Eating

As I change the way I eat, the more I find out why I ate the way I did. Habits are incredibly hard to break and reform in healthy ways. Especially when I dip incredibly low on the calories needed scale – all dieting is a form of slowly starving to death, literally. Less calories taken in than you need to live for the day, so you have to burn your own stores. It’s the trick of getting the body to burn that as opposed to just conserving and creating more stores of fat. When you starve yourself, as Browen likes to do, by not eating enough, your body starts storing more fat. When you eat just enough and speed up your metabolism by exercise and maybe certain vitamins, you lose weight and don’t create fat storage.

When I’m getting at is this. When I was growing up I really was the only friend I had. My neighborhood was, by all accounts, a privileged area and my parents taught me way too much kindness, ethics and selflessness to make friends who were looking for something to gain from their friendships, and nothing more. My parents were, at the time, unmedicated and mentally ill and my sister was (and occasionally still is) a huge bitch. I was also very hard on myself, and the only way I let me have any pleasure was by rewarding myself with food. For some reason, that was not out of bounds for me.

As I diet now, and manage to keep it up close to two weeks (longest diet I’ve done, ever) I have to stop myself from eating to reward me and make me feel good. It’s incredibly difficult. I thought about replacing the reward with something else, and I still might, but I haven’t figured out what yet. Instead, I have to change the way I think. I have changed a lot from that person who was never nice to me except by food, and I have people who love me as friends, my husband, and more. So the circumstances have changed but my behavior has not. Old habits die hard.. So now when I look at food that would not fit my diet, I think about how I am actually rewarding me by NOT eating it. Eventually, I would like to get down to my old size and maybe beat my diabetes. Sometimes my brain doesn’t believe it, but I think if I keep telling myself that it will work. I go into Starbucks instead of the bakery down the block because the walking is better for me (starbucks is further) and the food in the bakery makes me want to eat the world. Starbucks is tempting, but I found myself yesterday thinking “Oh my god I don’t want to blow it” FIRST instead of “Oh my god I want that peanut butter toffee stack.” and THEN not wanting to blow it. I was shocked – what a step in the right direction! What a great change! It means what I wanted MORE was not to blow it than wanting to please myself with the food! It was an improvement, a real change, so small but so significant.

That night I had banana tempura for dessert. I really thought about it first. I knew what I had eaten all day, made the calculation and decided that I wanted to try it – just once – and that would be enough for me. It wasn’t bargaining with myself, it was a rational decision and I don’t regret it. My point is, the way I think about food is changing. When I read people say that I thought they looked at the food differently, like the food itself had some innate change to it. Maybe they did mean that, but for me, it’s about MY INTERACTION with the food. So it’s more on my end than on the food’s end.

Or maybe I’m just writing this all cuz I just had a chicken spinach salad and I’m absolutely ravenous and can’t do anything about it. Go metabolism! churn little metabolism, churn!