Binging and Goals

I binged yesterday. I didn't exceed my daily points by more than five, but still. In the grand scheme I'm pretty sure a binge is a binge even if I manage to convince myself to make better binging choices.

I ended up eating an entire bag of frozen peas (cooked of course...with butter and salt) and a big bag of 94% fat free popcorn (the full size bag, not the little one pointer). Those, in combination with my dinner, were enough to give me the excessively full, post-binge feeling I was needing.

I'm kind of impressed with myself, though, because I could have binged on chocolate chip cookies and four different kinds of ice cream (why does the dieter have four different kinds of ice cream?!?) but I didn't even consider it because I knew I would be so upset with myself if I did. At least five points is just five points. An uncomfortably belly full of ice cream and cookies would require quite a bit more than five points.

Today, though, my binge desire has gone. I wish I would have put a bit of thought into why I felt the desire to binge yesterday so that I could have done a little work around it, but now it's too late. I do know that I felt pretty panicked about food, like I was spending too much time hungry and afraid I didn't have enough to eat, but it's not clear what triggered those feelings. Oh well, I can't imagine that will be my last opportunity to analyze my emotional binging. :-)

In other matters of interest, I've been thinking a lot about goals, particularly with regard to this weight loss adventure. At my last meeting when my leader announced my reaching 10%, she told me that this is usually when folks set a new goal...or just try to maintain at this place for a while to see what that feels like. I can tell you right now that there's no way in hell I'm going to try to maintain 265 pounds if there's a chance I can get lower, but I hadn't really thought about additional goals. Really, 10% wasn't even a goal I cared about in particular, I just knew that I'd get the key chain and that made it seem like a big deal!

In thinking about it, I'm not sure that setting a big goal really matters to me. I mean, I do have my ultimate goal of 140 pounds, but that's so far away that it's practically meaningless, and it may well be that I feel happy enough at, say 175, that I decide to stop there, and that's fine. I do care about each ten pounds I lose and each new decade of weight I see, which means that I have little goals for about every five pounds (since my ten pound losses hit midway between each decade), but I'm not sure whether I really care about a bigger goal, like another 10%. And maybe that's okay.

Frankly, it's hard to make a goal when I'm just so incredulous that this is happening at all. Each week when I show a loss it still feels unbelievable to me. My youngest child weighs 35 pounds and it's so bizarre to think that I could build another one of him out the fat I lost. Okay, admittedly that thought is bizarre for more reasons than one, but still, you know what I mean. Or you think I'm some kind of psycho building children out of fat, but whatever!