Food Pressure

It's Day 4 following the Bright Line Eating program I explained in an earlier post (no sugar, no flour, no snacking, correct portion sizes), and so far so good! I'm reading a lot of ingredient labels, but I'm still getting to eat some delicious food! For example, yesterday I had my favorite Cafe Latte Shakeology for lunch, and then I made this delicious lemongrass chicken dinner.

I am also using the Intermittent Fasting method. I have an incredibly slow metabolism, and one of the only advantages of that is that I can go for long stretches of time without getting hungry. My metabolism makes intermittent fasting relatively easy, and my favorite part about it is that it actually makes me obsess about food less.

I have an all-or-nothing personality, so going 16 hours in a row without eating makes it easier for me to tell myself that I get nothing to eat, than to fret about what and how much I can eat during every one of my waking hours. I set my eating window to be from 11 am until 7 at night. I think I would rather eat breakfast and skip dinner, but that's pretty difficult to do without becoming a hermit and declining every evening get together with family and friends. So I'm ok with skipping breakfast in favor of having a life.

Something I have noticed in the last few days, as well as in several other times in my life when I was following a diet plan that I wanted to stick to, is how much my food choices can bother those around me.

Have you ever noticed this?

I firmly believe that what or much of something someone else is eating is none of my business. What you do or do not choose to put in your mouth is a personal choice that should never be criticized.

And yet people do it all the time. I guess it must make others feel more secure and comfortable with their own food choices when everyone around them is eating the exact same thing? I don't know. All I know is that I am sick of the food pressure! I am sick of people trying to force me to eat a certain food that I do not want, or to eat at a certain time when I do not want to eat.

It's hard enough living with the food temptations that are constantly surrounding me- I don't need peer pressure to give in on top of everything else!