How Hungry Am I?

I work from home, and have access to food all the time, and when I think I might feel hungry, I need to stop and ask myself ‘how hungry am I?’  This is a game you’re taught to play in almost any weight loss program.  It’s a test of the emergency emotional eating system, and if you’re not familiar with it, goes something like this:

• Are you hungry enough for chips?
• Are you hungry enough for a slice of bread (no butter)?
• Are you hungry enough for an apple?

And my latest addition:

• Are you hungry enough to eat some cabbage?

I have added that because at the moment I have a head of cabbage (or most of one)  in my fridge.  I am planning to make coleslaw with it, but have been busy.  I did eat some cabbage, which explains why I don’t have an entire head anymore.  I like cabbage, I like it in many forms; stuffed, slawed, cooked with some ghee and basmati rice as I had for dinner last night with a nice piece of salmon.  I think it is excellent for soups and stews, and a variety of salads beyond traditional coleslaw, though I believe any cabbage based salad is considered slaw.  It comes from the Danish word sla which means salad, so I guess this has been a pretty circular exposition.

I have tried juicing cabbage, and that was a singularly unpleasant experience!  It was so bad I threw it out, which is pretty serious once you have gone through the trouble of juicing and cleaning up.  I am pretty good at describing flavors and feelings, but this almost defies description.  To say it was spicy doesn’t really do it, there was a tangy-ness that was off the charts, and all I can add is that if you can imagine the subtle edge that cabbage has amplified by 1000% you might get close to the awfulness of it.  No doubt some devout juicer will comment about how much they love cabbage juice, but the views expressed here are solely my own.

I have a lot to do today.  So much that my mind is dancing with tempting thoughts of pretty much any and everything else!  I have some cooking to do for blogging and photos; writing, reading, I have several projects that are in various stages of completion, mostly at the early stages…  I need to go take care of a friend’s cat, and there is more, but I don’t even want to look at my list.  All this procrastinating is making me hungry!  But not really hungry.  Not  I’m in need of nourishment, or it’s been hours since my last meal kind of hungry, but the kind of hungry that replaces motivation with avoidance.  I am hungry in my head.

This morning I figured something out that had been bothering me for a while.  I decided to take a different approach to a problem I have been unable to solve, and once I re-framed the question the solution was crystal clear, and the problem fell away.  Sometimes this technique works with my faux hunger.  I set it aside and look at what I am avoiding from a different perspective.  If I can get my mind engaged and focused enough I forget about wanting food, and get to work.  If I can do that it is a triumph, and the day is better, I feel better both mentally and physically and as an added bonus, I get my work done, and get to cross things off my list—yippee!

If I can change ‘how hungry am I?’ into ‘how can I feed my mind?’ or even ‘what can I cross off my list?’ I can forestall my impostor hunger and eventually I will become actually hungry, which quite frankly is a much easier hunger to satisfy.

8/15/2013