I was reading something the other day that asked, “What is your greatest fear?” And the thought which immediately occurred to me was, “Dying unloved.” I immediately discounted it as a weird and ridiculous thought but as more questions came thick and fast, the thought stayed with me.
What do you do because you’re fearful, what does your fear create, what proves your fear is misguided, what can you do to overcome it?
It came to me—as I was reading these questions and as answers kept popping unbidden into my head—was that most of us do when we’re fearful of such a thing is an act known as self-fulfilling prophesy. We step back from life, from friends, from family. We create the exact situation of which we’re fearful by pulling away from the ones we love and becoming introspective and overprotective of our emotions. What proves the fear is misguided? The love of family and friends. And what can you do to overcome the fear? Keep the communication channels open. Keep loving the people you love. Stay accessible. Love even more people than you do now. Help other folk. Be there for the ones you care about.
Now I suppose you could say this fear is grounded in possibility. There’s every possibility that I could die unloved. I could live to be 120 and have no friends or family left. A natural disaster could wipe out the world and just leave me in it alone. But the scenarios have to be pretty scary for my inner fear to transpose itself into real life.
So I suppose the fear behind the two-word thought is the uncomfortable feeling that you might not be loved by enough people. Or perhaps that you might not be loved enough by certain people. And that’s not something you can fix by making other people change. All you can do about it is to show more love yourself. That means being more present, more demonstrative, more thoughtful and just … more of everything good and kind and lovely.
Nothing wrong with aiming for that.

On the whole, I’m pretty happy with what I’m eating these days. I suppose you’d call it assisted eating because I am following a plan, but it’s a plan that makes sense and is malleable enough to fit into most occasions and most days.

Over Christmas I decided to have a break from my eating programme and I’m glad I did. It showed me that even a six-month stint of new habits is not enough to truly change deep-seated eating patterns. At first this may seem a bad thing, but actually it’s good, because it points out the weaknesses in the chain. It shows me where I need to take care not to put too much pressure on myself.

After a couple of days (okay, nearly a week) of eating junk, I was pretty much ready to go back to my planned way of eating, but it was scary how hard I found the first two days back on good food. I suppose part of it was the extraordinary amount of sugar I had  allowed into my body over the course of the festive week. The sugar fiend is only a sleeping monster when you don’t feed him!

The thing is, when the fiend is asleep, I can have a little treat now and again without waking the giant. It seems to work best for me when it is something that I plan for, look forward to and allow myself to enjoy wholeheartedly. In the lead-up to the holidays, I managed to do this and safely navigate a wedding, Christmas dinners, parties and afternoon teas. I didn’t go into free fall from having the occasional dessert or sweet biscuit. (Note the singular. One dessert. One sweet biscuit.)  But I had a very firm idea in my mind of what I was going to eat and I stuck to it.

There is a quiet enjoyment in this kind of eating which is not present in the open-slather, I-know-I’ll-regret-this tomorrow kind of consumption. Guilt is not present when I have planned to eat one treat. Clearly, it also doesn’t rouse the monster from his slumber.

It’s kind of like drawing a line in the sand. On this side, I’m safe. The other side has all kinds of sinkholes and if I venture there I’d better be really careful of I’ll end up in quicksand. If I stay on this side of the line and occasionally put a toe on the other side I’ll be okay because all my weight is still over here on safe ground. But if I stomp past the safety line in my hobnailed boots, there’s a great probability that I’m gonna fall into a hole. A big fat, unhealthy hole frequented by sugar fiends and other monsters. A good lesson to take into the new year, I think.