Celebrate Your Progress

February 7, 2009 · Posted in Catherine's Story, Emotional Eating

It’s so easy to focus on our shortcomings and ignore the amazing progress we make on this journey. This is called discounting the positive, something a lot of perfectionists tend to do. Many of us who clutter and emotionally eat definitely have perfectionistic tendencies. I sure do!

It’s like a gift when I have a flash of insight that turns my perception of reality upsidedown. Most of the time, I love those moments of sudden clarity and today I had one of them.

It’s been just over a year since I walked away from diets and eating plans. A year of eating whatever I want. And I’ve still been slowly and steadily burning off the extra fat my body carries. Some people call this intuitive eating; my goal is to eat what I really want when I’m hungry and stop eating when I’m full. It sounds easy, but of course it isn’t.

Learning to eat intuitively is a process and I’ve had lots of ups and downs. I don’t always honor myself by taking the time to think about what I really want to eat and then making sure that I feed myself what I want. I don’t always stop eating when I’m satisfied. And fairly often I still eat when I’m not hungry. I sometimes eat out of boredom, eat when I’m frustrated, eat when I’m fearful or angry or sad.

I know it’s not helpful to beat myself up when I fall short of the ideals of intuitive eating. But of course I feel disappointed and guilty sometimes when I know I have just eaten emotionally instead of out of hunger. Today I was pondering this and that is when the flash of insight struck.

Before I set out the goal of eating when hungry, I ate without any consideration whatsoever of whether I was hungry or not. I ate whenever I had the urge to eat, physical or emotional. (I was able to lose a substantial amount of weight eating whether I was hungry or not because I alternated between a plan that cut carbs and a low-fat, low GI plan. Neither plan restricted portions. However, eventually I reached a plateau at about 260 lbs and could not seem to go lower.)

So back to the insight! Today I realized that while, yes, I do still eat for emotional reasons sometimes, I am always conscious of doing so. I know when I’m eating to satisfy hunger and I know when I’m eating to try to stuff an emotion. And so of course I do far less emotional eating than I have ever done before in my life. I realized that I have a level of consciousness about my emotional eating that I have never, ever had before and that this consciousness has become a truly ingrained habit.

That’s progress! Instead of feeling disappointed that I do sometimes still emotionally eat, I can feel proud that I am so aware of my body’s hunger cues and my urges to eat for emotional reasons.

Can you turn your perceptions around to see if there are any victories hiding behind your disappointments? What are they?

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/furryscalyman/

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