Sustainability

I've been thinking a lot recently about sustainability.  It's just another word for maintenance, but it's maintenance made easier, at least the way I think about it.

The red line is my weighted average and the light grey line
is the actual scale reading from every day.

I have maintained my weight for over four years now, most of the time within a four pound band. I found this cool website that takes in my daily readings on the wifi scale and calculates a fancy weighted average, to show what it figures is my "true" weight, the weight underlying all the daily bouncing around from water and other minor changes. When you look at the trend over the last year, its calculation of my true weight shows even less variation - and in the last three months, varying less than a pound. And this is weighing myself every single day!

So clearly, like it or not, I'm in maintenance.

Having realized that, now I'm starting the push the boundaries of what is maintenance. I think I've written before that not actively trying to lose weight translates into gaining weight. What that really means is a lack of focus, a lack of effort, allows me to slip back into bad habits that cause the weight to pile on. The reason I stop trying to lose weight is its just so friggin hard. It's too much work. What my new friend Darya at Summer Tomato would tell me is I have to learn good habits, so when I relax the weight doesn't creep back. Or at least doesn't come piling back on quickly. I think I like to eat ice cream enough that eternal vigilance is required, but it would be nice to relax into good habits.

My cooking and eating totally awesome vegetables lasted about two weeks. Then I needed my life back to do other things, like go hiking with the dog, empty things out of my basement, see friends, attend parties, and go sailing.  I tried to find convenience foods that mimicked the food I would make at home, but it's not at all the same.  I didn't carry my lunch to work, and butter chicken at the food trucks is not, in my current parlance, a sustainable lunch. I have had time to walk, and to walk far enough to get good salads, and that is helpful. I have consciously kept my caffeine to two cups (mugs) of coffee each morning, usually my own, and I have added an afternoon habit of walking across the street to Starbucks for unsweetened iced green tea. I think the walk is as reviving as the tea, and I'm in a position where the $2.70 for something I could make myself for pennies is sustainable, though the grinch in me begrudges the money.

I spent almost the entire weekend making family dinner for tonight, Sunday night.  I had a full table - seven people - and my girl helped me pull it off successfully. We cooked phenomenal amounts of food, more than I served, and there is a good chance I'll be able to make it last all week, for lunches and dinners. I did get the kitchen cleaned up tonight, but parsing out what needs to be frozen, what can be divided up into lunch portions, will have to wait until tomorrow.

But this was a weekend more or less dedicated to celebrating summer food. I can't do this every weekend. I can't in a food weekend make enough food for a month. So how can I create a sustainable way of eating fresh awesome food much more often?  Ideas, anyone?