Tag Archives: food addiction

Willpower Testing Lab

Freeform thoughts, In the here & now, , ,

cat

So I’m heading out of town again this weekend, just for a couple of days – one of my closest friends lives a couple of hours north of here, and this same weekend every year there’s a large craft fair near to where she lives – it marks start of the run up to Christmas for me, since it’s chock full of Christmassy things. We go every year, and have a really lovely day out. You know the type of thing…there are some really unusual gifts, everything from hand finished cashmere shawls, beautiful statement jewellery, clothing and accessories to unique art works and beautiful house things. Oh yes, and the food hall.

What can I tell you about the food hall..?  I’m salivating at the thought. Most of it is home-made produce from local artisans who come and proudly display their wares…it’s an aladdin’s cave of speciality breads, cupcakes, flavoured vodka and gin, fudge, brownies, pies, sausages…olive oils, handmade chocolates, unique cheeses and amazing homemade chutneys. To be fair, that barely scratches the surface – it’s beyond awesome. And all the vendors give away free samples to tempt your palette and entice you into buying.

On a scale of 1-10, just exactly how much enticing do you reckon it’s taken in the past, to get this fat girl to stagger away at the end of the day under the weight of a dozen or more carrier bags..? “Would you like to try a…” “YES PLEASE!”  Yeah, that’s about how much. This time of year has invariably also coincided with the start of the pre-Christmas diet (which has been just as successful as the New Year diet, the Pre-Easter diet, the Post-Easter diet, the summer holiday diet, and the post-summer holiday diet) and as traditions go, the Living North Fair has also been the undoing of the pre-Christmas diet on pretty much an annual basis ever since we started going.

So it’s with a certain amount of trepidation that I’m looking forward to the weekend, because genuinely, it’s going to be a real test of my willpower. Here’s what usually happens. My friend, who by nature is one of life’s most nurturing people will ask me as we head towards the weekend what I would like to eat when I arrive on Friday. Am I dieting? Does a bear shit in the woods?  “Yes, I’m dieting but don’t put yourself to any trouble, I’ll eat what you eat, as long as I can point it”. And I usually do, after downing two large gin and tonics and the majority of the pre-dinner nachos and dip which I always say I’m not going to eat, but which I eat anyway.

Saturday morning usually starts with my friend cooking bacon sandwiches, which I accept with enthusiasm because this year – whichever year it’s been – I’m not going to eat anything from the food hall, I’m just going to look, so best have a decent breakfast. Did you know you can look with the inside of your mouth? It seems you can, I have perfected the skill over the last 5 or so years. By the time I’ve worked my way around all the stalls and sampled every scrap of whatever’s on offer, not to mention tasting the outputs from the cookery demonstrations I am groaning with food, having gained 10lbs over the course of one afternoon, and having left with enough food to last until the New Year diet starts. I mean I’ve blown the pre-Christmas one now, right?

This year, it’s going to be different. I’m telling you about it, and I’m accountable to you guys. I shall plan ahead, check in about dinner plans, agree there will be no nachos within spitting distance of me, and on Saturday I am going to have some samples…but I shall eat fruit for breakfast, and I’ll allocate myself a generous points budget for freebies so I don’t feel deprived. Then a light dinner will see me right.

I wonder whether any of the stands will have luxury polishing cloths so I can touch up my halo on Sunday morning.. 🙂

Like it..? Tell your friends!
 

Part Woman, Part Ostrich

Freeform thoughts, Reflections on past times, , , ,

ostrich

In the way that I often do when I’ve said something out loud – or written it on here which pretty much amounts to the same thing – I’ve been reflecting on something I referred to yesterday. Remember I talked about voicing my determination to stay skinny in between mouthfuls of cake..? It sounds so utterly ridiculous when I put it like that. But as much as I was being flippant yesterday in the interests of provoking a smile and a shared ‘eyes to the sky’ moment with you all, that’s literally what happened.

