Nervous!

I have just emailed my application for Chocolate Fairy training.
Oh my goodness!
I am so excited and so nervous.
My fingers are well and truly crossed :O)

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In other news - I've had an ok weekend. I've finished reading Geneen Roth's Breaking Free from Emotional Eating and I am so glad I bought it. She touches on a few areas that I hadn't even considered towards the end of the book. I recommend it to anybody.

I am now reading "Fat, So?" by Susannah Jowitt which is subtitled "For anyone who's ever wondered why they just can't managed to eat less." I'm only a few pages in but it seems like it's going to be a good light-hearted read, full of laughs.

Today I am not hungry at all but have eaten a quarter of jam sandwich and one and a half digestive biscuits. I am really craving vegetables at the moment but I am all out until the Sainsbury's van arrives between 5-6pm.

Janey on the Minimins forum has quoted part of my blog and told me that it helped her to discover that intuitive eating isn't about eating junk because you are allowed to, but that it is about eating whatever you want because you are allowed to - be that a chocolate bar, an orange or some avocado houmous on a rice cake!

Thoughts on IE

I actually posted this on Minimins but I wanted to keep it for my own reference.

Intuitive eating is not about eating piles of junk. It is about listening to your body, listening to your intuition and listening to what it tells you about when you are hungry and what it wants you to feed it.
Intuitive eating is also known as normal eating. It is about just eating normally, without diets giving us rules, without listening to compulsions formed by emotional problems, without punishing it by eating too much or for the wrong reasons, without depriving it of foods that bring us pleasure simply because Dr. X says it is "bad" for us. If a food is wrong for your body, your body lets you know.

If your body says "please feed me healthy foods" then to feed it healthy foods would be eating intuitively. The task that says to bring lots of chocolate into your house is not about eating lots of chocolate because you have it, it's about normalising chocolate, removing the word "bad" or "fattening" from it, because it isn't bad or naughty, it's just a food.

Good quality chocolate has some great health benefits, and eaten in an amount that is appropriate to our own bodies, therefore a personal amount our body accepts it. Bad quality chocolate has little health benefits, if any at all, therefore our body will only accept small amounts or even nothing before it starts to let you know in varying degrees that it doesn't appreciate being filled with poor quality foods.

Allowing all foods into your diet isn't about eating all foods, it's about being allowed to eat all foods but you making the call on whether you want to eat them or not. It's about you holding the responsibility, not giving it to your Weight Watchers leader or similar. You make the call. It's your body, your food, your decision.

The Beyond Chocolate approach also includes being kind to yourself. This is a major piece of the puzzle for me. If I berate myself for eating lots of chocolate, I feel down and I end up eating again because I have internalised societies morals on eating.

We can't be moral about eating and eat intuitively. It doesn't really go hand in hand. So whilst I said it isn't about eating lots of chocolate, it is also not about NOT eating lots of chocolate. It's about listening to your body, listening to your mind and making the judgement about what you really want. It's also about overriding your body and saying "No, I want chocolate and I know it is going to make me feel rubbish in a few minutes/hours, but right now I want to eat it and I am prepared to live with the consequences" if that is what you want to do.

It is not easy to move from dieting to intuitive eating, especially when we are bombarded by dieting messages of morality from every source of the media.

Also, the Beyond Chocolate method encorporates moving your body in a way that works for you, and not focusing on the weight loss benefits but focusing on the pleasure that it can bring when you allow yourself to enjoy it, the way we enjoyed it as children when we ran in parks, played kerby or football or kiss-chase.

The other things that I have learned from BC are that it is ok to be sad or angry and that I don't have to hide those feelings. It's also ok for me to get it wrong (and by wrong, I mean eating in a way that is ignoring any intuition but eating compulsively instead - it is wrong for me, it isn't necessarily wrong for everyone) sometimes, I don't have to do it all, and when I do get it wrong I don't have to jack it all in. I have also learned that I have the chance to take responsibility for myself and that I don't have to do things the way everyone else does and I don't have to answer to anybody, and certainly not people who criticise the way I eat or how I look.

