an article on the Mediterranean diet and metabolic syndrome from Dr. Weil's web site.

In that article, he defines metabolic syndrome as "a combination of obesity, high blood pressure and high blood sugar that raises the risk of heart disease."

Here's what the American Heart Ass'n has to say about it:

"The metabolic syndrome is characterized by a group of metabolic risk factors in one person. They include:

• Abdominal obesity (excessive fat tissue in and around the abdomen)
• Atherogenic dyslipidemia (blood fat disorders — high triglycerides, low HDL cholesterol and high LDL cholesterol — that foster plaque buildups in artery walls)
• Elevated blood pressure
• Insulin resistance or glucose intolerance (the body can’t properly use insulin or blood sugar)
• Prothrombotic state (e.g., high fibrinogen or plasminogen activator inhibitor–1 in the blood)
• Proinflammatory state (e.g., elevated C-reactive protein in the blood)"

Actually, all I know is that I have a family history of high blood pressure and high cholesterol, that I have abdominal obesity, and that I have (or have had) high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

Moment I remember: When I was 16 years old, and probably around 125 pounds, someone asked me if I was pregnant.

When I lose weight, my abdomen doesn't budge. I lose weight elsewhere, but not there.

While my cholesterol is high, my HDL (the good kind) is also high. Perhaps that's because I'm a vegetarian (lacto-vegetarian).

I've had a screening for clogged arteries and came out with flying colors.

Here are the official stats for diagnosing metabolic syndrome, from the same site:

• Elevated waist circumference:
  Men — Equal to or greater than 40 inches (102 cm)
  Women — Equal to or greater than 35 inches (88 cm)
• Elevated triglycerides:
  Equal to or greater than 150 mg/dL
• Reduced HDL (“good”) cholesterol:
  Men — Less than 40 mg/dL
  Women — Less than 50 mg/dL
• Elevated blood pressure:
  Equal to or greater than 130/85 mm Hg
• Elevated fasting glucose:
  Equal to or greater than 100 mg/dL

Hmmm, just took my blood pressure and it came in as 135/86, just barely above the limit. I'll have to get my other stats checked to be sure. My waist is 33, after losing the 17-18 pounds that I've been able to keep off. But I don't believe that makes the syndrome magically go away.

The recommendations are to lose weight, increase physical activity, and reduce intake of saturated fat, trans fat and cholesterol.

Here's an interesting tidbit:
"Use of Transcendental Meditation (TM) for 16 weeks in coronary heart disease (CHD) patients improved blood pressure and insulin resistance components of the metabolic syndrome as well as cardiac autonomic nervous system tone compared with a control group receiving health education. These results suggest that TM may modulate the physiological response to stress and improve CHD risk factors, which may be a novel therapeutic target for the treatment of CHD."

How to deal with a compulsion to eat

It's time to go into more detail about ways to deal with a compulsion to eat. I listed the techniques in this earlier post.

By the way, if you have a compulsion to eat, you might want to check out Overeaters Anonymous. OA is a group based on Alcoholics Anonymous principles; they have local chapters that hold meetings you can attend. I've never had any personal contact with members, so I can't give an opinion on it. Nevertheless, working on a compulsion problem with others can certainly be helpful.

One technique that worked for me, quoted from that earlier post, is: "Removing yourself from temptation, that is, food: An example is staying out of the kitchen."

Removing yourself from temptation means staying away from food. Here's my story:

When my kids were about 9 and 11, I started to realize that sitting down to dinner with them was a disaster for me. I always overate. If they left over anything on their plates, I scarfed that down in front of the sink.

I loved having dinner together. I have great memories of dinner time with my parents. We discussed the issues of the day and talked about science, history, politics, and more. I remember many times getting up to get the dictionary or encyclopedia during dinner to resolve some question.

But it wasn't working for me. I couldn't control myself. I had to break my attachment to having dinner together as a family. As soon as I did that, I was able to lose weight. I sat my kids down (my husband came home later) and gave them food, but I didn't sit with them. I put some vegetables in a bowl (plenty of food for me in the evening!) and ate them separately. Then I did other things.

Although I now cook two meals a day, I still don't sit and eat with the family at dinner time (I do for lunch), except on Friday nights. While the dinner is cooking, I take my own meal, which is different, and eat it. When dinner is ready, I get out of the kitchen and let others eat in the dining room. I go back to work in my office or do other chores. My husband, bless him, is repsonsible for cleaning up the dishes after dinner.

Whenever I come into the living room after dinner, where my husband is often parked in front of the TV, eating pretzels, I eat, so I try to avoid that, too.

All in all, this has been a very effective technique for me, a life-saver, in fact.

What's a customized solution?

You may have noticed that the byline for my blog mentions customized solutions. What's a customized solution?

The main idea is that people are overweight for different reasons, so the way they lose weight will differ. But there's more.

People have different life situations. In my experience, most diet books assume that you're single and in total control over your food. But perhaps you're living with your parents and your Mom (probably) cooks for you. Or you cook for others and don't have time to cook two different dinners every night -- not to speak of the energy and patience!

You need to consider these situations. In fact, the family situation is often very intertwined with why you're overweight. For example, you may eat more or less the way your parents did.

For me, a big aha was that I didn't need to sit and eat dinner with my family. I wanted to, but it wasn't a healthy choice for me. I digest food painfully slowly at night and when I sat down with the family, I always ate too much. Eating dinner together with the family was a sweet memory for me from my childhood, but I had to break that pattern. As soon as I cooked for the family, quickly prepared something extremely light for me, and ate it elsewhere (where I wasn't tempted by the good food I made for my family), I was able to make progress.

Think about how your family situation constricts your ability to make the right eating choices.

Reason 2 for being overweight

In recent posts, I've explained that there are 3 reasons for being overweight, and discussed reason 1. Today, I'll talk about reason 2, a compulsion to overeat.

A compulsion to overeat is more than a bad habit. It's a stress, lodged somewhere in your body, that makes you feel uncomfortable if you don't take that cookie and put it in your mouth.

Many people have a compulsion to overeat, although I'm not sure why. Well, I think I have an idea, but it's probably different for different people. In general, when people experience some anxiety, they find that eating makes them feel better. Over time, whenever that stress comes up, they continue to eat. Eventually, the sight of food triggers the need to eat and people lose control.

Most diet books and even dieticians ignore the compulsion to overeat. "Just eat a little bit less at each meal." " Take smaller portions." Yeah, right.

However, there are a number of tools for dealing with compulsion:

• Rules: "I am not allowed to eat sugar."
• Motivational techniques: One is fear. The kind that happens when your doctor tells you that if you don't lose weight, you'll be dead in a few years of a heart attach or stroke. But you can also be motivated by the desire to look good, be sexy, and so on.
• Removing yourself from temptation, that is, food: An example is staying out of the kitchen.
• Removing the temptation: An example is not buying fattening foods, so they're not in your house.
• Desensitization: This is similar to the techniques used for people who have phobias.
• Stress reduction: Here I can only recommend what I know, which is the Transcendental Meditation technique. There's lots of research on it.
• Finding the stress point: If you can find where the stress is, you can put your attention on it and start to heal it.

So, all is not hopeless, if a compulsion is one of the reasons you overeat.