Diet Mentality

I had a fairly lousy weekend. I did my grocery shopping on Saturday morning and came home with four large cookies and a bag of potato chips that I hadn't tried before, among other things. These days, four cookies can last for a month (I cut them into smaller pieces and put them in the freezer), but on Saturday I ate all the cookies and all the chips, and then instead of doing whatever I was going to do, I just got back in bed (and maybe the eating, as often is the case, was a way of giving myself permission to not do what was on my list).

The next day, I saw my taxing friend P. On my way to his house, I got a dreadful bloody nose, and then our time together was horrible and stressful (complete with crying and suicide threats--his, not mine), and on the way home, I had an eating tour of my neighborhood: I walked to the place that has the fantastic peanut butter cookies and got two so I could eat them while I made my way to the burrito place. At the burrito place I got chips, which I don't usually do, so I'd have something to eat while I walked home, where I could eat my burrito.

Then I spent another some hours in bed. Fortunately, I was able to get up Sunday night and do my cooking for the week. I chopped veggies and washed apples and made rice and beans and vegan lemon-poppyseed cake (very tasty) and tuna salad. (Yes, I know--vegans don't eat tuna.) On Monday night, I made a vegan baked pasta roll, and then the house was absolutely full of beautiful, tasty, fresh-cooked food.

As for the weekend's overeating, I figured out (again) that I was turning demand feeding into a diet and was trying, and of course failing, to stay on a diet, in effect. It's proven to be quite tricky for me to nudge myself toward demand feeding without feeling that I'm bad if I eat from MH, even though I know rationally that MH is totally fine. I think the key possibly is in the self-care angle: demand feeding is fantastic self-care; MH may also be self-care, depending on what's going on (or, at least, it may be the best I can do); and certainly being kind to myself no matter what is good self-care. Now I'm treating any thought that I should be doing better with my demand feeding as a BBT and aplogizing and asking "Who says?" and so forth.

But I also realized that if I'd brought home 20 bags of potato chips, I might not have eaten a whole bag (or I still might have). I think part of it is that I already did the thing where you buy 20 bags of potato chips, for years. I really did. I had shopping bags full of bags of potato chips. Part of me is resisting being back there, but if massive stocking up is needed, then so be it. As it happens, the chips weren't that great. But my shopping list for this weekend calls for 10 of one kind of cookie and 10 of the other (usually that's about all the store has), and as they won't fit in the freezer, I'm going to cheerfully let them go stale on the counter (or eat them), and do the same thing every week for a while.