South Beach Diet Day 25 - Sleep Eating

Today's South Beach Diet Tips:

* South Beach doesn’t magically dissolve your emotional ties to food.

* Those Ambien commercials may show a soothing green butterfly, but they don’t show that sucker cramming Twinkies down your throat when you hit the “night eating” sleep phase.

And now, here are the details of my 25th day on the South Beach Diet...

What I Weighed Today: 193 lbs. (8am)

I had a food dream last night. An incredible, completely realist food dream. I ate chocolate cake…with my hands. I've never done that in my life but as God as my witness, I could feel it and taste it. I even licked my fingers in between handfuls.

My dream also came equipped with onlookers who recoiled in horror and disgust. I kept eating and although I realized I was grossing everybody out, I had this feeling of, “Oh, well. We'll laugh about it later.” Some of the people I knew, while others seemed familiar but I couldn't say who they were.

After I woke up, I felt this need to remember what the occasion was. I don’t think it was my birthday because I got the feeling that the cake wasn’t for me. I don't remember 100% but I think I started hand eating the cake with my hands because we didn't have plates or forks and I thought everyone would join in. The dream was a bit disjointed because after the cake thing I was suddenly on a bicycle, riding on a highway by the beach and my fingers were still sticky from the cake. I could see that I still had chocolate under my nails.

What I Ate Today:
Breakfast: 1 South Beach Chocolate Peanut Butter Chocolate Meal Bar, Starbucks Venti Skinny Caramel Latte
Lunch: 2 South Beach Cinnamon Oatmeal Cereal Bars
Snack: 3 oz Low-Fat String Cheese
Dinner: Boneless, Skinless Chicken Thigh Meat (cooked on George Forman Grill)
Snack: None

EXERCISE:
None

I used to have food dreams all the time, especially when I was bulimic. I would wake up crying because I had dreamed I'd eaten a decadent meal. The dreams were so real and vivid it would take me a while to truly convince myself that I had not eaten or got up and noshed in my sleep. Sometimes I could swear my mouth tasted like food.

I have only actually “sleep eaten” twice in my life. Both times were while I was on Ambien (the sleep aid). The first time I took a huge log of goat cheese and tried to make a sandwich with it. Apparently, at some point I gave up on making the sandwich and sat on the edge of my couch and squeezed the contents of the large tube into my mouth like toothpaste. I then fell peacefully back to sleep exactly where I'd initially laid down. When I woke up, I could not believe the state of my kitchen.

The second time I sleep-ate, I made myself a dirty martini and then opened a can of black olives and walked around eating them and dropping them on the floor. The next morning, I found several half-chewed olives (spit out by my dog) and a water glass that was still half-full of martini. The only thing both these incidents had in common was that I took the Ambien with a small amount of wine to make it work faster. My doctor had told me this would be fine. I know better now and so does the medical community.

The Ambien story was just a rambling off-subject tirade but the point of this entry is that I find that I have food dreams when I consciously or subconsciously feel deprived. It must be subconsciously because I really felt okay about the path that I am on now. I am too busy really to feel a loss. I will try to get in touch with my true feelings but I am baffled by this dream.

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