Mindful Eating, when to and when not to

A well-respected and thoughtful fat acceptance blogger recently wrote about mindful eating. As part of what she said, she mentioned mindful eating, and how it is unrealistic for people to engage with every bite they put in their mouths. All eating is not for pleasure. Sometimes, it is purely utilitarian. In essence, sometimes, you just need to cram it in and fill your belly and move on. I like reading this woman's blog, even if I don't agree with 100% of the things she says. Of course, I could say that of many blogs and people. I'm sure no one agrees with all of what anyone else says. One of the reasons I like reading her blog is that she gives me food for thought through her perspective and this was one of those occasions.

I agree that not all eating can be mindful for everyone, nor should it necessarily be. That being said, I think that it's important to distinguish between the types of people who need to attend to the experience of eating and the types of people who do not. It's also important to think about the type of food being eaten and whether or not it, arguably, should be the type of thing to be eaten mindfully.

First, I'd like to address the latter of those two statements in the previous paragraph. There is food that is eaten for nutritional purposes and food that is eaten purely for pleasure. If you're gobbling down your lunch in an attempt to get something in your stomach before heading back to the grindstone, then you really don't have the time to enjoy it. That means that the chips, candy bar, cookie, etc. should be left in the lunch bag. What's the point of gobbling such things down when you can't take the time to enjoy them? They are, after all, empty calories.

Before I get any further, let me assert most definitively that I'm a big fan of empty calories. In fact, I've been criticized rather vociferously and personally attacked because I eat chocolate everyday and this is an indication of my eminent demise from heart disease, diabetes, and the moral decay that accompanies the consumption of food that exists purely for sensory pleasure. In no way am I saying, "don't eat empty calories." What I'm saying is, "don't eat empty calories unless you're going to enjoy eating them." If your eating is utilitarian and just meant to fill a hole, then fill it with nutritious food that you find palatable, not junk which is for the senses only. To me, eating chocolate in a hurry is like renting a DVD and "watching" it by scanning through the chapters and watching mere seconds of each one. You're getting almost nothing out of it for the investment.

Getting to my other point about the types of people who should and should not try hard to eat mindfully, there is a difference between people like me who have suffered from compulsive eating to the point of weighing nearly 400 lbs. and people who don't. I had (and possibly still have) a particular type of disorder in which I abuse food in order to fulfill psychological needs. I needed to learn how to stop doing that and I have to keep being mindful in order to not slip back into that way of living again. For me, mindful eating is a way to avoid compulsiveness. It's way of making sure that I eat for the right reasons because I'm at particular risk of eating for the wrong ones.

The question of how to distinguish is a tricky one because I can't speak for anyone but me. Well, I could, but then I'd be displaying a pretty hefty ego. That being said, I do believe that one of the hallmarks of compulsive eating is conceptualizing how much food you want to eat before you put it in your mouth and taste it and deciding you won't be satisfied unless you can have that amount. Compulsive eaters often want the whole bag or half a pizza or they aren't going to be satisfied. You're not looking at the sensory experience. You're certainly not thinking about satiety. In fact, you're likely to eat to the point of illness. The point of compulsive eating is to comfort, placate, or numb through volume and the very experience of consuming food. You're not tasting your food or filling your belly, but satisfying a deeper need for a particular type of experience based on desire and expectation. It has nothing to do with putting energy in your body or lighting up pleasure centers in your brain with sugary or salty delights.

Mindful eating is like a remedial experience for those who abuse food the way I did. Allowing ourselves to simply say, "it's okay to just keep cramming food in because food is utilitarian sometimes," opens the door to rationalizing a broad range of compulsive eating as utilitarian eating. And, make no mistake, compulsive eating isn't about nutrition or calories. You can eat heads of lettuce, bowls of fruit, or vats of beans and rice compulsively. Most people don't, but it's possible to get your comfort from anything. Lots of people successfully alter their lifestyle to a healthy one, but still keep the compulsive eating. They just lose weight by transferring the target to one which doesn't have an impact on their fat cells. That doesn't make it a mentally healthy thing to do. It just avoids the obvious consequences. It's what I did when I was in college and lost a tremendous amount of weight. And this way of transferring rarely works in the long run as the core psychological problems are left untreated.

