10-12012013
Having a break from The Rules for now.
I've got other shit to deal with as well.
When I returned to work after my
christmas holiday of 10 days I started to pay more attention to how I
eat at my job. I've been working in the same cafe for over a year
now, and what I eat there has varied a lot: a year ago I kept track
of everything I ate during one day to see what I actually ate and how
much and based on that I re-assessed my diet. During the summer I
mainly ate salads. At one point I used to eat a croissant every
morning. At one period I only ate soup for lunch. According to my
contract I am allowed to eat whatever food we have, free of charge –
and the lack of restraints has been both a blessing and a curse. In
the other hand I have had free food every day, which is a welcome
decrease from my budget; in the other I have had free access to
cakes, muffins, pastries, buns, and all other kinds of sweet stuff I
have a huge weak spot for.
I've noticed that at the moment I have
a tendency of eating something sweet every day at work, and I've come
to realize this is no good and compares to that of the habit of
smoking or doing drugs. I know the craving is in the mind and
occasionally I succeed in not falling for the temptation, but it
never takes long for me to break down again, which tells me I'm not
really facing the issue. I've even come to fear that my eating habits
will cause me a disease of some kind – yet the fear is not enough
of a motivator to stop me giving myself treats all the time.
I've noticed that I eat more when
stressed, and then it's more about having something to do with my
hands and mouth and not so much about filling my stomach. It is a
habit that started when I was a child and got bullied at school. In
my adult years there have been periods when I have replaced sweets
with other things to gobble up – more healthy stuff, such as fruit,
seeds and nuts – but as I ended up eating way too much of these
too, this stuff was also no longer so healthy as my body got too much
of one nutrient and lacked another. During the past few months I've
been slowly declining back in to eating sweets when stressed,
probably simply because I have become more stressed, or more busy at
least. I know the stress eating is some kind of an attempt to create
a safe comfortable personal zone where things feel nice and blissful
for a while, because as I get the sugar high I am literally high for
a moment. I have some childhood memories related to this search of
comfort.
So today I had a sort of a wake-up call
as I was reading the labels on our product packaging today and
noticed that one of the muffins we sell and I have eaten once or
twice actually contains 1500 kilocalories a piece. This is shitloads
of energy equal to that of my one day energy need. I also read
through the ingredients lists and realized that these industrially
produced bakery products contain a huge amount of preservatives and
other chemicals one does not have to add to freshly baked stuff. I
realized that I have to stop now and no longer poison myself with
this shit. So I will now go through my relationship to snacking,
treats and sweets.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to crave for sweets.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to crave for something to eat, not because I am
hungry but because I am restless and the eating gives me something to
do.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to crave for food/sweets when I am
stressed/uncomfortable because the enjoyment I get from eating
momentarily overrides the discomfort.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to not realize that after the temporary enjoyment
as physical and mental energy has evaporated, the discomfort I was
originally escaping is still there because the food was not a
solution but a distraction.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself, when and as I crave for sweets/food when I am
stressed, to not stop, breathe and realize that the craving is not in
the physical as an actual need but in the mind as a consequence of a
pattern I have not dealt with.
--
A memory: I was around 9-10 years old
when I started to read the Harry Potter book series. Around this time
I was already bullied/rejected by other kids. I borrowed the first
book from a friend and went home to read it. As I searched for a
comfortable place to read I went into the closet in my room. This
room had been my sister's before me and she had recently moved out.
She had forgotten her secret stash of candy in the closet. Throughout
the years I read all the seven Harry Potter books lying in the closet
among the soft piles of clothes while eating away my sister's old
candy. It was a safe zone of my very own that no one could enter –
not the bullies, not my parents, not my siblings – no one. I lost
myself within the wonderful fantasy world of the books, the soft
comfort of the clothes around me and the constant stimulation from
the explosively tasty candy. I used this as an escape from my every
day life, a stressful and painful experience at the time.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself as a child to escape the problems in my life into
a self-created illusionary safe zone where I felt like I was “safe”
and “comfortable”, because I did not know how to deal with the
issues I was facing.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to link stress with eating – and to link
discomfort with the need to escape discomfort instead of facing the
discomfort - I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself
to program myself into escaping by any means when and as I face
discomfort.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to not realize that when I am stressed and crave
for sweets/food, if I face the cause of the discomfort instead of
escaping it the craving for sweets/food will disappear.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself as a child to rather escape the experience of
being bullied than face and solve the situation.*
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself as a child to rather escape the experience of
being overworked than face the authorities that demanded this work
load of me and try to find a solution with them.*
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself as a child to rather escape the experience of
being annoyed and distressed by my little brother's behavior than
face my own reactions towards him and try and solve the situation.*
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to escape the experience of not having any real
support around me (friends, parents, teachers, siblings) by creating
an illusionary personal safe zone of “happiness” and “comfort”,
be it by entertainment, sensual enjoyment, or actually physically
going away from others.*
* Main stress points of my entire
childhood. Got to go through these with more specificity.
--
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to ignore the fact that too much sweets is not
good for my health with the justification that I can exercise enough
to burn the sugar/fat/energy away, not realizing that even though I'd
manage to burn off all that excess energy I'd still have already
damaged my body by taking in the sweets in the first place at the
expense of eating real food.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to justify falling for a treat by thinking “a
small treat won't do me harm”, not realizing that as I eat these
small treats often enough they will accumulate to cause the exact
same harm as large treats would.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself when snacking to automatically grab a new bite
without noticing as the satisfaction high from the previous bite has
dissipated, this indicating that as I snack my movements are directed
by the mind on autopilot instead of being self-directed where I would
be aware of my movements and choose to move myself.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to consume food without being aware of what I'm
eating, how much I'm eating and why I'm eating.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to space off while snacking because I then go into
a comfortable personal safe zone where things feel blissful for a
moment, not realizing I am then in the mind and not truly here as an
active participant in this reality.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to abuse food as a source of energetic feelgood in
the mind instead of using food as a source of physical nutrition.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to lose all direction of myself as I have given in
to the desire to eat and indulged in the satisfaction of eating,
allowing my mind to take control over me as this is what I have
wanted.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to resist stopping this habit because I do not
want to stop it.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to not want to stop this habit because I'm
attached to the temporary physical energy release I get when I eat
food/sweets.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to enhance this satisfactory energy release by
defining food/sweets as something “bad” that I “shouldn't”
eat, making it forbidden and hard to reach, thus when having given in
to my excuses making the energy all the greater because the suspense
has been greater.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to repeat this pattern of suspense/release over
and over again as I have decided that I will no longer eat sweets but
then have eventually given in, here going in a cycle because I
haven't addressed the actual reasons behind my cravings.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to believe eating to be a solution to my distress
because my mind told me so.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to believe eating to be a solution to my distress
because my mind told me “it will feel good”, mistaking “feelgood”
to mean “solution” because when I felt good I did not stop to
notice the distress.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to believe my mind even though I have known the
risks in eating too much / eating unhealthily.
I commit myself to stop with everything
I eat to be aware of what I put into my body.
When and as I'm about to eat something
without being aware of what I'm eating and why, I stop, I breathe and
realize that I still have a choice to not put it in my mouth, not
chew it and not swallow it. I then assess the food in question and
make a self-aware choice to eat it or to not eat it and I carry
responsibility for this choice and the consequences thereof.
I commit myself to study food to
understand what organisms best support my physical existence.
I commit myself to listen to my body to
tell me what it needs, when it needs it and how much it needs it, as
I have witnessed my body to always know the answers when I actually
face myself in self-honesty.
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