I Hereby Vow To Avoid the Crisp (Cookie Crisp, That Is)

So. I can't expect to be perfect on day one of really trying to follow my three simple rules, right?

Right?

I didn't think so. Which must be why I went home after work yesterday, got my chicken ready to put in the oven, and then while it was baking, I got the Cookie Crisp cereal out of the cupboard and ate a LOT of it. Dry. Straight out of the box.

Then I ate some rice while my chicken was still cooking. Then I ate my chicken. Then I MADE CHOCOLATE DROP COOKIE DOUGH AND MADE COOKIES. Yes, I did. At 8:30 at night.

Oy.

At least I screwed up the cookies, so most of them ended up in the trash. I underbaked the first sheet, and overbaked the second sheet, so I didn't eat nearly as many as I would have if I hadn't effed them up. I ate enough, though.

But. I came to work today and wasn't hungry. Following my new rules, I should have skipped breakfast and just eaten lunch, because I would most likely have been hungry by then, right? Well, I ate my peanut butter toast for breakfast anyway, lack of hunger be damned.

But! Again with the but! I went to lunch at 11:30, and was still full from the peanut butter toast and all the calories from last night, so I didn't eat lunch! So, maybe there is hope for me after all. I'm sure I'll suddenly be starving by 2:00, at which point I'll eat some strawberry Mini Wheats that I have in my drawer, and then when I go home I'll eat a leftover chicken breast and some rice, and I'll watch the SU basketball game (we're #1 now, yay!), and I'll behave much better than I did last night.

This whole thing of readjusting my attitude towards food and eating is obviously going to take some time. I'm going to keep plugging away at it, though. I'll take the bad with the good and hope to eventually have more good than bad, and I'll be happy.

And I promise not to eat the rest of the dry Cookie Crisp tonight. :)

Debate of the Chips

I've been doing well all day. I had my peanut butter toast for breakfast, then a turkey sandwich for lunch, and a small box of yogurt covered raisins when I got back to my desk after lunch. Then I was nice and full and fine for an hour or so. Then the urge to snack hit. I wasn't hungry, but this was what was sitting next to me:


That's half of a single serving bag of Baked Lay's barbecue flavored chips. Here's a snapshot into my mind, as I contemplated eating it.

"It's just half a bag."
But I'm not hungry, I don't need it.
"Half a bag! And it's right there! You know they'll taste oh so good."
(Reaches for bag, picks it up, then puts it down.) No! I don't need it, I'm not hungry.
"Aww, come on. It's just half a bag. It won't hurt anything! You're probably not eating enough calories anyway!"
(Looks at the chip bag again, mentally shakes head.) No. I don't need it.
"Wannnnnnt chippppppps."
(Puts bag of chips behind paper stand thing that holds my work, gets out a pack of gum.) Out of sight out of mind. I'm going to chew a piece of gum now.
"You suck."


Thank goodness for Trident Layers. I'm so glad I bought a pack when we got groceries this week!

Update from later: I ate the chips about two minutes ago, after I finally actually felt some hunger. :)

Small Steps

I can't even begin to tell you what a relief it's been to shed the "diet" mentality. I feel so free! I was surprised by how much relief I felt at no longer having to think about my food all the time. I didn't really consider any foods off limits before, or at least not many, and yet I was counting calories and thinking about every bite I put into my mouth, and worse yet, I was judging myself and chastising myself when I did "bad" on my diet, and basically just messing with myself mentally every single day. So the sudden absence of any guilt, of the over-thinking, has been a great feeling.

Now I feel like the real work is beginning. I'm not dieting anymore, and if this goes as well as I think it will, I'll never "diet" again. But I am starting to work on changing my eating habits. I have a few simple rules to follow, which I've probably already listed, but I'm going to list them here, too. Repetition isn't always a bad thing.

1. Eat when I'm hungry.
2. Stop eating when I'm full.
3. Don't eat for emotional reasons.

That's it! It's that simple. Of course, it's deceptively simple. I've been eating for emotional reasons for most of my adult life. It's going to be a very hard habit to break. It means I'm going to have to start facing my emotions and dealing with them without softening the edges of them with comfort food (junk food, usually). That is not going to be easy. But it's a challenge I have to tackle head on.

And of course, when I'm eating for non-hunger reasons, it isn't always based on emotions. Sometimes it's simple habit, or just a basic desire to keep doing something that I find pleasurable. When I have a tasty, satisfying meal, I find myself with a strong urge to follow that up with something dessert like. But if I'm full from dinner, the dessert isn't necessary, and if I want to eat a dessert, even something as simple as a cookie, then I need to just eat lighter at dinner to leave room.

I've started trying to live by these three rules, but in all honesty, the steps I've taken have been small at first. I did really well on Friday, I think - I avoided eating for any non-hunger reasons, and I didn't eat too much in my meals, I don't think. I was home on Friday for a snow day (our driveway was PACKED with heavy, wet snow up to my thighs), and I was alone for the first chunk of the day, since Jim was at work (had been from the night before). I was proud of the choices I made for breakfast and lunch, and didn't snack at all outside of those meals. For dinner I had been planning on taking us out, but my tax refund didn't come in, and Jim was tired anyway, so I made myself some rigatoni and two pieces of toast with butter and garlic powder on them (fake garlic bread, I call it). I ate my dinner with a glass of milk, and later that evening I went into the bedroom to watch a DVD, and took a 100 calorie pack of cookies with me to have as a snack. The only thing was, I was full from dinner, and imagine this, I never ate the cookies! Strange, but true.

The weekend was a little worse, simply because we kind of had a food-centric weekend. There was a big SU game on Saturday night, and we bought snacks for that, and some of those snacks bled over into Sunday, too. But that's fine, and I did make a few smart choices that I was proud of.

First, we went to Denny's Saturday for a late breakfast/early lunch. I got a cheeseburger and seasoned fries. I ate the whole cheeseburger, and ate about half of the fries - and then I pushed the plate away and took the remaining fries home. This felt like a huge thing, because I would usually have sat there saying I needed to take them home, but I would have picked and picked, and they would have been gone before we left. But I stopped eating when I was full, and took the rest home and had them for dinner.

The second good thing I did when I got home was wait before I let myself start with the snack foods we bought for the game. I was still full when I got home, and yet I wanted to dig into my Xtra Cheddar Goldfish as soon as I got them unpacked from the grocery bags. I made myself wait, though, until after dinner. I got hungry about 4:00, so I heated up my fries and then I let myself have the Goldfish when I was done with them.

So, small steps over the weekend, but today the real work begins. I'll let you know how it goes.