Wow. Last night was rough. Definitely the roughest night I've experienced so far, in terms of pure raw food cravings, since I started this health regimen. I did not go off-program and binge my brains out, but man, did I ever want to.
As expected, my period hit like gangbusters late Saturday night. Lately I've been noticing this tendency to have one last spike in the food-craving urges in the first day of my period. I made it through most of Sunday okay, but by Sunday night that paradoxical last-hurrah food craving spike was in full swing. Plus I was massively crampy and cranky, and just generally possessed of a feeling of ick. In the past, this would have been the perfect set-up for one of those pizza-inhaling sessions from my all-too-recent past.
Not so last night. Fortunately, I kind of expected this to happen, so I had reserved several units of carb exchange that day just in case. I was thus able to switch my food-consumption gameplan to mollify-the-munchies mode, and turned to the trusty low-fat popcorn and brown rice cakes. These foods offer lots of plain unabashed low-calorie volume to satisfy the oral-fixation snacking reflex, a little over-indulgence in salt to get the junk-food jones to shut up, and some actual healthy food value in terms of fiber (whole-kernel corn is, after all, a whole intact grain; and brown rice ditto). To intensify the junk-food-satisfying effect, I annointed the rice cakes with some spicy brown mustard--hey, it's not a New York soft pretzel, but it'll do in an emergency.
Result: I made it through the night--not to mention putting the final touches on my tax returns!--without eating anything I shouldn't. Even though my roommate had half a left-over chocolate cream pie stashed away in the fridge--yikes!
And when I awoke this morning, my state of mind with regard to food was a good bit more civilized. Thank goodness. I'm not sure if I'm totally out of the woods yet--we'll see how I am this evening--but I think I'm through the worst of it.
Another pattern I have noticed in recent years: once my period gets under way and gets past any initial binge-spike, the hormones shift gears once again, and suddenly my urge to eat drops off to nothing. I mean nothing. I mean, only noticing something is odd when I look up at around 5pm and think, gee, dinner-time already and somehow I forgot to eat all day, how did I do that? I mean, I never forget to eat, what the hell is this?!?!? Well, what it is, is the power of the almighty hormones.
I hesitate to think what would happen if the pharmaceutical industry tried to capture that appetite-suppressed state in a pill--I don't think I'd want to take something that manipulated my hormones that profoundly. Nor do I think it's all that good for one to ride with that natural bout of anorexia--fasting, despite what some alternative health pundits say, is not particularly good for you, especially if you have any of a number of health issues (gout and diabetes, just to name two; the first is a definite issue for me, and while I don't have the second, I am definitely sensitive to precipitous drops in blood sugar levels).
So if I'm shifting into the post-period no-eat phase, my task becomes that of riding my food plan and making myself eat my full allotment for that day. Definitely a weird turn of events for someone with my history regarding food--but if I had to choose between fighting off the binge-compulsion and fighting to make myself eat more, I know which one I think is more fun.
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