For three days now I have felt hungry...well not hungry so much as I just want to eat. Constantly. I just want to find some food and put it in my mouth and chew it up and swallow it and do it again and again and again.
For three days I have been trying to figure out what is causing these intense cravings. In an email conversation with Jack, he suggested that this is my body's (or my mind's) old way of dealing with stress. Yes, he is right about that, but the stress today is not any more intense than the stress of a week ago. What's changed? Why now? What's going on? I've tried to pin it on being so close to goal, but that doesn't feel right. Then I tried to pin it on too much exercise and not enough calories, but I should have recovered from that by now, so that doesn't feel right, either. So why the hell am I sitting at my desk at 8:30 in the morning wishing I had a bowl full of something to munch on? Just about anything would do, but sweets would be best.
Then, as I was writing to Jack, trying to explain what I was feeling, the answer dawned on me. It's Christmas-time. The month between Thanksgiving and Christmas is like this for me every year. And it's all mental. It's not because there is more food around, because there isn't. It's not due to holiday parties, because there aren't any. It's about this big emotional knot that I get inside of me at Christmas-time. It comes every year, just like clock work, right after Thanksgiving, and it sits in my chest like a water balloon until the day after Christmas. Year after year after year. I keep thinking it will get better and this will stop happening, but it doesn't.
I've believed for some time that this started after my divorce from the kids' dad. Christmas was always a very special time for our little family and our divorce messed it up, royally. It's been messed up ever since. Perhaps these issues go back a lot further than that...it wouldn't surprise me if that is the case...but I do know that Christmas hasn't been the same since...when?...1992, I guess. We got divorced the year Carla turned 7, so our last Christmas before our divorce would have been when she was 6. She's 26 now. You'd think in 20 years I would have gotten over it.
So...this next 5 weeks will be rough. I hope Jack has a hell of lot of patience. Perhaps it is time to give the ol' shrink a call. Maybe this is the last little vestige from a life long past that needs to be purged from my system. Whatever happens, I will not succumb to my desire to over-eat. Today, more than ever, I am grateful for my "Get Fit Initiative," this blog, the chart on my bathroom wall, my exercise habit, and the support I get from my husband, sister and friends.
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