Route to Management – Week 9

(LighterLife Route to Management – Week9 Day 6)

What a strangely ‘normal’ week. Don’t quite know how else to sum it up.

I have found my first real food trigger.

Let’s get right down to it: porridge is fine any time, day or night. Comforting it is, addictive it is not, nor binge-triggering. Not based on this week anyway, and I had some almost every day, on its own or with a Foodpack, berries, quark, or in some combination of those. Muesli is fine in the morning, but should be avoided at any cost every other time of the day, especially at night. I had 3 particularly unfortunate ‘moments’ with muesli. In fact I have now binned the bloody packet! My revelation: raisins!! I haven’t had any dried fruit and I had forgotten that when I was a kid I used to quite like raisins, the SunMaid kind nice ones. What a letdown!! No more muesli with raisins in my house!! It was nice muesli as well: the organic leaves-no-dust-at-the-bottom-of-box kind… I don’t think it would occur to me to buy raisins on their own, it was definitely the muesli context that did it. And I think I’ll stay away from dried fruit in general, even if most of it is too sweet for my taste anyway!

I may have worked out the role of the in-between weeks for me.

I’ve been immensely frustrated during some of the Route to Management weeks, either feeling there’s nothing ‘new’ going on or feeling they’re rolling along too fast to notice anything new going on in my head. The worst ‘offenders’ were week4, week 6 and week 7. But I’ve come to the conclusion that those weeks were critical to facing things other than food. Whereas week 1, week 2, week 3 and week 5, and now the actual Trigger Weeks 9-12 are mostly about food. Of course NOT LITERALLY or EXCLUSIVELY. But in the sense of having a bit of time to adjust, whether the revelations came there & then, or LATER, as often was the case. Often much later!! It’s not a terribly important thing, having made sense of this, but it kept nagging me so it seemed important to try work it out. For me personally. This is NOT a LighterLife ‘truth’ and you might find it all working VERY differently, depending on, well, who you are and what you’re made of!!

I have tried on new behaviour.

On just a couple of odd occasions this past week, I have put myself before my work. By going to bed instead of finishing a piece of work on time. A close friend has fascinating thoughts that just ‘come to her’. They are impossible to explain to other people afterwards, but this is essentially a result of one of those!! And I’m NO WORSE FOR IT. Amazing. Just amazing. I thought I would probably die. Or fall down from a stroke of lightning. Or be fiercely punished. Well I haven’t faced ALL of the consequences yet, but I’m finding they can’t really be that bad. Because I ALWAYS DELIVER. So if I’m a day or two late, people actually think it must take that long, whatever the ‘it’ that I’m doing. Amazing. Not a habit to be gotten to, I realise, but AMAZING to try on.

Summing it up.

I’ve been able to THINK. What a huge change to past few weeks. I have felt less pressurized and less vulnerable. Not NOT vulnerable, but less. And I’ve been less anxious about moving forward, even with the discovery of the muesli trigger. And more conscious of everything I’m doing, which has meant paying attention to how I feel, what I eat, when and why. And although I may not have learned all the learnings that were coming my way and I’ve felt a bit wobbly on more than one occasion, I have also felt a lot more calm and on top of stuff in a very different way than last week. Basically haven’t freaked out so easily!! So. Beating around all kinds of bushes I could probably say I’ve been more happy this week :D