Food, Glorious Food!

Here it is the end of March and I haven’t updated this silly thing all year. The truth is, there has been NOTHING to write about. No funny stories. No interesting observations. No witty sarcasm. But Maggie, you may be thinking, you’ve never written about any of that stuff before either. How right you are! Things around here have been pretty dull since the weather has been so slow to change to spring. It’s been cold and rainy/snowy and no one has really done much of anything. But I now have something that I feel may make for decent reading. So here goes.

Since the last week of January, I have been following a new diet nutrition plan. I refuse to call it a “diet” because I do not believe in diets. I think most if not all diets are unhealthy in some way (Eat tons of fat but no bread! Only eat grapefruit! Only sniff ketchup as your breakfast!) They just seem to set you up for failure because you are cutting something totally out of your diet. And obviously you liked eating it because it wouldn’t have been in your diet otherwise. So, you cut it out and lose a few pounds. Then once you hit your target you start eating it again and wonder why you’ve gained all of your weight back. I just think you can only be successful if you eat the things you want in moderation and make more positive than negative choices.

So, here we are on March 30th, 9 weeks into this exercise and I have lost a total of twelve pounds (and a few ounces!!). I have surpassed my original goal of ten pounds. My husband, who has done this with me, has also gotten down to his goal. Now for me, weight loss is not the ultimate goal. Yes, I needed to lose some weight. But the real goal is to be healthy and not eat a bunch of junk. I also have had high cholesterol for about five years no and I know it is due to the stuff I eat. So, at work, there is a program that others have had long-term success with, so I thought I’d give it a shot. The upside to this diet nutrition plan is that there are classes each week that teach you how foods break down in your body and how to pair foods together to maximize fat burning. The other plus for this diet nutrition plan is that it is a program which understands that you like pizza. And tacos. And cheeseburgers. And bacon. And potato chips. And beer. And sausage. And ice cream. And ribeyes. And fried chicken. And cookies. And… you get the point. It allows you to have days where you blow your diet to hell for roughly two days a week which, frankly, is the only way I’d ever be successful.

Now, I am not writing this to be an advocate for this particular diet nutrition plan or to detract from any other program you may be on. I’m just telling you it’s the only diet nutrition plan I have ever heard of that actually appears to be healthy and actually gets sustainable results. If any of you want to talk with me about my experience I’ll be glad to do that, but I’m certainly not trying to drum up business for them. They can do that on their own.

What I do want to tell you about is what I have discovered about my relationship with food. That relationship is, in a word, unhealthy. I never knew how much I think about food, plan my meals, go out of my way for something good to eat, and associate “fun” with eating until I began limiting the bad things I was eating. I learned this because the first week of this diet nutrition plan is fairly restrictive. You basically only eat lean proteins and fibrous carbohydrates for 7 days before you begin adding back in the other things. So, I was staring down 7 days of eating nothing but chicken, fish, salads and vegetables. How did it go?

Well, on day two, I considered going out into the woods to hunt down and kill a wild boar, feast on his sweet, juicy meat, and then pick my teeth with one of his ribs. Not because I was hungry. I really wasn’t. The protein was filling me up. But I just missed the gluttonous meals to which I had become accustomed. I mentioned earlier that this diet nutrition plan allows you to blow it two days a week. As it turns out, I was blowing it two times a day.

My old way of doing things was that I would start out with my very healthy breakfast of yogurt and a piece of fruit. Then, if I was at work, I would start emailing people around 9:30 to firm up my lunch plans. I looked at lunch as my most important appointment of the day. It was a win-win: I got to eat a bunch of yummy food and hang out with my friends. I used to be so annoyed with my friends who were following this diet nutrition plan when I would ask them to lunch and they would decline because they had brought their lunch. Or even worse – if they accepted and then ate fish and steamed vegetables while I drenched my chicken fingers in ranch dressing. What were they trying to prove, anyway?

If I wasn’t at work, it meant I was at home with my daughter running errands and usually grabbing something to eat while I was out. She likes grilled cheese and chicken nuggets and quesadillas and such, so we’d always go somewhere where she could get that. And if I’m out, I’m going to order something good, so I’d eat like that, too. In fact, I’d plan my errands around what restaurants they were close to. I never realized I did that until I decided I wouldn’t eat like that anymore. You know what happened? I lost all interest in running errands. Even fun errands like clothes shopping. What’s the point if I can’t go to Moe’s after I buy a pair of pants to replace the ones I’ve grown out of?

