After my wrestling with the chocolate demons last week, I've been thinking about the whole concept of "binge triggers". It's a term I use and I know a lot of other people use too, but do they really exist?

For example, I'd say bread was a binge trigger for me. Every week, Andrew and I go to the market and we go halves in a loaf of Turkish bread. When I bring that bread home, I think to myself: I must have control otherwise I'll be a total pig and eat this whole half loaf in a day. And, inevitably, I do. But, this is the question I'm wondering about, do I eat the whole thing because it's a binge trigger and therefore one bite leads to another until it's all gone OR do I eat the whole lot because by labelling it a binge trigger, I've put the idea into my head that I WILL eat the lot and, by thinking that, I set myself up to do it.

When I walked into the office where I was working for the past two weeks, I saw all the chocolate sitting there and thought I must resist that otherwise I'm going to go back to my chocolate-pigging ways. I struggled so hard with that thought that resisting chocolate was a constant buzz in my mind. When I think about NOT eating chocolate, the possibility that I will eat chocolate becomes stronger. I guess it's like setting up a black/white situation. Or, more accurately, a suceed/fail or good/evil. It gets down to two sides and the more you think about "winning", the more you open up the possibility of losing.

When you think about it, I have chocolate available to me 24 hours a day. The shops are full of the stuff. But I don't panic about that. I don't spend my life thinking - I mustn't go to the shops and buy chocolate. I worked in an office most of last year with chocolate sitting in the kitchen. I'd see it everyday and ignored it 99% of the time. It was just seeing so much chocolate, so easily available that caused me to panic.

It's the same with the bread. When I first started getting the Turkish bread, I won't pig out on it. Sometimes I'd end up throwing some out because it had been in the fridge so long, it had gone rock hard. Then, one time, I binged on the lot. Now I expect to do that every time. But it doesn't have to be.

Our brains are weird things, aren't they? We have to be so careful what we put in them. I'm going to stop thinking about foods as binge triggers and, instead, think sometimes I overeat that food, but sometimes I don't. I'm going to focus on the times I've had self control rather than the times I haven't. I'm going to make my brain work for me.