A girl and her cake

Beth Geiger’s dreams of cake

Last night, I was dreaming about cake.  Yes – literally dreaming about cake – a wonderfully light, fluffy yellow cake with thick chocolate frosting. I woke up, the dream still lingering, and trudged into the kitchen to cook my oatmeal.  And as I waited for my breakfast, I started thinking about how the dream probably came from all the post-holiday challenges in “retraining” myself to resist the treats I had gotten used to.

These past weeks have been hard.  Since the start of the New Year, I have found myself daydreaming about food all-too-often.  It’s definitely the worst at work.  We have a small kitchen on the floor of my office.  And during the holidays, whenever I’d go fill up my coffee or water, I would be greeted with one holiday treat after another.  And I would tell everyone that I couldn’t wait for the treats to be gone so that I could get back into a healthy routine, and stop facing temptation.

But the treats are long since gone – and the temptation remains.  In my mind, I still picture those treats on the counter.  So when I turn into the kitchen and see only empty space before me, I get disappointed. It’s almost physical – like it’s my body that’s missing the treats and not my mind.

I’ve heard that it only takes 21 days to “retrain” the brain to new habits.  I’m not sure how that applies to weight control and food cravings, but I do hope that it does.  Obviously, switching someone’s life to a deeply healthy lifestyle is an evolution – a journey made of small, individual steps.   But as Day 21 of the New Year approaches, I hope that the resolutions we’ve formed over the past three weeks are starting to become “habit”…so that it once again becomes easier to enter the kitchen without hopes of cookies, and contain the dreams of cake to the sleeping hours (if at all!).