What I Learned Today

Yesterday I had a fantastic reboot of my diet.  I was super motivated all day, prepared with my meals and plenty of healthy snacks, full of positive self-talk and eager to work out. It was great.  Today started the same way.  It’s hard to describe this feeling, but it’s like you know you have this power to accomplish anything. 

As I said, today started out great as well. That is until someone offered me one of my favorite unhealthy foods for free, mid-morning. Dilemma!  First, I didn’t want to offend this person by refusing because he or she was trying to do something nice by procuring and offering me this item.  Second, it’s just plain hard to refuse free good food.  However, I was still in a very motivated position, so I logged onto sparkpeople.com and calculated the calories it would cost me to eat it.  Turns out, if I ate this, but did not eat my lunch, I could stay within my calorie count and be just as full. (It was a meal-type item, so please don’t think that giving up my lunch was a bad thing. It was definitely able to replace my lunch. It just wasn't as healthy and if I had eaten it mid-morning and then eaten my lunch, I would've gone over my calories.)  So I saved the item until lunch and ate it, thinking that was a nifty way to navigate the situation.

Immediately after eating this, it was like a switch was flipped.  I started obsessively thinking about what other “good” food I could get my hands on.  It was crazy, like a Dr. Jekyll/ Mr. Hyde sort of scenario, except that it wasn’t a good to evil transformation, but like a healthy to unhealthy change.  I was thinking crazily, trying to figure out where I could get something else yummy to eat, while at the same time disappointed that I was going to fail on my second day of the diet reboot (and I was just accepting that?!?).

I had seen the catering crew preparing a lunch for some organization when I walked to my second office, which is right outside their kitchen, and found myself hoping they would pop in and offer us the leftovers. If I had eaten that, it would’ve been impossible to count the calories for it, and it would’ve been a second lunch that I didn’t need! That’s when I realized how crazy I was thinking.  I gave myself a pep talk, ate my afternoon snack of almonds a little early, drank a large amount of water and then ran an errand to get me out of the line of fire when the catering crew would possibly be making their offer. That makes it sound easy, but it was a struggle the entire time.

You know what? It worked.  I just had to wait out the crazy cravings and then I was back to normal. And I'm  within my target calorie range today.

So I learned two things today.  1) Unhealthy eating is slippery slope for me. Once I start, even if I’ve accounted for it calorie-wise, it’s hard to stop the cravings.  Unhealthy foods (be it sugary or greasy or fried) make me crave more unhealthy foods. 2) When I think I just can’t live without a particular food, I just need to wait it out, because the thoughts/cravings will pass if I wait or distract myself.  

Sorry this post was so long.  I also tried a new workout today, but I guess I'll save that story for another day. 

*Specific names and foods are obscured to protect the innocent.