I am a creature of habit

It is resoundingly true that we all are creatures of habit – I think for some people though this truth can become an extremely destructive force, as I am finding during my sugar free journey.  Also, why are good habits harder to make/keep than bad habits?  There must be some underlying emotion that is in fact the habit rather than the action – rather than what I do being just excused as a habit, it is the emotional reaction that the habit brings which is what I am chasing. 

I have lots of good habits now, but I am still struggling to shift a few bad ones.  These bad ones will have the ability to derail all the good I am doing so it is important that I deconstruct them and figure out why I keep doing what I keep doing when it is hurting me and my progress.  I have started to feel a bit of a difference finally in my weight, with clothes feeling looser (yes, even the lycra ones!) but I find with every 2 pounds off my immediate reaction is to reward myself with a burger (ok not quite that extreme but almost!).  I think for a lot of people weight is a security blanket.  I find that realisation is the biggest problem I am having.  I was at my thinnest when I lived in London, I had a great job, loads of amazing friends, lived in a cool warehouse, boyfriends etc.  I ate healthy and well but I didn’t really think about food much.  I was too busy living my life. 

I left London nearly three years ago, and have put on 3 stone since.  And I can’t seem to let go of it.  My eating habits were appalling until recently, including eating food I am allergic to and not caring that it made me ill.  I really believe everything about sugar addiction has got me to this place, and I know this new lifestyle is the right thing to be doing for my future health and happiness.  But now I am not in London, not particularly happy with my living situation and painfully lonely without my friends, I find that my body is clinging on to the weight.  I almost feel like no matter what I do for my health, until I am able to let go of this security blanket of weight emotionally I will get nowhere.  I have always had people comment on what I eat, especially thin people, who can’t believe how careful and monitored I am.  I now know about sugar and realise that while being careful I was/am a 100% feeding a sugar addiction.  So I am in a bit of a quandary.  Weight loss is slow, but I believe in what I am doing.  I know the moment I stop focusing on my weight and live my life I will see all the benefits I have been reading about.  But I feel I am constantly walking out of the room loudly, shouting “ok weight, I am not looking now, you can go” only to peek back around the corner and see if it is gone. 

This then leads into habits.  I have these habits, almost rituals, which I need to figure out how to stop.  One is eating at train stations, something I was discussing with my sister yesterday.  She commented how she always would ‘treat’ herself to a bagel or burrito on the way home from London to our parents, which would happen once every few months.  I had the same habit, though more often frequenting Burger King!  Now though with my new job I am at a big city train station literally 4-5 times a week!  I now find myself standing in stations, surrounded by stimulus of sugar, sugar, sugar, screaming my name, and my normal habit is to listen to it and get something.  Not only is this a bad habit, but now it is 4-5 times a week?!  And damn David Gillespie’s book that told me how burgers have no sugar, as this is now also chanting in my head with the call for sugar.  My sister thinks it’s the fear of not having access to food for 2.5 hours that fuels this habit.  If that is the case, a packet of oatcakes in my handbag should suffice … but it doesn’t.  I can’t stop myself associating train station = ‘treat’.  This is one of my current challenges.  The other is eating in my room.  This has been a huge habit my whole life, from when I was a small child stealing biscuits and eating them in bed, to when I was at University and obviously at in my room a lot.  What a bedroom is used for is really blurred for me.  Again, when I was at my thinnest and happiest I lived with a boyfriend, and it was very clear what the bedroom was for (wink wink … sleeping!).  But now I am single I think I actually have a hatred for my bedroom.  No, not think, I do HATE my bedroom.  It represents loneliness to me as my bed is now empty.  It represents a place of challenge where bad habits have been formed and perpetuated.  And what do emotional eaters do when they are lonely and upset … eat sugar as you get that rush of serotonin that makes you feel happy for a moment.  It is a comfort, fuelling that security blanket of weight.  Now, again with my job, I stay in hotels 3-4 times a week.  My bedroom in the hotel has become my living space, where I will eat something for dinner after work while watching TV (which is the worst thing to do when eating apparently – in fact eating with the TV off literally fills me with dread – I will deal with that at a later date though).  How do I address this then?  The bedroom is associated with so many bad eating habits that I am now really struggling to associate it with the good ones.  I buy rice cakes, I try so hard to get food from the supermarket that is on program and make salads in my little hotel room.  I travel with a plate, knife, fork and spoon.  And yet, alone in the hotel room, it is so hard to sometimes say no to that chocolate bar even now I know what I know about how evil sugar is.  Sugar is not my friend … but it has always been there.  It never left me.  Maybe that is where I am right now in my journey.  I have successfully kept off sugar for three months now, but I do occasionally slip.  Like that bad boyfriend you know you shouldn’t ring, even though he keeps texting … I seem to have found myself responding to some of sugars calls. 

