I Has Foodz Issues: Part IV

One interesting thing that I've noticed lately, is that my mind will start thinking in terms of excuses. I'll go into the café at work, and look around at the selection, and all of it will seem pretty well within the bounds of my diet. "Hm," I'll think to myself, "I could have that, or that, or that, or maybe all of it!"

That happened to me today at lunch. My sense of what is and is not a part of my diet is becoming blurred. But, maybe because I keep a spreadsheet with a grade and explanation for each day's eating, I was able to snap back to reality. It's possible that this habit I'm developing, of considering how my eating will affect the day's grade, is becoming sort of a trigger, to wake me up from dangerous food happyland.

So I ended up getting a plate full of some sautéed vegetables, and a couple of different kinds of raw vegetables - all safe, perfect foods.

This is a deviation from my usual habit, which is to go across the street to the salad place, order the same salad as I did the day before, and then eat it in the comfort and safety of one of the kitchens over here.

So I was thinking, "what's really happening here? Is something up? Am I leaving the true path?"

My assessment is this: one of the cornerstones of my diet is the flexibility to do without a meal if appropriate food doesn't present itself; as well as the flexibility to tolerate the healthy foods that are available, even if they're not entirely to my taste.

So, for me, lunch today ended up being a very healthy, yet probably not nutritionally complete, response to what was immediately available. And now I'm committed to that having been my lunch, and to no other food going in my mouth until dinner (except perhaps a tin of sardines, which have also been part of my regular habit).

So, I think I handled the situation the right way, but it's confusing. During lunch, I had the strong sense that somehow I was falling off the wagon. Somehow by deviating from my normal routine, I was in the process of failing. But when I think about what I ate, it just can't be the case. The food today was every bit as nutritionally dense as my normal salad; it just probably wasn't as nutritionally balanced as that salad is.

So my suspicion is that this sense of being in the process of failing, is something the addicted part of my brain is throwing out as an attack, just like when I was quitting cigarettes. It's trying to break my will by convincing me that my will is already broken. No need to stay on the diet, I've already failed, I might as well just eat whatever; and anyway all this food over here is probably perfectly fine for my diet.

It's very contradictory - part of me is saying the unhealthy food in the café is perfectly fine for my diet, and part of me is saying that even by choosing the foods that actually were fine for my diet, it still constituted failure.

So yeah. If I'm right, this is a little inkling of the psychological warfare to come. I need to maintain my hard-line approach regarding what is and is not OK for my diet; once I start to compromise on it, I'll be giving my secret anti-brain exactly what it wants - a way to confuse and disorient me, to trick me into a situation where it can tell me that each successive failure is justified by the previous ones. Or who knows what other nastiness it's got brewing.