Am I Hungry? Really?

It finally happened - I got sick of eating junk food almost non-stop! Woo! So today I started trying to just listen to my body's cues for when it needs food. It's so confusing in the beginning, though! I really think I don't know how to interpret my body's cues very well.

For instance: I went to lunch at 11:30, and had a 5" turkey and cheese sub, with a single serving bag of Fritos. Now, barely an hour after I finished eating, my stomach is rumbling? That doesn't seem right. I'm ignoring it for now. If it gets really insistent and I start thinking, "I'm hungry" involuntarily (I do that), then I'll eat something.

Still. I hope if I can keep this up, that my body and my head will end up in sync at some point!

Update of Sorts

It's been a bit quiet in here lately, huh? Yeah, I guess I haven't had much to report. When I was reading that book about how to stop emotional eating (whatever the name of it was), the author mentioned that when she stopped trying to "diet," she went through a couple of weeks where she just ate whatever she wanted, letting herself have all of the foods she had made forbidden for so long. For her, that translated into eating chocolate chip cookies pretty much morning, Noon and night. When I started saying I wasn't going to diet anymore, I thought I wouldn't need to do what she had done. Uh, I was wrong.

So yeah, I've been eating a TON of crap. Chocolate chip cookies, Pop-Tarts, candy bars, Cadbury Mini Eggs (only available at Easter, and oh so delicious), and pretty much anything else that I love but never let myself have when I was trying to stick to a diet. I'm not sure when this is going to end. I think I'm just about ready to start listening to my body and eating when it needs me to. And I think I'm going to try doing the 30-Day Shred in April. I just have to decide if I'm going to get it from Netflix, or if I'm going to buy it. I'll check out how much it costs on Amazon, and decide. Then I have to decide if I'm going to get up early and do it in the morning, or if I'm going to try to do it at night when I come home from work. Earlier is better, I think.

Anyway, that's what's going on with me. Also, I was supposed to have my cyst cut out of my head this last Friday. I left work early, went home and changed into a non-work shirt in case I bled a lot, and Jim took me to the doctor's office. I walk in the door and tell the receptionist person who I am, and she says, "Oh, didn't you get my message?" Ugh. The doctor was out sick, so they canceled on me AGAIN. She supposedly called the day before and left a message, but I didn't have a message from them, so I'm thinking they called the wrong number, and told some random stranger that my appointment was canceled. Oh well. So Jim and I left and went to lunch together. :) My appointment is rescheduled for Friday, March 19th. Maybe I'll actually get rid of the cyst then!

As for the food, I'll let you know when I seem to be ready to stop ingesting chocolate and other junk, and get to work on that new approach to eating that I'm supposed to have going. :P

I Hereby Vow To Avoid the Crisp (Cookie Crisp, That Is)

So. I can't expect to be perfect on day one of really trying to follow my three simple rules, right?

Right?

I didn't think so. Which must be why I went home after work yesterday, got my chicken ready to put in the oven, and then while it was baking, I got the Cookie Crisp cereal out of the cupboard and ate a LOT of it. Dry. Straight out of the box.

Then I ate some rice while my chicken was still cooking. Then I ate my chicken. Then I MADE CHOCOLATE DROP COOKIE DOUGH AND MADE COOKIES. Yes, I did. At 8:30 at night.

Oy.

At least I screwed up the cookies, so most of them ended up in the trash. I underbaked the first sheet, and overbaked the second sheet, so I didn't eat nearly as many as I would have if I hadn't effed them up. I ate enough, though.

But. I came to work today and wasn't hungry. Following my new rules, I should have skipped breakfast and just eaten lunch, because I would most likely have been hungry by then, right? Well, I ate my peanut butter toast for breakfast anyway, lack of hunger be damned.

But! Again with the but! I went to lunch at 11:30, and was still full from the peanut butter toast and all the calories from last night, so I didn't eat lunch! So, maybe there is hope for me after all. I'm sure I'll suddenly be starving by 2:00, at which point I'll eat some strawberry Mini Wheats that I have in my drawer, and then when I go home I'll eat a leftover chicken breast and some rice, and I'll watch the SU basketball game (we're #1 now, yay!), and I'll behave much better than I did last night.

This whole thing of readjusting my attitude towards food and eating is obviously going to take some time. I'm going to keep plugging away at it, though. I'll take the bad with the good and hope to eventually have more good than bad, and I'll be happy.

And I promise not to eat the rest of the dry Cookie Crisp tonight. :)

Debate of the Chips

I've been doing well all day. I had my peanut butter toast for breakfast, then a turkey sandwich for lunch, and a small box of yogurt covered raisins when I got back to my desk after lunch. Then I was nice and full and fine for an hour or so. Then the urge to snack hit. I wasn't hungry, but this was what was sitting next to me:


That's half of a single serving bag of Baked Lay's barbecue flavored chips. Here's a snapshot into my mind, as I contemplated eating it.

"It's just half a bag."
But I'm not hungry, I don't need it.
"Half a bag! And it's right there! You know they'll taste oh so good."
(Reaches for bag, picks it up, then puts it down.) No! I don't need it, I'm not hungry.
"Aww, come on. It's just half a bag. It won't hurt anything! You're probably not eating enough calories anyway!"
(Looks at the chip bag again, mentally shakes head.) No. I don't need it.
"Wannnnnnt chippppppps."
(Puts bag of chips behind paper stand thing that holds my work, gets out a pack of gum.) Out of sight out of mind. I'm going to chew a piece of gum now.
"You suck."


