Empowerment

This whole calorie counting thing is really empowering. Everyone who has unresolved food issues, if they haven't tried it, should do it (non-judgmentally) for a bit. I know the food journal thing is annoying as hell to some - I hated the idea of doing in high school. Actually, I didn't hate the idea, I hated the reality. Because you know what happened: I didn't want to go to the trouble of writing stuff down, so I hardly ate anything, and so I got hungry and cranky and didn't get any useful information about my eating habits because I wasn't following my usual eating habits.

Somehow that has changed. Maybe it's that I have my journal in a Google Doc, making it accessible, or that I eat in a more regular fashion than I did back then. At any rate, I feel like I have so much more understanding and control over my diet now. I won't go into details about my childhood since I can't remember it terribly objectively, but suffice it to say I developed a deprivation complex of sorts. (Note: I think my inappropriate portions were unrelated to this.) And I think I am not stepping out of my objectivity to say that my "forbidden fruits" shared two characteristics: 1) they were eaten in my family less often than I'd have liked and talked about in such a way as to mark them as only appropriate in such rarity, and 2) when we did have them, they were accompanied by "compensation talk" of the sort that just makes it no fun. I imagine this is similar to the guilt-talk many dieters tell themselves when they indulge. It would be the "oh we'll have to have a big salad for dinner because of this", it would be the exploration of how "unhealthy" it was, even while we were eating it... My parents are a little more lax now in their actions, and say they indulge often enough that how can food issues be justified for my sister? But you can't enjoy your indulgences when there's always a soundtrack of how you have to compensate for them.

And so, in high school, with my babysitting money, I would buy chocolate bars. I would eat a whole chocolate bar at once, y'know, one of those 3.5 oz bars. I didn't buy them all the time for a long period, but some weeks I might have eaten three of them. I ate them at school on my breaks, away from compensation talk. Of course, eating nearly a pound of milk chocolate a week is not the best nutritional practice. But as far as I'm concerned now, my parents were wrong too.

Now, I have my general idea of what a healthy diet is, and I have my primary rule that my daily calories must come in under a certain amount. And you know what I realized? There's no reason I can't eat chocolate every day if I want to, as long as I eat a small amount and fit it into my overall daily plan. I don't have to eat it only on rare occasions, nor do I feel compelled to chomp whole chocolate bars, in the back of my mind knowing I'm doing myself in. And so for a few weeks this summer, I practically celebrated the fact. I ate about 100 calories of chocolate every day for about two weeks and I really enjoyed it. Then I didn't want to spend the money on chocolate next time I was at the grocery store, so I stopped. I didn't miss it that much. It hasn't been a big deal. I thought of all this because I ate chocolate again today, maybe a month or six weeks since the last time. It was a 1.2 oz 70% cocoa dark Lindt bar that weighed in at 170 calories and it was delicious.