I decided last week that I was going to make some food changes. My biggest problem is snacking, followed by soda. If offered a snack, I’m going to take it. I’ve got a coworker who will offer me a couple of cheese crackers or M&Ms whenever she has them, so I’m always sneaking a couple of mini-snacks into my week. Additionally, my diet all goes to shit if I get into the “snack habit“.
So. The diet – which isn’t so much a diet as an entire fucking lifestyle overhaul – had been going to shit for a while. I’ve been eating my feelings since early November, when my world got flipped-turned-upside-down. Before that, there was the snack habit. There was a soda habit, which got kicked off over the summer with the return of diet cherry Coke and a big sale on diet cherry Pepsi at work. I love me some cherry sodas. We can’t forget the Great Oatmeal binge of 2018, where I was eating oatmeal for at least two meals daily since the spring. When you add in the stress over money, family, and legal matters, all the healthy eating habits I built up over the last 3 years were defeated.
Ten days ago, I weighed myself on the HIGI machine at work. I had tipped my BMI over into the realm of “overweight”*. In the last 9 months, I’ve gained about 20 lbs. It was time for some changes.
I gave up my morning oatmeal, and my pumpkin overnight oats for lunch. I’ve been vigilant about snacking, and not snacking. I don’t bring extra snacks to work, and I don’t buy extra snacks while I’m there. I brought back the snack rules that I made for myself when I first decided to change the way I ate: don’t eat the afternoon snack until after 2 pm, don’t eat my afternoon snack at lunch, and if I did eat the snack at lunch, I couldn’t buy anything else as a snack until 3 pm. The time constraints worked out well for me. If I ate it too early in the afternoon or at lunch, I felt like I needed to have something else when 2 pm rolled around, because that’s what I always did. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t really hungry. This brought me to making the 3 pm rule. In most cases, if I can get past 3 pm, I no longer want the afternoon snack.
My other big change was giving up the soda. I would stop buying it for months at a time, but then I’d be going to the cooler at work to grab some water and I’d see the cherry Pepsi. I’d justify getting one by thinking of it as a reward for not drinking soda. Plus, it was always a diet soda, that’s got no calories to worry about, right? One soda that week would lead to another one the following week, because now my brain would be screaming TREAT YOSELF whenever I walked by the coolers. At some point the soda would go on sale and now I could get two bottles for only $1 more than just one, and it would be foolish to pass up that deal. My mental gymnastics told me it was ok to have the soda, but only one a day. BAM. Daily soda habit is back in full force.
Things are moving in the right direction. I’m being proactive about the snacking, eating a lunch that’s more filling rather than something less filling that requires something extra to “fill the hole” later in the day. I’ve given up the soda at work (I may have one if we go out to eat on the weekend, but that’s not a weekly occurrence). I’m feeling better, both physically and mentally. Normally, I’d have gorged myself on chips and fried/microwaved fatty snacks for the annual Superbowl appetizer feast. Instead, I went almost entirely vegetarian this year. This morning, after I dropped him off at work, I came home and did a 70-minute workout. I had the time to push myself a bit harder than I normally would with my regular morning yoga, and I was done before 9 am. I refuse to go back to the way I was. I’ve made the changes before, and I can fucking do it again.
I weighed myself yesterday, and I’m down 4 lbs. I’m stoked. It’s a start.
*Yes, I know that BMI isn’t the best gauge. But it’s what the majority of healthcare uses, and I’m not doing measurements. I obsess about enough things about my body.
