On and off plan
Five days before Christmas something changed. From then on, I started using my gym membership, went daily and did at least an hours exercise. I read nutrition labels, bought healthy, low-fat food and started calorie counting. I kept a daily record of everything I did and ate. This, with the exception of maybe ten days total, has been my life for the past four-ish months.

One of the abovementioned days is, in fact, today. I feel like the biggest hypocrite writing and thinking about my old ways in disgust whilst knowing I have not made healthy choices today. Knowing that when I log off, I plan to continue making unhealthy choices. Which brings me to the question - what does being "off plan" mean?

Is the plan we mostly speak of the plan we're on to lose weight? Be it the zone, calorie counting, atkins, weight watchers... is eating food not advocated by these plans "going off plan"? Or is going off-plan when you eat things you didn't intend to eat, emotional eating or something else? I'm having a hard time reconciling this with myself.

On the one hand, I am not eating because I'm bored, unhappy, upset, angry, stressed or tired. If I pinpointed it to any feeling, it would most likely be frustration. But not frustration as in, not seeing results, because I am. It is becoming apparent that I'm losing weight and more importantly, I'm developing muscles and becoming more toned. I am about halfway to goal and I know that if I continue down my normal path, I will get there. Not soon, but definately this year.

I think it's just missing the tastes of certain foods that I haven't eaten for a long time. When something formed a major componant of your diet and you eliminate it completely for four months - yeah, the body will rebel! The first few weeks I had terrible cravings for junk, even stuff I'd never really liked much. How insane is that! Also the past few days I've been thinking a lot about the long term. Whilst I definately never want to go back to the old lifestyle I led, I can't honestly see myself continuing the cold turkey elimination of pizza, chocolate and gelato for the remaining 50 or 60 years of my life.

I hate using labels to define myself and my relationship with food because I think it can almost border on a self-fulfilling prophecy. "I'm a binge eater" seems akin to "I will never have a normal relationship with food" and I don't want to not have the hope that I can completely reform. I certainly don't expect it to happen overnight, in a period of months or even years. But at the same time, I can't imagine myself at 60 and still in a mentality of 'living to eat', not 'eating to live'. My tastebuds may change to some extent and I am coming to enjoy a lot of healthier foods and I know that those foods contain no nutrition whatsoever. But at some point, and for me it seems to happen once every two or so months, I just think, "enough already! I want to TASTE it all again, dammit!".

Two problems with this though. Firstly, I worry it's a fine line between one day of that kind of eating, becoming two, becoming three, a week, a month... and boom, everything I've worked for is gone, the scale is rising and there's no end in sight. Secondly, I do want to taste these things again. But I also know that I probably won't feel like it again for another six weeks. So when I do eat the formerly off-limits foods, I am eating in quantities that are way more than 'just for a taste'. Which really brings me back to a binge, only I feel enough guilt or satisfaction to signal "over" and I can climb back on plan. I mean, I now have the strength to keep exercising and tallying the calories regardless of what I eat, so that is a form of damage control... you can never go completely off track if you're still holding yourself accountable in print about what you at and if I eat to the point of physical pain, I know I'll still have to go to the gym, so there's less inclination to do that.

So I guess all that rambling aside, I'm acknowledging honestly that tonight I plan on eating way over my normal caloric limit and furthermore, foods that I do not normally allow. I am not going to pretend it didn't happen, fail to track the calories, skip exercising or allow myself to feel too guilty, nor do I plan to restrict my calories next week to compensate.

So the question is, does planning to eat off plan in fact make it part of your plan?
xx Lizzie 7:30 pm Post a Comment