Freedom, self-control and keeping to a diet

Life - God - has a fine sense of irony sometimes.

I'm on a diet.

Now, to most people that would hardly be a big deal... but to me it is - I don't think I have ever said those words before!

Back when I was trapped in food hell (I shared a bit more about this here), it would have killed me to admit I had anything other than a nondescript relationship with food. Nobody could know. The fact that my weight losses and gains were impossible to miss, the fact that I had to carry my shame in public, in my body for all the world to see, how I hated it - but I would never say a word.

Later, when I was in 12-Step recovery, I learned to admit publicly that I had a problem with food and was following a programme to address it. [The fact that I would never eat outside of three committed, weighed and measured meals - which sometimes meant taking the scale out in public and weighing my food at restaurants, conferences, working lunches etc. - could hardly be missed.] I was able to name the problem - addressing it as an addiction, a mental health problem.

And then, without asking for it because I thought I had all the freedom I would ever have by following that programme, I was simply and suddenly set free. God just did that.

My new found freedom meant that for the first time in a decade I was able to neither binge or starve - that food was actually just fuel, however enjoyable, I didn't have to think much about it or obsess about what to eat and what not to eat. I felt very strongly that not excluding anything [vegan], not restricting myself, just eating in response to hunger and fullness was the key to keeping that freedom. Sometimes I'd happen to get very hungry. Sometimes I overate. Most of the time, I ate what I fancied at the time and stopped when I had enough. If this sounds simple and obvious to you, let me tell you: to me, this was the holy grail of utter and complete freedom.

That's how I've eaten and maintained a stable weight for years now, since the time I was freed.

And now... I'm on a diet. Oh, the irony!

I have developed gestational (pregnancy) diabetes, genetically caused. Until the baby is here, I need to stay away from sugar. It's a diet.

Predictably enough, sugar is what I really really want now that it's off limits. I can sense the old ways, those old train tracks of obsession and crazy thinking - they are overgrown with weeds, but they are still there.

Perhaps, as a friend recently observed when I shared this with her, this is the next step in the freedom journey. Because freedom isn't doing what you want, all the time; it's the freedom to choose. Freedom is being able to be self-controlled. That is what I hope to learn in the next 10 or so weeks, until baby is here.

And yeah, I'll admit, I'm kind of scared.

Comments

Back to meat after 20 years vegan - 4 years on

Back in 2020, I briefly mentioned in another blog post that we were no longer vegan. I said that shift deserved its own blog post, but here we are at the end of 2024 and I never wrote that. Not that I intended to leave it this long, but it really did take me this long to truly digest the change (pardon the pun) and get enough distance from my previous world view that I could write about it. Paradigm shifts like that don't come quickly, or easily. I've had a few major paradigm shifts in my life - from atheist to Christian , and later to Catholicism - and it's a disorienting thing every time. It starts with the proverbial 'pebble in the shoe' (something niggling that gets harder and harder to ignore) and takes time to even go from subconscious to conscious mind, to a time of discovery and 'why didn't I see this before??', and finally a bewildering sense how I could possibly have thought the old way because I'm now wearing all-new lenses on life. The ...

Thrown into to a new reality, then back to the old

Towards the end of August this year, Mr. and I suddenly faced a very different future to the one we had envisioned: at 42 years old - and he's 55 - I found myself pregnant again. Camping after our summer trip - and I've just found out I'm pregnant As it's been seven years since D(7) was born, we really didn't expect that. We would have loved more kids soon after D, but I just never got pregnant. Seven years on, we were pretty convinced that this was our lot. Two beautiful children, we really can't complain! So we needed a bit of time to digest that. A new baby, with siblings 8 and nearly 10 years older! And Mr. would be 75 when that child was 20... the maths was mind boggling. But hey - if that was our new reality, we were going to run with it! The kids certainly were excited about it, they're old enough to understand and yes, we told them; this is a family matter. I knew there was a chance this pregnancy wouldn't work out, but we felt they had a right t...

Home Ed Questions: what about socialisation?

Last week, a reporter and cameraman from the BBC visited our house to do a feature about home education. It was great fun, a real adventure for the kids to be interviewed! The team spent 90 minutes at our house, but of course they had to condense that down to a couple of minutes for the feature, and sadly the kids' interviews didn't make the cut. (A transcript article of the feature is here ) I had put my hand up for doing this because the reporter had every intention to make this a positive piece on home education, and so it was; the premise was to try and answer why there had been such an uptick in home education in the past few years. They interviewed two mothers, probably strategically chosen: me as the one who always wanted to home educate, and the other mum as someone who felt she had to due to her son's needs. They interviewed me at length, and of course only a few seconds of that made it to the screen, but inevitably it was the part to do with social skills that th...

Will Dig Life

Search This Blog