Food is the red herring

Regardless of how much I eat or don’t eat, the worry and stress doesn’t go away. Food can make the stress worse, because when I eat during a state of stress, I get stressed out about how my eating sometimes only makes me feel worse.

Work stress. Body image stress. Relationship stress. Nothing seems to be in control, and it bothers me. Where is the peace and strength I had in the honeymoon phase? It disappeared as I realized I had lost almost no weight as far as I can tell. The strength came from the belief that the process was working. Now my subconscious says it wasn’t working. The fact remains I chose to go here. I chose to pursue more steady weight loss, and bought a scale to enable data collection. I choose to eat less, trying to reach a steady weight loss rate. Those choices have consequences.

First, the scale makes it easy to judge myself on the basis of noise, not real data. However, the real data shows that there is unlikely to have been any significant weight loss since June 30.  So the judgement of no loss is valid, even if the judgement of failure is not valid.

Second, the eating less leads to the irrational belief that any eating less will result in measurable weight loss. it also exposes me to more raw emotions. When I eat to full as opposed to satisfaction, I cause physical experiences that are similar, but not as strong, to the food as valium effect. Occasionally eating to satisfaction doesn’t give this effect as strongly.

So what’s the problem? Eating a little less shouldn’t cause BBTs. I choose to feel bad, but why? If I choose to eat less, it’s simply less food intake. My body doesn’t change. My relationships don’t change.  It must be that something else is either changed or is more noticeable when I eat less. There’s plenty of reason for my worry and stress that is absolutely unattached to food. Particularly my work situation and my sofa situation. Neither of these is where I want them to be, and the same is true for my eating habits and my body shape.  Maybe it’s the combination of: I’m changing my body by changing my eating habits, but when work and sofa stress push their way into the equation, it becomes overwhelming.

What can I do about overwhelming feelings? Chunk them.  Here’s what I now to be true:

• Food isn’t going to change my work situation. It sucks a little, and is full of sticky parts, but eating cake or whatever won’t change that one iota. Actually, nothing much will change my work situation. I simply have to get through the next week of change, and keep on the straight and narrow with the process improvement.  I can investigate the possibilities of doing PI differently.
• My sofa situation is getting better slowly, and this is the one area in which I can regulate my effort, and give myself some breathing room. It definitely went better when I didn’t have to think about my work situation or the weight loss situation.
• I’m moving steadily closer to ignoring the scale. Today’s data was faster than ever before and I had no interest in staring uselessly at the charts. I will stay on track with collection, take a break during my trip, and finish my 100 data points.
• My eating habits are just fine. Wait for hunger, eat whatever I want, stay between satiety and full. Enjoy next week. Keep experimenting with the veggie portions.
• Keep journaling. This provides more relief than anything.
• Everyone has these feelings. I am still learning to deal with them. My inexperience at dealing with these feelings is causing the stress, not any single factual element.

This is the first relief I’ve felt on these issues in a couple of days. It feels good. I feel more in control of my responses.

Control. I have control over only 2 things: my choices and my response to the consequences thereof. I believe the BBTs come from too much to worry about. It’s clear to me now that my choice of getting off the sofa is too much at the moment, since I can do little about the work situation. The scale situation is better, and will continue so. By letting the lower priorities be what they will be (my sofa, eating and scale situations), I have bandwidth to focus on work stress.