So, Friday was Christmas, which means my husband's family (his parents & his uncle) came over to have dinner. This was a tradition upheld by his late grandmother, who always used to have everyone over on December 25th to celebrate Channukah, no matter how Channukah actually fell on the English calendar. The reason was simple: "Everybody is off". She passed away around Labor Day this year, my in-laws do not have a great setup for hosting larger numbers of people (and especially kids), so I happily volunteered to take over the tradition.
I also thought it would be nice to try to cook some of the similar Jewish comfort foods that D's grandmother used to prepare, not all of which are grossly unhealthy. So I made brisket, roasted chicken, fresh latkes, and green beans. So, let the record show that we are up to *4* (yes, that's FOUR) batches of latkes I made, and four batches of latkes of which I did not partake a single one! And yet I'm still here to tell the tale. Taste is fleeting, right?
For dessert, I excused myself for that portion of the meal to work on the dishes and cleanup in the kitchen, which was a good strategy. However, I had a small moment of weakness when cleaning up; I grabbed a tiny piece of rugulah that broke off on the serving plate, and a tiny nip of a piece of chocolate babka cake that was left on my daughter's plate. It wasn't THAT much, but it was enough that I started to mentally torture/punish myself.
It started with some thoughts like: "Now, if I don't lose weight this week, THIS IS PROBABLY WHY!"
Then it got more negative as I started to think: "CRAP, my body has no forgiveness for this kind of thing.", "I'm probably out of fat burn all because of a bite of babka", "I might have screwed myself up. It hasn't even been a month" and "Uh oh, this is the beginning of the end, I'm going to stop losing weight and then it's only a few steps away from me getting fed up and completely falling off the wagon again and gaining 50 pounds."
In other words, I took a tiny bite of a dessert that I probably shouldn't have, and I talked myself into having gained back all the weight I lost, and then some, in the course of 5 minutes. Amazing how we can be our own worst enemy that way, right?
Looking back, I think there's some good and some bad here.
The good: I'm aware of what I'm eating. I'm aware of the choices I make and the impact they may have. I can't tell my body to "look the other way" at a transgression. Our bodies are machines in a lot of ways, and they react to what we put into them (literally and figuratively). TSFL is the sum of its parts, and even the tiniest nibbles (or, as weight watchers used to call them, "BLT's -- bites, licks and tastes") can add up, turn into a bad habit, and derail my progress. Being AWARE of this is important. Crucial, even.
The other good thing is that I did NOT eat any more cake, I did NOT eat any cookies, and I stayed on plan the rest of the night. My mind might have gone to a dark place, but I did not act on it. I reigned it in and controlled it from there.
The bad: I was feeling fear which was quickly devolving into negativity, self-loathing, and a lot of doom and gloom that was going to do me NO good. I named this blog "Deserving Health" because I have to know that I deserve to be healthy, and I have to be able to forgive myself and stay positive no matter what. I can't allow my mind to sabotage myself into a self-fulfilling prophesy of failure.
The funny thing? After all that, I still lost 2.5 pounds this week. And it wasn't for lack of stress or temptations -- I ate dinner out on Saturday night, we took both girls to a birthday party in Queens on Sunday, and today we took a trip to the Museum of Natural History in NYC. Aside from some parking drama (Oh, NYC, never change...), I did a lot of things right.
I wrote above about TSFL being the sum of its parts. I have to remember that a whole lot of good minus a tiny bit of bad, still equals a heck of a lot of good. The key is to be able to look that tiny piece of bad in the face, push it away, and drown it out with so much good that it isn't even a blip on the radar anymore.
This past week? I did GOOD.
WEIGH IN STATS: Week 4
* Change this week: -2.5lbs
* Total change since day 1: -18.5lbs
* Total change since March 2014: -41.5
No comments:
Post a Comment