Emotional Detox

One thing that can not be overlooked when discussing detox symptoms is our emotions. For people like me who have "stuffed our feelings" for most of our lives, there can be some very unexpected consequences to eating raw. As our bodies get cleaner, feelings that have been trapped as a result of emotional eating, start to emerge. And, they typically don't ask if this is a convenient time!

I have noticed as time goes on that more and more old feelings over a variety of hurts have been surfacing. Just about every time this happens I can identify a point in the past where rather than feeling some painful event, I suppressed my feelings with food. As I deal with the painful feelings, I find that it is much easier to experience them now than when the event actually occurred. But, I don't seem to be able to control when these feelings pop up or how long the emotional release might take. Several times there has been an almost overwhelming urge to go eat something to put an end to the painful feelings once more. Fortunately I have been able to recognize when this happens and been able to allow the feelings to just come out. But there has been an occasion where I decided that enough was enough and just ate my next meal or a snack to tone down the pain I was feeling.

Today was a good example of this. Possibly because Easter is this weekend, I started thinking about how much I missed my mom. We used to plan and start shopping for our Easter dinner right about now. We had many happy times around this holiday and today it was clear to me that I am not through grieving for her. I found myself in the grocery store, stopped in the middle of an open area, just thinking about her and starting to cry. I quickly checked my feelings until after I was back in my car, but then the tears really started to roll. I drove home and thought about what to do for myself. The feelings came and went throughout the day and I finally just surrendered to them. This afternoon I decided to go visit her grave and gave myself permission to just feel how much I missed her. After a while, I left there, and being tired of feeling so crummy, I went to a restaurant and ate a salad. It was enough to push the emotions back down for a while. I will let them out again another time. But it felt good to let myself just feel my feelings instead of resisting them. This is certainly a much healthier approach than just eating to make all the pain go away.

Today I ate:
Breakfast: Green smoothie with pineapple, banana, collards and kale.
Lunch: Lettuce wraps with cucumber, carrot, avocado, and romaine lettuce.
Supper: Green salad with pecans, tomatoes, variety of lettuces, avocado, lemon juice and olive oil.
Snack: A few power balls.

Did not Body Flex today. Need to get that routine running again.

Old Habits

It amazes me just how fast we can return to old habits! They can creep up and grab you when you aren't looking and drag you down before you know what hit you.

I received some bad/sad news for a couple of days in a row and finally noticed what I was doing each time. On Wednesday, I was sitting at my desk, minding my own business, when the phone rang and I discovered some disturbing news. There was nothing I could do to change the situation, so I sat and thought about it for a few minutes. Suddenly I realized that I was hungry. So I went to the kitchen, made some power balls and promptly consumed them.

On Thursday, a similar situation occurred and I just made a beeline for the kitchen and whipped up another batch of power balls. It wasn't until I had eaten two of them before I realized what I was doing. I was stuffing my feelings. Again. Being raw hadn't changed that life-long pattern of eating to avoid feeling badly.

In this economy it seems there is bad news everyday and today was no exception. For the third straight day I picked up the phone to hear that someone really close had lost his job. The news was particularly upsetting as this man worked with my husband and the axe had fallen pretty close to home. I sat in shock at this news and noticed the urge to go eat emerge from the depths of my unconscious. As I realized the instantaneous hunger, I also realized how badly I really felt. I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream and shout, "It's not right! It's not fair! No, you can't do this to someone I care about!" They can and they did, and there wasn't anything I could do about it.

As I dissected my feelings about all this, I began to see how the pattern got set in place when I was very young. I had no control over the events in my life and food became my pacifier any time something happened that made me unhappy. The seeds of a compulsive overeater were set in place at a very young age and they have ruled my life for the better part of 58 years. Knowing this doesn't change anything. The lesson for me out of this is to always be vigilant. Never eat without knowing why I am eating.

As for all those sad feelings, I sat and pondered them for a while and then took the advice of my very wise buddy. I put them on a train and let them go.

On Thursday I had:
Breakfast: Green smoothie of mango, 2 bananas, 2 oranges and 3 big stalks of Swiss chard.
Lunch: Citrus Avocado Salad with 1/2 grapefruit, an orange, an avocado, spinach and spring mix and a dressing of lemon juice, olive oil and Celtic sea salt.
Emotional Comfort Food: Power balls.
Supper: Salad with romaine lettuce, red and yellow peppers, leeks and carrots with lemon juice, olive oil and Celtic sea salt.

Today I ate:
Breakfast: Green smoothie with mango, 2 bananas, a pear, an orange and lots of kale.
Lunch: The rest of the smoothie.
Supper: A less than ecstatic attempt at a raw pizza: portobella mushrooms, raw tomato sauce, olives, shallots, and a raw "cheese" made with cashews, nutritional yeast, garlic, lemon juice, sea salt, and water. It needs some work. I will post some pictures of it next time. It looked fabulous.

Final note...today is 5 weeks of 100% raw, gluten and dairy-free.