Monday, March 15, 2010

Diet Diary Day - entry 2

While we were in North Carolina in December, we were at my Mom's house and she and I were upstairs in her bedroom. I can't remember the reason now, probably she was showing me Christmas gifts for the kids or something. She has a framed picture of the two of us at a cousin's wedding in 1993. My first thoughts were "Wow I had a lot of hair back then" and "That is one godawful dress I'm wearing". (Words can't describe the hideousness of it and at the time I loved it. Go figure. It was a fitted version of a flowered muumuu. Horrid!)

Mom's comment? "Look how thin your neck was in that picture." Oooo-kay. I was a lot thinner then, a good 45 pounds lighter than I am now. And that was BBK - body before kids - which meant that the damage done by my 12 and 9 1/2 pound kids wasn't even a blip on the radar yet. But really? Your neck was thin? That's a new one. Come to think of it, she's been focused on the state of my neck for years. No idea why. She'd be completely bewildered if I mentioned it, not having any idea what I was talking about.

Let's face it, I don't need help finding things to obsess about on my body. Every time I've tried to lose weight, I've focused on one thing or another: the amount of fat (or lack thereof) under chins, the hollows around collarbones, the area around the Achilles' tendon, how much the ankle bone shows, how thin a forearm is, waist to hip ratio - all sorts of details that avoid dealing with the real issue which is weight. Weight, weight, weight.

I'm hoping that with focusing on a healthy lifestyle rather than losing x amount of pounds as quickly as possible or fitting into a dress by a certain date that I've found the long term solution to the problem. Am I ever going to be a size 2? Nah. I'm just not built that way, and I'm okay with that. But I do want to be the best me and the healthiest me I can be. If it takes me a couple years to get there, that's okay. What's important is that I get there and that I stay there in the healthiest way possible. And that means eating right and exercising and the dreaded portion control, which is the hardest for me. Eating an entire sleeve of crackers? Not portion control. Eating the majority of a bag of snack size butterfingers within a day? Not portion control. Ordering a large soda (regular or diet) pretty much anywhere is definitely not portion control. Slowly but surely, I'm figuring it out.

This week I got to add meat back into my diet midweek. I had a really hard time sticking to the meal schedule. It's hard for me to eat four or five times a day. Sunday morning I woke up with a stomach flu and spent the entire day in out of commission. Once I got an appetite back, I was craving toast, so I did break the rules and have a piece of toast with jelly this morning. I decided that I'd wait until next Monday to weigh in again for two reasons: the majority of the weight loss that would show up would likely be from the stomach flu and I weighed in on Wednesday, so I'd like to give it at least a week between weigh ins to help me stay motivated.

I know this post has been a little disjointed and babbly, and I apologize for that. Next week I'll be back to normal or at least as normal as I get. :)

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