You’re not destined to be ruled by food forever.  You don’t have to succumb to elasticated waistbands.  You don’t have to live with the regret of feeling like you’re squandering your health over something so petty.  You can be the put-together babe with it all.

I know how frustrating it is to be controlled by food and obsessed with eating.  It all takes so much time and consumes so much energy – the endless dieting, the searching for healthy pizza base alternatives, the sneaking in food when nobody’s looking, the weighing, counting, measuring, restricting….the failing, the crying, the asking WHY MEEEEEEEEEEEE??.  It sucks.  As is the constant feeling of being judged as greedy and undisciplined and somehow “less than”.

You know there has to be a reason why you just can’t forget about the tiny bar of chocolate that’s in the fridge behind the butter, yet you can’t figure out for the life of you what is is.  Addiction?  Emotional problems?  Everyone else manages to go about their day without their palms sweating over a square of Dairy Milk, but not you *screams into pillow*.

That was me for much of my twenties and a good chunk of my thirties.  Most of my time was spent dedicated to the pursuit of eating.  When I wasn’t eating I was thinking about eating, or wanting to eat or trying to eat.  Bread was my tipple.  My wheat tooth was legendary, even as far back as my school days. 

But something happened and I no longer do that.  I’m even immune to a warm, crusty bread roll, fresh from the oven.  I’ve gone from embarrassed and out of control to the person who skips a hotel buffet breakfast, even when I know there’ll be hash browns.  See, I stumbled into the cure.  Not some fad diet or quick-fix solution, but the actual antidote to this bizarre greedy, food lust that had plagued me since my teens.  The cure was instant.  I wasn’t thin instantly (that would be weird), but I was cured instantly and it was only a short wait until my body caught up with my new way of eating.

Naturally my life’s purpose is now to pass on this magical cure – the juju that liberated me from the tyranny of baps, buns and bagels.  

The truth is there’s a throbbing misunderstanding lying at the heart of humanity and believe it or not, every piece of nastiness that plagues this planet of ours, which includes our inability to say no to another slice of pizza stems from this one misunderstanding.  Calling it a misunderstanding is kind of like calling Jack the Ripper “a bit of a rogue” but for want of a better word, if we were to correct this misunderstanding no longer would any of us have to sport an arse visible from space (and that’d just be for starts).

For a long time I had an arse that was visible from space.  At first I did what we all do to try and get my shit together, I tried to change my behaviour.  I cut the carbs and went to crossfit.  I ate the cottage cheese, I ate soup.  It worked … to a point. 

I mean, holding myself back from carbs took Herculean will which I didn’t always have available.  If someone passed around a plate of bruschetta I’d want one so bad that it was all I could do not to leap from my chair and pounce on the plate.  Whether I gave in or not, I was still in chains.  

I was like this for years.  On the wagon, off the wagon, lifting my shirt in front of the mirror to check my abs were still there following a run in with a pizza and a box of wine.  At best choosing a small veggie one, at worst saying to hell with it, I’ll start my diet again on Monday, ordering the large pizza, drinking most of the box and then munching on the cold, stale crusts for breakfast.  Round and round and round I went, all the time making sure I did enough burpees and toes to bar to minimise the damage.  Until a holiday came along, or an injury, or sickness or general malaise and I didn’t feel like training.  Then I was screwed.  I’d balloon.  Also my skin was appalling. 

See that’s the problem with trying to fix your habits at the behavioural level.  It ignores the thumping great yearning we feel in our chest that makes us want to do these things in the first place.  We don’t want to just be sated after our evening meal, we want to be actively full up, unable to eat any more, especially if there’s something like lasagne on the menu.  We don’t want to taste food, we want to eat food.  We want a fun Friday night to celebrate the end of another week and we can’t do that with a kale salad and mineral water.  

So it’s the yearning that’s the real problem.  I call it The Itch.  Our eating problems all come down to that feeling of desire that churns away in our chest until we either give in to it or throw ourselves off a bridge, because those are the only two ways we can think of to make it stop.   We might be able to resist The Itch briefly while our tank’s full of willpower but once that needle is pointing near empty?  No chance.  All the behavioural changes in the world aren’t going to make it go away. 

Fortunately there is another way.  Though it’s not a new way of doing that we need, it’s a new way of seeing. 

Contrary to appearances, you’re not flawed or undisciplined or saddled with dodgy genes.  Neither do you need psychoanalysis.  Also you can hold off on stapling your mouth shut.  You will be rid of your unwanted eating behaviours when you realise you can LAUGH at The Itch when it hones into view, instead of taking it so seriously you’re virtually sweating trying not to look directly at the jar of nutella.

This is the nub of the misunderstanding that I alluded to earlier that makes us humans crazy for sandwiches ….. and the maelstrom of other nonsense that engulfs this planet.  We don’t realise laughing’s an option.  So we essentially treat the bowl of nachos or whatever, as if it’s some kind of deity that we must bow down and worship.

Once we see the truth of where our experience of the nachos (and everything else) is actually coming from though, it’s hard to take The Itch, or the nachos seriously.  Cut to the end, you stop stuffing them into your mouth and your arse no longer features on Google Earth. 

Curing you of a lust for fried corn snacks might seem petty, but waking up to this truth of where every experience we ever have is coming from, which includes those of the nachos, is correcting the error of believing that as individuals we can ever be trapped and powerless, not only in the face of food.  I’m freakin’ excited to be in a position to show you exactly how knowing that is going to upgrade your existence. 

So who am I?  My name is CB, well it’s Celia really, but no one ever calls me that.  I live on a sailing boat in the tropics.

For ages I couldn’t decide who I found more annoying; hipsters, millennials or digital nomads, but as it’s transpired, I’m all three.  Though back when I was starting out, the term was *Location Independent Professional* (not as pithy a moniker, I can see why it was dropped).  Anyway, I’ve got the Thai fishermen’s trousers, the Jamaican anklet, the Glastonbury festival wristbands up my arm to prove it.  I’ve even got chia seeds from my morning oats stuck in my teeth.  It does mean on this website I post plenty of travel and sailing related stuff, and I can’t promise there won’t be snaps of street food or candid shots of me on a swing.  If you like the sound of that, you’ll love my Instagram page @rebelsandratbags.

Anyway, we’re going to correct this misunderstanding, rid ourselves of our powerlessness in the face of our filthy, slutty eating habits and in so doing, improve every other aspect of our lives at the same time.  So grab my hand and follow me (first stop: entering your email on the homepage.  Trust me, you do NOT want to miss out on that).