The Ten-Minute Exercise

Yesterday I mentioned the book I Wish I were Thin, I Wish I Were Fat: The Real Reasons We Overeat and What We Can Do About It by Michelle Joy Levine. She does not offer inane "diet" tips like use mustard instead of mayo, chew gum when you want a brownie (that's a good one, Josie), or other such stuff that every woman in the developed world knows if she's tried to lose weight or knows someone who has (which is to say most of us). In fact, the only tip in this book is what she calls "The Ten-Minute Exercise."

Next time you're ready to overeat, or eat something that you know does not fit with your goal of being thin, delay it by 10 minutes. Spend that 10 minutes doing something else. Thinking about how to nurture yourself in other ways; realizing that you can eat whatever you want, but you chose not to eat this particular food at this particular time, and thinking about why you want to eat (especially if you're not physically hungry). If you can delay the overeating by a full 10 minutes, then yay! If the 10 minutes you spend delaying means that you end up making a better choice for eating, then yay! If you don't last a full 10 minutes, that's OK. You forgive yourself and move on.

I have pretty serious issues regarding food. Food is love. Food is my friend. Food is where I turn when I'm having a rough time. Food is where I turn to congratulate myself. Sense a pattern? I'm never going to be able to achieve and maintain a healthy weight until I change my relationship with food. I'm learning, very slowly, that it's still OK to enjoy food, to really relish something delicious, but at the same time, even if it's delicious, I don't HAVE to eat all the food. There will be food available later. No one's going to take it away from me. And eating will not fix whatever the outside problem is.

On Wednesday, for most of the day, I had no internet service. I came home from Tony's drive test to find it down and of course, the earliest I could get an appointment with a tech to come out and look was Thursday. It came back for a while late Wednesday and into Thursday morning and then went down again. Fortunately the lovely tech fixed me up, and it's all good now. But the first thing I did on Wednesday after calling the cable company was go to the kitchen and look for some junk to eat. I settled on Fat-Free Pringles to minimize the damage, but that's what was in the house. I didn't even really realize what I was doing until later on. Yesterday when it went out again (while I was working, no less). I tried the 10-minute exercise and it helped. A lot. I'm encouraged and intrigued by that. I'll have to keep it up.