Dieting and Mondays

"I'll start on Monday." Isn't that what alot of dieters say? I can't tell you how many times in a Weight Watchers meeting I have heard the familiar lament, "I always blow it on weekends, I need the structure of the workweek to stay on track."

Well, I must be one giant weirdo because for me the exact opposite is true. Monday morning rolls around and suddenly the wheels are off. I sit down at my desk at work and within the hour, maybe sooner, I am jonesing for junk food. Friday afternoon comes and with it, a sense of relief and control. Ahhhhh.......NOW I can get back on track.

Weird, right? Maybe not. I am an accountant and my job tends to get busy and stressful. The first months of every year are particularly difficult. So, yeah, historically I have a tendency to try to deal with my stress by scarfing junk food all day. I do not recommend this method of stress reduction, however, because 1) it doesn't reduce stress, 2) it makes you fat and miserable, leading to 3) one more thing to stress about...your weight! Regardless of its ineffectiveness, eating still seems to be my main coping mechanism when I get stressed out. So when Monday comes and most dieters are on their best behavior, I am struggling HARD!

I have come to two important realizations about this situation:
1) There is nothing I can do about the stress in my job except quit and that is not an option so I HAVE to find a new, more effective, less health destroying way to cope with it (duh), and
2) We are finally out of the worst of the beginning of the year stress and things are pretty lowkey right now, but I am still struggling with food at work! Something bigger is afoot here.

I will leave Realization #1 to a later post and address Realization #2 since it more reflects the current state of things. I am no longer stressed out and yet I still want to scarf food at work. What is up with that? Here are some thoughts I have had about it. I don't think any one of these are the sole cause of my difficulty, rather all of them are contributing to it.

• Once I heard Dr. Phil say that sometimes we start eating for one reason but keep eating for some other reason. Maybe this is happening with me. Maybe I am having some kind of Pavlovian reaction. There are so many times that I have reached for food to cope during the busy times that now my brain thinks as soon as I sit at my desk it's time to start cramming my face with stuff.
• I am not particularly fond of the work I am doing. I feel unchallenged, not in terms of the quantity of work, but in the quality. I know I could be doing higher level work but the opportunity is not there.
• I feel unappreciated at work.
• I feel taken advantage of at work.
• I feel inferior.
• I feel "less than" at work because no one else is morbidly obese. I am a professional person but I do not look like it. I feel like since I have gained this weight, my superiors treat me differently and I resent it.
• I feel resentful of my job because I had to move away from my friends for it and now I am lonely.
• I feel resentful of my boss because he is a button-pusher. He likes to to stir things up and then stand back and watch the reaction for his own amusement. He does to everyone but to me it seems like I get alot of it. I have worked hard to not react to his bullshit in the hopes he will get bored and find someone else to annoy.
• I feel negatively about myself for thinking these things because my job is secure and I am well-compensated. Most people would love to have pay and benefits that I have and here I am complaining about it. It makes me feel like I am an ungrateful, greedy brat.

Now that I have gotten those thoughts down in writing it seems kind of obvious that I have many negative emotions associated with work. Jeez. And I just thought I was stressed out. Apparently not. And I wonder how much of my feeling that I am ungrateful and GREEDY leads to my behaving greedily with food? I dunno....that's might be a little too psycho-babble-y for me. But I definitely can buy into the fact that I am not just trying to cope with the stress of lots of work, I am also trying to bury lots of negative thoughts and emotions regarding my job. No wonder it is so hard for me.

On a positive note, I did much better today than I do most of the times on Monday. It was not a perfect day, but nothing terrible. So I am happy with that. Tomorrow is another day to learn more and to try again.