Back from my birthday hiatus week. I went out of town last weekend and ate like crazy. Then spent my birthday alone and wound up doing a lot of emotional eating. Ice cream is enemy number 1! I ate two pints of ice cream plus a big ice cream cone last week. EEK! So no change from two weeks ago is probably pretty good, all things considered.
I added myself to the sheet. I need to get serious. I am the heaviest I have ever been. I struggle with emotional eating and drinking. I am in heavy debt-repayment mode, and I stress. I stress over each bill, each interest rate, each payment. I calculate nickels and dimes constantly for max payments to my debt. I come home from working all day and clean house or cook and try not to lose my mind. How do you stay sane? I drink that $14 box of wine to make my worries go away, but the calories are not helping my weight. I feel overwhelmed most of the time.
This is me. No the debt, but other stressors. And it's not alcohol for me, but sugar. OMG! SUGAR! One day I looked down at the scale reading 220 and I told myself something had to change. I don't now what happened that day that was different from before, but I eventually got down to about 155. I'm 165 now and beating myself up about it. I need to get my act back together .
I don't know how you stay sane. I know I don't. I screw up all the time. This is really a mental game for me. When one thing gets better, something else starts stressing me out and has me reaching for the ice cream. Food is a coping strategy for me. Not good. When everything else feels overwhelming, I reach for food for comfort. But that is deceptive, because it'll make me feel worse later and what I eat is something I can actually control. When I have control over my eating, I have control over that little aspect of my life and I feel empowered and better able to face some of the other stuff. This can go too far the other direction for me too though. Eating so little that I pass out? VERY BAD! Yeah, I'm never gonna have a healthy relationship with food. The best I can do is keep trying to keep things reasonable.
A few things that have helped me: Don't buy any trigger foods in the first place. It's much easier to resist a moment of weakness if you have to go to the store before you can indulge. (Hard to do this one if you live with other people though. There was a time when I could basically only have vegetables, eggs, and chicken breast in my kitchen. Anything else was too much of a temptation.) Brush your teeth. As soon as you've finished a meal or when you feel yourself getting tempted to eat when you're not really hungry. Wine is not going to taste as good if you've just brushed your teeth. Tea; negligible calories but yummy, warm, and comforting so it helps me with some of my emotional eating stuff. Exercise actually reduces my appetite, but good luck convincing me I want to exercise when I've had to stay late at work and I'm coming home tired, hungry, and stressed out. Music, I like to dance, so if I turn on music while I am cooking dinner or cleaning up, I move around more and it gives my mood a boost and makes me mentally more wiling to do some exercise.
