Switching off the chocolate buttons
Today's Fatslaying Workout 68 minute brisk walk (yesterday); 64 minute bike ride today (632 cals burned)
Today's Weight 200.05lbs
*********
Time, I think, to sit back and properly appreciate a significant non-scale victory.
I think I’ve broken a bad habit.
The received wisdom is that you have to do something consistently for at least 30 consecutive days before it becomes a new habit and breaks the old behaviour pattern.
Well, I guess I must be a slow learner, because I reckon it’s taken me 130 days instead of 30, but I think I’ve finally got there in the end – I’ve broken my chocolate habit.
Until very recently, I was physically unable to enter a shop that sold confectionary and not – at the very least – go and browse along the chocolate shelves. On very rare occasions I was able to leave the shop without buying any, but I found it impossible not to at least have a long, speculative, yearning look.
Most of the time, of course, looking usually led to buying, and buying led to eating, and eating led to headaches, which unfortunately didn’t lead to me learning my lesson – I just ate more chocolate and got more headaches and ate more chocolate in a futile and depressing daily cycle.
Even on previous ‘diets’ I’d make room in my daily calorie allowance for a chocolate ‘treat’, which I’d anticipate obsessively from the moment I cracked open my eyelids in the morning until I finally took a bite in the late afternoon. As the clock hands approached 5pm (woohoo, choc-time!) I’d salivate uncontrollably like one of Pavlov’s dogs, then tear open the wrapper reverently and nibble the divine contents slowly, trying to prolong the experience as long as I possibly could. The total tantric chocolate experience.
An unbreakable habit, right? Wrong. This time it’s been different.
In a nutshell, I decided that I was simply going to quit eating stuff that was unhealthy. Chocolate, cake, puddings, fried food, pastry, sweets – all of it just had to go. I figured that with my family history of diabetes and heart disease it wasn’t worth playing Russian roulette every time I ate any of those items, and that just because I could fit ‘em by hook or crook into my calorie allowance didn’t mean that it was OK to do so.
Unhealthy crap is unhealthy crap, whether you have surplus calories left over or not, and realising that simple truth was a bit of an epiphany for me.
So 18 weeks ago, I went cold-turkey on all that junk.
I haven’t touched a bite of any of those foods for 18 weeks. Not a sniff, lick, taste or nibble. I’ve tried to ignore them completely, so that they don’t register on my radar screen at all. The aim was to make those foods the eating equivalent of shagging my sisters’ boyfriends – so far out of bounds that it doesn’t even enter my head to go there.
And believe it or not, as a strategy it hasn’t been that difficult - or at least not as difficult as I thought it would be. I think I’ve found it easier to cut out the junk completely than it was to limit my intake of it. A nibble just used to fire up my taste buds, and make me want more and more, and before I knew it I was back to eating family sized bars of Dairy Milk, and having cravings like you wouldn’t believe.
Cold turkey doesn’t get the juices flowing in the first place, so this time the cravings have been minimal.
I knew I’d had a breakthrough when I went to Tesco this morning. I stopped by the confectionary aisle for sugar-free dental gum, and I was queuing at the checkout to pay for it before I realised that I hadn’t so much as glanced in the direction of the chocolate. It simply hadn’t registered on my consciousness at all. In fact, the more I thought back, the more I realised that I couldn’t recall the last time I’d lingered drooling in the confectionary aisle. I think I must have broken the habit a couple of weeks ago at least, and hadn’t even realised it!
Holy cow, I’m cured!
And the best thing is, the 'cure' crept up on me without me being aware of it, and I've obviously been making healthy choices almost on auto-pilot, rather than having to exert loads of time and effort. That's been my aim all along, so I'm well chuffed!
So although the scale refuses to budge, I figure I’ve got something to celebrate today – a victory that snuck up on me when I wasn’t looking and that will hopefully have real and lasting benefits.
Huzzah for cold turkey!
I\'d like to defend my honour here and state categorically that I never HAVE shagged my sisters\' boyfriends, so - unlike chocolate - it wasn\'t a vice I ever had to give up, but I\'ll take the compliment on the great victory anyway!