My 3 Biggest Fears About Giving Up Sugar and Flour: Fear #1

I’ve been thinking about fear a lot lately. I’m surprised how much fear BLE raised in me. If you ever had trouble surrendering to BLE, you might relate when I say that the thought of having to quit sugar and flour is really scary. You might even say terrifying.

This week, I realized there are three big fears that I have struggled with (and still do). Here’s the first (I’ll post later about the 2 others).

Fear #1. I was afraid of calling myself an "addict." I wasn't even sure I was really an addict. Sure, I ate a lot of sugar and flour, and I regularly ate when I wasn't hungry, but I wasn't an "addict."

When I started BLE, I couldn’t surrender fully because I kept obsessing about whether or not I was really a “sugar/flour addict”. Maybe I was just someone who indulges too often. 

Susan says you don’t really have to know the answer to that in order for the plan to work. But that didn’t stop me from thinking about it. I spent way too much time and energy second-guessing the program because of this.

Surrendering to BLE – following the plan precisely as laid out -- was hard for me, because I kept thinking that I was different. I was overweight, yes, and thought about food WAY too much and hated looking at photos of myself and dreaded having to buy bigger clothes. But others had bigger food problems than me.

I kept comparing myself to Susan and BLE-ers, saying “well, she’s clearly an addict, but I’m not like that.” “A spoonful of XXX wouldn’t make ME go off on a binge.” 

I was convinced I could cherry-pick what I wanted to follow on the program. A few croutons on my salad. A few treats on a special holiday. Pizza on a Friday night once in a while. Others might need to cut sugar/flour out altogether, but I’m different. Right?

I felt like an alcoholic who keeps saying “others have a problem with drinking but me, I just enjoy drinking. If I really wanted to quit, I would.” 

My version of that was “others have a problem with eating sugar and flour, but I just enjoy eating these things a lot.”

HERE's what changed everything for me. An alcoholic whose blog I really admire posted something that blew my mind. When deciding whether or not to give up alcohol, she wrote, she kept asking herself, “am I really an alcoholic?” (Sound familiar?) She kept obsessing about it, comparing herself to others. How did their drinking compared to hers? Did they drink a lot more? Black out? Throw up?

Then, she realized she was asking the wrong question. Instead of asking, “am I really an addict?” or "am I like that person?", she started asking herself this: Am I really living to my full potential, and is my current behavior standing in the way of that?

So I tried her approach. 

Literally, every time I started to go down the path of wondering whether I was different from everyone else and could bend the plan to suit myself, I just blew it out of the water with two little thoughts: Is eating crap getting in the way of my dreams? Is eating between meals and eating too much keeping me from the life I’d like for myself?

It was. And that is all I need to know. 

So now, I realize that it’s a choice between what I want out of life and what is standing in my way. That I am LETTING stand in my way.

In that light, it’s simple. Sugar/flour – everything made out of them and with them – are standing in the way of my dreams, my possibilities, my goals and my living my life as I want to.

That’s all I need to know.

(Fears 2 and 3 coming later this week ….)