it's helpful for many of us to think of carbs as an addictive drug--we think too much about them, we can't stop once we start, if they're in the house, we can't leave them alone, and we may have even stolen as children to get them! Once you realize that sugar (or flour or chocolate) is your own personal "heroin," then it's easier to follow recovery programs--understand how poor your control is in this one area, abstain entirely from the drug, figure out why you use it, forgive yourself for having used the drug to numb emotional pain in the past, come up with new strategies to deal with emotional issues, and so on.
The longer you go without the drug, the easier it is to not want it. Cravings do abate. If you feed them once a week, they hang around forever. For some people, the cravings can be fed with artificial sweeteners.
After a cheat, the best procedure is:
1) forgive yourself entirely. Guilt takes off no pounds and can lead to further bingeing.
2) get right back on track. Don't punish yourself with fewer carbs or calories or more exercise than is healthy--just go right back to where you were in your program
3) keep good records of what you had eaten before, who you were with, and how you felt--you'll see patterns emerging regarding what triggers your cheats
4) invent new strategies to deal with those triggers...implement them, realizing some will work and some won't.
Patience & self-acceptance are crucial to the process. Very few of us heal from life-long sugar abuse in a week or a month or even a year. As they say in the 12-step world, it's one day at a time. Some people here attend OA meetings; I do a lot of work with binge eating disorder self-help books. Whatever it takes to change our bad old habits.
Okay... So temptation got the best of me...
ops i fell off again
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