My notebook and the torte

Day 5

I wrote a piece of this blog while I was out today. I'd taken my daughter and her friend into the city to go shopping.

A lot going on in my mind right now. I have a moment to sit down- really I want to eat lunch but it's a little awkward to do that for a minute. I'm glad I have a fair sized notebook to write in. It's about A5 size.

The day I bought it I was working, yet again, on ideas on how to get over bingeing. I was writing a few things based on ideas from a book about bulimia, which had been kind enough to suggest that the ideas might apply to binge eaters. I say kind enough, because if it hadn't made that comment, I would just have thought that there were no books at all in my local library that could help me, despite a multitude of books about eating problems. I did get a little help from the book, perhaps partly from the idea that this was something I could try to work on by myself, but also from the ideas in it.

Anyway, when I saw this little notebook with a tree on the front made from the words "for life", I thought it was a sign that it was made for me. Since then, the binge eating work fell by the way (resting, not forgotten), but though the book was a little bulky to carry around, I kept it for moments when I wanted to jot down ideas for a project, or for to do lists, and shopping lists and whatever.

I was thinking recently that as writing on-line was a big help to my last weight loss and as I'm planning to use it a lot this time, I need a back up for when I can't get on-line and this book would be handy for moments like this.


















I got up late and ate breakfast late. I started getting ready to come shopping about 11:45 but had a few things to fit in first and remembered only at the last minute, again, about lunch. I grabbed exactly the same things as yesterday, and figured there'd be a moment sometime when I could eat them. I'm so glad I did.

It turned out that not only was there the normal issue of being hungry and wanting some food and most of the options being bad ones, but today was worse. I used to spend a lot of time in the city when I was younger. I worked there for 7 years, and before that I constantly walked through it to change buses. It looks a lot different now, and most of the store names have changed. But then we walking down Hay St. It was after 2:00 and I was getting really hungry and right there, was The Forum coffee shop - still there after all this time. It was back in the days when a coffee shop was run like a little a la carte restaurant that I'd go in there, latest novel in hand and sit in an old fashioned booth, snug as a bug in a rug, and read, and order and read and eat. No need to queue or give anyone my name or carry a stick with a number on it, just snuggle down, read and be brought yummy food. And the thing is. I used to eat some nice sandwiches there, but I also used to eat the most wonderful torte. Continental torte they called it. Layers of sponge and custard and cream and a pastry base with profiteroles on the edges. Oh my how it called out to me!!! I was really wanting it but I was also really alarmed thinking, "But but but I am not - I do not want - I do not want to have that life."

I really do not want the life where I eat what I feel like, and that controls everything else about me, and cripples my body.

At any rate, we went passed the coffee shop, we ended up in a food hall and I sat at a table writing, waiting for the girls to bring back their unappetising food. I did dip my carrot in my daughter's gravy for a joke (it was a good joke in context of the conversation), and it tasted pretty good! So I did it some more. That tinned tuna sandwich tasted as wonderful as anything I could have bought there. I was really happy with it. The writing helped too. It quickly helped me calm down and feel less frantic about eating, and less interested in the multitude of food on offer around me.