Today I am going to tell you about how I invented the Collendar.
After giving up smoking I gained a lot of weight. For the first few weeks the brain demanded enormous amounts of sugar, presumably something to do with the changing chemistry. Then for some months after that the desire to keep moving the jaw and mouth after meals persisted, along with eating sweet foods as a substitute for cigarettes.
The problem is that the cravings for sweet foods last more than a few months. They go on for many months and meanwhile the body is growing larger and needs more food. To anyone considering giving up cigarettes my advice is to resist the comfort of patches and allow the weight gain to happen, even though it can be alarming, in the interests of giving the brain plenty of time to adapt to the loss of nicotine, say a good six months to a year.
There are a few things that can help. One of my favourites was to cook up a brew of filling broth. It had a litre of water, a chicken stock cube, tomatoes, onions and mushrooms and one quarter of a bottle of dried basil, all boiled together for half an hour. It isn’t too hard or time consuming to make and has the wonderful and comforting characteristic of involving a lot of hand to mouth actions.
So a time arrived to think about losing some of the weight.
That was roughly when I learned that the value of catalogues is multi-faceted. Not only do they inform you of the shop’s prices, they can be the basic material of an activity called “Collage”.
They have images of foods, motivating words and phrases, and all sorts of things like shoes, clothes, and parts of them are just plain colours. I set to to cut out all sorts of images and sometimes using sticky tape grouped them as my own picture on a page. My hands became very busy without the associated movement to the mouth.
Sometimes the groups of images started looking like “Calendar” pages. I would find an image with the month’s name and cut that out, and incorporate it with an image of a number showing what date it was and place all sorts of other images in my picture.
Voila! The “Collendar”.