Old Habits Die Hard

This is a true story. The names have been changed (minimally) to protect the guilty.

I was on the way to an appointment today with someone I spend a lot of time with. Lets call her "Bristy." Bristy and I were in a gas station store. It doesn't matter which one. Let's call it Tuick Qrip. We had just stopped in to buy an iced tea, to take to our appointment. We went in, marveled at the ridiculously large number of beverage machines, from icees to milkshakes. We then got our iced tea and left.

After leaving the store, my wife, oops, I mean Bristy, remarked to me that even though she had just eaten lunch, she was tempted to buy a snack. She was not hungry, and had no reason to buy one, but the sheer presence of all of that food made her feel like she should buy something. Given both of our histories with being overweight and struggling with nutrition, she made a good choice, and only got the iced tea. She also made a very good point.

Weight control and weight loss are a struggle. The struggle does not end when you reach your goal weight. It continues throughout your life. From time to time, temptation will rear its ugly head. The decisions you make in those moments will be the difference between weight loss and a life of obesity. Bristy tells me it is like a whack-a-mole game, where you have to keep beating the temptation down with a mallet, I hate whack-a-mole, so you'll have to take her word for it.

Either way, since in America, you can find food in almost any store you walk into, and most of it crap, the temptation is likely to be there always. That is definitely not how it should be. It just is. As such, if you are not prepared for the temptation, you will often eat when you don't want to, or shouldn't. Here are my keys for avoiding temptation:

1. Eat before you leave the house: If you are not hungry, you are much less likely to pick up a snack cake just because it is there.

2. Avoid food when you are emotional: if you are highly emotional (happy or sad), avoid places with convenience food. Times of high emotion are eat and store triggers for cavemen, because they equal times of famine.

3. Avoid food when you are tired: ditto for tiredness. You release Cortisol when you are tired, which increases appetite, as well as fat storage.

4. Avoid food when you drink alcohol: alcohol is a dis-inhibitor. It makes you FAR more likely to engage in poorly considered behaviors, such as eating too much (other poorly considered behaviors are possible, but beyond the scope of this blog).

Take something with you: put some sort of less perishable food, such as an apple, in your car or purse, so that you can resort to something healthy if temptation is just too strong.

As always, before you eat, remember to ask why you are eating, and why are you eating THIS. If you do, hopefully you will drop the snack cake before it is too late!