I’m giving up on this goal and starting a different approach to my nutrition and diet.

Last night I was super stressed—I went on a huge cleaning/organizational spree, and didn’t stop until almost 1am. At the end of it, I pulled a muscle in my leg. It hurt. I got cranky. I ate an entire box of crackers and then some. I cried. Hubby was patient. I cried more. I fell asleep feeling like hell.

I woke up this morning feeling bloated, and slowly got ready for the gym. On the elliptical I had a great dialogue with myself (all of my best ideas seem to happen on the elliptical) and I realized that part of why I’ve gotten so bad at overeating is because my perspective on food and nutrition has changed a lot over the past few years.

I used to look at my diet as such a positive thing. I chose to eat unprocessed foods because they are best for my body and they helped me break the addictive cycles that processed foods can lead to. I ate fairy “clean”—organic when I could, whole foods whenever possible, minimal processing, colors, things I couldn’t pronounce, etc. I felt good. I liked thinking about what the good things I was eating were doing to my body. I enjoyed cooking new foods. Eating was fun.

Enter new job, fall 2009. With 12+ hour workdays, my diet and exercise habits completely changed. I ate Starbucks muffins during quick breaks, microwaved frozen food from Trader Joe’s when I got home. I ate packaged soups for lunch. My tastes for food changed, and I lost that connection to the things I bought and ate.

Here I am, now, battling addiction to processed garbage once again. I need to stop thinking that my problem is that I can’t stop overeating. My real problem is that I don’t have the motivation to nourish my body with good, real, delicious food. I instead cave to cravings for complete garbage that has literally left me feeling weak and terrible.

I’m done. I am determined to go back to the old way of thinking, and part of that involves not focusing on how much I eat, but on eating well and remembering how to enjoy eating well.