Another Epiphany...

It's taken it's time arriving, but I finally got there. As of yesterday, I am no longer a calorie counter.

From this point on, I'm going to be trying to learn the art of intuitive eating...

• Learning to listen to my body and whether it says it needs more or less fuel, rather than trusting a spreadsheet to dictate that for me.

• Learning to trust my instincts that I now know, after 2 1/2 years of healthy eating, what constitutes a healthy choice and what leaves a little to be desired, nutritionally speaking.

• Learning the art of BALANCE and MODERATION to maintain my health, my weight, my happiness.

I've had a think about this overnight and I think my plan of attack will be:

1. Not weighing myself anymore than the once a month I've got it down to, at most once a fortnight but I hope not to start doing that. It's taken a lot of effort to wean myself off the scales, so I don't want to go backwards.
2.  Carry on weighing foods. Just because I'm not logging them anymore is not an excuse to let the portion sizes creep back up. The fact that I'm not then logging them into a cal counter should be irrelevant. It's also useful for managing carbs for (diabetic) hubs so I have no real reason to stop doing this.
3. Think about foods as nutritional/nutrition-free rather than good/bad... I don't want my brain to start associating foods as 'wrong' as that's likely to result in some dodgy behaviour further down the line, cal counting was good for me because it made me stick to an allowance each day when historically I'm capable of binge/starve cycles when I don't have guidelines to adhere to... So thinking about my food as nutrition not comfort/shame will be a benefit.
4. Limit my 'nutrition-free' meals whilst I learn to trust my intuition. I'm thinking about something like the 80/20 rule here, but as I eat like 6 times a day if you include snacks and protein shakes, that would be like 8 meals/snacks a week that I could eat whatever I wanted and I think that would lead to some pretty quick weight gain on my part! So I'm going to apply it as a 90/10 rule instead for normal life, and then if other things come up (holidays, celebrations, etc) I can relax this a little. Since I get through 6 meals/snacks a day, that's 42 in a week, so 4 meals/snacks a week can be nutrition-free freebies (NOT CHEATS, I think thats a bad terminology)
5. And lastly, go through my wardrobe asap and get rid of the last of the clothes that are too big for me. I've been hanging on to them as I don't have much money to replace them, but I'd rather have too few clothes in my current size than have bigger clothes that I can slip back into without noticing the weight gain, if you get me!

There, sorted...I did weigh myself this morning just to see what I was starting out with, and it was pretty much the same as last week, so I must be pretty stable now. Let's hope it stays that way!