Feast or famine

I persevered with the keto way of eating all last year, losing 17kg. When I attended a funeral down country in March, I found it too difficult trying to find keto options so decided to eat normally and resume keto when I returned home. The only problem to that idea was that I got Covid and craved carbohydrates while I was sick. The philosophy behind the keto diet is that one reduces carbohydrate intake to about 20gm daily so that the body goes into ketosis and has to break down fats to get its energy. It actually works and is one of the few methods that does work for me these days.

After I recovered from Covid I felt much better once I resumed the keto way of eating. But the problem since then has been that I haven’t been able to stay on it long enough to actually lose weight. I might do four or five days, then be somewhere where I am tempted by something appealing – usually for me that’s something sweet. And I always over indulge and take a few more days to get back to keto eating again. But what I am finding lately is that I have slipped into one of my bad habits, that is, that I tell myself, you have to eat this because tomorrow you might be on a diet again and not able to have it. So, I find myself over eating, like yesterday, past the point of enjoyment and into gluttony, just because I am telling myself, you have to eat it now because you might not be able to, tomorrow. It starts with an unbelievable sugar craving but goes way past that point once I begin eating. I have always felt I have been addicted to sugar. This addiction only lasts while I keep feeding it. Many times, I have given up sugar completely, usually for months at a time, and once I get over the first couple of day’s cravings I am okay and no longer crave it.

Over the years I have carried out many meditations around this issue. I have had hypnosis but nothing really seems to work. This morning I was determined to do some work myself, as opposed to treatments off the internet.

I already knew about two of my previous lives where I starved to death. In one I was entombed in the top of a pyramid. In the second, I was thrown out of a cart and left to die in the American desert. But the lifetime that came to mind when I went in about having to eat it all today, because tomorrow it mightn’t be there, was the North American Indian life, where our land was confiscated. Once our hunting grounds were taken from us, I saw, how much of the time we starved and had to feast up when we did have food, for that had to tide us over until we had more food with us often starving in between.

I am surprised I have never gone in before this to actually see where my eating problems have come from. When I was at boarding school, we used to diet like crazy until we got to the point of blacking out. Then we would binge and thus the cycle of dieting and binging was sown for me, the same pattern I now see as occurring in the latter days in the Indian life. It was interesting at boarding school because in those days I was so skinny and didn’t even know what a diet was, but followed the other girls’ leads in deciding it was something I needed to do. We often felt like prisoners while at this school and suffered lots of deprivation in the form of family, foods of our choice and freedom and for me particularly, I missed the farm and the land that I loved. My parents sold that the year I started boarding school, so I didn’t even have it to return to in my holidays.

The two lives of the pyramid entombment and the cart would have created other problems around eating.

Something is saying to me, if I go on keto again, I am just creating that same feast or famine scenario. With keto, one can generally find good replacements but many fruits are not permitted. I would like to be able to eat normally. I am sure if I get to the root of my overeating, I will be able to do so. I have already put back on 12 of those lost kilos and that is a worry, because so far in my life, the only way to lose weight has been to diet.

But in saying that, times in my life when I have been really happy, the weight has fallen off me. In one of the meditations I carried out last night, I was told to associate eating with a word and the one that came to mind for me was joyous. I can actually imagine how that could work if I could feel joyous each time I ate.

There is still a lot of work to do, but I am hoping I can learn to eat without restrictions and without binging. The summer fruit is calling out to me.