Happy Valentine's Day

Day 13 Post-Op


This is going to be a mixed bag of a blog today. Now that I’m back at work I’m finding that I have less time to sit and ‘stew’ and am finding it less necessary to blog daily. So a quick re-cap. I still haven’t weighed myself but I am going to start weighing myself on a Saturday morning now as I’m too rushed in a morning and as any desperate dieter will tell you – there is a certain ‘routine’ to weighing yourself – if you get my drift. I’m into a routine with what I’m eating daily at the moment. I’m sticking to between 1200 – 1000 calories per day and have a schedule of eating either soup or a smoothie every 2 hours. I am sticking to my daily exercise and am now doing an hour a day. I have realised that I have to make walking / exercising a priority and then fit everything else around it. I am making soup every 3rd day which is quite good fun. It’s become a challenge to see how many different vegetables I can pack in and still keep it tasty, lol. (To be fair I think a cardboard box would taste delicious at the moment), I am such a saddo. Did I mention it takes 21 days to break a habit and establish a new routine? Fascinating eh?


Anyway, I wanted to talk a little about the mental and emotional side of over-eating. In the whole time I have been qualified I have never turned my knowledge or skills as a therapist inwardly and examined my own eating behaviours. My level of denial about my problem really prevented me from doing so. I am reading an awful lot at the moment and feel that I want to mention two aspects that have struck a cord with me from the current book I’m reading. It’s an Over-Eaters Anonymous book called, “Why Can’t I Stop Eating? Recognizing, Understanding and Overcoming Food Addiction”. I bought it last week when I had a ‘binge’ on Amazon. Something else that I’m going to have to watch!! It’s a fantastic book, although I don’t really go for the whole 12 Step Approach, it only mentions OA minimally (in fact I was over half way through the book when I actually twigged it was written by an OAer). If you feel you need to examine in a little more depth your over-eating behaviour I’d highly recommend it.

"A Great Book"

The first thing that I want to mention is denial. I don’t think I realised just how much in denial I was in and I thought that my diet/binge diet/binge cycle was quite normal. I have said before that I felt I was a food addict and reading this book simply confirms this. So denial. Well I was in denial on several levels:


Blaming – It was always someone else’s fault. In recent years it was Jack Spratt’s fault because I was in love and content. He is slim and can eat loads, hence we have tonnes of junk for him to eat in the house. The reality? I bought the junk and I ate twice as much of it than he ever does.


Rationalising – I was constantly giving myself the excuse that I ate due to the pressures of work. If only I had a less stressful job then I would be thin. If only I had more time to myself then I would lose weight. I also used to think that I only ate because I was bored. The reality? I ate whether I was bored, stressed, having a happy day, a crap day. I simply ate, ate, ate, ate and ate. Attributing the behaviour to something outside of my control meant I didn’t have to take responsibility for it.


Diversion – If Jack, my mum, dad or brother tried to talk to me about how worried they were about my weight, I’d either flatly refuse to talk about it or I would change the subject. In a nod towards diversion I’d also avoid watching ANY telly that might provoke a conversation on the subject.


Defiance – I always tried to give the impression that my weight didn’t bother me. Especially at work. For all intents and purposes my colleagues thought I was confident and happy. They would never see me overeat and thought I was always a bundle of fun. Little did they realise the depths of my self-loathing and despair – especially before Christmas last year. I would lie in bed and wish that I would never wake up. I always suffered in the privacy of my own home. I think to the point that even Jack, our family and friends would never have guessed just how miserable I was over my eating behaviours and my weight.


Denial, it’s a mighty powerful thing. At work I’ll often talk about my patients and their families being in denial. When the largest amount of denial was coming from me and I couldn’t even see it.



The second thing that I wanted to mention was that there are a lot of theories that food addicts are predisposed to being addicts. There is evidence to suggest that this is both a physiological (i.e. it’s in our genes) and a psychological (i.e. we are influenced by the environments that we grew up in and currently inhabit) predisposition. Now, what I am about to say is NOT about blame. I am who I am. However, I have been thinking about my own family and their own addictive behaviours. I suppose because there is no alcoholism or drug addiction, that I hadn’t really considered that there may be a strong genetic element to my behaviour. When I sat down and thought about it honestly I was blown away. The range of addictions here is amazing. There is a strong contingent of family members with food addictions, whilst on my father’s side both my grandparents loved to gamble. Up until the day he died my granddad would spend about two thirds of his weekly pension on lottery tickets, going as far as bribing the home carers to go and fetch them. My father has an obsessive collecting streak. This is totally out of control and his latest fad has caused numerous financial problems as well as taking over his house. My mom cannot help herself from looking after people. I think this is the nicest addiction to have but, she will put everybody else first before herself, often to the detriment of her own health. I am amazed by my family tree of addictive behaviour. So I am sharing it with you below.

"My Family Tree of Addictive Behaviours"

Finally, after all that well-heavy stuff a little light relief. After agreeing that we wouldn’t make a fuss about Valentine’s Day, I got home at lunchtime today (I’m working tonight), and Jack had made me a beautiful card and had bought me a dozen red roses. Who said romance was dead? I am one lucky rabbit :)

"Aaaaaahhhhh"