I'm tired of a behaviour and I'm wondering if it is time to put a lid on it once and for all. Night-time nibbling. Actually, all nibbling, but after dinner nibbling is the part that worries me the most. I've always been a nibbler, and continued doing it all during the time I lost 150 pounds. But I've gained some weight, and I would like to lose 5 pounds, so I've been examining my eating. And I've seen that the eating behaviour that should be the easiest to eliminate is the nibbling. And I think the nibbling must add up, which could take care of those extra pounds.
But it's been damn stubborn to eliminate. It leaves for a day or two, and then it comes back. As it did last night. Fuzz had gone to bed very early because he has a cold, and so I was on my own, and there is that damn attractive leftover ham in the refrigerator. And I shaved off a little slice, and a little slice more, and THEN, I had a few spoonfulls of leftover corn. I finished with a couple of mushrooms. And I felt stupid. What was I thinking? What part of "I'm not going to do this" do I not understand?
Well, I know for one thing that there is a prehensile part of my brain that doesn't do logic. So, it doesn't help to beat myself up over it. If logic alone worked, I wouldn't have been forced to resort to Overeaters Anonymous, to admit that I was helpless in the face of this disease. As a good friend in the rooms once said, "I didn't want to be here when I first came; WHO DOES?!" None of us wanted to have to join this club. I was desperate when I first came. As I learned, the level of desperation was a good thing. It motivated me to give it my all. I weighed in the high 200's, and all indicators were pointing to me heading back up to, and probably beyond, my all time high of somewhere over 300 pounds. I couldn't go three days without a binge, I had hypertension, and was testing blood sugar indicating the appearance of type 2 diabetes.
Now that we're here, though, the alternative we've been given certainly beats the past experience. My life has improved in many, many ways, and I think it's because the food was only a symptom of my larger life being out of whack. I think my legacy from my screwed up family (see my previous posting) had driven me to a point where I couldn't see anything but a dead end. I was lucky. I chose to fight. Many don't, and sink into their addictions. The alcoholism of my father translated into my inability to cope with life without constantly eating. Honestly, though, the more I ate, the less I coped.
So, fast forward to today, and what seems like my relatively more benign problem with "the nibblies" (makes them sound like small gremlins). I read something the other day that reminded me to look back to how far I've come, not at how much further I had to climb. Doing that does make me feel good. Like yesterday. We had a foot of snow fall on Friday, and I'd done a lot of shovelling, so that my arms were quite sore. But I still hadn't shovelled a path back to the composter at the back of the garden. One of those times when I wish we did vermi-composting.
But I tried the technique, and it was satisfying, when I was half-way to the compost, about twenty-five or thirty feet down the yard, to look back at what I had already shovelled. And I could take a moment and enjoy the beauty of the late afternoon sky, and how the fresh snow makes everything look so wonderful. The last half seemed to go much faster.
Ok, so what does this have to do with me and the nibblies? Well, I've come a great distance. My life is pretty damn good. But it's not perfect. I think I've got a lot of underlying fear and anger still simmering below the surface. So, there's some areas I can do some step work processing on, writing about those issues. And if I am really bothered about the eating, and I certainly was last night, I perhaps need to make a commitment to change the behaviour. One alternative is to put nibbling into my definition of abstinence. This behaviour is causing me more grief than I want to live with, so it's something I'm leaning toward. The other option would be to move my evening snack to just being my dessert and then eliminating all eating after that point in the evening. That was suggested by my food buddy this morning. That part I'm resisting. I think the idea of the whole evening without any food is a little frightening. So... I need to think more about this, and it's also time to talk to my sponsor.
No comments:
Post a Comment