When I look back I can see myself walking away from Skinny Town, a place I loved and had worked so damned hard to get to. I was walking in the opposite direction without a backwards glance, sitting in my big fat leather armchair night after night with a family bag of cheese balls and a large carton of Haagen Dazs, having already eaten my way through the day. It’s all very well me looking back now and wanting to scream “what were you thinking?!!!” at myself…I don’t think I could answer that even if the Dalai Lama himself rocked up to help me find enlightenment. I wasn’t thinking – my head was empty. I mean yes of course, on a rational level I must have known that the wheels had come off but where I should have been having a word with myself…nothing.

I can’t seem to recall a single conscious thought about what I was doing and yet every day I watched myself get bigger and bigger. Discarding the skinny jeans in favour of elasticated waists and shapeless sweaters. I lived in the moment, and never thought about the pattern. The trajectory, you know? Where I was headed. From Skinny Town to Mooseville in one long straight run, stopping only to replenish the  supply of cake. You know what I think? I think it went beyond just not thinking about it…I think I made a conscious choice to ignore what I was doing to myself and stick my head in the sand. I was an Ostrich. And I’m struggling to understand why, I mean that’s not right is it…normal folk just wouldn’t do that. I mean, maybe they’d turn a blind eye to five pounds, or even ten pounds at a push. But one hundred and forty pounds…? No.

If someone had asked me why I wanted to put the weight back on, I would have looked at them as though they’d taken leave of their senses. I didn’t. And yet, I was.

You know I still don’t have all the answers, right? I know on here I come across as fairly well in control and self-aware, but it’s mainly because I’ve had some wonderful encouragement and feedback from you guys – I know you’re drawing inspiration here and there from the odd post, and the posse in general too which is amazing. I guess we’re all just figuring it all out as we go along. Getting skinny is a familiar journey – the unknown bit, the hardest part for me at least is going to be staying there. Pulling up the drawbridge and becoming a permanent resident of Skinny Town.

But you know, I thought it was worth talking about this today, because we’re all at different stages of this journey, and if just one of our posse is sitting in their armchair every night, walking away from Skinny Town without anyone there to hold the mirror up and yell WHAT ARE YOU THINKING..???  Well I’d feel like we’d let them down.

Please don’t be that person…don’t do what I did. Please.

Like it..? Tell your friends!
 

Eat This Instead!

Biggest struggles, Freeform thoughts, , , ,

This is an evaluation image and is Copyright Chud Tsankov. Do not publish without acquiring a license. Image number: 0521-1102-1611-4613. http://www.acclaimimages.com/_gallery/_pages/0521-1102-1611-4613.html

I get very excited when someone offers me a piece of bona-fide advice which has been endorsed by people with letters after their name, especially when it claims to eradicate some of those bumps in the road which could make the wheels come off my diet. I was totally ready to be impressed yesterday when I saw an article on cravings, and how you might stop them in their tracks. Granted the article was in the Daily Mail rather than the New England Journal of Medicine, but hey it could’ve been scribbled on the back of a fag packet for all I cared, so long as it worked.

In my haste to get to this holiest of holy grails I was even prepared to pretend I hadn’t zoned in on the typo on line four which referred to the ‘sweet draw’ rather than the sweet drawer – yes I know, I’m a freak, but stuff like that really twangs my strings. Anyway, there was a team of nutritionists – a whole team mind you – who were standing behind this research, so I ignored the typo and pushed on.

And it started well…I was nodding along by line eight.  Yes, I completely bought into the fact that your body finds ways to tell you when you’re deficient in something. I remember drinking about 2 litres of fresh orange juice every day when I was expecting my son, even before I knew I had a baby on board. Totally random fact which might have nothing to do with anything, but I was relating, you know..? There was definitely an air of expectation…like this was it, I was going to learn how to get rid of all those cravings once and for all. A defining moment. I’ll run through the advice shall I..? Distill it for you and give you just the good bits, you know, the highlights…?

“If you crave something sweet, eat broccoli instead.” Yeah because that’s going to cut it. The Asshole will totally go for that.

