It’s been a little over a week since I acknowledged my emotional eating, and started to heal from that. I wanted to give a brief update on how things are going.

I am doing my self-check-ins, starting as soon as I wake up. Before I get out of bed I take note of how I am feeling. Do I feel rested? Are there any muscle aches or pains? Do I have a headache? What is my mood and what thoughts immediately come to mind? I acknowledge that the thoughts and feelings are there and then I let them go without attributing a “good”’or “bad” label to them.

This has been a nice way to wake up. I’ve noticed that by doing this, when I actually get out of bed, I feel more awake and alert. My awareness has been heightened and it has a positive effect on my energy. I’ve felt exhausted waking up for the past 4 weeks. I attribute the improvement to my self-check-in, and also my body is finally adjusting to the Meloxicam.

I find myself doing a check-in before I decide to eat anything as well. This has been really helpful to me. If I am anxious or stressed, I put making a food choice and eating on hold until I can reduce my stress. Some of the tools I’m using to reduce my stress are doing 4-7-8 breathing, yoga videos, doing this (writing in my blog), and EFT Tapping.

One of changes I’ve noticed with these small changes is that I need less coffee to feel awake and alert. I also have had very few cravings in the last 5 days. When I had stressful days prior to my current health practices, my thoughts were only on having a big bowl of homemade stovetop popcorn with real butter. But I just realized today that I have not craved popcorn for the last 5 days. And yesterday was SUPER-stressful. The diminished craving for sweets or popcorn was a big surprise to me. I started on this journey with the knowledge that my stress and my cravings were connected, but to actually feel how managing my stress impacts my food cravings in real time….wow!!

A NSV that I took note of happened on Thursday. We picked up 2 ALDI Take & Bake pizzas for our dinner. While the pizzas were in the oven, I started to eat potato chips out of the bag because the bag was left out on the counter. It was right there looking at me, demanding to be noticed….and also I was hungry. lol. I stopped myself and did my check-in to see how I was feeling. I determined that it was in fact just hunger (I hadn’t eaten anything since 10:30am) and not stress, so I got out a little bowl and put a small handful of chips in there and enjoyed them. Then I did something I haven’t done in years. I made a Cesar salad to eat with my pizza. Back in the day we used to do that regularly. We would be mindful to have a veggie side with pizza because it helped fill us up and balanced out our plates. I even cooked some broccoli so my daughter had a big serving with her cheese pizza.

It was a good week! A few NSVs and also some intrinsic validation that I’m on the right path. I bought a book from our local bookstore The Raven about emotional eating so I will post about that when I make some headway through it. Stay tuned…..