So, I think that there are certainly people out there who don't need to work on mindful eating and that it's not something everyone "should" do. However, it's something I have to do and have to keep doing. I have a problem and if I find a way to rationalize compulsiveness, I will. Concentrating on what I'm eating and attending to the smell, taste, and texture is an exercise in mental health for me, but it's not an exercise everyone needs to do. However, I think it's irresponsible to offer up the notion that mindful eating is not always important without a deeper understanding and recognition of the fact that it is very, very important for some of us, especially those who are very fat and are the likely audience for a fat acceptance blog and are more likely to be compulsive eaters.

Finding balance, but still having extremes

These days, I'm so incredibly busy that I have little time to write about things which I believe are important to note on this blog. One of the things I hadn't had time to talk about was the recurrence over successive weeks of one evening of binge eating. I've written before that I had stopped binge eating for the most part, and when I did do so, it was nothing like before. However, I developed an almost routine return to compulsive eating over the past month or so. This situation, which has now abated, is important to remark upon because I want people to know that progress is not a straight line, and that this was not the end of the world or the beginning of the end of my ability to manage my relationship with food.

The fact that this occurred at all is no surprise. As I've written before, it is a biological impulse to gorge when stressed. All animals have this desire and it's one of the reasons that people often turn to food in modern life. We deal more with stress that cannot be relieved than ever before. Unlike the past when we could fight or run, we often have little choice but to stand and take it.

In my case, the stress has been brought on by various life changes. My husband has taken on more professional training work so he is around less. In the past, his commitment to these activities set off a rather scary disconnected binge incident, but this time I felt much better prepared to cope with his absence. And, honestly, I have been coping much better with it and feel less emotionally dependent on him than I have been in a very long time. However, all change is hard, and beyond his absence (which is a loss of a strong positive influence), I've been working a lot more and it has upset the schedule I have lived for awhile now. I am "catching up", so to speak, with the adjustments, but sometimes it feels like I'm tied to the back of a car and running as fast as I can as it pulls me along just a little faster than I can manage at my top speed. Occasionally, I fall (compulsive eat) and get dragged along the ground for awhile until I can scramble back up again (return to form the next day).

The "binges" I had were on Thursday evenings, one of the two nights when my husband comes home quite late due to the work he's doing. I would eat up to around 2500 calories, which isn't a monstrous binge, but often what I'd do is eat according to my usual plan and habits to around 1500-1700 calories, then binge a further 800-1000 on things like pretzels, animal crackers, lean ham or chicken, and cheese. I felt like I just couldn't manage feeling hungry at the end of the day on such days, and just gave in and ate and ate to a point of fullness (not simply satiety). The thing is, I knew what I was doing and I did it anyway. This wasn't like the aforementioned incident where I was mentally split from my actions. I knowingly did this as a pressure release valve. It was the equivalent of people cutting themselves and knowing it is destructive but desiring the release enough to do it anyway. I knew it would set me back a day or two in losing weight, but the relief was so emotionally necessary that I did it anyway.

I decided after the second time that I needed to take control of the pattern that was emerging, but it had nothing to do with losing weight or fear that I was going to set off a new pattern of behavior in which I'd habitually overeat on a daily basis. Mainly, I was concerned with using food in this manner and creating a stronger psychological link between stress and eating. The actions weren't really the problem, but the repetition of them and the way in which they would reinforce and condition future compulsive eating patterns was.

To be perfectly honest, there is a bit of success that I took away from all of this, and, no, it was not that I stopped the pattern, though I did do that. The success was that I didn't freak out or think that I was going to gain weight because of this. It is an immense triumph to me that I was able to, for the most part, objectify the experience and treat it as a behavioral condition to be handled rather than lapse into an "oh my God, it's the end of the world" mentality. I knew that if I did it one day a week, I wasn't going to do it again for at least another week. I knew this wasn't going to be everyday, and I was confident that I could eventually get it under control. I also know that flagellating myself for this behavior or panicking would only make it harder to deal with.

