I’m feeling pretty full today. ‘Why’s that, Hel?’ I hear you ask. ‘Did you have a lovely breakfast of egg white omelette and avocado slices washed down with caffeine-free green tea?’

Nope. I had a very stressful day yesterday. Between getting stitches out from minor surgery last week, running around to collect clothes to ship off to the refugees in Calais, making and sending a birthday card for my mum and doing about 10 hours’ very challenging work I just piled on the anxiety.

And when I get anxious, I don’t want to eat salad and rye bread. I want to eat total rubbish.

Breakfast was crisps and ginger beer. Lunch was healthy (still met my healthy lunch target!)  but then I had a ‘snack’ of a whole croque monsieur and then a massive pasta dinner accompanied by Wotsits and followed by a family pack of Revels.

That’s right, shocked cat. When I get stressed, I eat and eat and eat.

At the moment this is fine. My goal for yesterday was just to have a healthy lunch, which I absolutely did. It’s going to be interesting to see what strategies I can develop for coping with stress eating when my meals are more restricted in a few months’ time though.

I read an awesome book by Charles Duhigg a while back about habit change, where one of the points was that you have to replace old (bad) habits with new (good) ones. So I’ll start having a little think about what habits could replace stress eating.

The problem is, very few things are ever going to be as easy as buying a load of junk food and stuffing it in my face. I’ve got a while to try a few different strategies though, and for now my goals are very modest so it’s not impacting me much. It’s good to be aware of this stuff though so I have time to ponder it.

Smug mindfulness cat is smug, and mindful. (And really, really full.)