This is the third in a series of posts about a stereotypical day of not eating well.  You can check out Lunch and Breakfast as well.

I normally get home from work around 6 pm and Christine would typically have made dinner for the family to be served sometime between 6-6:30 pm (or we would order takeout or go to a restaurant) There were days when I would get very hungry around 4 – 5pm and feel a very hard to resist push to eat.  My typical choice would be 7-11 and I would get the following items on a typical visit:

Nachos and Cheese (800 Calories as I added a lot of extra cheese)

3 Taquitos (180 – 280 calories each)

1L Chocolate Milk ( 640 calories)

1 donut (160 calories)

I would then eat a regular dinner that Christine would make, let’s low ball and say 1000 calories(the instagram feed has lots of dinners that were typical, but I would eat a lot of even healthy food).

I would eat dinner even if I wasn’t hungry – which if I ate at 4 or 5 pm I certainly wasn’t. The reason for this is the shame I felt about it and I did not want to share that I had just eaten a bunch of food after she put in the effort to make a nice meal – so I would eat a meal after having just eaten one.

We then add in something that I would do on regular basis – eat a whole pint of Ben and Jerry’s – About 1000 additional calories.

So for a evening I would have consumed:

800 Calories
690 Calories
640 Calories
160 Calories
1000 Calories
1000 Calories

Total: 4290 Calories

Add in Breakfast and lunch and for a definitely non-typical and a very bad day of eating we get at total of

2550 Calories Lunch
1530 Calories Breakfast

8370 Calories

Apparently I have something in common with Bradley Cooper!

I don’t think I ever ate exactly like this on a day.  But I highlight this to talk about that addict word in the FAT Project.  These foods, eaten in in this manner had a lot of control over me, to the point that they were extremely hard to resist.  They are still difficult to resist but I have the Project and right now it is my best motivation and ally in resisting things like these foods.  I hope this illustrates the complexity of these wayward days…there have been many instances during the FAT Project where they seemed perversely appealing.

In the past week I have had popcorn 5 times. This was too many.

My wife Christine took a very well deserved break and headed for week off in the sun with a good friend. That had me and our three daughters(Ages 6,4 and 2) together for 8 full days of daddy/daughter time.  We really did have a great time with lots of activities.

I took time off from regular hours at work but I had a number of big meetings I needed to be at. So we had help from friends and some babysitting. Needless to say the week was crazy busy!  I worked more than 35 hours (usually at night after the girls went to bed) and actually had a pretty productive week.

In terms of coping with all of this busy-ness I turned to food a few times, primarily popcorn.  Filling my stomach with it after a long day of caring for the girls and working was easy and quite fulfilling.  Now popcorn is overall not a bad choice but I would add butter, salt and some parmesan flakes – which is super delicious btw.  So we are probably looking at 400-600 calories at least when I did this.

I haven’t gained any weight mind you but I have also been pretty static all week.

While I was eating it and usually before I even made it I had the realization that I was doing to ‘medicate’ myself.  To soothe the stress of the day.  Often I am able to work through these feelings and choose tea or water instead.  But there are times when this resistance feels to hard to muster.  This is one of the reasons I am writing about it – by making public it will be easier to make the choice to eat popcorn when I am hungry and really want popcorn as opposed to when I just want a full belly to make me feel better emotionally.

Thanks for listening. 🙂

I don’t ever remember having felt so intensely emotional on a constant basis. I go from very low lows to uber highs in terms of my outlook and feelings.  This can occur in single day or even a few hours.

I am finding it not only distracting and irritating but sometimes detrimental to my daily activities.  Tonight I just had to shut down so I sent the girls upstairs to watch TV for a while.  The emotional intensity of looking after the kids for the day, magnified what I was feeling – depressed.

Is this shedding of weight affecting my emotional state?  Yes, I am sure it is. I am also partway in not using food as a coping mechanism.  And I don’t really have another vice feeling the void (not that I want one.)

There are just times like tonight when I fake a smile and a good attitude and struggle through dark clouds in my mind. I haven’t penned a poem since Grade 12 IB english with Mr. McKenna – here goes…

Ripping at my decency, my humanity
Taking me away from what I value, what I love
I hate it, I hate myself for feeling this way

Pure sadness inhabits my being
The good slides away into the margins
I cope with platitudes and false smiles

Feeling flawed like the bruised banana
But I can’t peel it to see underneath
There is too much in the way

I’ll do a little segue from poetry into a gratitude list, I just need to do something…

• a partner who loves me – even through all this crap
• three amazing daughters, who are delightfully themselves
• work that challenges me, and lets me create the change that I so desperately want to make
• friends and colleagues who have patience with my moods, eccentricities and other childish behaviour

Have a great day and feel better about yourself, you deserve it.