Meet an Aussie blogger; and, 'all or nothing'

Just connected, if only in Twitter-ese, with Cameron Hay, 34, of Melbourne, Australia, a former personal trainer now working back from 315 pounds and blogging about it at fitnessandthefatguy.com.

After brief perusing, I thought enough of what I saw to bring him to your attention.

His next-to-most-recent post is right up my alley: The 'all or nothing' mentality. I recognize that mentality in myself, where I've found it to be both bad news and good, as I try to recover from addiction a day at a time. From what I understand, AONM is a hallmark of addictive thinking.

(Just to state the obvious, I'm speaking of myself and my experiences, and not in any way intimating that addiction is part of Mr. Hay's story. Jeez, we just met, and only on Twitter so h.t.f. would I know! And even if AONM is common to addicts, addicts don't have a corner on it.)

One way AONM helps addicts is that when we've decided to change, this line of thinking can help make chioces a lot clearer. Alcoholics, for example, don't dabble in alcohol, they choose the N of AONM.

As I've written before, many food addicts would prefer that sort of clarity, but of course, we need to eat. The best I can do is apply AONM wherever it does work, and strive to apply the spirit of it the rest of the time.

An example of the former is that I try, fairly diligently, not to eat flour and refined sugar. My default is to eat food I've prepared, and to read labels/quiz waiters when I'm out. An example of the latter to include not only substances in my food plan, but rigorous measures for quantity and timing. The AONM at work there is that if I'm relying on my broken "eye" instead of objective measures, I'm in relapse.

To be "all or nothing" within a framework of "do the best I can" isn't easy, but the lesson I take from having kept off 155 pounds for 20 years and counting is that it's possible.

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