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Senior Member
Join Date: May 2011
Location: Scotland
Posts: 1,425
S/C/G: 128/127/110
Height: 4'11"
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Great post, and it's really set me thinking. From my (admittedly short) experience, I'd say that there are two factors involved here.
1) Working out why you succumb to temptation, whether it's emotional eating, habitual eating from non-hunger cues, real hunger due to insufficient calories or a poorly balanced diet, feeling deprived, sugar addiction, feeling that life is not worth living without occasional chocolate, or what have you. Then you work on these factors and plan how to work around them, e.g. I have very small pieces (about 3g) of very dark chocolate as treats about once every other day. The chocolate is dark enough that I really don't want to eat much of it anyway, so it avoids chocolate bingeing and makes me feel happy that I've had a treat.
2) Just resisting the urges when they strike, which is what your post is about. I'd been working more on the first part and trying either distraction or making myself a nice herb or spice tea (licorice-based teas seem to be working well), but yes, this is absolutely crucial too, and probably more so for some people.
I'm now considering the language we use to discuss this sort of thing. It tends to be value-laden, emotionally loaded, guilt-trippy, and even religious. There was a diet my mother did once which categorised a lot of foods as "sins", and we all talk about "temptation". (My mother has always had a heavily turbulent relationship with food and goes for the guilt and emotion in spades, so I naturally shy away from that approach. Because whether you're healthy or not, resisting your parents is something that's compulsory!) I've just realised that I don't tend to use those terms, and on thinking about why, I reckon it's because they bring up the following schools of thought for me:
"I can resist everything except temptation."
"If you're sinning, you may as well sin thoroughly."
"Everything I like in life is either illegal, immoral or fattening."
And "cheating" just makes me think of sexual infidelity, which for me is a really weird way to think about what I eat.
It's a concept which presents dieting as something boringly mundane, say like school, but the real excitement comes when you break the rules, and it's strongly suggesting that you should. It's like the way that in fairy tales, forbidding something causes a compulsion to do it. Bluebeard's wife disobeying his order not to look in the secret room and finding the bones of his former wives is the right move for her self-preservation and gives us an interesting story; sneaking off to the cupboard for something loaded with fat and sugar that will leap miles over your calorie limit, on the other hand, is not a wise move.
After seeing my mother go through dieting **** for most of my life, I know that I would not be happy or compliant on any diet that restricted me in a way that made me feel deprived. She somehow raised me to be a healthy eater despite all this, and it stuck, so I'm basically doing calorie counting, cutting out obvious trigger foods (there is no real way of eating part of a bag of tortilla chips), healthy breakfast (usually porridge), soup and/or salad for lunch, and generally trying to keep an eye on weekly averages for macronutrients rather than obsessing over every day's portion of protein. So far it's working nicely, but I'm only about 6 weeks in and I'm curious to see what will turn up once I'm out of the honeymoon period and have been doing this for a few months. I'm already noticing the odd day when I feel bored, and have resolved to make an effort to make the soups and salads more varied to avoid this. (They are at least quick and easy to prepare, since I make up large batches of soup and freeze it in portions, and with my low energy levels that counts for a lot.)
I'm making a big effort not to get into the guilt mentality, and especially the shame mentality. So far I'm finding it helps to look at weekly balances. When it was our anniversary and we had pizza that day (he was working all day and evening) and then went out for dinner the next evening, I didn't think of it as cheating or what have you, I tried to go for healthy options, accepted that my calorie deficits were lower for those days, ate a bit less over the next few days, and by the end of the week it was all balanced out. Let's hope I manage to stick to this school of thought, because getting into a binge/starve mentality would be very, very bad for me both psychologically and physically.
Going back to the words thing, "balance" seems to be one I'm going for a lot. Nice tree-hugging hippy sort of feel to it, I suppose, and positive rather than negative. I'm trying to think of the calorie count business as simple and mathematical rather than loaded with emotion.
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But I'm so glad I read this!
