We all scream for ice cream?

Here’s what used to happen to me every night:

I’d finish my day with my evening chores – washing the dishes, bathing the kids and putting them to bed, folding the laundry.

After that I’d sit on the sofa to relax a little, maybe watch some tv before bed.

But before my (ample) bottom would even hit the sofa cushions, a little voice would whisper in my left ear: “Cindy, there’s ice cream.”

“Shhh!”, I would say to the voice. “I just had dinner, I don’t need any ice cream.”

And the voice would again say, a little louder and more insistent this time: “Cindy, there’s ice cream!”

“Be quiet!”, I would say to the voice. “I already told you, I don’t need any ice cream!”

Much louder now: “CINDY! THERE’S ICE CREAM!!!!!!”

So naturally I would get up from my seat and go back into the kitchen.

Here’s what usually happened next:

Knowing that I wasn’t really hungry and wanting to avoid the ice cream, I’d settle on an apple instead. My reasoning was as follows: “Apples are healthy and they will block the hole in my stomach that gives rise to the voice yelling at me to eat ice cream.” And so, I would eat the apple.

But of course, that didn’t satisfy the ice cream voice. Still haunted by the ice cream voice, I’d eat two dates instead. “Dates are sweet,” I’d say to myself, “and they’re good for you.” “If I eat two dates, it will satisfy my sweet tooth.”

But of course, it didn’t. I don’t even like dates!

Next would come two cookies. “Cookies are really dessert,” I’d reason, “and I can eat fewer of them than the amount of ice cream I would eat. So I’ll have two of those.”

We all know what happens next. I ate the ice cream. All of it. Almost every night.

And I would go through this internal dialogue almost every time, too, and graze my way through the kitchen in an attempt to avoid the inevitable eating of the ice cream. It never worked.

But I did have an alternative: sometimes I’d just eat the ice cream straight away, skipping the foreplay. I actually felt noble doing that; as though there were some sort of victory in admitting defeat.

It never occurred to me to stop buying ice cream.

It took me a long time to realize that this was the manifestation of classical emotional eating, and also to notice how much precious energy I was wasting on this screenplay. It was like a bad foodie version of “50 First Dates.”

Today, after having changed my relationship to food and reconnecting with my natural appetite, I can let ice cream sit in the freezer unnoticed. (Almost)

But I definitely don’t eat the whole container in one sitting. And I don’t feel compelled to eat it every night.

TL, DR: Here are some tools to help you skip to the end:

If you have a trigger food and you are trying to change your eating habits - avoid it. Even if it’s a “healthy food” (like peanut butter, for example).

I mean, keep it out of your house, don’t order it at restaurants, and definitely do not get in your car and pop over to the nearest supermarket/convenience store/ Walmart just to pick it up.

Trigger foods are called that for a reason – they trigger some reaction within us, some emotional connection, over which we have NO control. Zero. So stay away from it.

You get no points for setting yourself up for failure.

Someday you may get to have an “aha” moment like I did when I first realized there was ice cream in the house and I had forgotten all about it. I laughed my head off when I opened the freezer one day to discover an uneaten tub of abandoned ice cream. Score!

But for now, stay away from it. Or them. (There may be more than one.)

For more information to help identify emotional eating, see my blog entitled, “What is emotional eating?”