“If you crave chocolate, have some.” Right then. Way to go to combat the craving. Did the Asshole actually write this one? He uses that line all the time.

“If you’re craving a salty snack have some anchovies.”  Are you fucking kidding me?

“If you’re craving some dirty carbs, eat some turkey instead.” And again…wtf?

I stopped reading there, having written off said team of nutritionists as skinny dimwits who had obviously never experienced a fat girl craving in their lives. I mean come on. A craving will turn your head inside out. I’ve been known to drive the 15 miles to Ikea in my slippers at warp speed, screeching into the car park at 9.55pm a whisker before they close so I can buy a Daim cake, simply because I cannot contemplate getting through the night without one. I’ve eaten dog chocolate when there was nothing else sweet in the house. If you’d offered me a broccoli floret when I was in the grip of that craving I’m here to tell you that you’d have been invited to leave with the suggestion of shoving it sideways where the sun doesn’t shine ringing in your ears.

For advice on how to combat cravings, don’t ask the experts – ask a fat girl. We might not always be able to follow our own advice, but we know better than most what might work, sometimes. I’ll give you a clue…it’s not broccoli or anchovies. For me, right now it’s toothpaste. If I’m desperate to eat something and I’ve spent my food budget for the day, going and brushing my teeth with an overloaded toothbrush takes the edge off. It’s not much, but it’s something.

No holy grail today then…ah well. We’ll all just keep plugging away shall we? 🙂

 

Like it..? Tell your friends!
 

The diet, 11 days in.

Diet update, Freeform thoughts, In the here & now,

addictionIt’s going well. Bit light headed today but I suspect that’s because I’ve been busy, and didn’t have chance for any lunch. Other than the inside scrapings of a quiche and a couple of squares of dark chocolate I didn’t eat much yesterday either. I’m following a carb-free regime, and once the alchemy has happened and your body’s switched its fuel source to burn stored fat you don’t really feel hungry.

I’m not gonna lie, in the past, when (usually thin) people have said they forgot to eat lunch I’ve written them off as freaks, on the basis that forgetting to eat was so alien to me as a concept that they were clearly weird. Dizzy’s not good though, need to just watch that. I woke up this morning feeling thin. A bit bizarre when you consider I probably have around 140lbs of excess baggage but still, this morning before I got out of bed, I felt like Kate Moss.

When I did the all liquid diet, I loved the speed with which the weight fell off…my god once I got into my stride there was no stopping me. I stuck to it rigidly for 8 months and it really truly worked for me. There are side effects of course – how could there not be. Drinking 4 litres of water every day takes its toll, I’d never peed as much in my life. And going for a poo was a revelation, if Gillian McKeith had been presented with a bag of my poo she would have drawn the conclusion that I’d eaten Orville, it was practically luminous. Bizarre when you consider I was only drinking watery beige soup and eating the odd beige MDF diet bar.

But I’ve tried a couple of times since and I just can’t find my stride with it again, at all. Just the smell of a ketogenic soup or shake makes me want to hurl so I think that ship has sailed. Which is a shame, because I’d be far less likely to fall off the wagon if I could cut out food altogether and see results at warp speed.

I am a compulsive over-eater. A food addict if you will. I have a thyroid problem too which adds to the complexity but I estimate that my slow metabolic rate is responsible for maybe 10% of my weight problem. Hoovering up food like the world will be on short rations from tomorrow accounts for the rest.

Addiction is a funny thing. If you’re addicted to cigarettes, or drugs, or alcohol you have the option of going completely cold turkey and whilst of course I’m not suggesting it’s easy, it can be done. Sure, you’ll spend the rest of your life battling the urges, and the temptation, sweating it out and working hard to stay clean but it’s possible to go through life never again taking into your body the substance to which you’re addicted.

However. One cannot live without food, so on a daily basis a food junkie has to ‘use’. And for an addict, that’s a big problem 🙁

Like it..? Tell your friends!