It's Just Food

I've been thinking a lot of what I said at the end of the last post I wrote here. I haven't had a "healthy" relationship with food for so many years - most of my life! I'd say the last point in my life where I ate when I was hungry, exercised more than I ate, and didn't feel the need to eat in response to emotions instead of physical hunger has to be back when I was a pre-teen.

I'm 40 now. That means I've been dealing with this obsession and unhealthy attitude with food for close to 30 years! It's just not good, and I can't stand it anymore.

I'm also sick to death of recording my food in Spark People every day. It's a great tool, and it's helped me to realize how much of a difference there is between what I need to eat, and how much I want to eat. But I'm sick of doing it.

I'm sick of "dieting." I'm sick of some foods being off limits. I'm sick of having to stop and think about whether or not I have enough calories left to let myself have a Skinny Cow ice cream cone at the end of the day.

I've had enough.

I'm not giving up on losing weight - not at all. But I think right now, I need to concentrate more on fixing this dysfunctional relationship with food that I have. Yesterday I looked at my stack of snacks that I keep on my desk at work (100 calorie packs, applesauce, yogurt covered raisins), and said to myself, "it's just food." And that's true. It's not going to make me happy when I'm sad, it's not going to make me any less lonely when Jim is at work and I am missing him, it's not going to make me any less bored when I have nothing to do, it's not going to make the hours at work go by any faster.

It's just food.

So I'm not weighing in for a while. I'm not counting calories for a while. I'm just going to put that stuff on the back burner for a while and focus on training myself to listen to my body to tell me what it needs. I can trust it - it knows what it's doing. My head is screwed up, but my body has always known what it needs.

When I want to snack, I'll stop and examine my motives for it. Am I hungry? If not, then what am I? Am I bored, lonely, sad? Am I eating out of habit? If the reason isn't hunger, then I need to figure out what the reason is, so I can stop just blindly shoving food in my mouth and not knowing why.

And damn it, if I want to eat French fries sometimes, if I want to get chocolate chip cookie dough and bake it, I'm going to let myself. I'll have them, I'll stop eating them when I'm full, and I'll move on.

I'll check back in with a weight in a month. Okay, a month and one day - I'll weigh in again, officially, on March 26th. And in the meantime, I'll check in and let you know how it's going. When I want to eat for emotional reasons and don't, I'll let you know. When I want to eat for emotional reasons and am not able to stop myself, I'll tell you that, too. Hopefully by the time the month is over, I'll be more in tune with my body, I'll be obsessing a little less over junk food and all of the stuff that is "off limits" and hopefully, I'll be a bit smaller. We'll see.

All I know for sure at this point is that I can't continue to live my life like this. I can't go on obsessing about food. I can't go on eating away my emotions (because it doesn't work anyway - the emotions are still there when the food is gone).

Here's to starting to develop a healthier relationship with food.