No Doubts

Thanks to daily weighing, I can now safely say without a doubt that eating and drinking too much and moving too little lead to weight gain.

Yes,

I know,

D’UH.

But there are still weeks when I’d like to “get away with it”- defy nature, as Donna said.

Bizarrely, until I typed the words “defy nature”, I had forgotten what I’d written about just a few days ago. It must be something that I really need to process in order to get over this period/slump/quagmire.

On a positive note, I am certainly more body aware now than I was a couple of years ago.  A “slump” like this would last months or more and I wouldn’t step on the scale until my weight was into the 160s – or the 170s as in January 2008.

So I’m happy that I get this feeling at 146. I promised the women over at BCB that I wouldn’t weigh more than 145.8  by the time I got to my specialist’s appointment at the hospital next week.  Rather than set that as a distant boundary, I used it as a safe target so that I could give myself permission to eat and drink my stress away.  As of this moment, I no longer have that permission.

• I have permission to walk off my stress.
• I have permission to bubble bath my stress away.
• I have permission to curl up with a good book – and there’s one by my bed.
• I have permission to work.
• I have permission to drink large mugs of tea if I need to feel warm and full.

I don’t have permission to bake and eat.

I don’t have permission to eat more than enough for one person.

I don’t have permission to open another bottle of wine.

And the reason I’m banishing those things is NOT because I want to live some joyless life, but because I simply need to cope with stress in other ways.  I know what the other ways are, but I never give them enough of a chance to become real tools in my life.  They are always food substitutes rather than real stress-relievers.  I want to get my mind to the point that I think of walking or reading when I feel stressed.  Right now I think of walking or reading or bubble bathing as something to combat the urge to eat – not something to calm the worry.

Well that was revealing so I’m going to say it again but louder:

Right now I think of walking or reading or bubble bathing as something to combat the urge to eat – not something to calm the worry.

I am going to find foodless drinkless tools for combatting stress.  Maybe I should crack that Beck book finally to see if I can make some permanent changes in my thinking.

Happy Weekend.