If I'm starting over again on Monday, I might as well eat as much as I can right now, right?!
I was sitting here on Sunday night writing this post after having a pretty productive day, and it struck me how different Sunday nights used to be for me. Sundays used to be pretty rough. I’d often spend most or all of the day at home recovering from a food hangover—bloated and sluggish from whatever I’d been eating. I would dread having to wake up early for school (or work) the next day, put on my too-snug clothes and face responsibilities.
But then sometimes I’d get a case of the I’ll-Start-Over-Again-on-Mondays—and I’d start to feel a glimmer of hope! So what if I binged all weekend, so what if my jeans were tight, so what if I felt like crap. As long as I started my diet again on Monday, everything would be OK! My mind would race ahead: By the next Monday, after not bingeing and eating healthy for a week, I’d definitely feel less fat. A week after that, if I stuck to my diet, I’d actually be less fat. Eventually I’d get thin, of course, and then I’d be cured and everything would be perfect!
Does any of that sound familiar? I hope not, but if you read this blog, it probably does. 
Sometimes I still have to fight that urge to live in the future. It’s easier sometimes to fantasize about what things could be like than face the way they actually are. But doing just that—living right here in this moment, in this meal, in this day—is part of what keeps me sane about food. Life isn’t something that starts on Monday morning or once you lose the weight. We’re all living it, every single moment, every choice we make. I believe that now and know that when I make a bad choice—about food or anything else—it’s just a part of my life, and I go on living and do what it takes to help me make a better choice next time.
Men spend their lives in anticipations, in determining to be vastly happy at some period when they have time. But the present time has one advantage over every other—it is our own. —Reverend Charles Caleb Colton
P.S. If this post makes you want to see that “case of the Mondays” scence from Office Space, here ya go.
xo…Sunny
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[pic: .Clo.]
I am SOOOOOO needing to get over that these days! Especially around the holidays…it’s so easy to think “well, Thanksgiving’s a week and a half away….I won’t diet until then, and then the Monday after, I am totally back on track.” And then I go absolutely CRAZY from now until “that Monday,” cramming everything in that I “absolutely, positively will NOT” have after the diet re-starts. it’s so bad.
It’s a vicious cycle, isn’t it? And of course every time you “mess up” or “go off your diet” then there’s guilt to deal with, which makes you feel bad about yourself, which makes you want to comfort yourself, which makes you want to eat more to feel better, which makes you… For me, I had to get to the point where my thoughts about food had nothing to do with weight-and everything to do with being healthy emotionally.
Sunny