Getting past food police...

August 29, 2011

My IE journey right now is becoming familiar with the principles outlined in the

book IE and working within that framework. I need to keep it simple.

Right now, my internalized food police are my primary area of focus. I've

dieted more than most people on this list have been alive and my food police are

well-armed with both nutrition and diet laws of many stripes, soures and

varieties. The internalized diet rebel is also a member of an official " don't

tell me what to do " gang, so each side is armed to the teeth (as it were). This

is another Bermuda Triangle for me that has sucked so much of my life down the

drain.

Reading these posts and the IE book and working with eating when I'm hungry has

already caused a lot of shifting in my psyche and revelations about what food is

and isn't and has been for me. I think Geneen Roth may be right with, " how you

eat your food is how you live your life " - and that's kinda depressing right now

because the way I've eaten my food has been chaotic and full of half-baked

thinking and dietary illusions.

Tonight on my way home from work I was thinking about dinner and the question of

dessert came up. I never legally allow dessert and not doing so has caused me

to buy, eat some and toss more desserts than I could possibly count. So... I

figured I would try and legalize dessert. After some debate and floundering a

bit, I settled on some mints - the kind in wrappers with chocolate on them - as

chocolate is proving to be a source of internal warfare for me and there's no

cake and very little dairy involved. This wasn't a store that has GF stuff so I

needed something accessible and relatively sane for me.

I'm taking initial steps to develop an internal nurturer for when I am not 100%

perfect - and a neutral dietary advisor to help balance out the old laws still

yelled out by the food police. One thing I realized is that I've silenced these

voices over the years because they are so accusatory and mean that I didn't want

to hear them. Probably even eating " forbidden foods " was another attempt to

shut them up as I think my food police don't like pleasure of any kind,

actually.

Anyways, this is a new leg of the journey for me... finding sanity around food

rules and more importantly, bringing into being voices of calm and reason and

reassurance to work in harmony with my over-educated mind re all things food and

health.

Time for dinner.

Sandarah

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