The truth is that I'd be shocked if this pattern didn't re-emerge in the future from time to time, and I'm okay with that. It's not because I think compulsive moderate overeating in times of stress is a "good" thing which is to be blithely disregarded, but rather because I know it is a natural thing which many people do. It's not a cause for panic unless it becomes absolutely habitual, excessive, or overly frequent. If overeating is the one and only "solution", then it is a problem. If it is an occasional stress release valve, then it is natural animal behavior.

A big part of "balance" in all things is knowing that excess is as much a part of finding it as minimalism. Sometimes, you're going to do as little as possible and sometimes as much. Most of the time, you are going to stick around a range in the middle. That's what I'm looking for, not hitting some particular mark every single day under every conceivable circumstance. So, one of these days, I'm going to get into a stressful situation again and may find that I'm using food as a release valve. Some people get drunk. Some people get mad and scream at their loved ones who don't deserve such behavior. Some people sleep with strangers. Some people smoke pot. None of these things are "good" things, but if you expect to be "good" all of the time, then you're fooling yourself and setting a standard which most ordinary people cannot live up to. We're none of us paragons, and part of striking a reasonable balance in life is knowing that.

Awfully Familiar

Quite some time ago, I read a book written by health guru Dr. Andrew Weil. In the beginning of the book, he talks about stomping through some jungle somewhere and stopping for the evening. He heated a pot of water, and dumped in a packet of hot chocolate mix, the sort that you can buy in markets anywhere which is made of chemicals, cocoa, and dehydrated milk. He said that there was something very comforting about the familiar experience of drinking this sort of concoction, even though he knew that it wasn't good for him.

For those who don't know, Dr. Weil has written books about integrative medicine and also talks about things like "energy medicine" and eating whole foods. He was talking about avoiding processed foods long before it became the "in" thing to do. He advocates preventative medicine and natural healing where possible, but encourages radical medical intervention and treatment where necessary. He nicely straddles the divide between science and looking to nature for cures.

As one might imagine, Dr. Weil doesn't recommend that we eat things like processed foods or chemical additives like artificial sweeteners. That being said, even he understands the emotional and cultural connections that we have to the non-nutritive or potentially damaging foods we grow up with. That's why he included the passage about drinking the powdered chocolate in the jungle.

Today, I sampled a fragment of a Ruffles potato chip that my husband had leftover from his lunch and I was reminded of Dr. Weil's experience. It thought it tasted strange and not particularly good. Frankly, it was awful to me. That being said, I did find it familiar and emotionally sustaining at the same time. There was something about the weird oily texture and the flavor which must only come from Ruffles fry vats. I could easily see eating more and deriving comfort from them, not because I was savoring every bite as I do when eating mindfully, but because I could enjoy the crunchiness and the known chemical flavors. The pleasure could not come from the tasting, but from the act of shoveling one after another into my mouth. They felt like something which is not meant to be savored, but to provide a sensory companionship of sorts. The longer the companionship, the more comfort one could have.

Part of the reason I no longer find the taste of this sort of food attractive is that I haven't eaten it for awhile. That's not to say that I don't eat any non-nutritious food, far from it. I have pretzels, chocolate, cookies, and rice crackers all of the time. They're just not made in the same way, particularly in terms of the deep fried aspects. I've never been a fan of deep-fried food, so I wouldn't turn to such things naturally anyway.

The experience of tasting that chip gave me a stronger sense of the difference between compulsive eating (which is done for psychological comfort) and eating for pleasure. I could definitely see why people eat certain foods by the handful without even spending long tasting them. Though I had no desire to eat them compulsively (one fragment was enough), I could imagine doing so and extracting some pleasure from doing so. In fact, I could imagine enjoying it more if I did it more because renewed  familiarity would bring about more comfort.

Fortunately, I don't feel drawn to such things anymore and was not tempted on a sensory level. I wasn't tempted on an emotional one either, but I could definitely imagine being so. It's rather like understanding how someone might want to go bungie jumping for the thrill and sense of floating free or bouncing, but never wanting to do so myself.

