a flash of insight about food

What I eat impacts the way my body feels, not the way my mind or my heart feels.

My husband is away this weekend and so last night I had a great idea to buy movie theater popcorn from the theater but to bring it home and eat it while we had a movie night. (I actually do still think it was a good idea, and the movie night overall was a good idea.) Whenever I eat a ton of popcorn (and I don't seem to be able to have it around me without eating a ton of it), I do not feel well. Even as I write this, I'm sitting here on the morning after with a rumbly tumbly and a low-grade, salty headache.

I realize, especially with eating things that I know will put my body into distress later, that I'm eating to try to change how my heart feels, or how my mind feels (thinks), and it doesn't work. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with it (and it can even be an alert that something is going on that I'm not even conscious of yet), but eating the food that I think will make me feel better generally backfires.

I'm learning that it's not what I eat or don't eat that impacts how my heart feels. That's a different matter. If my heart feels like it needs buttered popcorn and red wine and leftover Easter candy, what does that really mean? It probably means that I wish my husband were home, not away for the weekend. It means that parenting alone makes me anxious and overwhelmed. It means that maybe I wish I were hanging out with some girlfriends who have kids, too, so that we could all be in it together.

Some of those things I can work with. I can't make my husband stay home -- he needs to travel and I travel quite a bit, too. As for parenting alone, I know I can do it. I prefer to parent as part of a team, but I'm capable of doing it alone. I can reach out to friends to get together today and tomorrow now that I've realized that's something that I yearn for. Those things, I can work with. They require me taking some action and being conscious, but following up on those realizations could actually get me somewhere. Buttered popcorn isn't going to do those things for me. I have to do them myself.