Sunday night

What a weekend. I learned that when I get stressed I want to eat sweets -- I must not have been terribly stressed over the past couple of weeks, because I wasn't missing the sweets until I had to deal with the mess about my credit card. So yesterday I had my normal breakfast, lunch of tuna and toast (whole wheat, minimal margarine), and then three caramel kisses, two marshmallows (or was it three?), about ten chocolate chips and a handful of Heath bar pieces. Then popcorn for a snack -- kettle corn, by accident; it wasn't labeled -- but I kept that to a reasonable bowlful, not over half the bag! For dinner I had leftover chicken with broccoli and rice, and I was careful with the portion size. I can't remember eating fruit yesterday, other than my morning orange juice; I must have missed it because of the sweets. I think I had milk with dinner.

Today we had waffles and bacon for brunch, and I kept it to one and a half waffles and one and a half pieces of bacon, so that's an improvement. I had some milk a bit later. I had a couple of friends over for Stampin' Up, and I had food out for them, but I barely touched it -- I ate a couple of cubes of canteloupe while I was cutting it up but until the friends were gone that was it. Afterwards, I ate a bunch more canteloupe and a banana (more than making up for yesterday's lack of fruit) and I had four cookies (two nutter butters and two chocolate chip, shame on me) -- actually I ate the banana to put a stop to the cookies. And I had a handful of doritos. We went out for dinner tonight, and I very virtuously ordered chargrilled chicken, and I only ate half of it. And they were out of baked potatoes so I had rice, not fries, and I only ate a few bites of that. And one bite of the breadstick. Frankly it was a very bland dinner -- I meant to order the cajun seasoning but either I didn't say it or she didn't get it -- though the chicken was very tender so it wasn't terrible; but I thought "rice pilaf" might have a little flavor. The dinner also came with a caesar salad, but it was so heavy on the dressing that I only ate a few bites. In any case, I was stuffed when I quit eating despite having eaten less than half the food.

I beat myself up over the cookies and things like that, but the truth is I am continuing to make an effort. I usually don't pay attention to how much I'm eating, but I'm sure it would have been a lot more than four cookies, and a lot more than one handful of chips, and I would have ordered a beer with dinner and gotten some kind of alfredo pasta, because, hey, we're eating out, so it doesn't count, right? And I would have inhaled the caesar salad and still stuffed myself with dinner even though I wouldn't have been hungry by then, because I wouldn't have wanted to waste the fresh food.

I didn't exercise today -- I did have that aborted attempt yesterday and I'll be back at it tomorrow. I had been thinking I'd try the Pilates class today since Body Flow failed yesterday, but the stamping event didn't end until about 15 minutes before the class was to start, which didn't leave me enough time to get changed and get there. And I was too pooped anyway. I still got more exercise in the past week than I've had in any week in years!

I feel like we're hitting the hard part now. We've been at the diet long enough that the novelty is wearing off, and it's so easy to pat one's self on the back and just let a few things slide, and before you know it you've started letting whole days or weekends slide, and then suddenly it's all over. But I think an important rule of this blog has to be nobody is allowed to quit. We need to keep coming back and reminding ourselves that we are trying to get healthy; we're not trying to get a quick fix, we're trying to change our lives and our habits permanently. The good thing about doing this with close friends and family is that we'll be missed if we try to disappear, and if we give up we have to admit it to all those people we see all the time. There will certainly be backslides, but maybe by meeting up in this forum we can prevent them from going on for months or years at a time.

My most successful diet ever was in 1998, where I lasted through roughly six weeks of counting food portions and sticking to a strict 1200-1400 calorie diet. I lost about ten pounds and kept it off for about five months. It was starting to creep back on, but then I went on a medication that made me sick at first and continued to kill my appetite longer-term, and I was on that until I got pregnant, so I did actually keep the weight off and never gained it back except while pregnant. Since then I've been either pregnant or nursing for all but two or three months, and at one fabulous point I weighed 17 pounds less than I do now, thanks to a Lent of no sweets whatsoever while I was nursing a one-year-old -- so maybe that was my most successful diet ever! The point is, I've never lasted longer than six weeks (six and a half, I guess, if you count Lents). This time it needs to be more, and I need you guys to stick around and drag me kicking and screaming, if necessary, through this!