Since I wrote my post at the end of November about not following healthy living blogs any more, I have been trying to figure out a way of eating that is going to work for me over the long term. While I acknowledge that blogs can be a great source of inspiration for healthy meal ideas, they are also a hotbed for comparison. This is why, after careful deliberation, I have decided to only read a very select few (about 5). These are ones that I don’t find triggering and who cover topics I am genuinely interested in. I refuse to read any blogs that post all of the food they eat or those that post more than once a day, and if I feel they are starting to negatively influence me I will stop reading them.
Since trimming down the number of blogs I read, I have felt a bit of a void with regards to how I eat; in all honesty I seem to have lost my direction. When I was attempting to be a healthy living blogger I always knew what my objective was: to eat as healthily as I could. These days, I really want to eat more intuitively but I find it confusing. One of the reasons I turned to HLBs in the first place was because I wanted to normalise my eating after being stuck in the restrict/binge cycle for so long but I didn’t want to gain weight doing so. Trying to eat healthily gave my eating a purpose and because I never truly knew when to eat for myself, I just followed the pattern that most HLBs seemed to stick to – breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, and possibly another snack/healthy dessert. I would purposely try and keep all of my meals small to save calories and would eat to a timetable of around every 3 hours, regardless of whether I got hungry sooner. I can honestly say that I never actually felt satisfied eating this way but I simply didn’t have the confidence to explore what amount of food and eating schedule suited me. Basically, I was, and still am, scared to eat without a plan.
For the past few months I have been trying to eat much more intuitively but it is really difficult. There are so many questions I have to constantly ask myself: do I want to eat healthy food? Do I want to eat unhealthy food? Am I hungry? Am I full? Do I want sweet food or savoury? Hot or cold? Spicy or bland? Am I craving anything? The list is endless and, quite frankly, it can be exhausting. It is also very intimidating. I am constantly haunted by the thought that if I truly give myself permission to eat whatever I like, I will lose all control and never eat well again. I convince myself I am on a one-track road to weight gain, and this attitude is neither healthy nor helpful. I just cannot seem to shake the feeling that I am gaining weight (I am not), or am eating in the ‘wrong’ way (whatever that is!). It is frustrating that the more I try to move towards adopting a healthier, more normalised approach to food, the more frequently the old dieting mentality tries to come back. I have found myself on each Sunday for the past two weeks saying ‘it’s fine that I didn’t eat healthily this week, I’ll start again on Monday and get back on track with trying to lose weight’. I have even gone so far as to devise entire food and exercise plans in my mind and set goals about how much weight I can lose by the time I come back to work after the Christmas break. Believe me when I say that this is not a conversation I want to have with myself.
I know I have to really get my head around eating normally. On each occasion that I have told myself to diet on Monday, I have proved to myself that I am not going to give in to these feelings and have never made an attempt to cut calories or change my diet. I will succeed with intuitive eating and whatever that may bring with it. I am slowly coming to realise that what I might really need is a major injection of body confidence and I will be working on this in conjunction with intuitive eating. At the end of the day, weight gain is not the be all and end all of life. I am not comfortable with making my way through life thinking that I have to eat in a particular way to comply with external pressures to be a certain size, or that I should eat according to some socially acceptable schedule. For the first time in many years, I want to find out what works for me - what foods I love, what amount of food is satisfying and how often my body likes to eat. From here on in I give myself permission to eat; food rules no longer exist.
I apologise if this post seems like a regurgitation of many that have come before it and I wish I had something more positive to say but at the moment this is where I am in my journey. My last post on the topic was probably slightly more optimistic than this one but it is hard not to revert back to previous behaviours. What I really need to do is figure out why I have started to think I should abandon intuitive eating and why the diet mentality is coming back. The path ahead is probably long but I know that the sooner I stop trying to get off it, the easier this whole thing will become. I am committed to eating normally and I am committed to learning to accept my body at the weight it was designed to have. Life is simply too short to be miserable.
No comments:
Post a Comment