Dawn Walton – It’s getting late. You’ve had a long stressful day at work and you are sitting flicking through the TV channels. You are bored. You go to the kitchen and grab the big bag of snacks you bought earlier. You figure you’ll just eat a few and save the rest. Pretty soon you are scrabbling around for crumbs at the bottom of the packet. You feel a bit sick. You go back through to the kitchen and grab some chocolate. You tell yourself you shouldn’t but you do it anyway. It makes you feel better. It makes you feel less stressed.
Later you beat yourself up. Why didn’t you just grab something healthy? Why didn’t you stop when you’d had enough?
You tell yourself you are only eating because you are bored. You decide that tomorrow you will find something else to do so you don’t get bored.
Tomorrow comes. You haven’t found something else to do. You switch the TV on. You go and fetch a bag of snacks. You’ll find that thing tomorrow. Tonight you are too tired.
Night after night you repeat the same behaviour.
You try diets and they kind of work, for a while, but then it gets too much like hard work and you have a day off. Then a few days. And somehow you can’t motivate yourself to start again.
You feel like you have no willpower. What is wrong with you? All these other people seem to be able to eat whatever they want and they’re skinny. Life isn’t fair.