You’re going through your day, feeling pretty good about your food choices and your co-workers decide to celebrate someone’s birthday and everyone has a piece of cake. You’ve been working super hard getting your workouts in, packing your lunch, looking online at menus when you’re not hungry so you can make a healthy choice when you go to a restaurant, you even thought to bring your sneakers with you to a conference so you can squeeze in a workout and that piece of cake was not part of your plan. After eating the cake, you might feel sleepy and then grab something comforting (insert favorite comfort food here: pizza? Cupcake? Candy bar? Alcohol?) on the way home from work. You might think, “Why did I have that cake? It wasn’t even good!” or “It was amazing! I want more. That Lauren totally guilted me into taking that cake. She said she made this cake (or worse, got it special order from a fancy bakery). If it weren’t Bill’s birthday, I wouldn’t be so out of shape.” The new you might realize that Lauren was just doing what she does. Bill might not even notice if you didn’t eat a piece of his cake. He may even go home feeling grateful that people looked him in the eye and wished him well. And you have eaten cake before. Lauren is not working out with you. She’s not sweating with you. If she has feelings after denying her cake, that is her concern and both of you will live another day. You will go on with another victory under your belt, knowing that you took a step in a positive direction and eventually, it will be easier to say no because you will have a lot of practice at it and because you won’t be emotionally tied to her’s or Bill’s reaction. Whatever a food bully’s motivation is, it doesn’t matter. What matters is taking care of yourself one battle at a time. Food bullies can be co-workers, Moms (who may be tied to the love=food cycle), Dads (because it’s just so good to have you home, dear), friends, enemies who are jealous of your progress. It simply does not matter. No is a complete sentence without explanations. If you are not in the place to say no, you can say yes and then quickly toss the food out after accepting it. They will never know the difference and you will still be on the healthy path!
