Major Off-Roading

I've kind of got a little bit of this going on right now. Or at least that's how I feel.

I've been pretty off my game the past week. I haven't journaled about my diet since last Thursday, and I've definitely been half-assing the diet in that week as well. Here's what's been going on:

For starters, I have a generalized anxiety disorder. I'm not sure if I've mentioned that in this blog or not. One of the positive things I HAVE noticed is that my anxiety seems much more controlled and lessened since I started this diet. That's pretty awesome. Unfortunately, it's not completely GONE. One of the areas I've always struggled is with achieving balance in life... balance in all my goals, mostly. If I spend too much time focusing on ONE goal I start to get anxious that the others aren't being achieved. In the past I would just get overanxious, shut down, and do NOTHING. I've learned through therapy to roll with the punches (or the mood swings, if you will) a little better though, and when I feel that anxiety start to come up I have gotten much better at shifting gears. That's kind of what happened last Friday. I was starting to get really anxious because I was focusing all my time on my diet and taking care of the family, and my house was falling into massive disarray. So I took Friday to chill out a bit and focus mostly on whipping the house back into shape. I stuck to the diet pretty faithfully, I just didn't blog or journal or make complicated meals (leftovers, yay). Unfortunately this carried over into some of the other days... with not being a HUGE fan of some of the foods I have to eat on this plan, it is hard for me to scrounge up foods on the fly right now. I'm still working on building up that repertoire of easy and satisfying freezer meals, snacks, quick foods, and foods on the go. Without having those resources in place, and with 33 years of bad-food eating habits in place, it's very easy to go backwards and grab things that aren't great for me.

Another challenge: yesterday was my birthday. YAY! We went out all day on Saturday to celebrate... we hit the Bristol Renaissance Faire (one of my favorite places) and then Joe's Crab Shack for dinner. I did OK on the diet but allowed a few small cheats to sneak through the cracks. Tuesday night I had a Partylites show / birthday party at my house, and mostly stuck to the diet but cheated with corn tortilla chips and a little cheese. (I also, in a moment of weakness, bought and ate a cupcake at Jewel when I was shopping for the party.) Yesterday, my actual birthday, a friend took me out to lunch and my family took me out to dinner. I cheated with corn chips again, a little cheese, and some barbecue sauce (mmm ribs). A few cheats here and there are definitely going to add up. Though I think overall I handled the birthday landmine fairly well.

A third challenge: we ran out of food money. Eating fresh, healthy foods IS expensive, and I don't have a good handle yet on some of my money-saving food ideas. I am working on learning:

• how to buy in smaller amounts so less produce goes to waste
• how to plan my recipes (which I'm still building up!) seasonally
• how to plan my meals so that I'm using ALL the ingredients I buy (for example, if I have a recipe that uses two stalks of celery, trying to plan a few more recipes in the next couple days that use the REST of that bunch of celery I bought)

I'm not quite there yet though. It's going to take time, and I recognize that, but in the meantime I am exceeding my food budget by quite a bit. I've been subsisting on $400 a month for our family of four. That's not cutting it anymore.  For processed foods, I could coupon quite a bit and get good deals and sometimes even free food. While fresh food coupons DO exist, they are rare. We already discussed changing the budget next month to allow more food money, but for this month (until the 15th, at least) I'm down to the 'scrounge in your pantry' stage. Which isn't working incredibly well overall. I got rid of most of the bad foods but there's still a few things lurking that I may have to delve into because I just won't have any other options until next payday. I'll do the best I can.

This leads me to another challenge: I do keep some foods in the house for my kids and husband. I am learning that some foods do not tempt me and other foods, unfortunately, DO. Things I have snuck bits of in the past week include ice cream, generic Cheetos, candy, and a Twinkie I filched from my mom's house. It's like logically I know these things are bad for me but before the logic center of my mind can process a strong rebuttal, my body is already going

and then it's too late. So this is another learning process... what treats I can and can't have for them in the house while I'm struggling through this. What I'm going to do about going to my mom's house I just don't know. It's pretty much a known fact that dieting 'willpower' is a myth. 

To attribute dieting success or failure to willpower, researchers say, is to ignore the complex interaction of brain chemicals, behavioral conditioning, hormones, heredity and the powerful influence of habits. Telling an overweight person to use willpower is, in many ways, like telling a clinically depressed person to ''snap out of it.''

 I'll just keep looking for ways to fight this war inside myself until I've managed to change my brain chemicals, conditioning, hormones, etc. as best I can.

So. Anyway. There's been some backsliding. I've noticed some health backsliding as well, some of the old symptoms coming back up, and I DO NOT WANT that. This is real life, and this is a HUGE process; I'm not going to beat myself up over it. I'm just going to pick myself up and get back on track. The Blood Sugar Solution book says:

Getting and staying healthy in our modern world is a heroic feat. It is a subversive and revolutionary act. We have to navigate dangerous food landscapes, resist carefully designed temptations at every turn, fight marketing that goes right after our primitive hard-wired survival impulses, and fend off food pushers, saboteurs, and a thousand distractions online, on television, and in other media.

A HEROIC FEAT. A A revolutionary act! I like that. I enjoy a good challenge. I started journaling again today, and I'm going to count today as the official start of Week Two... which I will blog about next time!