Breaking Bad

The process of being healthier meant breaking a LOT of bad habits.  Breaking the fast food habit.  Breaking the skipping meals habit. Breaking the eat-all-the-food-then-starve-myself habit.

So, when I had my bit of a crack up earlier in the year, some bad habits slid right back in.  I also dropped a few good habits, like every day exercise, but those came back pretty quickly.  I mean, I was whiny and weepy and resentful for a few days getting back into the groove, but moved along eventually. 

The bad habits are stubborn squatters.

I am a HUGE fan of refined sugar, especially chocolate.  One very bad habit I had dropped about four years ago was curling up in bed with a book and candy, and mindlessly eating candy while reading in bed.  When I moved to Flagstaff I decided that habit needed to go, and so stopped it, sort of.  Never curled up in bed, but sometimes on the couch.  Still as habits go, yay me.

One day as I found myself curled up in bed (having eschewed leaving the bed pretty much the whole day) with my iPad and a large bag of peanut M&Ms, it hit me that this habit that had been gone for YEARS had pushed its way back in.  Irritating, I tell you!

So my struggle, every single night, is the craving for sweets.  I do not keep them in the house (I'm not a purist, I have a stash at work, but do not have time at work to go really crazy on the chocolate. Plus, my assistant eats crazy healthy and would feel she wasn't doing enough to boost my mood if I turn to chocolate to feel better.  So we'd both feel bad.) but the craving is still there.  If I had anything in the house it would be eaten in minutes.

I can eat anything I want to and still lose weight.  It's all about quantity and timing, really.  The more refined sugar you eat, the more you want.  Eating it by itself, without a protein buffer, ensures that your blood sugar will spike and you will get sleepy and want more.  Eating it mindlessly means that I will eat waaaay too much, and frankly, feel really awful later -both physically and emotionally.

So, it feels like back to the drawing board, and it may be that this will always be my Achilles' heel -this occasional overwhelming consuming urge that all the chocolate in the world cannot alleviate, but CAN narcotize. 

Still, I like to dream of a day that whatever vacuum that urge is trying to fill is figured out and satisfied with whatever it really needs.

Probably isn't chocolate.