A Little Intro

I don’t even know where to start, but all I know is that I am starting. I want to change.

Let’s face it, no one is perfect. The short wish they could be taller, the obese wish they could be slender, and the supposedly ugly girls wish they could be “pretty”. You must be thinking this will be another one of those blogs where the author complains about his imperfection(s). Well, let me tell you that is not the case. I am not here to complain. I am here to accept and say that, yes, I have an addiction to sweets that is getting out of control and it needs to stop.

My idea is not just to share my experience and “let it out” in the hopes that the self-therapy may work. No. My idea here is to write as much as I can about my own experience, share it with you, and hopefully make you think twice before you eat another one of those Twix, another one of those delicious and rich Hershey’s chocolate bars, or one of those McDonald’s hamburgers. Whatever your weakness, whatever your bad habit, and whatever your life indulgence, we will get through it.

Back to Back

Well, it is true…I have been gone for 2 months. You want to know what happened? I fell back down. Yes, I went back to my uncontrollable consumption of sweets. I am not afraid of admitting it now, because I think that just like me there are many others out there who have also fallen back down one thousand times. Just when you think you have total control and that you can handle eating just one small piece of chocolate (or a small amount of whatever your addiction may be), everything goes out of control again. In the midst of my college life, my personal life, and my attempts to become the successful human being I want to be, I forget I have a life, I forget I have dreams, and I forget I have a body. I let myself be driven by those cravings, which only destroy my body, my health, my life, and if it continuous this way, my dreams too. I must go to class now, but I wanted to come back and write this short message to tell everyone that although I fell down again, I am back, I am stronger, and I will learn to live once again.

The Pleasure of Hunger

Well, although it may sound strange, I am happy to say that tonight I felt hungry. Yes, you may judge and say, “What?! How is that a good thing?” But, when you begin to live a life of over-indulgence, the feeling of hunger loses its meaning and feeling.

For days, if not months, one of my biggest issues was learning to control my “appetite” at night–cause you know the craving for chocolate is not categorized as food. Whether I was doing school work or not, the anxiety, boredom, or whatever other feeling crossed my soul would be enough excuse for me to grab a piece of chocolate and feel “better”. Of course, within half-hour, my craving was back and much stronger. You can imagine that by dinner time, I was full, but full of damage. I was getting nothing out of this, and instead I was feeding the horrific family legacy that continues to follow me around: diabetes. No, I do not have it…but by the way I began to live my life, I was surely paving the way to the dark abyss many have fallen into. True, sometimes you are simply born with diabetes. But, often times you only have the trait, and as someone who is majoring in science, I can assure you that trait will remain sound asleep unless you wake him up to feed it. That is what I was doing. I kept waking him up and although many times I managed to get it back to sleep, its resting hours would not last very long. Now, in fact, its power within me was beginning to take over my body…and it was enough.

So, having said all that, once again, today I was hungry. For the first time in a long time I got out of class and on my way to the dinning hall I realized I was really hungry. It was almost six o’clock, so it was perfect! It was a satisfying and unforgettable feeling and I could not be happier to remember that “hey! I am a human being and I have a stomach that’s being activated at the right time”. It was craving, but it was craving real food.

As I said, my plan is to share with you my experience and hopefully leave you with the message of perseverance. If you have not read “Training Day?”, I highly recommend it. Not because it’s my blog and my writing, but because in it I explain how I am taking one day and one craving at a time. If you have read it, on the other hand, you may recall how I write in a small notebook any cravings throughout my day and the exact time on which they crossed my mind. Yes, I may have just started it, but by looking back at today’s cravings, for example, I discovered the thought of eating some type of sweet appeared 12 times in just one day. Trust me, I had all the access you could think of to get that piece of chocolate, but now when I write those cravings in my small notebook not only do I think of me, but I also think of you. What do you have to do with anything? You, my dear friend, whomever you are and wherever you are, are helping me be the difference.

I wanna persevere, and not just for my health, life, and sanity, but I also want to persevere so that you know there is hope. It is not about drastically getting rid of your problem by throwing out all that hidden chocolate or whatever your obsession may be. I have been there–“yes! I will not eat any chocolates today. I got this”…three hours later…. This journey, my dear friends, is about first learning to recognize you are much more powerful than you think you are. It’s about learning that that obsession does not control your life, but that you control your life.

PS (first full day without sweets…one less day to worry about, right?)

New Training?

February 1^st, 2015

Six. That is the amount of times that I wanted to eat some type of sweet since two in the afternoon until 10:15 p.m. I know you may think it’s not a lot because we all have those days. But is it really not a lot when this constant thought invades your mind almost every hour? Is it really O.K., when until last night you would respond to every single one of those internal and impulsive sweet calls? Yeah, probably not. Until yesterday, I can assure you, I would be capable of finishing almost three-quarters of an entire bag of the “fun size” Crunch mini-bars. I am really not fat, but I this lack of control is starting to make changes in my body, mind, and health.

Basically, if my body felt like it, I would immediately go get some type of sweet from wherever. Of course, if nothing was at hand and I really had no way of getting to my sweet goal, then I would do nothing about the situation. My behavior is interesting. You would actually believe I am a chocolate addict, but when I do not have the means of acquiring that piece of chocolate, I am fine. I do not feel anxious, nervous, or irritated. I simply try to occupy my mind on something else. I often wonder…“why can’t I do that even when that package of chocolate is there?” And the answer is simple: the package of chocolate is there. It’s in my zone, it’s my weakness, and since it’s at hand, I simply take it. Neuroscientists affirm that the parietal lobe, in charge of impulse-control, is not developed until approximately the age of thirty. And if that is true, then although I am starting to get close to this age and I have learned to control myself about many things in life, I have not managed to defeat that last obstacle. Basically, when destiny manages to take away from me all the possible ways of obtaining that chocolate, it becomes a way of training me in the control of that weakness. The problem, of course, is that the training is not long enough to make me stronger, to teach me, and to remain firm in my decision of knowing it is not the time to grab a piece of candy.

So, since destiny’s training in chocolate-control is not effective enough, I made my own. As I previously mentioned, I am writing down in a small notebook every time I want to eat something sweet. First, I write down the exact time and next to it, the type of sweet I thought of, I craved for, or the one I almost grabbed. It’s been a few hours since I started this, so do not quote me yet on the training’s success, but after eating an uncontrollable amount of sweets since the new college semester started (3 weeks up to now), this simply exercise has saved my life six times just today. It may sound too dramatic, or maybe too insignificant, but when you cannot live without something, or even someone, you know saying “no” even once is the start to a hopefully great future.

I am not planning on keeping you any longer, as my goal is only to share with you the relevant “sweet” moments of my day, but most importantly, to help you by helping me. I am not sure how many people will one day read about my journey into health, as well as mental and spiritual well-being. But one thing is true: as long as I live there is hope to change, but first, I need to change to change you.