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.