Week five

Well here we are in week five and I'm finding this healthy eating lark the easiest of all the diet and get fit schemes I've done. Don't get me wrong, the junk food cravings are still there, the need to comfort eat has not gone away, but the cravings haven't manifested into obsession like they normally do when I am dieting.

I don't want to sound like I am bashing diet plans, some are very well constructed and work well for people, I love Slimming World eating plans and did well on them, but I found I slipped back into my old eating habits and piled on the weight again, so this time round I'm trying to find a sensible approach to food that I can live with for the rest of my life. I need to find a way to live with a food addiction, or whatever is wrong inside my head. This time I am learning what foods I can eat healthily and learning to listen to my body and how it responds to the food I eat.

So this last week I got another bad carbohydrate craving, but I am happy that a couple of slices of wholemeal toast and peanut butter knocked them out pretty quickly. Usually food cravings for me, turn into an all consuming obsession as I eat mindlessly through piles of refined sugar and carbohydrates trying to satisfy an unfulfillable need. It is hard to explain, but I need to eat, I imagine this is how alcoholics feel when needing to drink. You know it is bad for you but it doesn't matter, you just feel better whilst eating, even to the point of feeling ill.

This week I had chocolate for the first time in five weeks. I thought that seeing as I have now been off the junk completely for over a month, I would try to see if I could introduce chocolate into my diet without it resulting in the total breakdown of the plan. I bought 3 mini packs of Cadbury's buttons, so that if the worst happened, and I scarfed the lot, I couldn't do too much damage. That afternoon I was working at my desk and decided to crack open the buttons. My taste buds were all a quiver at the prospect of chocolate, but surprisingly the taste of that first button wasn't as satisfying as I anticipated. I don't know if my taste has changed in the last few weeks, but the chocolate didn't give me the usual pleasure hit that it used to. The flavour and texture was nice, but a small bag that would have lasted me all but a few minutes, now sat half eaten on my desk when I went to bed.

Next weeks experiment, I plan to face my nemesis, the Biscuit.