Bottomless Pit

This last week has been a kind of free for all with the eating. We've had family in town, dinners with friends and a ton of junk food in our house. Sometimes I am amazed by how much I can eat and I never have this feeling of "ok, I'm ready to stop doing this to myself." No matter how full I am and how much I've eaten in a day, I still get excited at the thought of eating something. I'm always wondering what is my next meal, what am I craving? That feeling doesn't ever go away. I've been making the excuse to myself that I'll start at the New Year and that this last week is a last hurrah. I'm going to force myself to start because if I waited around until I wanted to start, I'd probably keep on eating like this. So this is the beginning. The biggest hurdle I have always faced in the past is that I have trouble keeping both my eating and exercising on track. If I'm doing good with eating, I slack off on working out. If I get regular with the exercise, I have trouble monitoring my eating. At times it feels almost like I don't have enough mental energy to stay on top of everything in my life that needs to be done and to be on top of the two hardest things for me to do, eat healthy and exercise regularly. So I've decided to start by eating healthy and getting on top of that. For me this is the hardest thing to do. I tend to eat when I'm happy, sad, bored, frustrated... I tend to mark any kind of significant event with food. So I'm going to work on eating when I'm hungry and not in reaction to some kind of emotional state. Whenever I get into a pattern of eating healthy, I often feel better and more ambitious. When I feel like I'm in the zone, then I'll start doing some light exercise. In the past I have pushed myself with exercising too much and eating too little and that often results in me burning out quickly and not being able to stick to a routine. So my goal this year is to be balanced. In the last post I talked about being nicer to me. This idea of being balanced fits in with this. I won't beat myself up because I'm not losing huge amounts of weight every week. I won't feel unecessarily guilty because I missed a work out. In the past, getting down on myself because of these things often resulted in me giving up and feeling like things were just impossible. I don't know if adopting this type of attitude will make losing weight a slower process but I do think it will make it something more achieveable. We will just have to wait and see I guess...