That is what intuitive eating is about for me.

Eating what I want...

I've had a bit of a revelation with intuitive eating lately.

I had taken IE as to mean I should include "naughty" foods into my life and eat them regularly. But now I see that it isn't that at all. Now that the "naughty" foods are part of my everyday life, they are just everyday things, which means I am equally as satisfied by an orange. If I want chocolate, I have chocolate, but if I want an orange, I don't eat chocolate because its "naughty" and therefore fun, I eat an orange, because that is what I want.

I find this tuning in thing quite hard. Tuning in to my hunger is hard enough because my signal seems really quite weak. I seem to be neutral most of the time and then very suddenly reach ravenous. But the next step for me is tuning in to what the food I want is. My mind is often shouting "chocolate! cookies! cream!" when my body says "I'll just take an orange, thanks". I like eating vegetables, lot of them, and fruit. It sits better in my stomach than chocolate does, so I am gradually starting to naturally gravitate towards them.

I like getting the hang of this. Now I want to learn how to be kind to myself when my natural reaction is to shout "No, greedy pig, if you eat that you'll be a real fatty!". I'm still reading Geneen Roth's "Breaking Free from Emotional Eating" and I'm picking up more and more tips.

I'm so glad I chose this path. It's blooming hard work but for once I understand the meaning of delayed gratification :)

Feeling better now

I think I was more tired than I realised yesterday. Thankfully I had the support of the girls on the Beyond Chocolate forum to come to my rescue and point out what I was too fretful to see. I've slept and rested a lot of the day today, I had a bath about an hour ago and I'm feeling much better now.

My books from Amazon arrived - one box yesterday and one box today so I now have six books to keep me busy and a copy of Beyond Chocolate to pass on to my mum. I've read about a third of "When You Eat At The Refrigerator..." and I'm about a third into "Breaking Free from Emotional Eating" as well. They are both Geneen Roth books. The "When You Eat.." one is great. It's set out into fifty small sections of ways to help you get feeling better when you are being down on yourself. "Breaking Free..." is similar to Beyond Chocolate but a little wordier and obviously more American. It has a few new suggestions in it which I am glad I have been able to add to my "tool-belt" but I'm definitely a Beyond Chocolate girl :oD

One thing I have noticed over the last couple of days is how much it affects me when someone is too busy to give me support. I also depend on people to notice when I am down, rather than just telling them. I suppose I always think that if someone loves me they should be aware of me to notice that I am down. I am gradually getting more and more used to asking for help. It does seem easier to ask for help from people that I don't know well than from people that I do.

I had a bit of an odd meal today. First a bowl of organic carrot batons, boiled and then with a teaspoon of butter stirred in. This was absolutely delicious. It had a kind of nutty flavour to it as well. I'm not sure if that was because I was actually paying attention or whether it was because they were organic but they were brilliant. I then had three squares of chocolate (served myself four but felt indifferent about the last square so I put it back in the cupboard) and lastly a slice of bread with paté on it followed by one grape. I felt satisfied but not full and felt OK to stop eating.

I think I need to be kinder to myself when I am having a hard time. I think I was overanalysing and thinking that if I started binging last night then I never would have stopped. Now I'm feeling better about things, I can see that it was ok to want chocolate last night, and I can have chocolate when I actually want to sleep, but that a sleep will do me better. It's ok for me to have both, and it's ok for me to choose just one of them.

Gosh this is never what I had imagined when I first heard of BC. I am so glad that everything is coming out now though. I have repressed so many feelings, it (eventually) feels good once it is all out!

