Minimising the damage

later Thursday:

So I went to do my tax and the online system wasn't working me for, I rang up and went through all the long process of getting through to a real person only to be told that it was a known problem, happening to everyone, try again in a couple of hours. Which I will do. But I was already unhappy and this made me more frustrated.

I had my afternoon snack even though it was really early. Then I wandered around the house like a disgruntled ghost, avoiding all the other things I could be doing, sad and unsettled, and I gave into food. Oh, I resisted for a while first. But then I crumbled. Luckily we didn't have anything truly bad in the house. But I felt annoyed with myself afterwards, defeated. I'd already had my afternoon snack before the kids even got home from school and here I was eating extra! And I thought about eating more and more. Eating had squashed down all the bad feelings for a few moments, I wanted to repeat that. But I had just been re-reading my cognitive therapy book and one of the things it talked about was getting back on track after a binge, and all the reasons it was better to stop right now than continue and make it worse. And I put the food details into my calorie tracker. And you know how many extra calories I had eaten? 200. 200 is nothing, in the big scheme of things. 200 calories is not a disaster. Certainly not a reason to give up and eat even more.

I could, if I wanted, have a tiny dinner and still get in under my daily calories, but I am not going to. I am going to have my normal planned dinner, back on track, as if I hadn't stepped off the rails there for a minute at all. I was having a bad day, I need to learn to deal with stress some other way, but I am not going to dwell on it unduly or beat myself up. I'm forgiven.


... Hmm.

While waiting for dinner to cook I ate a couple of squares of chocolate and an unknown number of cashews - I didn't weigh them I just ate them straight out of the packet. And then later in the evening I ate some more chocolate, not because I was still upset but just because I'd kind of given up on the day. Despite the part of me saying that was a wrong-headed attitude, I still went with the "start again tomorrow" option. Total damage, around 800 calories extra for the day.