Funny how despite this week having not the greatest weigh-in for me, I’m still having a lot of trouble getting things back on track. Maybe my writing on Tuesday sounded a little more motivated than I actually was, but frankly, I think stress eating just had a lot to do with this…
Stress eating has always been a problem for me, especially when I’m facing down some sort of creative struggle because somehow in my mind I convince myself that the snacking helps me to stay on task and actually make whatever deadline I’m working on. It’s almost as if I get into this mindset where all I can think about is getting my column done or finishing a particular project, and at that moment it feels completely justified to shun whatever other strides I’ve made in weight loss that week just for the sake of pushing something else forward.
It would kind of make sense to me that it had something to do with being overloaded and only being able to handle so much at one time, sort of like a mini-breakdown … like my brain just can’t worry about losing weight and being creative on a tight schedule at the same time, so it makes me choose and thus I convince myself that eating a package of Pop-Tarts when they’re clearly outside of my calorie limit for the day will somehow help to carry me over that creative finish line. 😳
The sad thing is, sometimes after giving in I’ll emerge a few hours later thankfully victorious, but I’m not gonna lie and say that there have certainly also been times where I threw my diet out the window for an evening and by the end of it all I had to show were some empty candy wrappers and the same three half-finished paragraphs as when I first started!
I’m not really sure what the answer is at this point, except maybe a little hope that more diligence with diet & exercise AND not allowing myself to fall behind enough to get creatively panicked like that might together help to prevent me from having to face the food vs. art conundrum head-on to begin with.
I’ve said it before – sometimes I wish that I could just ignore everything else and simply focus on nothing but weight loss until I was done once and for all, but aside from the people who go on The Biggest Loser and all of those other TV shows, that’s simply not reality for the rest of us. We have to learn to balance life and all of its stresses with this seemingly impossible goal of becoming thin and healthy, and it’s really hard, but nobody ever said that life would be easy.