a practically non-phobic lunch

I had a fantastic day. I went out to lunch again, and I did not feel "sick" before, during, or after eating. I did have an uncomfortable full feeling at one point, but I didn't get anxious about it, and it went away within five minutes. I also finished my meal when usually I have to take half of it home, because I get "full." (My wife jokes that I have an "at home full" and a "restaurant full" that are wildly different.) And I got dessert and almost managed to finish that too!

I have no idea why this meal went so well, and around the time I was waiting for my dessert, I actually started worrying about my lack of anxiety, thinking about how strange and uncharacteristic it was. But even that didn't lead to anything bad. I just tried to remind myself to be appreciative of it. I know it's weird that I needed to tell myself to enjoy this, but my mind usually starts racing just as much when I have oddly perfect experiences like this. It drives me a little crazy, because I want to know why. I want to know what I did this time that was so right, what led to me having the experience I wish I had every single time. But obviously it's one of those questions I'll never be able to answer. I can only make guesses, and quite possibly it was just luck, just a good-feeling day.

I have pretty bad social anxiety that competes with the emetophobic anxiety, and trying to work around both of them is really annoying. I try to only go to restaurants at off-times when I think there won't be a big crowd, 11am or 2-3pm. But it's really an off-time for me as well, and it leads to me badly planning my earlier meals / snacks so that I show up at the restaurant and am either not hungry or so hungry that I feel "sick." I didn't do that today. I went at a normal time, around 1pm, so I wondered if that had something to do with it.

Also, the decision to go out for lunch was a little spur-of-the-moment. I didn't have days to think about it and figure out exactly what was going to happen. Basically, I'm wondering if all the planning and preparing I'm trying to do to make sure these meals are successful is having the opposite effect. My therapist was saying something similar to me the other day, something along the lines of "if you are putting all this effort into planning events and still feeling sick during them, maybe it would be better to stop planning and just accept whatever happens." It's much easier to go along with that when "whatever happens" is amazing, like it was today. I need to get to the point where I can have a more challenging day and be accepting of that too.

In any case, people without this phobia don't do all this planning, so I'm sure it is something I should try to stop. It's not really getting me anywhere, and it takes so much mental energy.