Showing posts with label Emotions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Emotions. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Dealing with Cravings on the Juice Feast

During my first Juice Feast in the first few weeks I had intense mental cravings for junk food.  I thought it rather harmless, my nocturnal junk food cravings for McDonald's (where I worked as a teen) and other vile "food" I hadn't thought about or touched in years. It reminded me of Larry Groce's  old song Junk Food Junkie.


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I often resolve tough situations with humor--or maybe humor is such a fundamental part of my life (I find it intellectually stimulating to make others laugh) that it arises without much needed thought or incentive.  Nevertheless I deal with these false psychological cravings for junk food by recognizing them as phantoms from my past. Some say it is a form of detox. The Juice Feast did funny things to me emotionally--at times my emotions were like a wild roller coaster ride.  This was foreign to me as I'm a pretty even kind of person. I often found myself talking myself down from the ledge of irrationality.  Don't get me wrong life is often irrational but I make sense of it (most of the time) through rational means.

In the first JF I'm fairly certain I didn't meditate once. I wasn't a regular back then. Now that I have meditation working with me I intend to use it to help me clear my mind of cravings during the second JF. I also keep a journal of the days. I find much of what I wrote to be repetitious nonsense and that's okay as it is really an outlet for my mind to stop thinking about things. I find that when I write things down my mind is triggered to let go--I won't forget the message because I've written it down.  Another tactic to deal with cravings is to accept them as they are.  When I quit smoking I did a lot of reading on addiction. The books I read all indicated a craving lasts no more than seconds. I knew I had the willpower to outlast cravings despite the mind doing funny tricks on me. I would usually notice the craving, count for the seconds it lasted and be amazed how it disappeared.  On occasion a craving would return three or four times in one hour and I would repeat the process--but this was rare for me.

I recognize cravings will come and go on the JF.  With any luck they will amuse me--and quickly go away.