I've made a breakthrough in my diet. It started with me ditching the food log. Yes, I know that tracking your diet is very important. I know there's a lot of research showing that people who log their food lose more weight and meet more of their goals than those who do not. But ever since I stopped logging my food, I've been more consistent with my mostly paleo-ish diet.
Here's why: the food log filled me with dread. And shame. If I ate something bad for me, I didn't want to log it. Then I would go on a crazy binge, hating myself, feeling like a failure.
The thing is, I know what I should be eating. I don't need a food log to know that devouring an entire bag of Tostitos at 9 o'clock at night is not helping me. At this point, I understand that I should avoid gluten and eat lots and lots of bacon. But the food log became a stressor for me and an impediment to better eating.
Allow me to generalize for a moment about the relationship between women and food. (I feel like I can do this because I actually took a class in college called "Women, Eating, and Food" - thank you useless liberal arts education!) Women eat for emotional reasons. We eat to reward ourselves and sometimes to punish ourselves. We find comfort in food. We crave certain foods at certain times. Sometimes I want something crunchy, sometimes sweet. Sometimes I want a hot food. Sometimes I want something I can put butter on, mostly because it's socially unacceptable to eat a tablespoon of butter by itself. Food should be fuel. But it's not.
Food can make us feel terrible about ourselves. It can drive young girls to anorexia and bulimia and all sorts of other complexes. The food log was making me feel bad. It was making me obsessive and ashamed, so I ditched it. And I've never felt better.
I can't remember the last time I ate sugar . I've (mostly) kicked my late-night snacking habit. And I don't even want bread (mostly because we started buying sprouted grain bread which is just impossible to eat, really, it requires a lot of effort). So even though I know the food log is an important part of the challenge, I'm not going back to it. I don't want to be on a diet. I don't want to obsess about what I put in my body. I just want to have a relationship with food not defined by success or failure, compliance or noncompliance. I know I'm going to slip. That's okay. That's life. I don't want to feel bad about it.
And I trust that in the long run, a healthier, stress-free attitude toward food will keep me on the right track.
