FF: A winter binge

The next couple posts are going to be ones that I wrote this past winter and never got around to publishing. This one is a post I wrote in January/February;

So; I believe I’ve mentioned how cold it’s been, every time the temperature dips back down, I have felt an uncontrollable need to rush to dunkin donuts and get half a dozen delicious, chocolate-covered or sugar-coated or crème-filled deliciousness. I didn’t see the pattern at first, but after the third time I realized it. When it gets cold, I crave baked, sugary goods. Filling, fatty stuff. And, since it’s been too cold to be in my living room or bedroom, I haven’t been cooking or doing my Yoga challenge like I had planned. I did my best so far on weight watchers when I was making every meal from their recipes. But, I got hibernatory and started ordering out a lot instead. Or just making a PBJ. Once, I did have a can of soup but it was disgusting…

Yup, so two weeks after I had lost 3llbs, I gained 2.8 of it back. From pizza, Chinese food, PBJ’s and oh so many donuts. I think part of the problem was that I had gotten a bit cocky. I had done well, and then I guess I thought I was good… well, it doesn’t work like that. Once it comes off, it can go right back on again.

That, and I was having a lot of ruminating thoughts (thanks, Depression!) about my father and how he had treated me as a child.

Honestly, I don’t want to go into it much for this post. Just know that he was hard on me, there was a lot of yelling, and it’s where I learned many of my irrational thinking patterns.

So having ruminating (repeated, hard to control thoughts?) thoughts about this was not good. Whenever I am upset I tend to turn to food. It’s always been that way. When I was younger, I had a kick-ass metabolism, and it was probably also curbed since other people ate that food too while I was living in my parent’s house. My sister seemed to notice every missing morsel and was vocal about it. (it’s not fair to me, waaa) So I probably ate a little less, I definitely tried to hide how much I ate from them. But, it didn’t show, I stayed skinny until the tail-end of college when I finally started gaining due to ‘cookie dinners’ and ‘vending machine breakfasts, lunches and dinners.” I will NEVER eat a frozen meal again. Not because I’m choosing to be healthy, blab la bla, but because I can’t even stomach looking at them anymore. They all look and taste like cat food to me now (how I assume cat food tastes, come on now, I’m not that crazy).

Anyway, one thing that made me successful on simple start was the fact that I was able to have dessert every day. I bought cookies and put fat free ice cream between them and stuck them in the freezer. Ice cream sandwiches with my favorite Kroger bakery cookies!! And cold, so that you know they’ll stay fresh after a few days and don’t feel pressure to eat them all at once before they go bad.

So I’ve decided to have dessert every day. The past two days it’s been donuts. Oh, I love donuts way too much. I can almost taste them now…

But knowing I WILL have dessert each day and being able to think about what I want so that I can have the thing I want most that day, and being able to look forward to it helps me to not snack throughout the day, and gives me a little bit of that feel-good, bingey feeling without going overboard. Because that’s the other rule: buy only single servings. So yes, I have to go out every day to buy dessert, but if I bought more than one, they’d both get eaten in one sitting. I just can’t control myself. It’ll sit there in my mind, I won’t even be able to push it to the back, I’ll think about it until I finally give in and eat and it will feel SO amazing!

But the new rule is; One single-serving dessert a day, eaten with full attention and pleasure after dinner and logged appropriately in weight watchers. I’ll try to keep my points low enough during the day that there will be some extra for this snack, but I won’t worry about it too much because of the weekly allowance. And even if I go over, oh well. With a single serving it’s not likely to be by much and it’s keeping me in control so it’s worth it.

I feel like I’m really treating myself well, giving myself this daily dessert. It’s a self-hug (don’t make this sexual, guys).

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