How to create a nice environment and feeling while I eat instead of feeling anxious and eating that way?

[WholeNAT23]

Hey everyone, it´s the first time I am here and I am so excited for having this forum for support on my whole30 experience. I am on day 7 and the truth is that it´s been feeling a little lonely. Well, I´d like to ask you for suggestions with the following issue:

The thing is, I come from binge eating. This new year 2019 I am letting go of disordered eating of any kind, and I really really really want to change my relationship to food into a healthy, loving and peaceful one, and doing whole30 is the first step of my plan towards achieving that resolution. It has been great so far, and I feel that if I keep doing this till I completely get used to it so much is gonna change. I am making a menu, a mealplan every week and I have promised myself that I will keep making weekly mealplans and sticking to them for the rest of the year. This is challenging my patience, discipline, boredom feeling and also my impulses and anxiety. I wanna get in control of my choices 100%. So I would like to ask you for advice or any suggestions you may have for me to stop cooking and eating with anxiety. Today I snacked and it´s something I don´t wanna do cause binge eating is all about "let me have a little bit of this, a little bit of that". I simply wanna stick to what I plan. Learn to wait for food. Learn to cook patiently, even enjoying it. For example, today I went grocery shopping for the next week, which took me around 3 hours. I bought some grapes and felt like having some to taste their sweetness on the way home. By the time I got home I was moody and it had already been 5 hours since I had had breakfast, and still had to cook my lunch. Pfff, and I needed to tidy up all the groceries before. So I started doing that and ended up eating some hazelnuts I had bought for a snack for some other day I really needed them, I haven´t contained myself. And I knew I was gonna eat lunch soon but I still had to cook it. So while eating those things I was standing, and cooking fast and the kitchen was still kinda messy. I didn´t take it with peace and calm and that made me feel messy too. By the time I got to eat I found myself devouring my lunch, maybe overeating a little bit without feeling myself too much and in a hurry. So do you know any ways in which I can make my eating experience a peaceful, slow and loving one in my relatinship with food? Thank you so much

[ShannonM816]

In this case, it might have helped to have something prepped so all you needed to do was heat it up when you got home from the store. It would be lovely if you could always have a neat kitchen before cooking, but sometimes stuff happens and you're hungry and just need to eat, so if you had something planned where you could get home, stick the perishable stuff in the fridge, and cook something easy so you could eat lunch (scrambled eggs with leftover vegetables or a couple of big handfuls of spinach, or hard boiled eggs or leftover chicken eaten cold with vegetables and mayo or guac -- something that just takes a few minutes), then you would be better able to concentrate on organizing your groceries and tidying up the kitchen once you've eaten, and you wouldn't be so tempted to have a handful of this and a handful of that as you're trying to get everything done.

You might also make yourself a rule that you won't eat fruit by itself. It seems like having the grapes on the way home is where you feel like you got off track. There's not anything inherently wrong with fruit, but sometimes having it on it's own can cause a bit of blood sugar spike, followed by a crash, which might be part of that moodiness you felt by the time you got home.

Also, while we encourage you not to snack, if you knew that your grocery trip was likely to take this long, it might have been helpful to have something before you left the house, and some combo of fat and protein would have probably been the most useful thing to have. So maybe a hard boiled egg with mayo or even a scrambled egg or some leftover meat from a previous meal. Not a huge amount, just a little so you wouldn't be quite so hungry by the time you got home from the store.

 

[SugarcubeOD]

Welcome!  I think your desire to take more control over your eating environment is very commendable and I know you can do it!  Making a meal plan every week for the whole30 duration is a great goal... it's very common to want to make edicts about what we're going to do for a whole year but learning a new skill (which is what you're doing) is a process and it's something that needs practice so start with a more manageable piece.  Second, try not to let perfection override good enough.  By five hours you were starving and still had to cook lunch but instead of focusing on that, you put the groceries away, snacked, tidied, cooked and then it was so long since you'd eaten that you were no longer in control.  How about instead it looked like 'I got home from grocery shopping and I was starving so I put the perishables in the fridge to organize later and made myself a cold plate lunch of leftovers, sat down and ate it in a calm manner and then went back and finished your tasks.  It's laudable to want the kitchen clean, the table set, the soft music playing in the background for every meal but if that's not attainable at this time (or ever), do the best you can.  Maybe making an agreement with yourself that you'll sit at the table for every meal (regardless of if the kitchen is messy or not) and then when that becomes habit, add something else.

You're on the right track for sure - I just wouldn't want to see you throw the baby out with the bath water because you can't get it all perfect right away

[WholeNAT23]

Thank you very much, your advice was very useful. I am definately going through proccess of learning to make things easy for myself, and it´s good to be reminded to take it one step at a time. Thank you for your encouragement! Next time there´s a possibility I´ll be out for too long I will either eat sth before leaving the house or take with me a proper snack. By the way, would dried tomatoes with prosciutto or a handful of nuts be a proper snack?

[laura_juggles]

The tomatoes and prosciutto would be a better snack than the nuts (though both would do). Nuts are notoriously easy to over-eat and can be tough on the stomach.