I managed to fast all day yesterday despite there being chocolate almonds in my cupboard. Those almonds seem to pop up in my mind whenever I’m stressed or bored, and as I was driving home from work last night, I was nearly convinced that I deserved to indulge in something sweet. It’s becoming clearer to me than ever that my relationship with food (especially junk food) is very much psychological. I eat to be comforted.

I have an overactive brain because I have OCD. All sorts of unnecessary thoughts and observations run through my head all the time, and it’s exhausting. The cognitive load is high, and it feels like I’ve done a lot of mental work even when I have nothing tangible to show for it. Indulging in something sweet seems to calm my brain down—at least for a while. I once gave up sugar for four months, and when I finally broke down and had just a tiny bit of ice cream, I felt “better” as soon as the sugar hit my bloodstream. I remember thinking, “This must be what it’s like to inject heroin.” I know that’s a problematic comparison for all sorts of reasons, but my point is that I find a lot of relief in sugar. It shifts my state of mind and makes me feel more comfortable—sort of like morphine for pain, I guess.

When I really think about it, psychology is what drives me to eat in a less-than-healthy fashion. That may seem like a “duh” statement—I’ve never been deprived of food, so there has never been a time when I ate because I was literally starving—but that reality has really sunk in lately. Junk food is sort of like one of those medications in which the side effects are as bad as the problem the medication is treating. The thing is: a bag of Reese’s mini peanut butter cups immediately provides some degree of relief from anxiety or depression, but the deleterious side effects of consuming a bag of Reese’s mini peanut butter cups are not instant and therefore less obvious. The consequences of such an indulgence are down the road, while the benefits are instant, so the brain doesn’t really make a cost/benefit analysis in the moment.

So, I’ve got to dive deeper into the psychology of my eating patterns. I don’t think it’s enough to just try to resist every time I’m tempted to eat something that’s bad for me; I’ve got to understand the mental processes driving that choice. That will require a lot of thought and reflection, and I’m not exactly up for that undertaking today, but I’ll do it at some point. It appears that I have to if I really want to get a handle on this behavior.

I’m down about three pounds today, so that’s encouraging. My weight has been bouncing up and down lately, and I know that’s the result of the poor choices I’ve made on the days on which I eat, so I’ll modify my behavior accordingly. We’ll see how that goes…