Eating Whatever I Want + Weighing In

You would think that following my doctor’s dietary advice would be easy. After all, there’s no weighing, measuring, calorie counting or special foods-just eat as much as I want of whatever I feel like, whenever I’m hungry. Over the past month I’ve come to realise it’s not as easy as it sounds.
Knowing when I’m hungry has proved to be a real challenge. As has knowing when I’ve had enough. The only aspect of the plan that I’ve not had a lot of difficulty with is eating whatever I feel like-though because this is the real world that often translates to whatever appeals to me most out of what’s available in the cupboard. To be fair, I don’t keep anything in the cupboards that I wouldn’t be delighted to eat at some point, so I’m hardly denying myself with this limitation.
I surprised myself, not only with how easy I found it to follow my fancies and guiltlessly eat ‘special occasion food’ whenever, but also with my lack of desire for junk.
One of my main worries had been that given total food freedom I would eat my own body weight in chocolate pudding (or any of a hundred other fat-sugar-salt combinations that I have previously eschewed). When I raised this with my doctor he told me that maybe I would but it wasn’t something I should worry about. He suggested that after so many years of ‘deprivation’ I may very well indulge in an orgy of calories hitherto unknown and that is an important part of the process. My subconscious had to learn that there were no boundaries, if I wanted chocolate pudding I could have some, that there was no need to binge, I could always have more later if I wanted to. Eventually, he told me, my body would get tired of rubbish and I would start to want better quality food.
Needless to say, I didn’t believe him. I didn’t believe I would ever fancy the healthier, lower calorie option over the fat-laden nutritionally dubious option. Nor did I trust myself enough not to go on an endless life-long binge, conning myself with the idea that I had my doctor’s blessing to do so. This was the main reason I didn’t take his advice when he initially gave it to me. I had visions of myself laying on the beach four times my current size while the Greenpeace people tried to roll me back into the ocean.
What I’ve learned over the last month is that if I do really think about what it is I’d like to eat I end up having a fairly balanced diet. Sure sometimes it’s all about the chocolate pudding but other times I really do fancy yoghurt.
It did take a couple of weeks to come around to the idea that eating the chocolate pudding for lunch was okay. Years of sensible eating and unconsciously weighing up the nutritional qualities of different foods was not an easy habit to break. Then one morning the penny dropped. It was ‘sensible’ eating that had kept me fat all these years. I haven’t looked back.
When I weighed in this morning I was pleased to note that I hadn’t gained weight. Neither had I lost any. I am at exactly the same weight as I was at the beginning of the month. And given that this month included Easter, when I ate an entire Terry’s Chocolate Orange, and more take away/junk food than the previous six months combined, that’s not a bad result.
I still want to lose the excess kilos I’m carrying around and I feel confident that my new relationship with food will eventually see that happen.-Lynn