Dashboard Confessional

Actually, this isn't about the band, but I really do like the name, and I'm feeling vaguely confessional today, so... there ya go...

The Cheats start to sneak up on you, have you ever noticed that? (Putting aside the fact that the word Cheating is weird and doesn't really apply well to a Food Plan... I mean, Cheating is to help you win through unfair means, and there's nothing winning about gaining weight, right? So why call it Cheating? Be that as it may, everyone knows what I mean when I say the word Cheat, so I'll just use it. It's like Organic food. Stupid. All food is Organic. If it were Inorganic, it'd be plastic, or rocks, or dirt or something. But then, I could write a whole article on my particular grammatical twidges, so I will just stop here before this becomes a rant.)

Where was I before I got distracted by the grammar police? Right. Cheating. Sneaking up on you.

They do. Creepy little things.

Back when you (and yes, by you I mean me.) start your diet, you're soooo good. You watch every bite you each, you write it down, you measure, you weigh. You make sure you get all your fruits and vegetables, and you avoid temptation.

After a few months of it, you may sit back and think (smugly, of course) "This isn't so hard. This isn't so bad. Why did it take me so long to get around to doing this?"

I think the first thing to go is measuring. Measuring takes time. And we're not just talking about the time to dig out the measuring cup, fill it up, scrape it out, dump it in your bowl. We're also talking about having to wash countless numbers of measuring cups. And I don't know about you, but I only have 2 of each cup size. So, if I have a cup of this and a cup of that and a cup of the third thing, I have to stop mid-meal prep to wash out a measuring cup.

So... we eyeball it. And our eyeball gets bigger, every time we have a bowl of ice cream.

The next thing... journaling. Writing down every nibble and bite we eat is BORING. It's also time consuming. Even with the computerized options. I mean, Weight Watchers has a mostly lovely site to enter your food journal, and yet, you either have to look up each food item as you enter it, or you can save things to favorites. And yet, your favorite list is alphabetized. And Brown Rice isn't under Brown, but under Cooked. For Cooked Brown Rice. Skim milk? Under Fat-free Skim Milk. So, it takes time to sort through the list... And certainly, once you skip a day of journaling, you feel like you have to "catch up" and it's hard to remember what you ate yesterday, but looking at those blank pages makes you feel guilty... vaguely uneasy...

It's just easier to shut the book and not write anything down. "Oh, I'll remember it."

Water water everywhere... and it's rather unpleasant to drink, at that. It either comes out of the tap and tastes vile (as well as having everyone's leftover prescription drugs in it!) or it comes out of a bottle and poisons the environment for 4,000 years. Or you drink it from a plastic cup and you're poisoning yourself. If you believe some reports. Or sometimes, not. It's complicated and confusing and yet, you're told to drink 6-8 cups a day, and honestly, do you really need that much? Some studies say you do, some say you don't. Caffeine is the enemy. No, no, it's fine. And you try to alternate between soda and water, just to make things easier, but jeez, you're already putting the Crystal Light in the water, so it's got the artificial sweetners in it. Does it matter if you're drinking all soda instead of water? Not to mention two of my water-bottles developed leaks and I had to throw them away.

So... soda it is.

Or those little bites of things. And this is the one that's really getting to me. Darcy still eats sugary cereals. Perhaps I'm a bad mom that I let her eat "normal" food while I eat "diet" food. She gets full fat hot dogs (on lowfat bread rolls, but still, have you looked at the calorie and fat content of an Oscar Meyer Weiner?) and ice cream and fruit snacks and full sugared cereals. On the other hand, she eats whatever we eat for dinner, and as she's just as apt to chose a banana or some grapes for a snack as a cupcake, I'm happy to let her learn to have a better relationship with food than I do. Is it so bad that she doesn't currently think of a cupcake as the root of all evil?

And yet, these things she eats... some of them are very tempting. (Not the hot dog, through. I don't really like hot dogs.) But... gummy lifesavers. Cereal. Full fat ice cream.

I don't take much.

Just a bite.

But it's a bite here. And a bite there. And it's getting more and more frequent.

I counted, yesterday.

I had four extra "bites". That's probably more than two points there. And because it's "only a bite", I'm certainly not writing it down. Or counting it as a point.

Back in college, I took Geology 101, colloquailly known as "Rocks for Jocks."

In that class, we defined Creep as "the slow, inexonerable movement of soil downhill."

I think I'm suffering from Dieter's Creep. "The slow, inexonerable movement of my eating plan downhill."

And the result?

I'm up .6 pounds this week. Creep. Creep. Creep.