First, evenings are the worst for me. Yeah, I know, like everyone. If I’m home at night, the hours between the end of dinner and bedtime are torture. It’s the “witching hour” for me.
My addictive brain goes ballistic. It just keeps nagging and nagging and nagging. Clearly, I’m not hungry, I just ate dinner and have no physical signs of hunger. But my brain keep saying, “eat, eat, eat.”
And I know why it happens. It happens because my addictive brain is a screaming toddler.
In my 18 months of relapsing and resuming, I have most often relapsed in the witching hour. That’s when I tend to give in.
It is only after going through this for months that I’ve realized — or learned, deep down in side — that my addictive brain is like a screaming toddler. Not just because it. Will. Not. Shut. Up. But because every time I give in, it gets worse.
It is just like if you are at a supermarket and your toddler wants a cookie. Doesn’t just want a cookie, but screams and cries for a cookie.
If you give in once, the crying will stop and you’ll have peace short-term, at that moment. But you better believe that from now on, whenever you are with your toddler near the cookie display, your toddler is going to scream and cry. In the long-term, you’re going to have a lot more screaming and crying. A lot more.
(1) Give in every time. This ensures your child will comes to adore cookies. Bad eating habits, health problems in the future, maybe obesity and obesity-related diseases.
(2) Give in occasionally. This ensures the screaming and crying will get worse and worse and worse. It ensures that the toddler will become obsessed with screaming and crying, in hopes that this will be a visit where you break down.
(3) Never give in. This means you’ll have to endure screaming and crying short-term but it WILL lessen. When your toddler realizes you never give in, the point of screaming and crying goes away. It doesn’t work. It never works. So there’s no real point. This is the hardest option but also the one that has the greatest potential to get you to your goal of a child with healthful eating habits and a healthy future.
Clearly, number 3 is the way to go. But it means enduring a lot of distress and upset and anger in the short term. That’s just how it works.
When it’s a half-hour after dinner and my addictive brain turns into a screaming toddler, I just have to take a deep breath and remind myself I have the same three options:
1) Give in and eat. This ensures I’ll struggle more to get to my weight and food goals.
2) Give in occasionally. This ensures my addictive brain will get louder, more annoying, more upsetting.
3) Never give in. This means I’ll have to put up with the addictive voice for a while, but WILL settle down and eventually go away for the most part, or at least, to a bearable extent.
Every single time I give in, I make the screaming get worse. Every single time I don’t give in, I’m one step closer to making the screaming stop.
Disclaimer: This site is not officially affiliated with Bright Line Eating or Susan Peirce Thompson. The opinions expressed here are entirely my own.
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