Confession

I read very recently a rant about hating how Mommy bloggers use their blog to confess "oh no! I got caught out and had to feed my kid regular milk, I couldn't find organic!" or some such way of boasting how great they normally are.  Of course people put their best feet forward on their blog. I do too, though I strive to be honest. (I can't find where I read the rant, or I would link to it.)

And honestly, I've not been doing so well on the eating front. I'm sick and tired of tracking, it just seems like too much work. I got through the holidays without tracking and without great damage, but that may have been due to a stomach bug. Certainly since the holidays I've been mostly eating as if it didn't matter.  That means not only multiple sweets a day, but gratuitous carb sides as well, rice and pasta and bread.

A big problem for people who eat low carb as I strive to do is that when we fall off the bandwagon, we combine styles of eating that converge to the worst of all possible worlds. During our truly low carb stints, we lose our fear of fats. We are able to lose weight and keep it off eating as much as half our calories from fat. We can eat not only the good fats, olive oil and nut oils, but also the animal fats labelled bad by most nutritionists, and still our cholesterol and insulin are just fine.  But when we add sugar and grains to the mix, without cutting down on the fat, insulin gets bad, cholesterol gets bad, and we get hungry and cranky.  And we gain weight.

I'm not sure how many days I've been eating like this- edging into it since New Years, truly - three weeks!  Eating I have done recently:  a Big Mac and fries, and the same afternoon, a brownie and a huge snickerdoodle (at a conference with constant snacks and short time for lunch). Yesterday: chicken and pasta main course, several home baked chocolate cookies afterwards, and ice cream sandwiches later. I have eaten too many sweets knowing I'm going to feel bad in a few minutes, not just regret it intellectually but actually feel physically bad.  What drives this? Where does this come from?

Of course, we can only focus on and take care of a few things at a time. There is only so much will power to go around. As Scott Adams points out, one needs to make things easy on oneself to make sure we can make the right choices.  Apples instead of ice cream sandwiches in the house. But I have apples in the house, and still I buy the ice cream sandwiches and eat them up.  He makes it sound too easy. There is no doubt that I, and many other people (who appear to be mostly women), eat to be consciously destructive, not just for short term gratification. Plus, I know that "binge dieting" - that is, a very focused and disciplined campaign to lose weight - works for me. The "easy path" of many good small choices works for maintenance (maybe) but not for actually seeing the scale go down.  Perhaps that's because I have the disadvantages of thrifty genes and a lowered metabolism from having been very fat before - there is plenty of evidence that both those things mean one needs fewer calories than if you don't have those things, to maintain the same body weight.  (There are other, even worse, disadvantages I'm so lucky not to have, e.g. so far my thyroid seems fine.)

Am I going to turn this around, before the scale fully reflects the disaster that is about to appear? (There is a good chance that my weight will skyrocket over the next several days even if I clamp down now.)  Probably not. I want to, but I'm not ready to commit to do so. I am committing to doing some running, on the treadmill till the dog is back in commission.  I like the feeling I get from vigorous exercise. I am wedging in the running, 30 minutes three times a week. You can peek at the Quick Log, where I will probably post the workouts, since none of my apps really catch the treadmill activity in the way I want it without having to do extra entry.

Well, enough self indulgent navel gazing. Off to do something or other.  Excelsior!