Palestrina, I hope your cleanse helps! Keep us updated.
I started a new job at a restaurant as a hostess. Its only a few days a week for the lunch shift. Anyway, Im in the middle of training right now, and part of training is that you eat your "training meal" for every training shift. There are 5 of them.
They bring out all these platters of food and you eat what you want, give some away or box it up and bring it home. Today my trainer was eating with me. We both had a little something of like 5 dishes on our plates. I was eating away when suddenly she just put her fork down in the middle of a bite and was like "that's it! I just hit my full point. bam! Im done." I looked over and she still had a lot of food on her plate. Enough that it would have been really hard for me to stop eating even if I was full. I have done pretty well on not eating all the platters but I have a hard time not eating what I put on my plate.
Anyway, it was very inspiring to see it in person. The last time I did IE successfully my roommate was naturally an IE person and she would do the same thing, just stop eating in the middle of a meal and put her fork down, regardless of the amount of food she had. It really helped to see a living example in front of me.
Also, I have started working again on waiting until I am hungry to eat. I realized that somehow I had gone back to eating when I wasn't hungry again.
I ate lunch about 5.5 hours ago, it was leftovers from my training meal. I wasn't hungry for dinner so I sat down with my kids and worked on some paperwork and drank my water. I keep forgetting that I haven't eaten dinner yet because Im still not hungry. I get kind of a panicked feeling when I think about it, like oh no when will I eat? LIke all the food will be gone and I have to eat it IMMEDIATELY and not just tommorow or the next day. ( which is totally irrational)
I was talking to my good childhood friend on Sunday. She reminded me of how I pretty much lived at her house after school and stayed for dinner almost every night because my mom did 2 things. She didn't go grocery shopping very often but she she did, she bought lots of food and then labelled it for herself only. I would come home and there would literally be cupboards of food but I was not allowed to eat anything in them. My mom had an eating disorder and barely ate so that food lasted a long time. I still remember one time I was SOOOO Hungry and I looked in our pantry. It was completely empty except for an old orange. I was so happy to find that orange and I ate it like it was the best food ever since I was so desperate. I know I have mentioned that before, but I had forgotten the severity of it. I really think that plays into my eating when Im not hungry and overeating. Even all these years later I have a fear of scarcity. I notice that when the fridge is bursting with food, I tend to eat less.
Anyway, Im still here, still working on it.