Over-eating

I have over-eaten at dinner time the last two evenings. As I continue to learn how to cook on this Aga, I slow roasted a shoulder of pork the other evening, served up with tasty green veggies and it was yummy, but I ate too much and felt full all evenings afterwards.

Then last night the BBQ was delicious and I ate too much, and felt stuffed afterwards.

A lack of self control

I don’t like over-eating, it’s the ugly, gluttonous feeling afterwards, it sits in my belly all evening and I can feel it, reminding me that a) I lack self-control, b) I am undoing the good of my healthy living through stupidity, and c) while a billion people around the world barely have enough food to survive, I have so much I can over-eat.

Most of the time, 99% of the year, lunch is my main meal of the day and I eat very light in the evenings, often just a bowl of home-made vegetable soup and then a handful of nuts I nibble throughout the evening. This way, I go to bed feeling fresh, light, lean…not quite hungry, but certainly not full. I like this, I like how it feels, it’s lean, clean, healthy. I sleep better and wake feeling fresher, lean, strong, more energized.

So then on rare occasions when I overeat at an evening meal, I go to bed feeling full, gassy, hot…it’s horrible, waking in the night sweaty and unsettled because I am tossing and turning with a full belly. I remember the years I used to sleep like that all the time, eating take-aways and drinking beer and going to bed full all the time. Yuk. Now I hardly ever do it, and on rare occasions when I do, I hate it and my own behaviour disgusts me.

The urge to purge

I would not purge, but I can understand that if my feelings were more intense, if I took it to the next level, that would be an eating disorder thought pattern…I can ‘feel’ and ‘sense’ that self-loathing, that desire to undo the damage, to lean over the loo with my fingers down my throat and try to get the food out again to purge that stuffed feeling. My feelings do not go that deep, I would not do that, but I do think I can understand and empathise with that feeling, and I can see how that behaviour develops…craving tasty food, over-eating in a fit of lost self-control, then purging to undo the feeling of gluttony. I understand it and can see what difficult mental cycle that is.

I shall not allow myself to over-indulge for the last two or three days of this holiday.