The flu’s gone now. It’s cycled through my workplace and hit almost everyone twice. I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve had a few days where I felt crummy lately, but no fever or cough, just the winter blahs and general stress, as far as I can tell.

My health plan isn’t completely on-track yet, but then again, it hasn’t derailed either. I haven’t started walking—our weather’s been atrocious and bitterly cold on all but a few days, and I haven’t been able to line up an indoor walking spot yet. But when I do walk somewhere, even just into a store from the parking lot, I’ve been walking faster with a longer stride. I go up and down the stairs a few extra times at work. And I’ve been doing lots of organizing and shuffling around at home. I’m hoping it all adds up to at least get me moving toward being more active.

My stress level managed to get entirely too high for a few weeks. Fortunately, I’m feeling much better now, in many ways. But for a while, I wasn’t sleeping well, and when I did get to sleep a decent amount of time once a week or so, I found myself wanting to sleep for too many hours. And I’m a stress eater.

Well, okay, let’s be honest. I eat no matter what I feel. Any emotion that swings the needle too far in one direction, be it a happy or sad one, triggers my urge to eat. But depression, worry, nervousness and stress are the big ones for me. So when I feel stressed out, as I have for a while, I tend to try to console myself (maybe drug myself) with food.

I remember an episode of Family Guy where Peter, who is quite fat, said to his wife (paraphrased), “I’m very upset with you right now. So I’m going to go to a Denny’s and abuse myself.” I laughed, but it struck a chord. It can be a form of self-abuse or punishment at times, a reward at others. Thinking about all these things hammered home to me that I don’t have a healthy relationship with food. At least I’m aware of it, and can be on the watch for unhealthy and self-abusive (it feels strange to use that word, but that’s what it is) eating patterns.

One positive change I’ve been making is trying to make sure we eat breakfast. It seems that the benefits of breakfast really do make it a crazy thing to skip.

Breakfast eaters have one-half the risk of becoming insulin resistant and obese? Recently an article came out, I think it was through Yahoo, that claimed eating anything for breakfast, even things tagged as not necessarily healthy like doughnuts or cold pizza, was better than eating nothing. I thought, well, I can do that!

Yet, I have been trying to make healthy choices. And my daughter, 11, tries to do the same. While she loves sausage and would eat it daily, we limit it to once, maybe twice a week, with eggs or the occasional pancake. And as a working mom, the convenience foods do call out to me, especially the ones she loves, like doughnuts, or mini-muffins. I’ve opted for healthier hand-held choices most of the time, like fruit, and granola or nutritionally balanced breakfast bars.

I noticed another article about breakfast after I read the one linked above, touting the benefits of cereal.

We used to eat cereal all the time, and then got out of the habit of eating any kind of breakfast. So I’m incorporating healthier cereals into our breakfast routine as well. I do notice that when I skip breakfast, I graze all evening after I get home from work. I’m already obsese, but if I can instill the right habits in my daughter, maybe her odds of developing those maladies later in life really can be sliced in half.

Walking a little faster, taking the stairs more, and eating breakfast don’t seem like much, when I think about it, but they’re all steps in the right direction, so I do feel like I’m making progress. And facing the fact that I have a problem with eating in general, that makes it easier for me to look at something and think about how I don’t really need, or even want it, it’s just some sort of conditioned response at this point.

I won’t lie and say it works every time, but it doesn’t have to. As long as it works some of the time, I’m still making progress, and that’s good enough for right now.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 7:11 pm and is filed under Corrine's Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.