So that would be lunch on any given day. For dinner, we’d eat out a lot. My husband would joke that if I told him it was time to eat, he’d start loading the kids into their car seats. The truth was, we would eat out a lot. I discovered through this diet nutrition plan that one of the reasons we’d eat out so often is because at around 2:00 in the afternoon, I’d start thinking about pizza or Mexican. I’d begin to crave it and before I knew it would have committed myself to a plan that involved either picking it up or going out and eating it. It was strange that I’d even be thinking of food so early because I would have stuffed myself at lunch and still be miserably full at that time. My portions were not what a reasonable person would or should eat. They’d serve me my lunch at a restaurant and I’d think Oh my goodness that’s way too much food. Yet, I’d clean my plate every time.

On the rare occasion that I would actually cook something for dinner, it was usually something unhealthy. If I made it, it was convenient to make. If it’s convenient to make, odds are it’s full of things that are very unhealthy. Sometimes, though, I would decide that I should be sure my children had not lost their ability to recognize vegetables and I would fix “chicken and vegetables”. When I decided to fix this for dinner, I’d get depressed about it as soon as I’d finish my lunch. Nothing to look forward to for dinner… And I’d always be sure that chicken and vegetables included a corn casserole or some kind of side dish that was full of butter, or cream-of-whatever soup or something fatty to make it tasty. So even on the nights we were eating in and eating "healthy", we weren’t eating healthy. And on top of that, I wasn’t satisfied because what I really wanted was a chili dog.

So going back to that first week, it was a shock to me how bummed I was because I knew I wasn’t going to get to eat anything I wanted until the weekend. (I had decided to allow myself to blow it on the weekends from the beginning.) Food consumed my every thought. And when I say “consumed”, I am well aware that I have chosen a word that is very closely identified with food. I was at work one day and we were throwing out ideas about how to get some members of our team more engaged. I started thinking to myself about having roundtable meetings for these associates early in the morning. Before I knew it, I was thinking about getting Chik-fil-A to cater breakfast biscuits for everyone. My mind immediately went to the social nature of eating and how that was the glue that would hold us all together. I was so fixated on food that I was using it as a means to have a meeting. Forget the content of the meeting. I really wasn’t thinking about that at all. I was thinking about and salivating over chicken biscuits. In the early days of following this diet nutrition plan, I found myself doing that a lot. I discovered that I largely associate food with EVERYTHING. And I did it all the time.
On the second day – the please let me kill and eat a wild boar day I like to call it – if my husband had said, “let’s quit” I would have in a minute. I was almost depressed about not being able to eat something big and nasty. We had a sitter for the kids one night and my thought was, well what’s the point of going out? We can’t eat anything good… And in my mind, I was struggling with thoughts of I’m never going to enjoy food again!!!!.

But as I stuck with it – and I’m proud of myself for sticking with it; it’s very un-Maggie-like – I began to notice that if I could make it through the week on healthy foods, I’d be okay and would celebrate on the weekends. As more time passed, I celebrated less on the weekends. Now, I didn’t cut out the burgers and junk food altogether on the weekends. But I also wasn’t doing that at every meal. In other words, I began to feel a little guilty for just going hog (there’s that wild boar again) wild on Saturday and Sunday. I was getting results (didn’t have to stuff myself into my pants and squat for several minutes at a time as much) and so I wanted that to continue.

As things stand today, I have dropped two pants sizes and have lost more than 15 inches all over my body. My entire family is eating healthier foods on a regular basis. My kids like squash and broccoli. Who knew?! And that’s just since the last week of January. I’ve seen this diet nutrition plan work for others and I can attest to the fact that it does work if you are committed to it. I am not as tired.  I am more alert. I am exercising more (healthy patterns tend to develop when you are getting results in one area). And I’ve been able to go out and get some new clothes and not feel guilty about it – I can’t wear many of my old clothes!

So, what is the lesson here? Well, there’s not one. I’m not here to educate you. I’m here to entertain you (in case that wasn’t obvious). But I will say that I don’t think I’m the only one obsessed with food. Most TV commercials are about restaurant offerings (and erectile dysfunction remedies, but I can't help ya there). There are billboards everywhere picturing plump, glistening cheeseburgers. Food is everywhere. And our country is fat. No one has time to commit to changing their lifestyle. But I’m here to tell you that I changed mine. And I’m not one to commit to anything that requires a lot of work. Or thought. Or energy. Or time. Or planning. And other than that second day, it has been relatively easy. And I’ve been satisfied with what I’m eating as well as the results I’ve seen.

I weighed in today just to see how it was going. The last time I weighed, I had lost almost 10 pounds. That was two weeks ago. I ate like a pig last weekend. I stepped onto the scale just to see how I was doing and discovered that I had lost just over two more pounds. Some habits are hard to break – when I saw this the first thing I did was consider getting a chili dog for dinner. I even texted my husband and sort of jokingly said that’s what I wanted to do to celebrate my weight loss. If he had agreed, guess what I’d be eating for dinner.