From skwigg's journal:
"Do you ever 'screw up' anymore? Like have any feelings of guilt or remorse or 'shit that was disordered... why did I do that?' Or are you completely nailing it 100%?"
Neither, but only because I don't think in those terms anymore - "100%" or "screwing up." That has nothing to do with the way I eat and everything to do with the way I think. In general, I don't label my behavior or assign meaning. If I do something that doesn't feel good, like eating considerably more than is comfortable, or walking a thousand jillion miles one week with a psycho mindset, I just notice it. It's interesting! Why did that happen? What was I telling myself? What could I do instead that would feel better?
In order to have feelings of guilt or remorse, I would have to believe my stories about doing something wrong or failing, which I don't when it comes to my eating. If I robbed a bank or ran over someone with the car, I might feel guilt and remorse and it might be appropriate. It never is with food. Guilt and remorse are always misplaced there, the result of a doozy of an unquestioned thought. Knowing that, the negative thoughts rarely come up anymore, and if they do they're amusing at best, and very short lived. It's kind of like that quote about leaving the front and back doors open. Thoughts can come and go, but you don't sit them down and serve them tea.
"Do you ever have something happen that makes you question your recovery and progress or challenge your self-trust?"
No, because again, there would have to be a heck of a painful, false, unquestioned story behind "my recovery is in jeopardy" or "my progress is ruined." Don't get me wrong, I do dumb things and think dumb thoughts ALL the time. LOL I just don't make that mental leap about what it means.
"I am still trying to overcome the automatic tallying of calories that is just stupid noise in my head these days but it is still there! That's kind of what I am getting at here - like Skwigg do you still get this type of stuff ocurring (even though there is no judgement or thoughts of this being wrong etc)...?"
I want to say it took about six years from the time I decided calorie math was irrelevant until the numbers quit popping up automatically all day long. Early on, there was a lot of effort involved in stopping the count. I'd have to notice I was doing it and then make a conscious decision to think of something else and not follow through with my tally. Then that would happen less often. Then there was kind of a background awareness of calories but I wasn't specifically tracking anything. Finally, after years of eating to appetite and not looking at nutrition labels my auto-math feature seems to have been turned off or overwritten. Calories don't occur to me anymore and I genuinely have no idea how many I eat in a day. That did not happen quickly though.
Even now, the useless diet chatter is still chattering away at times. It will warn me about how much cereal I'm putting in the bowl, or the perils of eating whole bananas. It will notice that my plate is all starch. It will ask if I really need ice cream after the brownie. It will gasp if a bagel and juice occur together. It frets about the number of Tic-Tacs I eat while driving. Sometimes it points out that eating pizza is reckless when I don't even know how much I weigh. It sounds the alarm if I eat out too many times in a row, only the alarm is a teeny little tink, tink, tink and not the mental air raid siren it once was.
The best way I can describe it is kind of like talk radio being on in the background but the volume is very low. It's pretty easy to tune it out. It's not gone though. Maybe one day like calorie math it will be, but probably as long as I'm living in society I'll hear these diet messages and my brain will helpfully spit them back up in certain situations. I'm not bothered or threatened by that.
Now do I ever eat in ways I don't like or wish I hadn't? SURE!! Sometimes when I've eaten cake with the previous six meals in a row, I'm like, WTF was I even thinking?! Or I'll eat lunch and then eat fourteen other things after lunch, and it's fun while I'm doing it, but then an hour later I feel like I ate a bowling ball...but it was still sort of fun, or I wouldn't have done it. So, I just remember that it's also fun to feel good after I eat and maybe try that next.