I always knew I was an emotional eater. Bad day? Binge. Good day? Go out to (over) eat to celebrate! Negative emotions always exacerbate(d) the binge, but food and stress/comfort have always been a thing.
Especially carbs. No one has ever been able to comfort me as well as a bowl of pasta could.
Today wasn’t utterly awful, but I did get some news that was a huge setback towards feeling (finally) settled in the city. As I told a family member, this level of rejection/pain is on par with getting rejected from my #1 graduate school choice in 2012.
So, when I received the news earlier this afternoon my mind immediately went to food mode. What can I binge on? What’s within reach? Can I eat enough pizza to put the delivery driver’s kid through college?
But I didn’t. I did reach for food, but it was grapes. Seriously. Fucking grapes. And you know what? That was enough. It didn’t comfort me the way that I had accepted pasta could, but as a therapist once told me, “you can live with feeling uncomfortable, can’t you? It’s not the kind of pain that will kill you.” He was right. I lived - obviously.
Even though I still ate, I didn’t eat off the program, I didn’t throw my hands up and say “fuck it!” and eat ALL THE THINGS/CARBS. No. I ate MOST OF THE GRAPES.
Right now I’ve got a Whole30 approved zucchini lasagna cooking in the oven and am looking forward to getting all sorts of creative with the cooking this weekend while I have a full size kitchen.
Despite my mood / events that happened this afternoon, today was a good day. No real cravings (even after a dream I had about eating half of a cinnamon poptart), and my energy was significantly higher in the afternoon, when typically it tends to steadily drop around 2PM.
Breakfast - coffee with coconut milk, a banana, 3/4ths of a pear
Lunch - (2) grilled chicken breasts, broccoli, snow peas
Snack - green & red grapes
Dinner - zucchini lasagna, salmon