Perhaps mindful eating practices broke me of the joy of compulsive eating, or perhaps practicing calorie counting and portion control did it. Maybe it is just a habit I got out of and don't feel compelled to get back into. I was going to say at this point that I'm not emotionally different than I was a little over a year ago, but that's not actually true. The stress and environment I live in is the same, but the way in which I use (or abuse) food has changed. It's not something I turn to for comfort, though I can still use it for pleasure. I can remember wanting to and being able to gain comfort from compulsive eating, and I hope not to forget that so I can maintain empathy for others.

I think that understanding that we approach the food we use for compulsive eating as opposed to the food we actually enjoy differently is of some value. Perhaps knowing the difference will allow us to try to focus on those specific foods or the manner in which we eat those foods which provide comfort and how we deal with them. It can create awareness which can lead to altering our relationship with such foods, and hopefully end compulsive eating.

Birthday

My birthday is coming up in the not too distant future, and like most people, I have been thinking about how to "celebrate" and that means food. Many people view these times as ones in which to indulge and let themselves off the hook for a day. Last year, as my birthday rolled around and I was about 3 months into altering my relationship with food, I also thought I'd allow some indulgences. What happened ended up being a surprise.

I had planned to eat some small portions of cake and ice cream. I had no intention of going overboard. I just figured I'd buy the equivalent of a half slice of cake and one scoop of ice cream. I also thought I'd have a special, though modestly portioned, dinner and not worry about the calories overall. I figured that I'd probably be at no more than 2500 calories if I ate a few extra rich foods in moderation, and I figured that'd be okay.

When the day rolled around, I didn't end up caring that much about the food aspect at all (even though I did nothing special to celebrate and just relaxed around my home). I had about a scoop of ice cream, maybe a bit less, that I found buried in our freezer. I didn't have a special dinner or cake, and I didn't really care. It wasn't that I was trying to "be good" or suppressing any desires to enjoy more or less nutritious food. It ended up being the case that the food wasn't important enough to me to go to any trouble to obtain it. If it had been around, I might have eaten more, but in the end, I didn't care enough. It ended up being the case that thinking about having special things was a bigger deal than actually having them.

This year, my "plan" is essentially the same, but it may end up being the case again that I will be too indifferent to go to the trouble to acquire anything special. I want to buy small portions of a few things I don't normally eat and I'm not going to worry about the calories, but I don't anticipate that I'll overeat by much or at all. One of the things that I realized this year as I planned this is that I actively do not want large portions of treat foods anymore. If I were given the option of a big portion of ice cream or cake, I wouldn't want that much.

The reason for this is not because I've grown into some paragon of food virtue. It's not because my stomach has shrunk from a year of reduced portions so that I can't eat larger portions (though it has shrunk so I get full faster, and would likely feel sick if I ate larger portions). This is the consequence of the mindful eating process. It takes so much time and effort to concentrate on every bite of food and fully attend to eating it that I find it tedious to eat more than 3 or 4 bites at most of any food which I'm consuming for pleasure. The fact of the matter is that it gets boring eating a lot of a sweet if one has it in great quantity when you are eating slowly, pausing, and paying attention to the experience to the maximum extent possible.

I know I prattle too much about "mindful eating" but it has had a significant impact on how I eat. One thing I realized thinking about my birthday besides the fact that I really just want a few bites of sweets to celebrate is that it has created a clear mental divide for me between compulsive eating which is done for the psychological satisfaction of mindlessly shoveling food into my body and the pleasure of food. The existence of the latter does not mean that I never feel compelled to do the former. It just means that I the blurred line between these two types of eating has become quite clear and sharp. I think for many people, myself included, it's very hard to separate eating spurred on by psychological compulsion and that which is done for pleasure. We think food is our medication of choice because we love it, and we do enjoy it immensely, but it's not always eating out of love of food nor is it always eating out of compulsion.

I can no longer say that I ever eat a lot because "I love food". I eat a little when I'm loving food. I eat a lot when I'm hating myself. The motives for eating are entirely different. Eating small amounts to gratify a sensory need for food is a joy. Eating large amounts to relieve anxiety or drown out bad feelings is a problem.

