avoid the forbidden fruit, or candy, or cookies...

Well, well, well… my wedding ring and my watch are getting looser – or rather my fingers and wrist are getting smaller. And it’s not like I have been eating perfectly, or dieting, or getting a lot of exercise, because I most definitely have not!

First of all, my son missed out on trick-or-treating on Halloween night because he has the flu. And then I caught it. And we have been in bed for the last 5 days. So there has not been much exercising around here.

Secondly, there was the Halloween candy. My kids have candy “preferences”, and I am the lucky recipient of the candy they don’t like: Reese’s peanut butter cups, Reese’s pieces, Oh Henry bars, caramels, etc. And believe me, I have been eating it! By the way, the reason Mitchell had candy, even though he was sick, was because his twin sister generously carried an extra bag and begged neighbours to also fill up his bag! And then there was the candy we had purchased to hand out to the trick-or-treaters. Mike did the shopping and brought home Rockets and Twizzlers, which I like, but I did not eat them – well, not all of them, and certainly not enough of them that we needed to go out and buy more!

And thirdly, there were the chocolate mint Girl Guide cookies (the traditional chocolate and vanilla are in the spring). My daughter is a Brownie and they sell cookies to raise money so that they can go on outings and go to camp in the spring, especially for those girls whose families may not be able cover the expenses. Well, the last two years we have just written a big cheque when it was time to hand in the proceeds of the cookie sales, because they were not sold door-to-door – I had eaten them all! I could easily sit down and eat a whole box of Girl Guide cookies, and the next day eat another, and then another, until the entire carton had been consumed. It’s kind of an expensive habit, at $4 a box, especially when I don’t really like the mint ones! But it’s for a good cause, isn’t it?

This year was different. When the carton came home it sat in our kitchen for a week, unopened. And I was really proud of myself for not opening it. Then I did open it … and had a box. And I was not feeling quite so proud of myself. And then I had another, and was feeling guilty. I didn’t have one every day. But still, when I did, I ate a whole box at one sitting – or rather at one “lying” (i.e. usually lying down reading a book). Then, when I couldn’t stand being mad at myself, I put the carton out in the sun porch so I wouldn’t see it and be tempted. But I still braved the cold of the cement floor in the sun porch to pull out the odd box. It seemed that telling myself I could not have them, and trying to use “will power” to stay away from them, just made them more desirable. You’d think that lesson of the forbidden fruit would have sunk in by now; why Ellyn Satter says restriction leads to dis-inhibition.

So why are my ring and my watch looser? What’s different this year? Well… despite having more candy and cookies than I need, I have been practicing the strategy of saying to myself: “I can have some. I can have as much as I want, whenever I want. It will still be there later, today or tomorrow, if I want some.” This seems to immediately make me feel more relaxed; there is no anticipation of restriction, deprivation, or starvation. No more of the “I might as well finish off this box, because I won’t be havin’ cookies once I start my diet tomorrow,… on Monday, … next week…” You get the idea.

Ellyn Satter says “Normal eating is… leaving some cookies on the plate because you know you can have some again tomorrow, or it is eating more now because they taste so wonderful.” So my approach is as follows. Food is plentiful. Food is something to be enjoyed. Food is something that we share. And food is something for which we are grateful, not guilty. It appears that this small shift in thinking can have a big impact on the girth of my fingers and wrist, and hopefully…, eventually…, on the girth of my waist.