I’m in the airport heading home from an incredible vacation in Punta Cana with all my fitness friends, and I’m reflecting on the last few days and the breakthrough that has happened slowly over the last year. I’ve spent the last 10 months focused on a new way of eating, one that is WAY better for my mental state and has for the first time in my life created a healthy relationship with food. It’s been about portion control and eating the right amount of all the food groups instead of obsessing about calories and restricting myself. Well, I just went on a 5 day vacation at an ALL INCLUSIVE RESORT…that’s right, a recovering overeater at an all inclusive resort. It’s kind of like giving heroin to a recovering heroin addict. It’s so funny to me that the company that I work for that has built an empire on this amazing portion system, and then sent all their biggest fans whose lives have been changed by this program and put them in front of ‘round the clock buffets and cocktail waitresses…it is seriously ironic. They must be conducting the ultimate experiment.
But here’s the good news, I passed the test! The old Erin would have eaten herself sick, eating every morsel on the plate and going back for seconds or thirds. I literally used to not be able to stop myself until the food was gone, which is clearly hard to do when everything is unlimited. I definitely had a splurgy vacation (it is vacation, after all), but stopped when I was full (even if there was still food left on my plate, imagine that!) and didn’t let it trigger me into all my old patterns, which is to binge and them shame spiral for days and days. It’s so much more fun to measure my success by this kind of behavior instead of the scale and measurements…this is when real change happens.
