Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

This postcard from PostSecret reminded me of how I white-knuckled my way down to 150 pounds.

It reads:

My diet makes me obsess about food to the point where I google image search my cravings in an attempt to stave them off…

Just a note to this person and anyone else in this situation: IT DOESN’T WORK. I have done many crazy things to keep myself from eating food, which just fed my obsession.

• Looking at food on the Internet.
• Smelling food, but not eating it.
• Getting scratch and sniff stickers and smelling them instead of eating.
• Eating too much healthy food instead.
• Planning how I would binge as soon as I got thin enough.
• Trying to distract myself with something else.

Once I realized that I had no control over food, I saw how silly all these activities were and how they actually made my food obsession worse. I also felt a huge wave of grief and self-pity because I felt completely and utterly doomed. I was fully aware that there was nothing I could do to control the biological urge to overeat. My hunger response was so broken and I felt as if I could never get past this.

And then I found this awesome other part of my brain. It had been there all along, but I never had been able to access it before. Now, I let it control all my eating and it does a better job than I have ever been able to do on my own.

If you are feeling hopeless over your eating behaviors, there is a way out. Get yourself into an OA meeting. Get a sponsor, do what your sponsor tells you to do, and learn to access that powerful part of your brain that can handle your hunger more than you could ever do it.

PostSecret‘s beneficiary is the National Hopeline Network. It is a 24-hour hotline (1 (800) SUICIDE) for anyone who is thinking about suicide or knows someone who is considering it.