Being able to separate these two types of eating is extremely helpful in stopping the problem eating because it is not about the food at all. It's about me, my motives, and my actions. This is a major step for me in a mental process whereby I separate food from my psychological issues. It's part of why I don't have "trigger" foods which I binge on anymore. Recognizing that it's not the food itself but my feelings, compulsions and habits unloads that gun.

I can't say with any certainty that I'll never ever eat compulsively again, but I feel better being aware of what drives that desire and that it isn't getting all mixed up in a love or enjoyment of food. It's not that I'm weak in the face of tasty food and just can't stop. It's that I have a need that I'm trying to fulfill which is unrelated to the food. Recognizing this will give me the opportunity to attend to that need in a more constructive way, and hopefully break the unhappy relationship between my psychological pain and food.

Hunger Conditioning

When I first started restricting my eating in the hopes of losing weight (as outlined in my plan linked on the right), hunger used to drive me nearly insane. Even now, with relatively moderate restriction (1400-1700 calories a day, mainly falling in the range of 1500-1600), there are times when hunger nags at me. Of course “nagging” is better than “gnawing”, which is what it used to be.

I’ve been thinking about hunger and my response to it quite a lot lately, and reached a few conclusions. Hunger is not a good feeling and it’s not supposed to be, but there was a time not too long ago when people simply ignored being hungry because they had no other choice. Before refrigeration and preservation methods, we couldn’t simply pick up what we wanted to eat and eat it. In fact, it’s my guess that even 50-75 years ago before so much processed and packaged food was around, people viewed food and being hungry quite differently than we do now.

I’ve concluded that people in developed countries have lost the ability to endure hunger effectively. It's a psychological muscle which has nearly completely atrophied. We have this urge and we are free to act on it any time, so we do not develop the mental capacity to simply tolerate an uncomfortable state. It’s something our ancestors (even our grandparents) probably did a much better job of than we do. Of course, it helps that our grandparents weren’t surrounded by food cues like television advertising, T.V. shows where people are eating pizzas and Chinese food, or internet ads. Seeing, smelling, and thinking about food just makes hunger worse.

In order to help normalize my responses to food and hunger, I’ve been “stretching” my capacity to endure hunger and attempting to alter my response to food cues. The main mental exercises I’ve been following are:

1. When I smell delicious food while walking around town, I consider that the aroma is actually better and more gratifying than the taste and texture of the food itself. I focus on the olfactory satisfaction alone and do not couple the consumption of the food with the lovely smell. In particular, when I walk past a bakery, I know the bread smells better than it tastes. If I feel tempted (and I actually haven’t been strongly so), I will think about relatively mundane experiences of eating that food like eating day-old bread, or bagged supermarket bread, or I will consider the times when I bought something based on smell and found it wasn’t as good as I’d expected. Attractive food almost always smells better than it tastes. I tell myself that when smell lures me to a food.
2. When I am hungry, I consider how long it has been since I have eaten and whether or not my stomach has food in it. More often than not, I ate not too long ago and should be able to wait. I’ll try to put off eating for at least 15 minutes and then see if I can add another 15 to that. If I know or can feel that my stomach is not empty, I will make that “wait” longer, likely at least a half hour. I will choose a task to become engaged in to distract me for a while.
3. When I eat and I’m really hungry, I often have the urge to eat a lot because I sometimes convince myself that being so empty means I need to be very full in response. The thing is that these factors are not related. Being very empty sometimes makes me ravenous (a normal physiological response), but a normally portioned meal (which is to say small and measured amounts of food) is going to satisfy me just fine. It’s extremely important to eat slowly and mindfully in these situations so that the experience of eating lasts and the mental need to spend time eating and to experience food is gratified when I’m very hungry. Wolfing down my food in response to strong hunger will not relieve the hunger any more rapidly.
4. I’m endeavoring to react to hunger as something that I can set aside for awhile. Yes, it is bad to be hungry, and it is a signal from your body. However, I am not actually a starving person. I’m an overfed person. My body has energy to survive on, but it will only use it if I force it to dig into its stored energy. That means that there are times when I’m going to have to be hungry. I’m trying to develop an emotional response to hunger the way that we all have developed emotional responses to sexual arousal that occurs at a time or place when it cannot be acted upon. The urge is there, but we set it aside and act on it when the time is appropriate.

