day 13 [round two]

Day 13
Meal 1: 1 1/2 sausages, 2 eggs, coffee w/creamer

Meal 2: Nando's mixed leaf salad w/plain chicken and olive oil/balsamic

Snack: 1 sweet potato

Meal 3: Leftover Tex-Mex carnitas salad, 1 bowl berries w/coconut milk

Snack: 2 apples w/too much almond butter.

Okay, the snacking and extra food is going overboard. I've got to get this under control.
I think maybe part of it is that I know that people are reading this and going through their first whole30, so I'm afraid that they'll look at these entries and be like, "Well she ate five sweet potatoes at midnight, so why can't I?" and then that makes me panic and eat more.

The issues with this are, obviously, I need to get over myself and let people just DO their whole30 without worrying if I'm influencing them negatively. And I need to get this emotional eating/snacking/cravings under control. I had this issue the first time around--the stress about the timing of my eating, how much I ate, what I ate, etc. (I like strict rules and guidelines, as if the whole30 rules aren't strict enough--I want times, and measured amounts, people! Heck, just give me a menu and tell me what to eat!) I posted about it on the forum and the response that stuck out to me the most was a wonderful person who said something like, "Stressing about this is going to take away a lot of the positive impacts that eating this way is trying to give you. Can you stop worrying about amounts and times, and just eat. good. food. for awhile?"

That felt so freeing, someone giving me permission to just eat and not worry about if I should or shouldn't eat something, whether I was going to have too many carbs from this or that, was this just a craving or was I really hungry (I mean, I felt pretty hungry!) But for some reason, when I decided I'd go for round two, I thought to myself, "Okay, now you have to deal with those emotional ties you have with food. No more 'free eating', this round is about getting your mind under control." Except that seems to have backfired, because I'm now even MORE anal retentive about what I'm putting in my mouth and when and it's causing stress and so I'm eating my stress. Awesome.

I don't know what the answer is yet. I can't say, "Yes, okay I'm going to eat what what I want when I want" because then I literally would be eating like four sweet potatoes a day, especially right before I went to bed. But I also can't keep trying to lock myself into this mental extreme because it's stressing me out and ruining everything I'm trying to accomplish.