Starting Out Wrong

Yesterday was a disaster from both an eating and activity point of view...  and I blame it all on the doughnuts!

Instead of starting out with a healthy small spinach omelet at Whole Foods, for reasons not relevant I ended up at our nifty little downtown Silver Spring farmer's and craft market. Not much available in produce yet (lettuce and strawberries and last year's apples) but there are a couple of unique food stalls. One makes tiny little doughnuts right there - squirting the dough into a vat of fat and scooping out little rings onto paper towels to drain. These are tiny - maybe half or less the size of a "doughnut hole" from Dunkin' Ds. With noble intentions, I bought a small bag to take to the kids. I continued strolling and looking at the stalls, and finally the smell got to me. I popped one in my mouth, and it was every bit as good as I thought it would be. But there was a quick slide down that slope.  Really, it is like an addiction. I was thinking about what I was doing, but it was like I was watching a movie, shouting "don't go through that door!" to the clueless actor on the screen.

So then I thought to recover myself. Just sweet carbs in the morning makes me feel bad, shaky and out of sorts. As that feeling came on, I fastened on the crepe stall.  They were doing a brisk business in breakfast crepes- with eggs and meats and cheeses - as well as fruit crepes. "Get some protein to balance the sugar" I thought, and did.  It also tasted wonderful, but the ratio of sweet to protein was not as helpful as I thought. Maybe if I hadn't had doughnuts first, the crepe would have been ok?

So the rest of the day was just --- struggling for the right word here:  punky? draggy? dull? foggy? logy? At any rate, I did some chores, read two books, took a nap, hung out with the kid. I made and ate a meat-and-vegetable dish in the mid afternoon, and capped the evening off with ice cream splashed with rum, instead of an evening walk. Lawn was  not mowed. Plants not planted. Shopping not done.

I feel bad about wasting a beautiful weekend day. Sometimes, we just need a low-energy day, but this was extreme. Would it have been different if it had started out differently?  We are not just a collection of chemicals.  We do have free will. We can choose. But, we can also set ourselves up to make doing the right thing easier or harder. Some days, life will seem entirely like an uphill crawl. But we don't have to tilt the playing field to make it harder.  Maybe I'd better eat breakfast now.