Comfort Eating

I feel terrible and I want to eat everything. I want cake and chocolate and biscuits or a combination of all three.

I'm not sure when I learnt to recognise that I want to eat everything because I want to hide from how incredibly stressed I am today/at the moment. I'm probably not actually genuinely hungry.

Today has been the closest I've come to opening the emergency chocolate bar stashed in my lunchbox. At 13.5 syns I really don't want to eat it, but it's there for those occasions where you need to. I snapped the squares up inside the packet, believing I'd open it and have half (therefore half the syns and less to worry about) and then I put it down again.

I'm glad I chose against it. I think I might have to abstain from all chocolate for a while, until I trust myself around it.

So this is what I've got instead, at my desk where absolutely no work is happening (that blank page on the right? Should be full of notes by now, and an essay structure, or at least some kind of progress) - a bowl of raspberries, banana and yoghurt.

I can't say I don't still want the cake and chocolate and biscuits, but at least I know I'm not hungry now. And I can try and fool myself into being proud of being virtuous. 

I hope I remember these things over the next many weeks, because the stress levels are only going to increase. I already don't know how I'm going to manage and this is the first time I've really felt it so far. With the essays coming up it's going to get worse and worse. The emotional support I've got here is second to none, and I appreciate it more than I've got words for, but in practical terms I really don't know who to approach for advice on these essays I appear incapable of doing. (I do this every time. I get worked up, I panic, and I decide I can't do anything and must run away/drop out. And every other time so far I've ended up pulling it out of the bag and sailing through, great marks, no problem. I'm terrified this is the time that doesn't work, that I'm right in worrying, and I really can't do this.)

But I've made more Italian Chicken and Bacon soup for lunch at work this week, so at least there's that. 2 weeks today until this essay is due. I wonder how many times I'm going to not-eat-the-chocolate between now and then.