Avoiding temptation vs. accepting and dealing with it

Monday morning finds me glad that it's Monday...TGIM! Part of the reason is that this weekend afforded me way too many opportunities to eat too much. I wasn't crazy, but there seemed to be lots of good food at every event and locale I attended. There's even a certain AA meeting that I decided last week I have to stop attending because they always have a smorgasboard of sweets, and no matter how determined I am prior to walking into the room, I end up having something, which often leads to something else. It wouldn't have to lead to something else, but with me it does. I know this about myself, accept it, and therefore can take necessary action on my own behalf IF I CHOOSE TO. And I do chose to.

Amy H, of No To The Deuce, had a great post about this today that got me thinking about it all. She even mentioned an alcohol connection where a friend of hers in early alcohol recovery didn't attended a certain function because there would be alcohol served and many folks would be drinking. I know all about this, given my 18+ years of AA recovery. Especially in the early days, or even years of giving up booze, an excellent tool for staying sober is to avoid situations where booze is part of the mix. Even if fellow attendees are having but one drink or so, it can be a real trigger for someone trying not to drink. Besides just seeing people loosening up over the hours after a drinky poo or 2, an atmosphere with alcohol is a potential hotbed of conflicting confusing temptations and emotions for a recovering alcoholic. It's a wonderful tool to simply stay away if one is feeling vulnerable. "When in doubt, leave it out." Some events are command performances, like weddings, funerals, retirement parties, office holiday gatherings...the list is endless. If you have to show up, have an escape hatch, like one's own car in which to get out of dodge if one starts feeling squirrely. Very smart strategy.

Amy points out that it's different with food. Do we really have to stay away from parties and events because there might be something good to eat? It's such a good question, and again brings up the importance of knowing ourselves and our tendencies, or addictions in some cases. It rather sucks to think that there are certain events that are essentially food based, whether originally intended to be or not. Sad but true that Thanksgiving has taken on this dubious distinction. I need only walk up the hall of my work place and see bulletin boards decorated for the holiday that don't mention Thanksgiving...they say instead, "Happy Turkey Day!" Yeah, and happy stuffing, yams, casseroles, breads, gravy, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, creamed onions and assorted pies and cakes day.

I hear myself speak about this as though viewing it from a place of sanity and possible sad judgement, "Too bad society has bastardized a holiday about gratitude and family by making it all about food. Tsk, tsk". Let me assure you, plenty more than just holidays are essentially all about food in my life, else I wouldn't have a weightloss blog, a 25 year history of eating disordered behaviors and dimpled thighs! But obviously it isn't just parties, special occasions and holidays that fall prey to the "about food" designation".

For the food addict I am, anything over the course of a day can become about the comfort, warm fuzziness, the softening of harshness of tough feelings, and blunting of emotions and serious living issues that food so readily provides many of us. Booze IS different. You don't ever have to drink a drop again and you will not only be fine, but your life will unfold in miraculous ways that are unimaginable to a newly sober person. But we have to eat to exist. We don't have to abuse nutrient empty calorie and chemical dense food, but we have to ingest nutritional substance in order to be healthy and well and function optimally. The beast must be let out of its cage 3-5 times a day (depending on your food plan!)

And so it is that wrestling with addictive or emotional eating is at its core a head game. There are no failsafe tactics with which to deal with a sudden craving or the unexpected appearance of our favorite junk food item. Each day presents its own challenges. Some days are easy - feelings of gnawing empty stomach hunger are bearable, even embraceable. Just saying no to the first compulsive bite is (sorry) a piece of cake. Other days it seems that food thoughts prevail over all reality and each non-bingeing moment is a struggle from the moment we open our eyes. On such days, if a food situation looms ahead (like an eatin' meetin' as they call it in AA), I can decide to stay away so I'm not faced with "to eat or not to eat" as a question. But generally speaking, I'm not likely to avoid events because I "might overeat". Maybe I should? Sometimes I do, if it's a dispensable situation.

It does get tiresome at times. I wish I could just be normal with food. All the time - not just when I'm visiting the DR, or when I'm under the influence of general anesthesia. I wish one bite of a savory morsel could stay just that...one bite; rather than morphing into the equivalent of the first drink of alcohol where all bets are off as to the outcome of the indulgence. This is what I mean when I talk about making peace with food. In the DR, I several times drank freshly made fuit juice with sugar in it. It was delicious, and I could have drunk 5 gallon containers of it left to my own devices. But given the circumstance where a glass or at most 2 were offered, and then we were on our way, the juice didn't set off that reaction of total obsession in the mind to GET MORE OF SAME OR SIMILAR. Nor did I worry about that happening, nor feel guilty about enjoying it. Because I experienced that so recently, I'm still wondrous over it as it was such a departure from ye olde default setting!

Two years ago, I attended a 12 step program for eating called Food Addicts In Recovery. I lasted exactly 2 months with them, because their strategy was extremely rigid in all aspects, from meeting attendance to every morsel put in one's body. You had to call a sponsor every morning and talk for 15 minutes about your feelings. You also had to list all your food for the day ahead. If you ended up dropping an apple during the day you were going to eat on the subway platform and it was crushed by an incoming train, necessitating you to instead eat an orange, it was considered a relapse unless you called your sponsor first to report and discuss it. When I asked why such rigidity, my mirthless lifeless orange-haired sponsor said, "We keep the food black and white so we can live our lives in color." Oh, really? Well that's f'ed up, so bye bye. It has to be the gentle head game of making the best choice in each moment of how I'm going to treat my body, mind and spirit. There's no perfect abstinence with food, so patient progress and learning to stop beating myself for my imperfections will have to be the way.