Goodbye, temptation! (Version 6,754)

Do you have one of those terrible tempting bowls of candy at work? Or in your house somewhere? There is one right outside my office that is lovingly refilled by a certain department almost daily, and I must pass it eight thousand times each day on one of my many, many pee breaks. (Speaking of, do you know why pregnant women pee so often? It’s not, as I’d always thought, something that only happens toward the end because there is no room for your bladder. It’s because pregnancy hormones make your kidneys more efficient! Wow.)

Since going off sugar in late December I have been cruising along just fine. I have passed up endless breakroom treats that used to sing their terrible siren song back in my sugar-addicted days (daze?).

Well today I had a bit more of a personal sugar temptation. I met a friend for lunch who I hadn’t seen since Christmas, and she gave me a belated present. It was a lovely, thoughtful card and a holiday tin full of candy. FULL OF CANDY. And some of it was peppermint candy I wasn’t too excited about, there were also two dark chocolate Ghirardelli squares.

But it’s funny. I took one look at it and didn’t really desire any of it. For a moment I felt the old hoarding instinct, that maybe I should keep the Ghirardelli for later, just in case.

But in case what? The stores ran out of chocolate? Hello, fat thinking! Once I realized this was absurd, I marched straight to the hallway candy bowl and emptied out all my candy into it. It’s not mine anymore, it belongs to whoever it is that passes the candy bowl and needs candy. That’s just not me anymore.

Sometimes I think I sound like a crazy anti-sugar convert. But it’s as if I lived my whole life without knowing I was drugged, and now suddenly I’m alert. It’s a nice, easy bliss born of discipline that seems to require no willpower; it’s the ultimate high.

Stretching out

It’s hard to do anything in life when you think that you have only two options:

1. Fail spectacularly in a terrified stupor, or:
2. Hide under the covers.

But that is really how low self-esteem works! The rare middle ground lasts mere moments, and for me was usually like this: Holy cow I am flying so high and I feel really good oh shit this can’t be real wow the ground is approaching real fast. [Splat.]

I read a great article today in the NY Times, “Can you become a creature of new habits?” (May 4, 2008) that made me think about this stuff. Dawna Markova and M.J. Ryan posit that there are three states of existence that we move through when seeking change: a zone of comfort, stretch or stress.

Comfort is the realm of existing habit. Stress occurs when a challenge is so far beyond current experience as to be overwhelming. It’s that stretch zone in the middle — activities that feel a bit awkward and unfamiliar — where true change occurs.

Fearful thinking (fat thinking) makes me think there is only Safe and on the other side, Scary. There’s no such thing as Stretch in between! Because sticking around in that “awkward and unfamiliar” state takes guts. Elsewhere in the article, Markova says, “You cannot have innovation unless you are willing and able to move through the unknown and go from curiosity to wonder.”

And that curiosity, for me, requires a bit of self-love. Otherwise, my curiosity turns harsh and all I can see is a myriad of awful, damning faults. I have to be curious and gentle, and I have to be willing to let that curiosity morph into wonder and excitement. That’s the feeling I had when I rode a bicycle last week for the first time in over a decade. That’s the feeling I have when I go walking somewhere new and I find beautiful places and can feel my legs moving strongly beneath me. That’s the feeling I want to feel more and more. It’s nice to know, from the researchers profiled in this article, that this feeling will help me become more aware of the world and change ingrained habits.