For Tonight

Tonight I chose to have a salad for supper. I was quite pleased with the calorie count, ~275 calories for a huge glass bowlful. Then I treated myself to 2 rice cakes with peanut butter and honey. It's a couple hours later and I'm not physically hungry but I want to eat. Yep, I'm a stress-eater. I think being a stress-eater is a cruel and unusual punishment! We have to eat to survive, but then when we crave the carbs and the sugars we can't have them, or at least we shouldn't, and then the message we send to our brain is: "You're being deprived of (chips, cheese, chocolate, cookies) which is causing you stress and on top of that, I'll deprive you of your favourite foods." Yep, not too pleasant. I learned something this afternoon, though, in my communications class. I learned that the brain doesn't accept negatives. In other words, you can't tell it to "not think of the little red monkey" because then it will. So when it comes to taking away favourite foods that may not be the healthiest, to say, "You can't eat (chips, cheese, chocolate, cookies)" is not going to register but rather trigger an even stronger desire for those things. I think the purpose is to refocus our desires so we can say, "You can eat a salad with chickpeas and guacamole for supper" and retrain our taste buds so they are pleased with our choices. I'm thinking this analogy may apply to other areas in life too.

Here's the part for honesty: the weight went up. If I step on the scales just once a week, I tend to cheat on my daily calories. If I step on the scales every day, I tend to get stressed out when the weight does go up for various reasons (dehydrated, too much salt, eating out one meal). Either way, I end up being frustrated and tend to want to give up. Unfortunately this time I can't. I've been here before, and sometimes I plowed on through and other times I returned to old eating habits. I like to think each time I find myself at the crossroads I'm a little healthier than I was before. Tonight I made a healthy choice and instead of reaching for a bag of vegan gummy bears, I blogged and reminded myself that a moment of enjoyment would likely mean a week of misery as I'm battling a sore throat right now. Here's to tomorrow and the endurance to make more healthy choices. . .