While still sitting in “the now,” let’s move the time machine forward again, and think about the situation tomorrow morning.  It’s important to scope out and write about the two possible scenarios:  If you decided to go out (and did), let’s imagine that. What food did you buy?  What kind of feelings do you predict you will be having about the incident when it’s looked at in retrospect?

If the previous exercises made you re-evaluate and helped you prevent yourself from proceeding with your plan to go eat, how will you feel?

Moving forward:

The choice is now yours.  As I mentioned previously, your commitment to follow this program does not include a commitment to not eat.  At the same time, it’s not “permission” to go eat.  This writing exercise is simply to make sure you don’t just go on “automatic pilot” without at least getting a sense of what is going on within you.  Hopefully, it’s allowing enough time for you to make a thoughtful decision.

If you decide that the negatives outweigh the positives, then perhaps you can go back to what you were doing before the thought to go eat came up.  There’s a good chance that following this plan will work as a “pressure valve” to dissipate the pressure that was building up in you to continue your march towards relapse. 

If this was the outcome, it’s important to stop and write about it.  It will be a chance to remind yourself that the urge to eat does not have to end with eating.  You will have proven to yourself that following this program will help that the urge to eat will go away on its own.  If you were like I was when I was relapsing, I had never tried this before.  The urge and the action were fused together in my mind. Why?  Because I didn’t believe that urge could go away without eating.  If only I could have seen it was possible to try a different way, I might have considered trying the alternative. 

An important statistic is that the average craving goes away within 20 minutes.  I never would have known that because I never waited that long before heading out the door.