What now?

I mustered up the courage to weigh myself and measure myself after a not so good past couple of weeks.  Measurements were okay — my waist measurements are up about an inch but everything else is the same.  My weight, on the other hand is not the same.  I saw a number I have never seen before.  To my credit, I did not start crying or calling myself Shamu.  It’s a very scary number to see.

I don’t know what to do.

All week I’ve felt like I’m doing all this wrong and that I’m out of control and just eating to eat and that now I’m going to gain more weight.  I know I had PMS and all that this week, but it’s very scary how much and how easily I eat.

I’ve also been battling thoughts about wanting to go back to Weight Watchers or go back to a diet.  I know I can’t, that I shouldn’t.  I know that the minute I start Weight Watchers, I will feel deprived or that something will come up to throw me off and that I’ll fail again.  Same thing with counting calories.   But it’s very unsettling to not be dieting in some fashion. I’ve been likening it to having training wheels on a bike.  I’ve been dieting on and off for about 14-15 years so it’s always been there in the backgroung – if I wandered away for a bit, I knew I could go back to something.  Throwing it all away and purposefully NOT dieting is feeling like trying to learn to ride a bike without the training wheels, I’m faltering and all over the place and don’t have something to catch me when I fall.

Then the other part of me keeps thinking that I always have an excuse for not following through with something.  Something is always going to come up that I didn’t plan for.  I can’t plan a perfect weight watcher week and expect nothing to come up.  That’ s not realistic.  That’s living in a diet bubble.  I have this all or nothing mentality with dieting and I feel like it’s seeping into the intuitive eating.  I feel like I’m not doing it perfectly and so since I’m not dieting anyway, I might as well just eat what I want so I don’t feel deprived.

But now I’m gaining weight and it’s scaring me. I don’t like losing control, not having some kind of control.   I can’t do abstract, I’m very linear.

I feel like I’ve been indulging myself long enough and that now I need to focus on eating healthier foods.  I threw away 2 bags of potato chips the other night because I’d been mindlessly chowing down on them and I didn’t want them triggering me the next day.  But isn’t that running against what intuitive eating says? I’m supposed to be legalizing foods so that eventually they aren’t a trigger and that I won’t mindlessly plough through a bag.  I’ve been buying fruits because they look so colorful and healthy, but they sit uneaten while I head for the cookies, chocolate, and chips.

I’ve been ignoring my body and eating away until my stomach is hurting — I hate the feeling and yet I continue to do it anyway.

Part of me wonders if it was smart of me to try to take this on during tax season, knowing it’s a a stressful time for me and that in times of stress I eat.  Should I have waited until afterwards?  Do I need some kind of structure (i.e. a diet) during this time just so I maintain some modicum of control?  But don’t I need to deal with the fact that I handle stress by eating?  So then maybe it does make sense that I’m doing this now?  Because I can tell you even if I was dieting, those Cadbury Mini-Eggs would still be calling my name, I’d still be participating in our Wednesday socials at work and I’d be hating myself for going off my diet and saying to hell with it and eating a ton anyway.

I just feel like I can’t win right now.

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