Blinded By The Light

This morning, I had one my legendary shower-inspiration moments. 

For some reason, the shower is a place where I have frequently struck mental-gold over some snarly problem that I've been stuck on.  God knows why, but in my uni days it wasn't unusual for my flatmates to find me frantically writing code several hours after I got out the shower (I did a computer science degree, just to clarify) still sat wrapped in a towel.  I never could get my head round programming, and I could be turning a problem over in my head for hours with the solution just tantalisingly out of reach, only to get in the shower and have the answer crystallise perfectly after 5 mins under the hot water.  Not wanting to lose my train of thought I'd just grab a towel and throw myself back into my desk chair and pour it onto the screen before I forgot my logic.

Anyhoo ..... back to the present .... the last couple of weeks, the observant amongst you may have noticed a somewhat up and down trend with my weight.  After a couple of weeks solid progress at the start of the year, I stalled.  I knew what I should be doing, but just couldn't quite consistently hang it all together.  I've continued to work out a steady 3 or 4 times a week, but have trouble extracting my hand from the cereal box and my head from the fridge for extended periods of times.  And as for the weekends .... mostly best not spoken of.  This weekend has probably been the worst yet, as I haven't even bothered to track it.  Never a good sign.

What I haven't been able to figure out was why I was behaving this way.  I still wanted it - there as no doubt about that, but I was just consistently saboutaging myself, and then having to turn myself inside out to try and make up lost ground.

BAM!!!

Shower inspiration!!!

It came to me as clear as day this morning - I have been indulging in absolutely, text-book perfect emotiomal eating, and I hadn't even realised it.

The compulsion to eat, and the comfort it gave me, as I sat there with my hand mindlessly moving between the cereal box and my mouth?  Looking around for the next thing when I finished the first?  Errrrr - yeah - classic emotional eating.

I don't know why it didn't occur to me earlier what I've been doing, because I've been feeling it for a few weeks now.  I guess I didn't really register how all the stress about money, men, my car, my low-self-esteem and worrying about my friends was affecting me. 

It's weird, because the moment I realised it, I felt like somebody had flipped a switch in my head.  I just feel lighter today.  Or maybe that shining a light on it has made the gremlins go away.  Not knowing why I kept wanting to eat made it virtually impossible to stop as it was just trying to fire brute-force willpower at the problem, and effectively fighting myself.  But understanding my behaviour means I can find alternative ways to cope with it instead.