food game

Last year I was incredibly disciplined in my diet and weight loss goal. I lost somewhere in the vacinity of 20kgs I think. Not sure exactly how much it was.

I ate extremely healthy food and practically eliminated most of the junk from my diet almost overnight although I still indulged on the odd occasion.

This past month finds me eating eratically and I am fast falling back into old habits again.

Most of it is emotional.

I am an emotional eater! It feels like one is confessing their secret addiction, but I am seriously an emotional feeler type eater.

I am hungry all the time currently and its only because food sates the anxiety within so immediately. Fast, efficient salty, fatty high-carb foods that buzz my system with happy pleasure chemicals. I feel peace when I eat because the sensation of the food overrides the hunger within.

Hunger for what?


Resolution. Gain. This. That.

It's a long story.

I'm aware of my issue in this. Stopping it will take time and some deep soul searching about my emotional "issues" I want and need to deal with.

I don't WANT to be the size I was again but that desire isn't currently strong enough to sway me into keeping on the narrow path toward wellness. 99 percent of "dieting" is inside the head, in the part that says "I CAN and I WILL" and is happy and positive that success will be assured.

Too often, we say we are going to "lose" weight only to fail dismally at it the very next mouthful of creamy, cheesy lasagna! The missing link is the optimism and the determined belief in being able to win to the point where lasagna is a non-issue and salad greens are!

It is about what we put into our mouths and it is about how we perceive our choices as we do so.

I am emotional eater. I followed my mum's example from my childhood on this. When she was bored or stressed she snacked. But we snacked on the good stuff. Sweet biscuits mostly in those days.

For me, my emo food of choice is bread. LOTS of bread and bread-type foods. Pastries run a close second.

When I was a kid, we didn't have a lot of really fancy foods easily available (except for those sweet biscuits), and I in my youthful vigor and raging hunger would head for the loaf of bread and the toaster. Lashings of butter/marg and blackberry jam thrill me like nothing else for a quick fix easy meal for soothing the blackened soul within.

I know its time to stop. To stop the bread addiction and deal with the actual problem that underlies it.

I feel very much like I am swimming through mud emotionally lately. There is some heavy duty shit on my emotional radar right now which I won't go into here.

Food will not solve this for me but I am using it as a stop-gap comfort even so.

The things we fail at are often the things that teach us best. I am currently failing at my diet strategy. It's teaching me to deal with the core issues of which there are many. It's teaching me to have courage and face my fears of which I have many of those too. It's teaching me that I have little will power when I hurt inside.

My self-esteem requires that I claw some dignity and that will power back. I refuse to be towed under by my own emotional negative excesses.

How I do that is a strategy that requires I face my emotions head on and accept them and work through them without leaning on food as a drug to fleetingly assuage the pain