You Don't Scare Me

Every now and then I have to travel for work. The thing about traveling is it doesn't feel like real life
. Bank accounts and calories cease to exist. Its the same with holidays and birthdays. We overeat, overspend and then pay for it the rest of the year. I once read a statistic that stated if you overate and overspent only on birthdays and holidays you would add 5 pounds a year to your weight and $2000. a year on average to your debt.. We then compensate by starving ourselves and limiting our budgets. Just thinking about it exhausts me.
As I write this I am sitting in a hotel room. I have ginger snap cookies, grapefruit slice gummies, oranges, grapes, chocolate covered gummy bears and Swedish fish sitting on my desk. I ate a late lunch on the way up here and then stopped at the grocery store so I could stay in and work this evening.
You may be thinking, OMG this girl is a crazy sugar fiend, and you would be right, however this is actually a victory for me; allow me to explain.
A year ago, when I started this freedom project I would never have allowed myself to enjoy treats in moderation, I would have come to the conference, overeaten at a local restaurant with friends, after doing some shopping and then berated myself all evening while feeling the effects of the meal well into the evening. The next morning before heading to whatever workshop or conference I was attending, I would vow to make up the difference by under eating, because experience has showed us this always works. I then would have proceeded to get up eat a light breakfast, sit through 4 hours of complete mind numbing boredom and be completely starving when the corporate lunch arrived at noon. I would eat everything in sight and top it off with an enormous corporate size cookie. Then of course there's always the table candy they throw out to keep you from going comatose in the afternoon session, all washed down with large amounts of diet coke.
Not this year! As I said at the beginning, I enjoyed a normal size late lunch on the way here before stopping at the grocery store. I had so much fun picking up small baggies of all my favorite treats. I spent the late afternoon working and am able to enjoy some fruit and  a few of each of my favorite "out of town" treats without guilt. I don't have to overdue it, and I don't have to feel guilty or deprived. Food is not my enemy or my secret lover, its just another part of my life. I can enjoy it because I am not afraid of it.
I will take all my fun leftovers home with me, along with a the great feeling of one step forward.