day 7 - doing well

The weekend is going much better than I had expected it to be. As I wrote on Friday, weekends are always difficult for me. Snacks seem to be everywhere, the routine is gone, it's so easy to fall off of the wagon.

Yesterday ended up being a very very busy day. The busy thing worked in my favour and kept me on track. At the end of the day, I actually ended up being a little under in my calorie intake and that made me feel great. I was very aware of everything I ate yesterday and that helped.

In the grocery store yesterday, I had my list and my hunny and I were discussing the ingredients for our dinner. We planned to make warm salad with some nice, skinless chicken we had. In the salad dressing aisle, I was looking at a bottle of low-fat, balsamic vinaigrette with roasted garlic, my hunny was looking at some full-fat, but really delicious looking, ranch dressing. We almost got into an argument over it, silly as that sounds. All week I have sort of felt like the bad cop from the food police squad or something. Because he's a classically trained, French chef, he's accustomed to cooking very heavy, fatty, but incredibly delicious food. Again, I reminded him about how frequently he tells me that he's unhappy with his body, his appearance, the way he feels, all of the things that being overweight can do to you. I also offered that if he wanted to, he could get the full-fat dressing for himself and his dad but that I'd have the low-fat, vinaigrette for myself. The compromise we came to was to get the dressing I wanted and a fat-free version of the one he was looking at.

On the way home from the grocery store we had a long discussion about cooking techniques and food as fuel vs food as recreation. To say that you'll never enjoy a delicious, decadent, full-fat meal again is just stupid. Of course, once in a while, it's totally okay. What's not okay is to cook and eat like that, 3 meals a day, every day. Doing that made us gain a tonne of weight during the first 3 years we were together. I offered him a challenge. I challenged him to come up with new recipes that were tasty and lower in calories. He's not been feeling really well this week so he didn't seem overly excited about that. I think that when his knee heals up(he's feeling much better today) he'll be more interested in my proposal. In the meantime, we're stocked up on chicken stock and are cutting back on oil in cooking. Baby steps, right?

Bad habits are hard to break. It's a big struggle keeping myself on program much less keeping everyone else on it too. Fortunately, once I get everyone else on my side, it'll be easier for all of us, we'll be able to support one another and the bad habits will be replaced with good ones.

Right now, I'm resting up. Today is a break day. My arms are still sore from the snow shoveling I did yesterday and I have a week worth of Oprah's tivo'd. Enjoy what's left of the weekend folks, I plan to!