Testing, One Two Three

(Hey, I said I forgot my camera... but I did steal some photos from Jeanne, who was kind enough to bring hers... It's actually probably a good thing I didn't remember my camera. It's not working very well recently anyway. About 1/3 of the time, it doesn't actually save the picture to the card. I thought it was the card for a while, but when I replaced the card, same problem. Guess I need a new one. That'll take some interesting planning...)

I spent most of yesterday brooding. And not eating much either. Isn't that the stupidest thing? Not at all unique, as I understand it, though.

Who else goes through this little routine where they very carefully pick what they eat on the day of their weigh in, so that several ounces of whole wheat pasta doesn't show up (undigested) on the scale?

Bleh.

Around 4pm, however, I was a little too hungry for that. (I'd been seriously restrictive with myself; prior to that I'd had a bowl of cereal first thing in the morning, and then a bowl of tomato soup for lunch... bad me! Bad!)

I did weigh my sandwich, though.

It was a 3.2 ounce sandwich.

I was half-joking/half-serious talking to my friend Leigh about it. "Is it bad that I weighed my sandwich?"

"If it gives you some peace of mind, not in the slightest."

(I'm not, however, going to subtract that 3.2 ounces from my official weigh in number. That would just be silly.)

"You might want to think of it as being a test for maintenance, though," she continues.

"Huh?"

"Well, you weren't counting points and stuff, but you are more aware of food and what you should be doing, even if you're not worrying about it too much. I mean, after all, you don't really want to be counting points and obsessing about your 8HGs for the rest of your life. So, if you lose, or maintain, you know you're getting the hang of what the rest of your life will be like. If you gained, you know you're not quite there. Either way, it's a learning opportunity."

I had to push my chair back from the computer and think about that for a bit (yes, 90% of my conversations don't actually take place with actual face-to-face interaction... )

I've been awfully focused on the numbers recently... how much of this, how little of that, what's my weigh in, what percentage of weight have I lost, how far do I have left to go, how long is that going to take...

The rest of my life.

That's a concept that I sometimes have trouble with. Frankly, I tend not to think about it too much, since the idea of spending the rest of my life eating whole wheat pasta and passing on buttered rolls and counting points depresses the living hell out of me. Conceptually, I understand... I will never be able to "eat like normal". This is my new normal. That doesn't make it less depressing. Emotionally... well, I think we've all been at that concept, looking at the road to good intentions and see it paved with hell.

On the other hand...

I had a great time this week. Really great. And the food I ate was good. I certainly didn't feel deprived. (Well, maybe a little, because of the dessert thing, but I'll get to that in a moment...)

Yes, for lunch on Thursday, I had a salad. Admittedly, I had a salad with grilled steak on it, and cheese and bacon crumbles. But it was a salad. Vegetables and everything. And it was quite tasty. I ordered my dressing on the side and dipped my fork into it... I did, mind you, scrape most of the cheese shreds out of the bottom of my bowl. And we skipped dessert for lunch (which I would not have done last year) on the idea that we'd have dessert with dinner.

I didn't snack all day on Thursday. We didn't make a special stop at any of the various taffy or candy shops. I didn't bring a bag of chips with me to eat in the car.

For dinner, I had the sashimi (raw tuna is nothing, if not core foods) and a tilapia steamer with veggies. (and butter and Parmesan cheese, but I didn't eat the butter, just the cheese). I was happy with dinner, and quite delighted with the sashimi (best. sashimi. Evah!) When it came time for dessert, our waitress rattled off a list of items that either contained allergens (welcome to the Household of Deadly Food Allergies) for me or Darcy (who the hell puts pineapple chunks in key lime pie? People, please!) or just didn't sound very good.

So we didn't get any.

The waitress tried to push the caramel flan on us, and I don't exactly dislike flan, but in thinking it over, I didn't really want it badly enough.

I did feel mildly deprived about that. So I got a candy bar on the way home when we stopped for gas. A 210 calorie candy bar. Probably 5 points for the whole thing. (6 if the fat grams fell on the wrong side of the line... I'm not entirely sure, I didn't double check it.)

We did a lot of walking on Thursday (and climbing up sand dunes is a crapton more work than walking on flat ground, let me tell ya!) and I was vaguely disappointed that the lighthouse we got to see was not open for climbing. I was interested to see if I really could climb 8 flights of stairs. We walked around at the life saving station. We ran around in the grass outside the Bodie lighthouse with Darcy. We walked all over the Elizabethan gardens. We climbed a sand dune When we went home, I was tired, but not miserably so.

Later in the week, we got ice cream; and I had a mint chocolate chip ice cream sundae with cookie bits and fudge syrup.

I couldn't eat it all. I made a fair-sized dent in it, but I probably only ate between 1/2 and 2/3s of it, then pushed it away. I was done.

I wasn't eager to weigh in this week. It was suggested by a few people that I use my "no weigh in" pass. But no, I think I needed to know. Even if the weigh in was terrible, I needed to know that.

Maybe I do have this thing in the bag, so to speak.

I was down, .6.

Maybe, just maybe... I can do this, for the rest of my life.