Get on and Shine with Holly Honeychurch

Get on and Shine with Holly Honeychurch

Being a Slave to My Belly

Let’s talk about diets and healthy eating choices shall we? Hooray! What fun. 🙃 From my experience, it has certainly been interesting and enlightening.

Food used to be important. I seemed to feel full, in an uncomfortable way, most of the time. Food was at the forefront of my day. I was its slave. I would chop and cook for hours. I would gorge on incredible amounts of unhealthy stuff. I ate way too much rice and bread, cakes and chocolate. And always had BIG portion sizes.

I was chunky and my belly was the place I chunked out, since I was a kid. People would ask if I was pregnant. Bless them, bless me, how embarrassing. Sometimes I just said yes.

Food was my obsession and breaking that habit brought me freedom. I guess I’d had enough of the old way. Something seemed to click inside and with the help of my companion, we both set forward on a low carb diet.

Now I eat between 30 - 60g of carbs a day. Amazingly I don’t crave the old stuff. It’s because I see my body changing and I’m addicted to that change rather than addicted to the food. The fat is gradually disappearing off me.

I eat well. Lots of salad, fish, eggs, vegetables, protein shakes, nuts. And having the added bonus of a ‘cheat day’ where anything and everything goes, I never deny myself anything and it always stays a treat. Something to be appreciated rather than abused.

It’s funny because the new food choices have made me realised just how much sugar there is in processed foods. Sooo much. And it turns out that even on cheat day I’m more discerning about what I choose to put in my body.

I also realised that while I’m grateful to have delicious food choices and appreciate that I can eat more than others, it’s not my entire existence anymore. Supermarkets just make me feel tired whereas before the biscuit aisle would elate me (and then depress me after I’d eaten them all). My purpose has changed.

I don’t slave away cooking for hours. I don’t think about food or long for it. I feel wonderful being a bit emptier. I feel amazing having a couple of bites of something and then moving on. I want to spend my time creating and imagining and exploring what I’m capable of rather than spending my time thinking about what I’m going to gobble up next.