The Food Confessional

Posted by Sylvia

I knew that there was going to be a lot of good food while I was away and I decided that I wasn’t going to worry about what I ate until I got home. I knew that I would put a chunk of weight back on and I decided to see how I felt about it when it came to having to lose it again.

Strasbourg has some of my very favouritest food in the world and I did think that on the bright side, I had a bit of room to manoeuvre having taken off 5 kilos before the trip. I gave myself a stern talking to about enjoying the food but not ordering things simply because I had escaped the diet (i.e. no binging). But the food – German peasant food with a French influence – is built upon cramming as many calories in as possible before a hard day’s labour and I fear no amount of strolling around the city could undo that.

Still, I feel that I ate the same as I would have if I had not dieted at all this year, so the net gain of the weight loss still holds true! Or at least that is what I’m telling myself. I have not done a weigh-in yet but I could feel myself getting more bloated as the fortnight went on.

I’m never quite sure why one day I can look in the mirror and feel pudgy but pretty and the next day I look like Jabba the Hutt but it’s quite clearly psychological to some extent. I think I generally see myself as skinnier than I am (certainly, I find photos of myself terribly shocking) but on the other hand, I have to hold this view up sometimes or else I wouldn’t leave the house. On this trip, I started on a high note and slowly drifted down until by the end of it I wanted to avoid seeing anyone because I was so horrendously fat.

Annoyingly, my reaction to this was not to up the fruit and veg in my diet and reduce the fatty meats. That would be much too sensible. I did, however, get incredibly upset at meals which were not wonderful. What a terrible waste of calories! I left behind food on the plate, unwilling to shovel down mediocre food if I was going to have to pay for it later. I also refrained from convincing myself that as I had had a smaller meal, I deserved a dessert to make up for it. In fact, I had two desserts the entire time I was away – Cliff claims that I only crave sweet things when I’m not supposed to have them and that does seem to be the case!

At the moment, I feel pretty positive despite the obvious weight-gain. C. and I are in agreement that week-day lower calorie living needs to be fairly constant in our lives for the forseeable future. We’ve both noticed some adjustment in thinking towards food – for example noticing fatty dishes which we didn’t give much thought to before which now seem almost unbearably greasy. Also, both of us felt very bloated and uncomfortable after the first few days which I realised was almost certainly the result of a real lack of vegetables in the protein high diet that we were having in restaurants.

Although I have previously complained about taking the same 5 kilos off repeatedly, this time I feel that it was a thought-through trade off: lots of sauerkraut and potatos and sausages and hams now in return for strict dieting later and then back to continuing the weight loss I was so happy to see last month.

I’m home again now but with guests. We are eating lighter than we did while travelling but not dieting until the house is empty again. One unexpected struggle is that I keep thinking about meals to make and dismissing ones that are light enough to feature on a low-calorie day – I feel like I should save them up for when they will really count. This is clearly silly and increases the risk that I will make very high calorie dishes whenever we are home and not dieting, which is not the intent.

I wanted to write all this down because I have no idea if this time next month, I’ll be feeling miserable and hard-down by or still happy with the deal I struck with myself. I am not sure how many weeks at 1,200 calories/day it will take to make up for a fortnight of food thoughtlessness. And although I think that this time next year I will weigh less, I thought the same thing LAST year and I started 2009 back at my heaviest weight. So I don’t trust my own thinking and logic and I want a detailed record of the processes I used at this time.