I have no idea what it was, but my appetite was off the charts today. Nothing seemed to satisfy the beast that decided to take up residence in my belly – I even had to break into my emergency, emergency stash just to get through work…
I’m not going to lie – days like today still throw me off. No matter how far I seem to come in healing my relationship with food, the days where I get hungry basically every hour still make me somewhat anxious; especially since I’m not doing the hardcore workouts that are notorious for amping up the old appetite. I mean, I did go to the lake yesterday…
… but I wasn’t exactly running laps around it. You would have thought I was, though, by the way my stomach was behaving all day. It all started in the morning…
Plain Greek yogurt – blueberries – nectarine – Puffins – Kashi Honey Sunshine – trail mix – almond butter.
Continued into the afternoon…
Sour cream & onion Popchips.
Annie’s Mac&Cheese – hummus – hardboiled egg.
Banana – almonds – Enjoy Life caramel apple chewy bar.
Came home with me after work…
Another banana, this time dipped into chunky almond butter.
And appears to have settled down after dinner…
Pumpkin chili Mexican scramble buried under cottage cheese, avocado, salsa, and Annie’s cheesy bunnies.
… but I’m sure that it’ll be checking in multiple times before the day is done. Talk about mentally exhausting. I can’t stand the way I feel when I’m hungry (I turn into a cranky/anxious crazy person who can’t focus on anything other than food), so I do my best to honor my hunger cues, but that doesn’t mean that all the extra food doesn’t make me uncomfortable sometimes – it does – and I think it’s because I have a hard time believing that I could possibly need more food when I don’t really feel like I’m doing anything that would warrant it.
But I obviously am doing something if my body is telling me that it needs more. Our bodies are smart – they know what they need better than we [read: our minds] do. And more importantly, they’re not influenced by outside sources in the same way that our minds are. Our bodies don’t care about the latest 1200-calorie, low-fat, low-carb, what-have-you diet that’s out there. They don’t care about what other people are or aren’t eating. They only care about getting what they need so that they can operate at the most optimal level.
The problem is that our minds do care. We read the magazines, we watch other people, and we trust them more than we trust ourselves. We begin to tell our body what it needs, ignoring its protests and requests until it throws its [figurative] arms up in the air and doesn’t bother trying to talk to us anymore. There we go; we’ve just screwed ourselves over. We’ve abandoned our best source of information for one that knows nothing about us and is doing nothing but leading us astray. Win? Not really, especially because re-establishing that trusting relationship takes a lot of time and effort.
I gave up on calorie counting and measuring my food quite some time ago; the only tools I use now are my eyes and stomach. Yes, it was terrifying, and yes, I slipped up and went back to old habits on several occasions, but I eventually came to realize that my body wasn’t trying to screw me over and that it was perfectly capable of taking care of itself if I would just hand over the reigns… Now I just have to be sure to remind myself of that on days like today.
. – . – . – .
Do you have days where you feel like a bottomless pit? How do you handle them?
What did you eat/do the day before?