I guess that is it – I need to break up with sugar once and for all.  I need to accept that we have had some amazing times together, some real highs and lows (ha ha I love a pun), but it is time for me to move on to a different future.  I can’t see the life I want to have for myself happening with sugar still in it.  It is the biggest habit I will have to break.  I have given up smoking and worse with greater ease than sugar, and it must be due to the emotional bond.  It’s the emotional bond that is so much harder to break that the physical addiction.  Perhaps just writing this blog post, in which I seem to have personified sugar, will help me … I do feel better about it actually already.  Time to move on to new companions – nothing is taken away from the fact that sugar was there for me when no one else was, and I am grateful for that.  But now I need to break that habit and move on with my life.

I am the before photo

All people know the worst part of a diet is the beginning when you feel you are doing everything right but you still look like your ‘before’ photo.  What is even worse is when you are on a ‘lifestyle’ change rather than a diet (which quitting sugar definitely is) as this seems to be a way of long term and sustained health, but a journey which takes 1-2 years rather than the quick fix 20 pounds in a week styles of ‘diet.’  Once I have lost the weight though, and I am healthy, I know I will not go back as I am making a continued and sustainable lifestyle change … but the going is sure slow!  And since I do that ‘fat person’ thing of not weighing myself, rather going by how my clothes ‘feel’ (I am sure this Lycra skirt was tighter last week …) I am really struggling to feel motivated at the moment.

As Nicole Mowbry points out in her book, one of the hardest challenges has been other people – people thinking I am crazy, rolling their eyes, or even worse trying to sabotage.  I like it when she rebuts to people who say “life’s to short, have a cake” with “life might be short but I would rather live it thin and with great skin!”  You are holding up a mirror to other people’s choices by denying something in your diet, so it does make a lot of people uncomfortable.  I have found other people’s reactions to my eating quite isolating at times – I even have some people waiting to catch me out, almost waiting behind corners to jump out and yell ‘ha ha that is sugar!’  My advice would be to not tell anyone what you are doing, as this is a lifestyle not a diet – you want wine, drink up, you want chocolate then eat it – just do it with your eyes wide open knowing what those choices are doing to your body.  At least then when you do choose chocolate no one can yell at you in victory that you have failed. 

David Gillsepe’s book has really clouded my judgement since reading it, and I almost wish I hadn’t now.   Firstly he lost 6 stone across 3 years, which is amazing, and clearly his way worked for him.  But he still drank diet drinks, and ate artificial sweeteners.  For me, this feels like you are still eating sugar.  As Nicole says, your body reacts to the sweetness – even if it is an emotional reaction rather than a physical reaction.  And in fact, in my opinion, the emotional reaction to sugar and sweetness is almost harder to move away from than the physical reaction.  He still ate fast food, yes the sugar free stuff, but food that was not going to benefit his body in any way.  What I am trying to do is ensure that everything I do choose to eat is giving me the best nutritional, functioning benefit.  It’s like a negotiation; I look at my food options and think “right so if I choice to eat you fish and chips (which has no sugar so technically fine) what are you going to do for me?  Oatcakes with salmon and houmous, same question”.  Yes, I am still talking to my food.  But while fish and chips are ‘on program’ they are not going to add any benefit to my life and my health.  Whereas oatcakes will be slow burning carbs, the fish is full of healthy fats and omega 3, as is the houmous, again with filling chick peas.  The fish and chips has so much bad fat, and the chips will do nothing but stodge me up.  So it is tricky, and I have found since reading David’s book with his chart of what to choose when you are in a McDonalds, that I have been making bad food choices – not eating sugar, but not being at my nutritional best. 

I have been doing a new cocktail menu for my job and that has been hard – tasting them and the milkshakes, it’s amazing how quickly I can feel my body become addicted to sugar again.  It wasn’t long until couple of glasses of wine were added to my dinner, and I was eating chips and crisps when I had been doing so well.   I think it is a combination of feeling like the before photo, and just being at the beginning of something when you look for any escape route in weaker moments – “there’s no sugar in this cheese roll, I guess I should eat it.”  I do travel for work and it is really hard living in a hotel 5 days a week to keep food exciting and nutritional but again those are just excuses.  I have eaten well before, and last week was not a good example of how well I know I can do. 

