One thing I know to be true is that I never regret going to the gym or working out. I regret NOT going, but never regret going. (I mean except when I didn’t plan to wash my hair but the workout got sweatier than anticipated, that happened to me yesterday) Anywho, the same thing happens with food. We never wake up and regret the days we ate healthy or stuck to our diets. Even on vacation, when meals are special and drinks are foreign, even if we refrain from indulging…we never regret it. Yet, we often regret the days we do give into temptation. This is something I’ve known for a very long time. I know I HATE the way I feel when I eat poorly, unplanned and unnecessarily. But in the moment, when were staring at what we think we want and what we think we should eat, we forget about the regret we’ve felt in the past and if we do remember that regret is coming, we justify why we shouldn’t feel the regret this time around.
I have a friend who I text when I binge. She texts me when she does also. Recently her and I met for coffee before work and we were talking about looking at food differently. Unlike me who is a carb-o-holic, her weakness is cheese. She told me how recently she felt really badly after overeating cheese. She said that cheese binge made her realize that she needed to look at food as gift to herself. A gift that she wanted to still be enjoying hours later.
She said, “When I binge on something unhealthy it makes me unproductive and insecure, and I feel the opposite if I eat something good.. So now it becomes a favor to myself to eat better, and it has made the food taste like I’m doing something good for me. CONSCIOUSLY going in the other direction is masochistic.”
The truth is, this is a lot easier said than done. Especially when food has always been looked at to us as love, family, celebration, medicine and pleasure. But, if we change the way we look at things, things can begin to look different.
After that conversation, as the universe would have it, this article popped up on my news feed on Facebook.