Another Binge

I started the day with chocolate cafe au lait again, for those who asked a cafe au lait is half coffee and half hot milk and I just add whatever flavoring I like. For the chocolate ones, I have been using TJ’s sipping chocolate which is much richer and less sweet than regular hot chocolate. Breakfast ended up taking much longer than I thought so I had a couple of hard boiled eggs to hold me over.

My official breakfast was bulgur porridge made with milk and a dash of salt. I topped it off with a sprinkle of cinnamon and half of a banana. I didn’t like this as much as I had thought I would, I think I like bulgur in savory dishes much better.

For a mid morning snack,  I had this little tangerine. Citrus fruit is really the only reason I like winter at all

For lunch, I was trying to use up some leftovers so I had a piece of roasted chicken and some corn chowder. The corn chowder was NASTY so I only had a couple of bites.

It went pretty downhill from there. A couple of weeks ago, I decided that I needed to try to “legalize” nutella, which in the intuitive eating world means to get rid of the “good” food and “bad” food mentality by making all foods legal. One of the ways to do this is to stock up on the foods that you consider bad and continue to remind yourself that you can have that food anytime you want. Well, for me, nutella has been the food that time after time, I end up binging anyway. And it happened again yesterday.

All weekend long, I had been thinking about Thanksgiving and how I needed to do my best to stay on track so that I could enjoy Thanksgiving without guilt. I developed a fever yesterday afternoon and was feeling pretty crappy. In my mind, I wanted a piece of bread with a nutella smear on it. Well, since I wasn’t feeling well, I didn’t feel like heating up any of my frozen bread so I hit the jar of nutella with a spoon instead. I grabbed a bag of crackers and plopped down on the couch. I had a couple of the crackers with the nutella and eventually put the crackers down and just ate right out of the jar with the spoon. I polished off about 2/3 of the jar before all of the sugar caught up with me.

I ended up falling asleep on the couch and when I woke up, I felt terrible guilt about what happened. I had all sorts of thoughts running through my mind. First and foremost, who can I give all of this nutella to, I still have three unopened jars. Secondly, what would have happened had I just pulled a roll out of the freezer, heated it up and had it with a little nutella smear, would I have been able to stop? Another thought was about how this binge wasn’t like any of the others. Yes, I did sit there very aware of the fact that I “shouldn’t” be eating the jar of nutella but it wasn’t fast and furious as they typically are. I wonder if I was feeling deprived because I kept thinking about Thanksgiving and how weight watchers allows for any foods but not in unlimited quantities. This binge was so different than any other, I really wonder why.

My excessive nutella intake caused me to not get hungry for dinner until very late. I had been cooking pinto beans all day in order to make bean burritos for dinner. So, when I felt even the slightest bit of hunger, we ate dinner. I had the beans that I turned into re-fried beans wrapped in a whole wheat tortilla topped with a sprinkle of cheese and salsa. I ended up not eating very much of it because I was only mildlyhungry when I started. I also had a huge glass of grape juice in hopes that it would fight off my fever, yet another anti  weight watchers maneuver. 

Thought Provoker: Do you binge? What are your triggers?