Food Photo Fatigue

Monday, 19 January 2009

This past few days, thankfully, have been a little less hectic! This week, to inspire myself to be creative and enjoy my food, I decided to do a photo food diary on Flickr. I would photograph everything I eat, every day, then post it on my Flickr photostream. I’m a week into it, and I’m thinking… no… not the motivational tool I had imagined. It’s fun to be creative with food, but I don’t want to get caught up in holding myself accountable to being too detailed with my accounts of my food because it starts to feel like just another task on my to-do list. And if it feels like that, it seems like I’m on a diet. And, though I have specific preferences now, and actually enjoy healthy foods, I won’t do dieting anymore. The minute I perceive myself to be restricted, the lens through which I view my life shifts from one of abundance and possibilities to one of lack and limitation. This triggers old feelings of defeat and failure from my yo-yo dieting past. And, naturally, I don’t want to go down that path. Looking back on my old food journal entries, it’s neat having that chronicle of my food consumption as a little window into where I was in my life then. But, there’s a balance to be found between recording life and living it. Thus, I’ll just resolve to go back to photographing things when I feel like it, which feels fun and creative, not like a chore. Also, I’ll continue to use the venue of this blog to vent my challenges and successes. It’s most therapeutic!

Even having abandoned the “I’m going on diet on Monday” mentality, I’m still a planner, and I enjoy trying new routines, seeing how different foods affect how I feel, and experimenting with exercise. My challenge now is to just pay closer attention to how I feel, stop when I’m not quite yet full, and continue with the exercise. The more days in a row I do that, the better I feel, and the weight stabilizes. It just requires trusting in myself to make good decisions and keeping those self-defeating voices in my head in check by focusing on the positive in every situation.