Eating Everything in Sight

I tried a new recipe for dinner tonight- Cajun salmon cakes. Here's the recipe, if you're interested. It was delicious, but the portion size was a wee bit...well, wee. After dinner I was still hungry. I still am. There's a bag of olestra potato chips and a carton of cottage cheese in the refrigerator calling my name. All I really want to do right now is go in the kitchen and go crazy.

It's after 9 p.m. If I ate a bunch of salty food right now, I'd be all bloated in the morning, and my workout (not to mention my weigh-in) would be less than fun.

That whole "eat when you're hungry" philosophy is hard for me to get on board with, as is the motto "eat to live, and don't live to eat." Let's just get it out on the table- I live to eat. Always have. I love the taste of food. It's rarely about the nourishment. It's about the taste and the way it makes me feel.

I've come to the realization that I have two sorts of hunger. There's stomach hunger, then there's what I call mouth hunger. The stomach hunger tells me when my body needs fuel. If I don't pay attention to stomach hunger, my stomach growls, I get a headache, and I get really, really crabby. Mouth hunger is everything else. If I smell something good, see a fast food commercial, or even think about the way something would taste, it flips a switch in my brain. That's the danger zone. If it hits when I'm in the kitchen, I'm in real trouble. Thankfully, right now I'm in front of the computer so I can write about it rather than do it.

Emotional eating (which I never thought I had a problem with) also falls into the category of "mouth hunger" for me. It was naive of me to ever think I wasn't an emotional eater. My reasoning behind beliving that was simple- I didn't overeat when happy or sad. In fact, when I was sad I would lose my appetite completely. I was leaving quite a few other emotions out of the equation. I eat a LOT when I'm pissed off. If I'm on my way home for lunch and some jerk is driving like an idiot, I usually "graze" when I'm preparing my meal.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this post. It's really just a distraction so I don't raid the kitchen. Let us assume that I *did* go in the kitchen right now. Here's what would probably happen:

1) Get out the potato chips and cottage cheese, planning to have only one bite of each.
2) Have my bite, then have 3 more bites.
3) Now that I've had something salty, I want something sweet, so I go for the lowest calorie option, which is a sugar free fudge pop. I don't feel satisfied, though, so I grab a 100-calorie dark chocolate bar.
4) Oops, now I want salty again. How about some of those wasabi almonds that have been around since Christmas?
6) Dammit, now I need sweet. I always have to finish with sweet. But now that I've already fallen off the wagon, let's fall off in style. Let's just have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, shall we?
7) Leave the kitchen feeling like a complete failure. Entire day's hard work ruined due to weakness.

That's what could have happened tonight. In fact, I was pretty close. But I'm not gonna. The mere act of resisting my urge to binge has left me pretty much exhausted, so I'll just go to bed. Then, the second I wake up I get to eat breakfast.

I swear, most of the time I feel like a heroin addict who's looking for the next fix.