I'm working on a massive one-man (well, woman) project in the office. It requires a huge amount of mental work - creating spreadsheets, sorting and correcting tens of thousands of data, comparing, evaluating, what not.... In a nutshell: it's a cracker. (hahh, did you get that? )

Anyway, there is leftover cake from my boss's birthday yesterday which I could normally withstand (I'm not really interested if I didn't bake it, and anyway it's a day old cream cake). However, today, sitting in front of my screen trying to cut my way through the enormous task the cake is calling my name....

So I thought "that's strange, let's see what's going on in my head which creates this unusual food pull". So I did take a moment (or five minutes...) and this is what I've found:

I found the scale of the task so daunting, that my subconscious just refuses to deal with it and it throws up anything it can to distract me from doing it or thinking about it.

It literally flashes a picture of the cake and the feel in my mouth constantly in front of me so I drop my focus from the task. It (meaning my subconscious) just doesn't want to work on this project.

Now, the curve ball is that I did try to give it an alternative option to de-focus: a walk, a chat with a co-worker, answering email, and it sort of works. But as soon as I open my database to work on my project it starts with the cake images again....

I reached a point at which I can look at myself and my behavior from the outside and let me tell you: it is a weird experience. I find myself admonishing myself for the behavior and thoughts of my subconscious and trying to wrestle my focus back on the task on hand.

This is such a strange feeling - I'm dealing with my eating demons since I was 12, but only now I feel I start to understand what's going on. There's going to be a long way to recovery (or just staying sane and away from the cake), but I will see this moment as an important point in my journey.

All that said, I still have a question to ask:

How do you deal with the inner demons? Any "magic bullets" out there? I'd like to know - one might work for me too.

Now.... back to the database...

I've found out just in this short journey (I'm not banded yet (May 28th), when I was doing the high Protein low carb diet that I eat just simply out of boredom, so cliche', but I have done this so long, it was like an epiphany. You'd think just get busy doing something, right. Nope I would just continue to sit there craving something, I did not give in this time like I normally would, I finally started getting on the computer more, never have been one to be on the internet much but now it is taking the place of my food addiction. I don't know if that's good or bad yet,but right now it's what works. Probably have a lot more to learn about myself and food seeing as how I'm just getting started with all this.

~~~Stephanie

Girl, I am in the same boat. I had surgery almost a year ago and I am just really begining to see my demons for what they are. I fear there are no magic bullets to deal with them. We all have diffrent triggers to cause them to rear their ugly heads (yours work). We also have to come up with our own coping skills to deal with them. I am still looking for mine.

Yesterday, I was having trouble staying away from donuts brought to our office. I was a little hungry so instead of a donut I pulled some grapes from my fridge and a cheese stick. Do you know how filling that is? After about 10 grapes and half a cheese stick I was feeling FULL so I desired to put nothing else in me. That worked for that time, who knows what it will be next time.

Good luck!