Changing Habits: Food As Entertainment

Lately I've been working on changing some very deeply ingrained habits, seeing what happens. This is both in the spirit of challenging myself and also with the hope that I can improve my moods and my life over the long term. Some things that I've changed over the past few years, to some degree:

1. Making exercise a part of my daily life, not just in a "going to the gym" sort of way, but as a habit, incorporating exercise into my day-to-day.
2. Understanding and divesting myself of pack-rat habits. I still have a lot of changes to make in this regard, but I've actually improved quite a bit. I am much more aware of how I tend to squirrel things away (to mix my animal metaphors), and am starting to enjoy the "getting rid of" phase of reorganizing my living and work spaces.
   
3. Working with anger: I've had a lot of success with this, but I've also been working on it for like 20 years. My temper is still there--it comes out mostly these days when I'm riding my bike and I have to interact with folks who are less-than-kind in their driving/walking/biking. It comes out sometimes with loved ones, but that's rare now. More than that, I've also managed to get at the root of some of the anger, so that I'm not internalizing it as much either. Still a lot (a lot!) of work to do there, but I'm also enjoying some of the fruits of my labor in that regard, which is nice

I've also been working with my relationship to food. Some of this has to do with having to deal with a family history of high blood pressure, and finding ways to avoid that legacy. Part of it has to do with just some basic bad habits that I've had since childhood. Some of it has to do with environmental concerns--recognizing how much the way I eat affects the entire world around me. But I'm figuring out that my relationship to food is also intertwined with my tendency toward depression--I'm not a binge-eater, exactly, but I do eat to distract myself. I eat for entertainment, which isn't what I want to be doing. So one thing I'm attempting to do is self-enforce a new rule: No consuming media while also consuming meals. This is really tough for me. I have grown up eating in front of the television, or with a book in front of me. Some of my happiest memories of my day-to-day childhood life are of eating a big bowl of cereal and reading the comics in the daily newspaper before school each morning, and of coming home from school, making a huge pre-dinner dinner and plopping down on the couch to watch cartoons. (Said pre-dinner often consisted of frozen burritos slathered in melted cheese, and a coke or two.)

And I've made improvements over the course of my life regarding my eating habits--but I still have to deal with the fact that there is a deeply-rooted connection between eating-too-much and consuming media: Television, movies, even books. I get a lot of pleasure thinking about going home, making/buying dinner, and sitting in front of my computer screen to watch a DVD while I eat. But I don't get so much pleasure out of that actual experience. It tends to be pure escapism, which is fine from time to time, but not so fine day-to-day. So I'm attempting to reconfigure how and where I eat. New rule: No TV, books or computer while I have my meals (I'll work on snacking later). It sounds so silly, but it's one of the hardest changes I think I've ever made.