NoFruit thread

Wassup guys.

So let me preface this thread with a quote from the Stoics: "any pleasure taken to an extreme becomes painful." And as you can guess from the title, my pleasure-pain pipeline of choice is fruit.

Now you might be saying "well fruit is good for you, it's got fiber!" From a perspective of moderation, that might hold weight. But when you get to the point that you're eating seven apples or ten mandarin oranges on a daily basis in the evening, there's a problem. Thus, I'm going cold turkey on this, just like I did sugar.

Especially salient is the notion that, as a person who has been off of added sugar for over two months, me eating fruit is the equivalent of harboring sexual fantasies while trying to reboot. In both cases, I would be playing with fire.

So, I'll make it a goal to go without fruit for a week and then work my way there.

Interventions:

• Imagination technique: every time I want fruit, I imagine myself getting the fruit, putting it back where I found it, and going back to my room. If that doesn't work, I'll focus on more extreme forms of ideation, like taking a bucket of apples and throwing them at a wall of spikes.
• Urge surfing. Each repetition of this technique will be a shortened meditation session where I keep the sense and mind-objects associated with this craving in my peripheral awareness. I hold myself from eating fruit, I increase my powers of mindfulness in the process. Win-win.
• Journaling. According to the mind-system model in The Mind Illuminated, impulsive states like anger and craving are the result of a vocal minority of unconscious sub-minds interfacing the consciousness first. They do not reflect the true consensus if all existing sub-minds had their say in the conscious. Therefore, both the act of waiting and expressing rationality into written form gives the slower sub-minds time to overcome impulsivity.

The devil tempts me thrice, I respond to him thrice in turn. Here we go.

 

I'm a day in. Often the most tempting hours are after dinner. I have no idea how I'm going to feel or think the day after I get my booster shot, so I'll have to keep my guard up.

 

Day five I think? I'm good with fruit, but I just can't seem to stop overeating. I've been reading this book called The Hungry Brain, and according to the models of satiety that we've developed from evolution, eating more palatable, seasoned food just makes us hungrier and more ravenous for food- even though our stomachs feel full. So I'll have to keep that in mind. Also, the fact that I have to see food in the kitchen when I enter the house doesn't help. But that's a short-term obstacle.