Dreaming of delicious bread

Last night I dreamt about bread. About gloriously-filled juicy pumped-up fluffy white baps filled with ham and cheese. About freshly-roasted bread jewelled with poppy seeds and toasted grains. I didn’t just see the bread. I ate it.

I was somewhere in a city where food was suddenly needed. And the only place serving food was a cafe with a cabinet full of filled baps, French sticks, croissants and baguettes. “That’s all we have,” an irate large Italian man told me. “You take it or you leave it.” I ordered a ham and cheese bap but knew I was far too hungry to just eat the filling as I now try to do when only sandwiches are available.

Smoking

When I gave up cigarettes 30 years ago – round about this time of year – at first I kept dreaming I was smoking again. Oh no, I’d think, bereft deep in sleep. Oh no, I said I’d never smoke again and here I am. Smoking. I was devastated. But when I woke up, I was so relieved. It had all been a dream. I hadn’t smoked. My resolve had remained firm.

That was just a dream, just a dream

I felt the same this morning as I’d felt all those years ago after dreaming I’d been smoking. I hadn’t eaten the bread! Not a morsel of grain had passed my lips. My dream also contained a scene where I was eating a large cream cake! Kind of, what the hell, I’ve had the bread, may as well have the cake too.

What does it all mean? I’ve no idea. I went to bed feeling very full from my steak dinner. I certainly wasn’t hungry. Quite the opposite. Is my subconscious trying to get me to eat bread again? To do the thing that made me fat? Is my brain fighting me on this?

My fat enabler

Many people struggle with diets because they’re living with fat enablers – partners who don’t actually want them to lose weight. And so subtly – and often not subtly at all – try their best to sabotage a dieter’s efforts. As with the whole Educating Rita Syndrome – where a formerly uneducated person gets an education and then outgrows their partner – many dieters’ husbands, wives and partners don’t want them to lose the weight because they fear it’ll change them.

And of course they’re right. It WILL change them. Good relationships get over this; poor ones probably would’ve failed anyway – or simply been the vessel that held two unhappy people together. Better to be thinner and happier single than fat and unhappy.

Personal devil

My partner is extremely supportive of my diet and happy to eat meals when I cook for us both (which I don’t always) that are Paleo on the plate. But I’m now wondering if it’s my own sub-consciousness I need to do battle against? Is my brain trying to keep me fat? Tempting me with its dreams of bread and fresh cream cake? Go on, have some, you know you want to, oh you did, may as well stop dieting then and stay fat.

For last night was certainly not the first time I’ve dreamt I ate foods forbidden by Paleo. Nor the second time. These dreams are fairly constant now. I think it’s a sign the diet is working. I think it means I’m going to be successful. So my brain needs to get over itself and stop trying to drag me back to pre-Paleo ways. I’m going to stick with the Paleo programme, stabilise my blood sugar, lose all this excess weight and damn well NOT get Diabetes. That may be the script at least part of me feels fatalistically it must follow. But I’m not going to. I am NOT!

In a word devil brain – go to hell.