One thing that I often read from people who are trying to lose weight is that “you shouldn’t be hungry.” This is a premise that I disagree with. I think that hunger is a normal part of life, and losing weight means you will sometimes be hungry. I’m not talking about a ravenously, insanely, “I-want-to-eat-my-shoe-leather” type of situation, but simply that there are times when you may want to eat when you would be better off resisting. I want to slowly condition myself to have better hunger impulse responses because I think it will curb compulsive eating or poor eating choices induced by food cues. The latter refers to such things as buying fast food or a candy bar because I’m hungry rather than waiting a half hour and eating when I get home (not that I do that, I don’t, but it I have come close to making poor choices in the throes of strong hunger).

At the moment, I feel like I’m in a “second phase” of my lifestyle changes. This second phase is a lot more comfortable than the initial ones that I went through, but it is still something which I have to actively work on and endure some physical and mental discomfort with. I’m much better and more adept at portion control, spend less time ruminating on food or daydreaming about eating, rarely eat mindlessly (I focus on the taste and texture as I eat and eat more slowly), and I’ve conquered about 75% of my emotional eating. I’ve also broken the bonding between activities and food. I rarely think things like, “It’d really enjoy making a big bowl of popcorn and watching a movie”. In fact, just a few weeks ago, I thought about how this happy pairing of food and fun had just vanished without my really pushing it out of the picture.

That being said, I’m still dealing with compulsive eating and cravings. It is these factors that I’m doing these mental hunger resistance exercises to for. I don’t wish to stop eating or lose the pleasure I take from food (which remains considerable), but I do want to have better impulse control. I believe this will work, but only time will tell.

Not Wanting More

During the holidays, I was given a big portion of a cake from a work-related associate. The entire amount of cake would probably be two somewhat large portions or three smallish portions. I gave myself a portion equivalent to a quarter of the entire amount of cake. The cake was divine in texture, taste, and smell. It was definitely one of the best bits of cake that I ever had.

I had about 5 bites of cake in my portion, since I eat relatively small bites. I do this because my mouth is small and I can’t eat a lot at once. I ate my small piece and experienced something that I cannot recall having experienced in my memory, and certainly not as an adult. I thoroughly enjoyed the cake and finished my piece, but I had absolutely no desire to have more. It wasn’t that I was full, as these days I’m rarely truly full. Besides, I’ve been full before and followed up quite imprudently on a desire to eat more (especially when it came to dessert) when I had had quite enough. Fullness never put me off of eating more of something that tasted good.

For the first time in memory, I really enjoyed something, but didn’t want more at all. I had the experience and enjoyed it, and that was “enough”. I don’t think I can recall having “enough” when it comes to food I really enjoy short of having extreme stomach discomfort that forced me to stop, or running out of food. It’s the sort of impulse that tends to make people who are overweight have issues leaving a bag of cookies or chips unfinished. They just keep going back for more at every opportunity until it’s gone. I remember that impulse with perfect clarity as it’s a battle I’ve fought again and again and lost throughout most of my adult life.

Not wanting to go back and eat more of that extremely tasty cake was such a profoundly different experience, that I took note of how the absence of desire felt. I wondered if it was going to happen the next night when I had another small portion of the cake as a holiday treat. I wondered if this was a fluke, or if it was the culmination of the conditioning I’ve been doing on myself for the past six months.

The next night, I had the same experience. I had a small piece of cake and again had no desire to tunnel back into the fridge and nibble at more. Maybe it’s the cake, but I doubt it. I think there has been some sort of shift in my relationship with food as a result of the behavioral changes I’ve made.

I can’t say that I believe it’s going to happen every time, nor can I say I believe it will last forever or happen every time I eat some really delicious food. I don’t even know exactly what actions I've taken which has led to this change, but I have a feeling that it's related to actively tasting food that I eat for pleasure and not denying myself anything that I want to eat. All I know is that it felt good. It felt as if I had a sickness that has been plaguing me all of my life and suddenly I wasn't suffering its effects. It was like a tremendous psychological burden had been lifted, if only for a short time.

