Happy Halloween! 👻 🎃 🥳🥳
My friends & I used always have sleep overs for Halloween.
We’d call them The Fat Olympics because we all brought loads of crisps, chocolate, fizzy drinks, whatever was going & did an impressive job getting through it all 😅.
We used watch horror movies & had pretty much worked our whole way through the horror movie section of Mr Video in Dunmanway 🙈.
The nights were so much fun! So much chattin, laughing, joking, shrieking, SCREAMING & hiding behind each other during the scary parts 🙈🙉😱.
Not to be a Debbie downer on all those gorgeous memories but there’s a few things I wish I had known & understood at the time so I could have been more present to lap it all up🙂
I was always on diets in secondary school, usually Atkins or something weird. Every morning I used wake up saying “Right. Today I’m going to try & stay away from nice things 😖”. Which of course never happened.
The sleepovers were my big cheat nights. ( Apart from 1 where I only ate a jar of Doritos salsa ’cause I was off everything else🤢)
I remember one time thinking ” How can people concentrate on the movie when there’s half a bag of Minstrels sitting RIGHT THERE!!?🤯”
For me the food was talking way louder than the movie.It was all looking at me & I was constantly figuring what I could justify eating next. & if I did eat it what that would mean.. what would I have to do tomorrow or next week to cancel it out 😖.
Inevitably it was the same conclusion. There was so much undoing to be done that I’d have do some amazingly extreme strict diet next week. I’d be soooo good and lose soooo much weight. & since that was starting next week, tonight I could go mad.
I’d eat so much I’d feel unwell 🤢. Even after staying up chatting till the wee hours, it was hard to sleep sometimes ,I was so full my stomach was hurting me🥴.
Sometimes I would be working in my part time job in Centra the next morning.Waking up still so full 🥴 but you have to eat a breakfast before work right?? 🤷🏻♀️ And you have to eat something at break time right?? 🤷🏻♀️. And since I’d ruined it all anyways I might as well get some stuff from the hot food counter and from the Cuisine de France stand for my lunch & to take home for later. The rest of the weekend was the same level of carnage, eating anything I could before the diet started. I’d be bursting at the seams putting on my uniform on Monday morning (which at one stage was 2-3 sizes bigger than I am now).
What I wish I had known
- Putting myself under pressure to lose weight caused weight gain. By putting pressure on myself to lose weight, I was telling my subconscious mind that food would soon be going away! This made sure I was always overeating in advance of the looming shortage.
- Even if diets work for everyone else in the world, clearly they just make me fatter. When I started dieting, I also started binge eating, overeating, mindless eating, secret eating, continuously snacking & obsessing about food & weight all of the time, which lead to weight gain. Not weight loss!
- Your stomach only has one setting and that is RIGHT NOW. And it is your job to listen to what it needs,& protect it from what it doesn’t need. By always doing this you’ll return to your healthiest, lightest natural weight.
- What other people are doing or eating, has nothing to do with what or when you need to eat and what feels good to you.
I hope you enjoyed this article. If you did let me know.
Have a wonderful Halloween 🙂
xx
Aoife
