Food Habits, Diets and Friends

I’ve blogged before about my obsession with certain foods and my complete lack of self control in this arena. In particular Nutella, sour cream and white chocolate.

Because I’m so anal about weight gain and how many calories I eat, I obsess about wanting these foods all the time. I talk myself into why I should eat them, then I eat them in vast quantities and then obsess about how many calories I’ve consumed and how far I’ll have to run to burn them off.

“Insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results”

I think Einstein had me and my eating habits in mind when he penned that phrase.

It’s exhausting.

So what better way to ease the guilt than call a good friend and offload your eating woes onto them, right?

I have a very good friend, who I love very much. Lets call her Sally because her name is actually Sally.

She gets me. We have one of those sorts of friendships where you can talk about anything without judgement and there’s nothing I could say to her that would shock her. She knows absolutely everything about me and is still my friend so I figure we’re stuck for life! We have kids of similar ages and we often laugh we were separated at birth.

It’s kind of scary that there’s someone else in the world as, erm, ‘unique’ as me.

We have the most bizarre conversations about many things, but in particular about food. We usually call or email each other several times a week to whine about what we have or haven’t eaten and then we offer suggestions to each other on what to do about it.

Everybody needs friends like Sally.

Friends that you can take a photo of your arm and text it to them asking them if they think it’s fat.

Friends to discuss with how much weight you’d lose if you caught the gastro bug that’s going around school at the moment. Positives, positives.

I know I have issues with food. It all comes with having an obsessive personality. I’m not trying to be funny when I say that either. My obsessiveness is by far my biggest personality flaw and I have to keep a close eye on it because it ventures into a lot of areas of my life.

Put simply, I am shit at moderation. Food, exercise, shopping – things that might seem harmless but it doesn’t stop there. I couldn’t even have children in moderation.

It’s the reason I don’t drink alcohol, because I can’t moderate it so the only solution is to have none.

It’s a great personality trait when it comes to exercise because I become obsessed with achieving certain goals (at the moment it’s a half marathon) and I’m the fittest I’ve ever been, but there are very dark and dangerous aspects to it as well. At times its taken me to hell and back and its taken me forty years to understand and have the ability to manage it.

It’s why I am so grateful for friends like Sally who I know will be frank and honest with me and tell me when I’m going overboard. She tells me if I’m being stupid and tells me as it is. She is one in a billion and saying goodbye to her when we leave London already fills me with dread.

I know she’ll be reading this so I want to acknowledge how grateful I am to have her in my life and even though I’ve already told her I want her to know how much I love her.