So yeah, I am feeling a bit demotivated and definitely edgy as I think the addition of the sugar, the carbs and the wine last week has retoxed me somewhat.  I am back to it today, having my vitamin shakes that I make, chopping Cavolo Nero into my stew that I made for dinner, eating avocado and cottage cheese.  I am back on track because it is the right thing to do.   My energy is so much better, my skin is really good, and my nails and hair are growing really fast which it never does.  I am definitely less bloated and I feel ‘lighter’.  I am going to have to bite the bullet and just weigh myself soon so I know where I am at.  After this next detox …

I am a Sugar Addict

So I find myself standing in a Whistlestop at Paddington Station in silence holding a packet of Fruit Pastilles, for a good three minutes, just staring at them – there are two very wrong things with this image.  Firstly, is the monologue that is going on in my head whilst holding said pastilles, and the fact I look mental.  Secondly, I don’t even like Fruit pastilles.

How has it come to this?  How have I become a person who is holding a packet of fruit pastilles in a train station, whilst inside her head I am saying “you only want these because you are tired, stressed and upset after that work meeting?  You will only feel better for ten minutes.  You will literally only store this as fat, around your belly (where sugar lives on our body.)  If you are prepared for that then buy the pastilles, but don’t kid yourself anything else will happen… Like I said, mental.  On my dark days I curse the names Sarah Wilson, Nicole Mowbray, James Duigan and David Gillespie.  But really they have opened my eyes to the answer to the answer to my long term problem with my weight and my emotional attachment to certain food groups.  In order to keep me focused and honest, as well as to hopefully educate and inspire others as I have been, I have decided to write this blog to track my progress from the very beginning.  It is scary and exciting as I have no idea how this is going to end.  If I believe in what I am reading, and I live by this lifestyle which I believe in, then I should be typing this at a natural, healthy body weight in the next 12 months … Well here goes!

One day about a month ago I was reading the Daily Mail online and I came across an article by Nicole Mowbray.  It was like opening a page in my journal and reading a description about my life (ok, apart from the fact she cycles to work every day and is 5inchs taller than me).  Here was this woman who thought she was making good food choices yet found herself overweight, tired and overall not feeling her best.  The reason I was so drawn to Mowbray is because she started at a size 16, as I am currently and did all the things I thought were right – lots of low fat yogurt, agave syrup not sugar, organic dark chocolate, loads of sushi, restricted carbs, not too much fat, good grains – but was not losing any weight!  In fact she, like myself, was gaining weight!  Then she realised what her diet was dominate in – SUGAR.  Now I had read The Virgin Diet about four months ago and while I had enjoyed it found it just so depressing to keep up (no wheat, dairy, corn, sugar, soy, peanuts … and three other things) I had fallen back to old ‘healthy’ habits.  I did really like a lot of the points JJ Virgin made though, specifically about sugar.  Sugar is the current ‘devil’ of the food industry and like most people I have watched and read lots of research about it.  However it was on reading Mowbray's book and then the subsequent books by Wilson specifically, that a light bulb went off – I AM A SUGAR ADDICT.  A tough pill to swallow (especially without the spoon of sugar Mary Poppins chases her med’s with) but it was true.  Here I was shovelling sushi filled with mirin, entire melons (one of the highest sugar fruits), litres of Coke Zero, low fat granola, low fat soya yogurts, lindt dark chocolate …. In fact I was CRAVING these foods like an addict, but hadn’t made the connection that this was in fact just SUGAR I was eating.  I would drink on the weekends (sugar again) and then do the standard hangover Sunday with carbs and sweets.  How much damage could just the weekend do?  Well I am 31, and in the last three years I have gained 3 stone through what I thought was ‘healthy’ eating.  I have had a tough 3 years for personal reasons and I have can now definitely see that during the course of this I have become addicted to sugar to self-medicate the stress and emotional challenges I have been facing.  But now it is time to make a change!  I still may have a lot going on in my personal life that is challenging but I need to sort my health and my weight out if I am going to stand any chance of sorting the other stuff out. 

I used to have a blog reviewing restaurants, and cocktail bars.  This blog is going to be more of a journal, where I will share my sugar free highs and lows, products and recipes that I have found great and just generally my experiences while changing my life - I am a normal, chubby, greedy girl who eats with her heart not her head; if I can do this anyone can!