Rubbish

Rubbish day.
I am mostly frustrated that I had been doing so well over the last week or so, but today feels like a big release of frustration and resentment and like I just want to lash out.
I don't really have much of an idea why. I'm sure it can't possibly still be about the incident with my husband's dinner on Monday night. I have had a tiring day, walking to pre-school and then going to fetch my car from Ben's workplace as I couldn't face walking there and back again and then Ben not coming home till 8.30pm this evening. Maybe I'm just tired.

I'm struggling to actually feel what it is I am feeling because I am so used to just ignoring it and making myself feel good (and then worse) by eating nice things. I am struggling to notice the difference between hungry and not hungry and even when I eat my hunger level doesn't seem to move. I keep zoning out whilst eating, probably because I am eating in front of the television, all the while telling myself I'm "doing it all wrong" and "need to do it properly".

I just want the indecision in my head to shut the hell up and just leave me be for a while.

So I gave in and ate chocolate and climbed in bed and typed this.

Now I can feel I'm repressing something, and while I don't know what it is, I can feel I need to let it out by crying. Why am I berating myself again and telling myself not to be so effing immature?

Rambling

Today has been pretty odd. I have felt like picking all day long, and have been doing that occasionally throughout the day. In the last week or so I have been able to take it or leave it. I think it's stemming over from last night to be honest, I guess rejection is another thing I've been afraid of.
Of course, my husband didn't reject me, just the dinner I had cooked but if there is one thing I have learned since starting my blog it's that there is often more to an emotion that meets the eye. I guess nobody takes rejection well, but I know it's something that has always stood out for me. I'm not really very good at just picking myself up, dusting myself down and starting again. I tend to see rejection as a rejection of my whole self rather than just one aspect, and then start believing that I must be worthless.
I have tried to use this occasion to be my own guru, but it's just not coming. It's like I know the truth but I'm struggling to believe it if that makes sense. Still, must not berate myself, must not berate myself, must not... Why is it so hard to follow your own advice?

It's tipping it down with rain here and there is little more frustrating than being stuck inside with a bored three year old boy, so I've decided to give in to his insistance to have his new umbrella up inside the house, laid out a blanket and put on a mini picnic for him and my little 9 month old. Nothing fancy, just a few cubes of ham and cheese, some sticks of cucumber and halved strawberries, grapes and bananas. It's kept them busy for 45 minutes so far but I suspect the novelty will wear off shortly.

I'm still struggling with my postnatal depression getting in the way of "just getting on with things". I'm just frustrated with it all now. I just want to get on and be mum instead of feeling like crawling under my duvet all the time.

Ben should be home soon, perhaps I will crawl into bed then.

Zzzzz.

Worrying

Hmm. I was hungry. I cooked my dinner - salmon with mashed potato and steamed vegetables, something I love, and dished it up. Then my husband arrived home and said he wasn't hungry. I felt upset by this, because I had been working hard to make sure everywhere was nice when he came home, the children were fed and bathed, I even had put on a non-baby-stained top. Oh, the glamourous life of a housewife!

So I shoved his dinner back in the oven with foil on top and sat down to mine, alone. I must have completely zoned out because when I tuned in, I felt stuffed and yet I felt I was still hungry, as I hadn't actually eaten anything. I let my dinner go down a bit and had two chocolate yoghurts (which I made sure I kept tuned in for), which seem to have done the trick. I am not food hungry anymore, but I still feel so sad.

Apart from feeling rejected and disappointed that my efforts came to nothing, I can't think of why I reacted the way I did. I feel like there is more to it than just being annoyed at my husband.

I am sad that his rejection resulted in me zoning out, especially as I have been doing so well recently. I wonder if the tuning out was what made me feel like I needed the chocolate yoghurts. The salmon was a little bland actually. Maybe what I needed was something with a lot of flavour.

I feel better for realising I felt rubbish and coming and posting here instead of sitting and feeling low. I think I am tired too. And a bit bored too. And I guess I'm a bit lonely as well.

I think I might go and curl up in bed with my Beyond Chocolate book as soon as the sheets are dry.