My family celebrated my sister's 21st birthday this past weekend and I made quite a few not-so-great food choices. My feelings are mixed about this. I scheduled her birthday as my high calorie day because I knew what I would be eating. However, now I feel like I should have limited myself more, high calorie day or not. But at the same time, I have to live my life. I mean, should I always have to miss out on treats? I don't feel like it would be healthy to do that. But add a couple pretty high calorie meals to the 500 calorie slice of Coldstone ice cream cake, and that becomes a pretty big high calorie day. It felt kind of a like a free-for-all. Don't get me wrong, it was all completely delicious, but I felt like CRAP afterwards. That food just sat in my stomach even a day later. I felt sluggish and gross. So was it worth it? I honestly don't know.
It's situations like these where I am still trying to figure out the space in between all or nothing. I'll be honest here. Sometimes, just for a little while, I want to be like the other people I see eating who don't worry about calories and just eat whatever they want. It's a lot of work to constantly be thinking about how many calories different foods have, and sometimes it's irritating because I can't just turn my brain off calorie-counting mode when I decide to have a high calorie day. It's not possible for me anymore to be able to eat junk and not know exactly how many calories it has, exactly how much sodium, exactly how much scary processed crap. Most of the time this makes me happy, but every now and then, I wish I could just turn that part of my brain off and take a break.
Lately, I have been contemplating not having high calorie days anymore. The problem with that is that high calorie days are actually good for your metabolism because it confuses your body. I think what I really need to do is try to give up junk food high calorie days. I could just have high calorie days where I eat a few hundred extra calories of healthy food instead. Maybe on rare occasions if I was really craving some specific junk food, I could have it then. I'm not making this decision based on weight loss. I don't have enough high calorie days really to affect my weight loss. This decision is more for my mental health. I hate how I feel after eating junk. I feel terrible physically and I also feel terrible emotionally. Eating that stuff also seems to make me more likely to make poor decisions in the days after. The more I focus on clean eating, the worse I feel about putting anything processed in my body. It feels like poison, which is what it pretty much is. The few minutes of pleasure I get from eating junk is not enough to compensate for all those side effects. It's just not worth it.
This post is kind of all over the place, but that's how I'm feeling. It's hard to decide what I need to do sometimes. It's also still hard for me to not see junk food as a reward at times. So sometimes when I refuse to eat junk, it can feel like a punishment instead of the reward it really is. If anyone has any thoughts or advice on this, I'm all ears!
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