Complacency and the Food Compass

Lately, I've felt like I've been in a (productive) holding pattern. I eat on or close to target every day, get in a sufficient amount of exercise and wait for appreciable results. I think less about the struggle because I struggle less, though sometimes I feel like I had better focus and resistance to eating earlier in the process.

Sometimes I find myself slipping into emotional eating or compulsive eating without thinking too much and landing a bit higher than I'd like in calories or eating unhealthy food. I wonder if the success I've had to this point has brought on some mental complacency. It's as if I feel less vigilant because I now require less food policing.

This type of complacency is, I'm certain, the youthful sprouts of backsliding. I can see how not nipping this type of mindlessness about food in the bud could lead to regaining in the future when I let my guard down even more. I'm also guessing this is one of the many reasons why it is common for many people, particularly women, to do well initially on their diets and then halt their losses for awhile, or even gain back much of what they lost.

I have an acute sense of my food compass needing to be forcibly held in position such that it points at careful eating at all times. If I become inattentive to its position, it will gradual start making its way back toward less mindful, less healthy, and less portion-controlled eating. It can't be left to its own devices for long at all. I reckon that people who have never had an eating disorder don't give a second thought to their compasses for most of their lives, and are able to point them in the right direction without fear that they'll drift out of place the minute they turn their backs.

I'm hoping that I can snap my attention back when I first start perceiving this drift, but I do get tired of thinking about what I eat, measuring it, and writing it all down all of the time. The tediousness of tracking food, preparing it so carefully, and controlling my desires is immense. In fact, I'm realizing that getting healthy and staying there is unlikely to ever be something which won't drain my time and energy, and it's yet another thing I'm going to have to get comfortable with and accept.

Perfect Control

Today while I was out walking for a bit of exercise, I was pondering my control issues and compulsive eating. A few days ago (on a non-counting day), I found myself standing in the kitchen over an open container of mini pretzels scarfing down about 6 of them. That was preceded by the consumption of about 10 Cheez-its from another container.

I'll grant that I had a minimal lunch and may actually have been hungry, but that wasn't the way to deal with it. I consumed a string of small quantities of various snacking foods when I should have had a planned snack with better nutritional balance and more substance. I probably put away 300 calories on bits of junk that I just popped into my mouth while walking around the kitchen.

As I was out walking about, I was thinking about self-control and how I always feel like I need more of it, at least in regards to food. That being said, I think that everyone has self-control issues on some front. Some people drink more than they should. Others find themselves sleeping with people and regretting it later. Many people buy things they don't need and/or can't afford or gamble. And some eat things they shouldn't.

The main difference between compulsive eaters and people who sleep with people and regret it or buy junk that they don't need is that eaters display the consequences of their lack of control for the world to see. Debt and V.D. aren't visible to the naked eye. That being said, I'm not looking for an excuse here. I'm just considering the fact that lacking perfect control isn't all that uncommon among most humans. Therefore, there's no need to beat myself up or deride myself for slipping into bad behavior.

I had a talk with my husband about this point this morning, and he told me that I should focus on my success rather than preoccupy myself with this point that I'm not pleased with. I have a tendency to be a perfectionist, and it has rarely served me well. I'm not sure if this is one of those situations where I expect too much of myself (perfect control) or if this is a point that I should be putting more mental energy into dealing with.

In regards to self-control, I will say that I have considerable control in many areas of my life. I have never drunk alcohol and never had any temptation to do so. This is largely because my father is an alcoholic, but also I just don't see the appeal. I also have always been good at not wasting money and save a considerable portion of my income. In school, I was exceptionally disciplined in my studies and got great grades. I never had to cram for tests because I kept up on homework and required reading and attended my classes. In many areas that other people show poor self-control, I have had very good control. But, then there's food.

Maybe the reason that I expect perfect control over my eating is that I've had such good control in other areas of my life. Maybe I have poor control with food because I generally have such good control elsewhere. I don't know, but it's something I'll have to think about.