A Realisation

This was the post that would have gone up yesterday had I not been too busy enjoying (non-alcoholic) drinks last night with the husband at our local Wetherspoons!

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Yesterday I ate a Toffee Crisp.  Yeah, I know.  I want to be healthy and lose a little weight so I indulge in confectionary.  It doesn’t make any sense to me either.  It was good though and I enjoyed it a lot.  It also led to a bit of a realisation.

I don’t think it is at all helpful to categorise food in terms of ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’, which let’s face it really means good and bad.  While I agree that some foods are much more beneficial to your body than others that doesn’t necessarily mean that I should automatically feel bad every time I eat something which I don’t deem to be healthy. 

Last night I ate the confectionary and I proceeded to feel bad about myself. 

‘Why do I sabotage myself?”’

‘Why am I such a pig?’

‘Why can’t I just stick to eating healthy food?’

‘How can I claim I want to lose weight and then eat this?’

This dialogue went around in my head and I was basically telling myself that I wasn’t good enough, that I had somehow failed.  That thought lead to an urge to just throw in the towel and seek comfort in - you guessed it - more food.  As I was reaching my hand into a packet of nuts I suddenly realised what I was doing.  I caught myself and put the nuts down.  I was suddenly struck with a realisation: negative thoughts breed negative actions.  I felt bad about myself for eating and enjoying the confectionary but instead of inspiring me to do better, it almost lead me down a more destructive path of overeating.  My negative thoughts almost became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

From that moment, I tried to change my mindset and think positive thoughts instead.  My reasoning is that if negative thoughts breed negative actions then surely the reverse must be true and positive thoughts should be motivating and inspire change.  For every negative that I had told myself earlier, I tried to come up with a positive to counteract it.

• Except for the Toffee Crisp, I have eaten 100% healthily all week.
• It is the only chocolate bar I’ve eaten (and even craved) in at least 7 days.
• My dinner was really small – only about 300 calories – so eating an extra 230 calories in chocolate isn’t really a big deal.
• I enjoyed it.  It satisfied a craving and so now I don’t feel deprived.

When it’s all said and done, the fact is that one chocolate bar does not have the ability to make you fat.  It was a treat - I ate it; I enjoyed it; I moved on.  It is unrealistic, for me at least, to think that I will never eat certain foods again (chocolate, cookies, cake, pizza, curry) and it is wrong to think that I have to give them up.  I don’t.  I just have to be more moderate in my intake of them and I don’t think that one chocolate bar a week is going to do me any harm in the long run.  It doesn’t make me a failure and it doesn’t make me unhealthy.  It makes me normal and probably more likely to stick with healthy eating in the long term.  I’m glad I ate it because it made me recognise that categorising food isn’t necessarily a good thing – thinking I am eating something ‘bad’ is a trigger for me to just carry on eating.  Hopefully, knowing this will mean that I won’t let it affect me in the future.