In the Groove

Last month, I put up this post about managing my health a bit better. I'd been resisting paying attention to what and how much I'd been eating because I guess I was feeling a large amount of self pity and jealousy. For the last month, I've been slowly putting everything back together again. I started cooking 4-5 nights a week. I banned any store-bought snack badness from our house. Any desserts that do come into the house, I make by scratch from Cooking Light or Clean Eating Magazines. And I managed to keep myself from gorging on them by either throwing them away OR by handing them out to others.

This week, I started cutting out all the calories that had randomly creeped into my diet. I cook without my overdose of binging in the name of "tasting." That means when I make a warm chocolate pudding for the boys from CL I didn't take a taste of it when it was made. I didn't steal one chocolate chip. I avoided the trigger without expelling the food from the house. It's not that I wasn't tempted. It's not like I didn't think, "I can have one. It won't hurt"a few million times. But the follow up sentence in my mind was, "Yes, it will. You know it will. Have a tangerine."

So I ate a tangerine. And honestly, the last set of clementines I got kind of sucked, but these are perfect. I've also stopped grabbing extra food off of X-man's plate. Funny how I fought to get rid of that habit only to have it creep back up on me again.

I also have gone one week with only having one diet soda. This is a giant thing. I've switched over to either doing a protein shake or smoothie, low-calorie Crystal Light or just ice water.

I've been reading books on vegan and vegetarian lifestyles. I'm researching. But I haven't made any decisions, yet. The near-vegan approach is looking quite appealing, however.

My next step is to get rid of eating out. I'd fallen off the wagon and was doing it 2-3 times a week because of the convenience and my exhaustion. I need to prepare for my situation better, so I've been working on it. And I'm kind of proud of myself. X-man asked to eat at El Toro for lunch today. I sent the boys by themselves and stayed home.

I had been falling back into the gap of American food culture. Now I'm kind of climbing my way out of the hole again. The goal is to avoid the gap in the future by making choices that are best for my body and brain. I started to think that it wasn't fair that I couldn't eat what other people ate. I rebelled in giant ways. Now, after five days of monitoring and recording after weeks of preparing and making small changes, I feel like I'm back in charge of my body. This is a really nice feeling, but talk to me at the end of May and we'll see how I'm doing.

Of course, last night my husband took to watching Julia Child in bed on the iPad and is drooling at her recipes with 2 cups of sugar and heavy cream... :-) But I don't feel deprived, and he got double chocolate pudding for dessert last night, so he probably shouldn't feel deprived either.

As for tonight, I'm trying a veggie and chickpea curry in the slow cooker. We're headed out to the Rotary Family Day at the Savoy Recreation Center at 2 p.m. So, it'll be nice to have dinner pretty much ready to go when we get home around 4 p.m. (I just have to make the boys some rice.)