Breaking Free

eating and celebration

For every celebration on the calendar, food (and often also drink, e.g. alcohol) is linked right in there.  Christmas lunch..... Easter chocolate eggs...... birthday cake......champagne and wedding cake......having a restaurant meal out when you first get it together as a new couple. You get the idea.  Eating is a profound form of celebration, in any culture that I know about.

Therefore some of the difficulty with "diets" is that I'm effectively saying to myself- No ! you don't deserve any celebration, you can't take part in our culture, you have no place in fun and pleasure.

Where we seem to be getting it slightly wrong these days is that every day has elements of food or drink in it which would, once, have been for celebrations only.  Therefore our expectations, and our calorie intake, increase.  The original idea of midwinter / Christmas celebrations, and Easter/ Ostara feasts, was to eat and drink a LOT - to make up for several weeks when people were on a naturally restricted diet due to eating seasonally grown food.  Now we have "celebration" food available to us every day, all year round.

I've been thinking about celebration following a family party last weekend in which (guess what) I ate more than usual, and drank a lot more wine than usual.  Do I regret this ? Hell no.  But what are my ways in which I can celebrate, praise, rejoice, have a good time - which are NON-food related ?  This is part of my quest to break free from other people's or society's expectations of how I should control my food and drink intake.

measuring up..

One of the things I've really struggled with in the past is the concept of having to weigh every item I might eat, or else to measure its volume, or else to look up how many "carb units" it contains, or else to write down its calorie content and deduct that from my total.......   this just seems WRONG to me. 

Now it may well be that part of the reason I got fat in the first place was a breezy indifference to carbs, weights and precise calculations of food's calorific value.  Certainly I am trying to be well informed at present about what I eat - and am trying to make the best choices available to me.

However the obsessional focus on counting, measuring (and maybe also entering the details into a website which calculates your intake) just doesn't do it for me. I have tried these methods, for a few weeks each, and I felt constrained and panicky.  How much did that cheese roll weigh ?  If I had a coffee but someone bumped into me and I spilled half of it, how many ounces of milk were left in the coffee cup?   Surely this is not the point of food.

Therefore I'm breaking free from obsessional measuring, calculating and worrying.  I'm going to eat what I believe is a healthy option, and I'm going to buy food based on good choices for me.

I already have a list of criteria which, for me, are important when choosing food : some of these are -

1. vegetarian
2. good protein source
3. locally grown or low food miles
4. organic
5. sourced from a small shop, local people or a co-operative as opposed to a supermarket
6. free-range if eggs are involved
7. seasonally grown
8. a reasonable variety or change, e.g. if I had apples last week, I'd like pears today.
9. avoiding artificial colouring, flavouring, sweetening, etc etc
10. no doubt there are more but this is enough for now......