I am hearing an echo in here....

[Pony]

Where is everyone?? It's been fairly quiet in here the last few days. So here I am left to talk to myself. Hmmm

Eating habits. In all our talk about losing weight and making better food choices, there has to be a change in our eating habits. I don't just mean about how much and what kind or when we eat. I mean how do we go about our meal time?? Is it on the run? How do we prepare our food and what do we do while we are preparing it? Where is our focus during our eating? Just some of the things that maybe we can discuss, that just may have an impact on our unhealthy or healthy eating habits. What have you noticed that has been become a healtier habit from when you began your journey?


Me: I am a snacker. I grew up with having three proper meals a day and maybe a snack when I got home from school, which was mostly likely fruit or celery/carrots. My mom was always watching her weight....she was on "Weight Watcher's" for most of my life, so I grew up knowing what the proper foods were and how much was allowed. I was still a heavy kid.....all of us were. Eventhou we knew what and how much, we still had bad habits that never changed.

I know that one of my biggest, which I learned from my mother, is to taste eveything that I was cooking. I mean, really, I had to know if it was good or not. And then I would sit down to eat the meal. In reality, all that tasting probably was the meal. Has anyone else been guilty of that. I am still guilty of that today. Although I am trying to change it, I still catch myself doing it...just from habit.

Another really bad habit, especially for mothers, is to eat what their children left behind, not really something I have done~ but have seen other mothers do it, and/or eating what has been leftover instead of putting it away for the next day. Now that one I have done. Maybe there was one piece of chicken left in the pan....instead of putting it away for a lunch, it became the after dinner snack. Very bad !!

Ok, how about you all?

[liveweyerd]

hi, I don't post in here very often. But, I, too, am trying to eat healthier.

I am in the baby step of learning how to listen WHEN my body tells me it is hungry. THAT is WHEN I should eat.

didn't want it to be so lonely LOL

live

[BigSis]

My "thing" is eating out of boredom...to push down anger... to celebrate (and moderate) excitement...

I "discovered" eating to push down feelings while watching a Harrison Ford movie, The Witness, I think it was called... the one with the little kid? We were watching the movie on the VCR, and it was getting very intense. I grabbed the remote, paused the movie and ran into the kitchen... Mr. Big was wondering just WHERE the heck I was going! I could NOT watch another second without... popcorn.

While it was popping, I realized, the popcorn was to push down the feeling in the pit of my stomach... first time I was able to identify that.

But I still do it. Awarenes, I guess is the first step, eh? Still workig on "acceptance".

[liveweyerd]

WOW, I didn't know anyone else did that...duck out when a movie gets too intense!

[stacey]

Hi there,

My "thing" is eating when I'm nervous or anxious. It's kind of a calming thing for me. I have put on 8 kilograms (17 and a half pounds) of 'calm' this year because my anxiety has been off the charts... (She says as she stuffs her face with chocolate)...

Today I am attempting my first medication ever, Xanax, to try and ease the anxiety and I'm hoping that might have the rub-off benefit of controlling my over eating (and drinking) as well, given that I binge when i'm anxious. Fingers crossed!

P.S. I love that SR has all of these different forums because so many of these problem behavious are interconnected!

[justicej]

I too "stuff" my feelings. I have done so all my life. Because of an alcoholic grandmother, I have been phobic, controlling, and codependent with my addictive behaviors.
But food is a big one in my family, but I didn't realize how much until starting 12 step work.
I could tell horror stories of group binges. One of our favorites was pairing food with the late night movies, and orchestrating the emotion stuffing party.
My mom and one of my sisters have both had gastric bypass surgery to effect weight loss.
I quit smoking back in May, gained 10 pounds, but here's the magic.
I didn't realize I was addicted to food. Until trying to recover from codependency. I started becoming aware of how I feel. I started to find safe ways to express how I feel. And all of a sudden I can feel when I am full, I ate less because it was okay to be in my skin with my emotions. I started to lose weight without even thinking about it, for the first time in my life.

Thank you sober recovery.

[Pony]

Wow, this was great to hear from so many that I haven't talk to before. Thanks for joining in.

I truely believe that addiction is addiction...whether it be food or alcohol or other substance....or even sex (ssshhhhh, to talk about such things...lol) and relationships. It is all interconnected... and sometimes you can be abstinent from one, but really you are substituting one for the other. What I mean is that say you give up smoking....many turn to food to fill that habit of smoking....drinking is the same as is with all substance abuse. We use it to fill whatever void is causing us pain and we want to numb it.

Being in touch with your body and feelings is a very important step to changing to healthier lifestyle habits. Knowing how you are emotionally and physically feeling is a huge step to eating healthier and making much better choices for one's self.

Thanks again for joining me on this....

[stacey]

That's so true. It's funny how things that should be blatantly obvious manage to escape us for years. Just the other night I was madly trying to stab a cork out of a bottle of wine using any objects I could find because I didn't have a cork screw. When I couldn't get it open and finally admitted defeat, my first thought was "Well i'll just have to gorge myself on food instead!"

As soon as it came out, I thought "Hmm... That's a little odd..."

I mean I know that I drink to ease my anxiety, but that night it occured to me that maybe it's not necessarily the effects of the alcohol that put me at ease like I thought - maybe it's the 'indulging' in general, whether it be in alcohol or food or anything else.