The Heathen Housewife

Crap! I’m editing this at 9 a.m. Wednesday morning. I wrote up the rest of this post last night and I would have sworn I pushed Publish Post, but here we are the next morning and it’s still sitting here waiting on my screen. At least it didn’t all get deleted. Ah, I see a little error message that says securityToken: Your request could not be processed. Please try again. Ack! I was busy lounging on the couch with my knitting and did not realize that I needed to try again. I hope this doesn’t disqualify me from that nifty NaBlogEverydayforaMo thingie. Why, oh why can I not remember the proper name of it? ACK! Must go finish drying my hair before Sophie gets bored with the Lego.

Gah! I am still so incredibly tired and crabby from this neverending cold. Julie was awfully squirrelly today, and I was trying to think up something to do with her that would be fun and also kill some time while Sophie was down for her nap. I’d been craving those crunchy-edged brownies again, and now that Julie can eat wheat (it’s going fine – she’s eating all the wheat we are and there have been no problems. We’re going to start with the soy as soon as we get around to it.) I figured she’d like to enjoy some brownies with me.

As an aside about the brownie craving, Joe was headed to the grocery store last night to pick up some coffee because he had failed to mention to me that he was out of coffee, so I failed to buy him any coffee. He asked me if there was anything I wanted from the store, and I responded something like “I’d love to eat about five brownies right now, but I don’t need them, so no thanks.” He gave me a shocked look and said “FIVE?! You couldn’t really eat five brownies, could you?” And I gave him a shocked look right back and told him I’d done it before and will do it again. I was a little floored that after five and a half years of marriage, plus years and years of dating before that, he has yet to fully appreciate my immense cravings for and ability to consume sweets. I mean, he’s seen me head into the kitchen and bake a pan of brownies or a batch of cookies on a whim because of a craving. He doesn’t understand it, but I thought he was used to it by now.

Which leads me back to today’s brownies. We made them. I “only” at about three before I was full. I’m still trying to follow a reasonable diet, and I’m down about 15 pounds. I’m pretty happy about that, but I’m still a good five pounds over the maximum healthy weight range for my height. I’ve been sitting on a bit of a plateau for a few weeks, and I’m not too worried about it, but I do feel like it’s about time for me to buckle back down and start counting points some more.

But I feel like I owe a few answers to questions about what exactly I’ve been doing, what habits I’ve changed. And it’s nothing magic – I’m happy to share. I signed up for Weight Watchers online on September 3. I’m not going to meetings or anything – just tracking points online. The first week was super hard. I felt hungry all the time. I thought about food constantly. I made some hard changes. I’m not really proud about the little habits I’m about to describe, but I had fallen into them, and now I’ve mostly dug my way out of them.

I had been eating chocolate All.Day.Long. Lots of chocolate. Little bites of dark chocolate here and there for every reason and no reason. I cut that right out. For that bittersweet taste, I turned to an extra cup of decaf coffee with a bit of sugar and milk in the afternoon. It wasn’t perfect, but it helped. Yes, there are calories/points in the coffee, but it takes a lot longer to fix and consume a cup of coffee than it does to pop a square of chocolate in your mouth.

And here’s a thing that I realized about cravings. No matter how bad I crave something, I have two choices. I can give in to that craving – eat the chocolate – and I will still crave more. Or, I can suffer a while longer from the craving and maybe it will subside a bit. It helps if there is no chocolate in the house.

Bad habit number two involved Grande Decaf Mochas at *bucks. It had turned in to a more-days-than-not habit. I realized within a day that just one of those pretty much blew my points for the day. My goal is to rein in my points enough during the day so that I can have treat after the girls are in bed, and if I have even a tall, non-fat version of a mocha, it means that a treat after bedtime is going over the points. It’s pretty simple. But at least, even now that I’ve gotten a little sloppy on this habit – must re-commit to the program – I’m getting the smaller non-fat version when I must succumb.

Habit number three is a little more nebulous. I had just gotten used to eating big servings of everything I was eating. A typical breakfast used to be a fried egg, two pieces with toast with butter and jelly, and sometimes a piece of sausage too. Now, for the same breakfast I have the fried egg cooked with cooking spray instead of butter and one piece of toast, no butter, no jelly, but with a splash of Tabasco on it and the egg. Yum! Other mornings, I eat oatmeal with raisins or yogurt with fruit. But the egg with its protein really seems to stick with me.

Another example of this portion-size issue is Chipotle burritos. Joe is obsessed with Chipotle, eats there several times a week. We tend to get it for lunch on either Saturday or Sunday, too. Before I was pregnant with Julie, there was no way I could finish a whole burrito from there. I’d eat half and be stuffed. Somehow during the pregnancies my appetite stretched and I was eating the whole thing without thinking twice. Adding up the points in the WW calculator, one burrito was basically my food for the day. So I started cutting it in half before even taking the first bite and resigning myself to leaving the other half. The first time was really hard. I felt so sad that I didn’t get to eat the other half of the burrito, I gave myself a “bonus bite” – just one bite of that second half to help me feel better. But over the last couple of months, I’ve gotten used to the half-sized portion again, and now it’s enough.

There are a thousand examples of the portion-size issue, and after a few weeks of paying attention, I kind of figured out what I should be eating for most meals. I tend to be a creature of habit, so as long as I’m not going out to eat, it’s pretty easy to stick to my normal stuff. The less I can think about it, the easier it is to stay in line. This is a little cheesy, but I have been buying some Weight Watchers food – their Smart Ones frozen desserts and some of their frozen dinners. They’re easy, no-brainer ways to give myself a treat without having to calculate a bunch of points. And somehow, those tiny little desserts are usually enough. Even when the giant bowl of ice cream with chocolate syrup and nuts on top wasn’t enough. It makes portion control easy. And the dinners are nice for lunch some days when I want something more than just leftovers or cold cuts *again*. The ones I get are only four or five points, and it certainly doesn’t cost as much as going out to lunch.

So anyway, I’m no expert. I haven’t even reached my goal yet. But my wedding ring fits comfortably on my finger now, my pants are loose, the XL shirts are looking all sloppy on me and the L shirts are fitting just right. My tummy no longer looks five months pregnant, although it has never been flat and will never be flat. I feel better. I just need to re-focus and stay on this train a little longer.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 2:52 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.