Talking Turkey

It’s hard to put my finger on it, but something feels different. We’re just a little over a week away from Thanksgiving and I should be a nervous wreck by now, worrying about what I will eat, how much weight I will gain, how agonizing it will be to resist the tantalizing delights that will be placed before me. The reason I think I should be a basket case is because this is how it has been for me since losing one hundred pounds. Yet, none of those thoughts has surfaced. What I have been thinking is that I will eat enough to feel satisfied, maybe a bit more than I should (whatever “should” means), and life will go on. If I do gain a few pounds, I’ll just buckle down and lose them in the weeks following the holiday.

Why the shift? Well, my weight is in the low end of my range right now. Being lighter always reduces my worries about regaining. I suspect it may also have something to do with the fact that I’m approaching the five-year anniversary of maintaining my goal weight. In all of my past attempts to manage my considerable tonnage, I’ve never kept it off this long. My usual pattern has been to lose big and then gain it all back in a year or two. But this time, I’ve somehow beaten the abysmal odds that a newly slender person faces. So perhaps I feel a bit more confidence in my ability to keep Inner Fat Girl at bay, knowing of course that the trick is to avoid over-confidence.

Yet I don’t think any of that completely explains my lack of angst. There’s something else going on inside my head. I’ve talked a lot in this blog about the food culture that surrounds us. What I haven’t talked about as much is the food culture that lives inside us. By this I don’t mean food neuroses or anxieties, or family food traditions, but rather the beliefs we hold about food as it applies to each of us individually. Like my past conviction that I could not resist York Peppermint Patties – or anything with a name that began “Ben and Jerry’s…” And my current view that high-carb fare is a deadly foe. Perhaps those notions are fading away, replaced by a new belief system that holds among its articles of faith that food is not a Lorelei, beautiful, seductive, enticing me towards certain destruction, but rather that eating is a way to take care of myself. Something to be savored and enjoyed. Maybe even (ya think?) that I’m in charge, not the chocolate.

Could it be that everything I’ve held true about eating is not so much false as it is merely the way I’ve chosen to understand food?

If I get to choose, then there is hope for the future.