This morning, I read the blog of a good blogger friend of mine, and it had to do with cravings and emotional eating. Well, I’m an emotional eater, and while I have no scientific evidence for what I’m about to say, I’m willing to bet the vast majority of overweight/obese people also struggle with their emotional relationship to food. For some it’s worse than others, I imagine, but I’m perfectly willing to admit I was a complete junkie when I began my reconstruction. If I had a bad day at work, I had no interest in downing a bottle of wine or having a few stiff martinis. Nope – an alkie, I’m not. But if I had a stressful day, I would sure eat the hell out of a box of Fudge Stripe cookies, or a pint of Blue Bell Ice Cream, or most of a pizza, or…well…you get the ugly, way too honest picture.
This past week in fact, I was under a good bit of stress, and I ended up having a few snacks late at night that I normally wouldn’t now that I’ve seen the light, yelled hallelujah, and changed my ways. The snacks were fairly healthy, portion controlled, and nowhere in the same zip code of a binge, but they were a few more calories than I normally would have eaten that late at night. And they usually consisted of a craving of one sort of another.
Cravings are a fact of life. We all have foods that we love that aren’t the greatest thing in the world for our health or our weight loss efforts, and it’s just a given that we’re going to crave those foods from time to time. In the beginning of my journey – the cravings were intense and frequent. Now they’re fairly rare, with varying levels of intensity. The most recent was for a Chick-Fil-A chicken biscuit, a craving I tried to blame on my dog. I’m a firm believer that as soon as you make a food forbidden, you’re going to crave it even more, so one of my little rules for myself before I even went to my nutritionist for the first time was that nothing would be totally off limits. Over time, I’ve come up with my Top Five Tips to Deal with Cravings – which I’m sure are heavily influenced by tidbits of advice I’ve gotten from my nutritionist, as well as some of my readers, and I’ve put all that advice together with some of my own common sense: » Read more: Nutrition Monday: Top Five Tips to Deal with Cravings
It is spectacularly beautiful here in Atlanta today. I mean perfect. I wish my 5K were this evening, because tomorrow has a bit of a crazy weather forecast with spring storms. Hopefully they’ll hold off until after about 9:30 tomorrow morning. Anyhow, I am remarkably calm. I picked up my race number (left), time chip, and other goodies this afternoon. I thought by now I’d be nervous, but I’m not in the least. Maybe something’s wrong with me, but it’s just another Friday night – I just happen to have a race in the morning.
