Coming clean about my current relationship with food

It is my decisions, not cookies
that will determine my destiny!

For some time now my blog has been focused on my successes while downplaying my struggles. I've been hiking up a storm, have recently taken up running in organized 5K events, and I generally have an upbeat, positive outlook on my progress. Still, my weight has been stuck around 270 for nearly a year now, and there's one very simple reason why: I tend to reward my good behavior, and recently, I have been soothing a broken heart with sweets.

Ice cream, candy, chocolate and cookies all call to me in both times of celebration and times of loss. Today, I have been feeling great about all the exercise I've been getting, and my diet has been fairly good lately, but I've also been feeling a bit sorry for myself for various reasons. This made me doubly vulnerable to those cute little Girl Scouts who were outside the Walgreen's just now, where I went to buy some UV protection I'll need for the killer hike I'll be setting out on sometime in the next few minutes.

It's literally a quarter mile from the Walgreen's to the house, and in the less than five minutes it took me to drive up the the hill I'd finished off an entire sleeve of Thin Mints. I remember opening the box in the car thinking to myself, I'll just have two. That's 80 calories and a perfectly fine snack. But two turned into four, and four quickly morphed into eight. Before I knew it I convinced myself that the entire sleeve wouldn't hurt; After all, I'm about to burn like a million calories this afternoon, right?

Oh well, so there you have it. That's where I am right now, and to tell you the truth, it couldn't be any farther away from where I want to be than when I was at 420 pounds just a couple of years ago. I have a goal: to lose at least 42 pounds by the end of the year. And there's no way I'll even make a dent in that goal if I don't get my eating under control.

This is obviously emotional eating, a problem I've dealt with in the past. I think it's time to re-visit a book that helped me curb my emotional eating back then. It's called Breaking Free from Emotional Eating, by Geneen Roth. I'm sure I can break free again. The first step is admitting that I have a problem. The next step is acting to overcome it. And if anyone can do this, I sure as hell can. And I will!!!