Day Eight - Grace on All Hallow's Eve

There always food at work. There's a guy whose wife bakes cookies each month when we celebrate birthdays in our department. They come fresh out of the oven and still warm. There are places you can go and get a mini candy bar from little bowls that are spread around the building and open to everyone. There are random platters of treats that show up at the coffee island in our area. I know about all this and, as part of this plan, prepared myself mentally to avoid those traps. It's only been a week, but so far, so good. At Halloween everyone in the company dresses up and every department decorates according to a theme. In our department there is a big potluck meal and tons of candy. There are some days when I need to exercise a little grace with myself and this is one of them.

Grace is a difficult lesson for an addict to learn. Part of what has created and fed my addict through the years is a lack of grace. My stepfather wasn't a gracious man. That and other things contributed to insecurity and a very harsh, self-critical spirit. Standards I could never meet became ones I embraced. To comfort myself when I failed (and when you set impossibly high standards failure happens regularly) I chose food, among other things. It's an interesting dynamic now that I've identified my eating habits as a problem and I've set a very high standard for myself. My addictive personality wants to beat me up when I eat too much, thereby missing the mark I've set. Missing the mark is failure, which triggers my addictive urge to eat for comfort. You can see how this can become a downward spiral very quickly. The best way out of this is the application of a little grace.

I'm not going to list what I ate on Halloween. It wasn't excessive, but it was more than I had hoped I might eat. It's not going to derail my overall goal. I'm back at it this morning and, as soon as I post this I'm headed over to workout. I've recorded almost everything I ate, but it feels like I would be overly harsh on myself if I were to post it. Grace is the order of the day and a chance for me to learn how to live with not being perfect. And I don't care that my addict doesn't like that!