“Monitoring”

I feel like I’m back in a more solid, controlled space. I recently read the book Overcoming Binge Eating by Christopher Fairburn, and the second part of the book is a self-help guide centered around CBT. It contains a few charts and detailed instructions on how to complete the different steps in the program he outlines.

I have to admit, I’m skeptical. I don’t much care for self-help books, and I cringe at the idea of workbook pages. But, what I’ve done in the past has obviously only gotten me so far.

So, today I started with a “monitoring” worksheet. I have been consciously avoiding tracking my food intake, since I can sometimes become obsessive with “good” and “bad” days and feeling defeated when the calories go over a certain point. But, this tracking is mostly to see what the trends are in habits and to see if a certain time, place, emotion, event, etc. triggers the desires to binge. Obviously, I’ll follow this through (maybe) a few more days/weeks, but today I did notice some encouraging things:

• I do actually eat meals, even if it’s a string of smaller things here and there. I might have an egg and English muffin, and then decide that I also want an apple with PB. But, that’s actually what most people would consider a full meal, rather than how I tend to see it—I feel like I’m constantly grazing without a plan, but on paper it looks pretty balanced.
• I need to eat every two hours. It seems to me like every “plan” suggests not to go longer than 4 hours without eating. I feel like I would die if I went that long. I don’t really eat before 10AM, but then I eat about every two hours thereafter, even if it’s just a quick protein ball or something as a snack.
• I definitely drink too much (not alcohol, just beverages). I have always felt like I probably ingest too much liquid because I always need to be consuming something–like an oral fixation. But, seeing on paper the “pot of coffee” this morning, four sparkling waters before lunch, half a pot of decaf this afternoon… it’s obvious that I could stand to cut back on my beverage consumption.

I’m interested to see where this notating takes me. I didn’t feel the urge to alter my eating today, and while I did do a quick mental estimate of caloric intake, I didn’t really feel the urge to consider the day “good” or “bad” (maybe because I overall felt OK about the day)…. So, we’ll see.

Day 6.