Positive Snowballs

It's been a while (again). I was traveling (again). And busy with grad studenting (always).  But here I be, for better or worse...

So the trip last week was interesting. In some ways I did poorly with food--I was at a relatively high elevation, which always seems to absolutely evaporate any hunger or appetite cues.  One of my most severe relapses ever came when I spent a summer in a high elevation city, because I just never felt the need to eat and was accidentally apathetically blasé about taking care of myself.

 BUT there was some success on this latest trip--on more than one occasion I handled eating events much more "normally" than I would have been able to even a short while ago. I ate at dish at a restaurant that was very hard to estimate calories for, had dinner very late one night (what equated to past midnight for my body clock if you take jet lag into account), and when I was struck with a case of ravenous-itis after getting back, I tried to honor those cues, and loosened my rules on meal times and such as a result.  And felt surprisingly comfortable and low-anxiety with ALL of that.  Kinda blows my mind?

I don't want to shirk responsibility on the appetite and intake issue, btw, but I did want to mention that the friend I was visiting offhandedly mentioned she has lost a significant amount of weight since living there, because she's just never hungry, and the guy behind us in line at Starbucks overheard and spoke up to say that he'd had the same experience.  So my point here is that I think that my body's response to the environment was fairly normal, although I acknowledge that I am conscious (and overconscious) enough about my food intake that I should have been more on top of it.

Still, I felt really happy that I was able to function like a pretty normal person in the group eating sessions.  The eating issue I struggled with the most the entire weekend was my lack of skill with chopsticks...

yes, I still have to eat sushi with a fork if I don't want to make a fool of myself.  And asking for a fork for sushi involves making a fool out of myself anyway. Sigh.

But overall I felt like I handled things pretty well. And I was a little easier on my body for a couple days after I was back, because I knew it was a bit depleted after being sick for a week and then being fairly deprived for a couple of days.  I guess I know I didn't handle things perfectly but I know I handled them way better than I would have in recent memory.

I'm not sure if you readers have picked up on this, but I'm feeling like more and more often I am coming away from challenges feeling a sense of success or at least progress--and it feels like it's getting easier and easier.  I have used the "snowball effect" metaphor at times to describe relapse, where small habits and rules and obsessions add up over time and build on one another to result in a rapid descent into the depths of EDdom. But I think I'm learning that the snowball can move the other direction to--it seems like breaking little barriers here and there, in a positive direction, really is making the whole thing more and more manageable and rewarding over time.