Recognize.
Every day is such a series of little choices and it’s curious how one little choice can start you down a path that gets more and more twisty-turny, more and more familiar and frightening.
These days, I feel like I’m doing really good, feeling strong and centered and cared for. Lately, though, as I’ve been working on increasing my running speed/endurance, I’ve been logging workouts as a way of monitoring my progress. Just a few jotted notes: distance, speed, time.
Then I thought it’d be good to add a little column of keeping track of my fruit and veggie intake, and then before I knew it, it had of course turned into a food journal.
What can I say? I like the orderliness of a list, the illusion of control that comes with knowing numbers.
But it is just an illusion.
I realized what I was doing today when I found myself craving a steak and my husband suggested going out, and one of my first thoughts was, “How do I journal that without knowing measurements/prep/sides?”
Oh, sugarplum, that’s diet thinking.
But I recognized it. And the food/exercise journal? Those pages have been trashed, the pen is back in the drawer, the journal itself is empty of all but clean, white, neatly-lined pages. It hopes to find a new life as a poetry notebook.
And my steak? It was excellent. I had it with a baked sweet potato dusted with cinnamon and some lovely broccoli, and tomorrow is a new day of living without the numbers-net.
It’s more fun that way.
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Cinnamon, really? A regular potato?
Oh, never mind, you said “sweet potato” and I’m just dumb. Everything falls back into place now.
This is of course awesome like everything you write; I was just perplexed by the idea of cinnamon on a potato.
Sweet potatoes are also good cooked with butter and brown sugar…mmmmmm….(Homer Simpsonish drool…(
I loves me some sweet potato with cinnamon!! I can eat that as a dessert sometimes – so yummy!! And good for you for recognizing your diet voice and then quieting it with reason. I am a list maker also, I can’t do anything until I’ve made a list.
Your recognition is so recognisable (couldn’t resist, sorry) for me. You say “I like the orderliness of a list”. So do I.I’m an orderly person, I like recording things, like the feel of control that gives me. (If that’s only an illusion? I feel it’s a nice one.)
So. I had practically the same experience you had, just a couple of days ago. Only for me it was worse: I was slipping back to recording calorie intake as well. Apparently, rather subconsciously I had already been doing that for quite a while in my head and then got back to writing it down. A full-blown dieting journal. So I stopped doing that once I realised, and like you: I threw it away – in my case the entire journal.
But I liked the idea of recording what I ate (I started off doing that without recording the wretched “numbers”), because I could track back why my digestive system was churning up – O! See! Finally I know for sure it’s because of eating too much dairy! – I liked seeing a pattern emerging of when I was hungry and needed to eat something – really handy to know, so I can prepair the amount of food I need to take with me for instance when I’m at work – I liked writing down when I went to bed so I could kind of figure out what was a good period for me to sleep – I now believe I’ve been going to bed too early, often resulting in being awake at the end of the night and then getting up cranky because of that – and in general recording how my body functions helps me to get to know it better.
Is that a bad thing? I don’t think so. It’s just very important to make the distinction between keeping track and “diet thinking”. Besides: I think I can track something for a while, see the patterns, and then perhaps move on to tracking something else, until I have a general idea of how everything in my body works. I just need to be aware to not slip. Well, and when I do, I just have to get up again and move on, and certainly not stick to what can result in disordered behaviour. Maybe this goes for you too? Me, I’ve got so many beautiful notebooks in my bookcase (I’m a silly collector) to slip a number of times, so I have plenty of opportunities to learn… I believe learning and becoming aware are among the most important things towards really being able to accept myself.
Lady, you should be writing suspense novels. I always read posts like these with my heart in my mouth, thinking, “Oh no, is today the day she went back to the darkside?” I keep waiting for the end of the post to be a justification of why this is NOT the same as before, and it is NOT a problem for you to keep up this behavior…
But then it ends with you beating the disordered thinking (at least for today). That’s amazing, on a personal level, and really inspiring (and suspenseful!) to read. You rock.
I really enjoy these posts of you moving on. I usually get caught up in the backsliding and stay there for a while. It’s refreshing to read about someone who takes a step back but doesn’t let that stop her from keep on keepin’ on.
Dutchy, I absolutely agree that there are lots of valid reasons to ‘keep track’ of one’s food intake, particularly when trying to address one’s response to certain foods. It’s completely a useful tool for that. But that’s not why I was using it, and I’d be kidding myself if I said it was anything other than a tool of restriction for me. Basically, I can’t be trusted with a food journal because I misuse it and put my vast knowledge of calories to unholy uses. And good for you for tossing your journal when you realized it wasn’t working for your good.
Now I want a steak and a sweet potato. Yummy.