Hi Em. You'll always have cravings for anything you're "addicted" to. I don't mean it to seem so literal, but imagining life without cravings--i wouldn't want to live! Cravings are part of desire, passion, motivation, pleasure. I think fighting them is unnatural, which is why it's so hard.
So, okay, what am I saying? Well, I used to canoe white-water rivers and if things went a little sideways, I didn't try to paddle upstream to avoid a rock or a current. I learned that the best way to survive is to stay calm, put your paddle straight down into the water and just move it in a circular motion vertically, which stabilizes the direction the boat is going. Yeah, with food you instinctively want to fight against it, but that's not normal human behavior. We eat. We like it. But some of us get hooked into an obsessive thought pattern about it, and that is what turns eating into something we perceive as bad.
Missy mentioned keeping a journal. I can't agree more strongly with that. I'm not even going to explain why a food journal works so well. Just try it and remember, BE HONEST about every crumb. The more aware you become, the more you'll feel in control. And practice relaxation, deep breathing, breathing into a panicky thought, telling yourself you're fine, it's fine, don't get sucked in. If you crave a piece of pie, why not try cutting off a sliver, putting it formally on a nice china plate, getting out a beautiful silver fork, a lovely linen napkin, and set it down on a nice placemat on a table with a tablecloth? Then sit down, no tv, no telephone or laptop, and take tiny bites, allowing them to melt into your mouth, putting your fork down between bites, dabbing your mouth with your napkin, making a big ceremony about it? Don't punish food for being delicious. Allow. Allow. Allow yourself to love it without fighting that love. Just plan in advance not to gorge yourself, and to be in sync with eating, not fighting.
The Japanese tea ceremony is very similar to what I described in the white water story. There are a lot of beautiful books and online places where you can study the ceremony and all the philosophies behind it. Jay McInerney wrote a gorgeous book, "Ransom," a novel about a westerner living in Japan, and how that compared to his East Coast Harvard lifestyle and the culture shock behind all that. There are undoubtedly better resources, but I hope you get the point. Culturally, especially in Japanese cuisine, the place setting is more important than the recipes. Setting a beautiful table, then sitting down for rice and tofu, is a luscious contradiction.
Don't punish food, don't punish yourself. These negatives are like throwing gasoline on your blazing eating disorder. Feed your head with positive thoughts and admit that you LOVE food, and you can have a little with respect and restraint while feeling really good about it. It might sound hard, or illogical, but what are you doing now? Why are you eating so much and not loving it? Food is for survival, of course, but if it wasn't also a nearly erotic pleasure, we'd just be grazing in a pasture somewhere from dawn to dusk.
Oh, yeah, I just remembered, check my profile. I have photos there of my love affair with food. It takes me way longer to cook than eat in some cases, but I am aware of every bite, I taste every kind of flavor and I do so unabashedly. Thank god for WLS, as the experience allowed me to love food without gorging myself and feeling ashamed.