Thank goodness for Trident Layers. I'm so glad I bought a pack when we got groceries this week!

Update from later: I ate the chips about two minutes ago, after I finally actually felt some hunger. :)

Small Steps

I can't even begin to tell you what a relief it's been to shed the "diet" mentality. I feel so free! I was surprised by how much relief I felt at no longer having to think about my food all the time. I didn't really consider any foods off limits before, or at least not many, and yet I was counting calories and thinking about every bite I put into my mouth, and worse yet, I was judging myself and chastising myself when I did "bad" on my diet, and basically just messing with myself mentally every single day. So the sudden absence of any guilt, of the over-thinking, has been a great feeling.

Now I feel like the real work is beginning. I'm not dieting anymore, and if this goes as well as I think it will, I'll never "diet" again. But I am starting to work on changing my eating habits. I have a few simple rules to follow, which I've probably already listed, but I'm going to list them here, too. Repetition isn't always a bad thing.

1. Eat when I'm hungry.
2. Stop eating when I'm full.
3. Don't eat for emotional reasons.

That's it! It's that simple. Of course, it's deceptively simple. I've been eating for emotional reasons for most of my adult life. It's going to be a very hard habit to break. It means I'm going to have to start facing my emotions and dealing with them without softening the edges of them with comfort food (junk food, usually). That is not going to be easy. But it's a challenge I have to tackle head on.

And of course, when I'm eating for non-hunger reasons, it isn't always based on emotions. Sometimes it's simple habit, or just a basic desire to keep doing something that I find pleasurable. When I have a tasty, satisfying meal, I find myself with a strong urge to follow that up with something dessert like. But if I'm full from dinner, the dessert isn't necessary, and if I want to eat a dessert, even something as simple as a cookie, then I need to just eat lighter at dinner to leave room.

I've started trying to live by these three rules, but in all honesty, the steps I've taken have been small at first. I did really well on Friday, I think - I avoided eating for any non-hunger reasons, and I didn't eat too much in my meals, I don't think. I was home on Friday for a snow day (our driveway was PACKED with heavy, wet snow up to my thighs), and I was alone for the first chunk of the day, since Jim was at work (had been from the night before). I was proud of the choices I made for breakfast and lunch, and didn't snack at all outside of those meals. For dinner I had been planning on taking us out, but my tax refund didn't come in, and Jim was tired anyway, so I made myself some rigatoni and two pieces of toast with butter and garlic powder on them (fake garlic bread, I call it). I ate my dinner with a glass of milk, and later that evening I went into the bedroom to watch a DVD, and took a 100 calorie pack of cookies with me to have as a snack. The only thing was, I was full from dinner, and imagine this, I never ate the cookies! Strange, but true.

The weekend was a little worse, simply because we kind of had a food-centric weekend. There was a big SU game on Saturday night, and we bought snacks for that, and some of those snacks bled over into Sunday, too. But that's fine, and I did make a few smart choices that I was proud of.

First, we went to Denny's Saturday for a late breakfast/early lunch. I got a cheeseburger and seasoned fries. I ate the whole cheeseburger, and ate about half of the fries - and then I pushed the plate away and took the remaining fries home. This felt like a huge thing, because I would usually have sat there saying I needed to take them home, but I would have picked and picked, and they would have been gone before we left. But I stopped eating when I was full, and took the rest home and had them for dinner.

The second good thing I did when I got home was wait before I let myself start with the snack foods we bought for the game. I was still full when I got home, and yet I wanted to dig into my Xtra Cheddar Goldfish as soon as I got them unpacked from the grocery bags. I made myself wait, though, until after dinner. I got hungry about 4:00, so I heated up my fries and then I let myself have the Goldfish when I was done with them.

So, small steps over the weekend, but today the real work begins. I'll let you know how it goes.

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.

Crampy!

It's been a crampy, pain filled week around here. I've been bloated and popping Advil and feeling like a half drowned cow.

Lovely, yes?

But the cramps are going away, the pain is receding, and I no longer feel like I'm carrying a gallon of water around in my belly fat. So, things are looking up.

Isn't it fun being a woman sometimes? :D

I stepped on the scale this morning, with it set at last week's Friday Weigh-In weight. It laughed at me and said I needed to think again, because I may have felt like I had gotten back to normal, but in reality I was still holding onto a lot of water. Or else I ate too many fries last night.

Yes, I had fries. The restaurant I do marketing for at work called and offered me food in exchange for delivering their updated menu to them. They asked if they could bribe me with food, and I said you can ALWAYS bribe me with food. And I took my chicken tenders (barbecue flavor) and fries, handed them their menus, and drooled all the way home.

In all fairness, though, I only ate two of the tenders - the rest are in the fridge for tonight's dinner. I did eat all of the fries, though. And I don't regret it - they were delicious. :)

We'll see if the scale is still laughing at me on Friday, though. Oy.

Do you ever wish you could just stop having to think about food? Do you ever wish you could just eat when you were hungry, giving your body what it was craving, without worrying about calories, carbs or fat grams? Do you ever wish you could go back to the way it was when you were a little kid, and food was something to enjoy but not something to obsess over?

Or is that just me?