Making This Diet Official

I love sweets. I used to have a huge addiction to soda and for years I've eaten as though I'm still 18 and working a hard, physical job daily. My husband's weakness for fast food has been hard to resist. My weight has yo-yo'd for 10 years.

Now that all my linen is being aired nicely, I can start fresh and get this weight off. I've made some realizations and the result is a few promises to myself and a new point of view. I lie to myself. It's in little white lie form, but still there and damaging my weight loss efforts. I pretend not to see it if there is only a 2-3 lb gain and for a while I was counting my lowest weight even though it had fluctuated. I would forget to write certain calories because I didn't feel it counted if I only had one (or two) bites. Then of course I wondered why I was hitting dead zones.

I kept a food diary for a year, mostly as a way of shocking myself but it was a good guide to plan my next meal or see a pattern in my diet. I really was shocked to see some of my calorie count for the day end up in the 3000 range, even though most of the time I was about 2200-2300. That explains how I gained about 20 lbs a year. As if I was mystified, lol.

I had a huge hill to climb as far as changin my eating habits, I wasn't satisfied with a temporary or fast fix and I had really, really bad habits. Desserts too often and about twice the size they should have been, fast food several times a week, soda or coffee or BOTH daily. Full sugar, no substitutes. Did I mention how much I love adding sour cream and cheese to tacos, creamy sauces to chicken, frying vegetables? Yeah, bad eating.
First, I tackled learning protion control. Sounds kind of simplistic, we should know portions but it's startling how little we really know. For instance, a regular size can of my favorite soda is 2.5 servings? Who drinks less than half a can? And a bowl of cereal should be roughly 1 cup. It's a lot smaller than it sounds when you see it in a bowl, especially when a serving of milk is the same, 1 cup. My 3 year old son eats more than that for breakfast, forget about it satisfying the appetite of a big woman like myself. That's not even considering how unhealthy the average breakfast cereal is, and if its healthy it doesn't taste very good.
It took me nearly a year to make or eat meals that were of a normal size, time to move on to change number two- making healthier food choices. This one was much easier, believe it or not. We got menus from our usual restaurants so that we could be more informed before making our selections, restricting our eating out to one night a week, finding healthier alternatives for desserts and snacks. We managed this in a couple of months, all but soda. Ah, the worst of our habits. My husband refused to quit, he didn't want to so I did it on my own over a summer. I started by drinking diet. It was gross so of course I drank less, but not enough less. So I quit coffee and soda, replacing it with sweet tea. In copious amounts to give me the sugar and caffiene I craved. After a week I cut the amount of sugar in half, then another week I made it with no sweetner at all. That wasn't so hard, but replacing half the tea with water was.

Changing my eating habits and getting more active brough me down from 300 to 280. I've been down to 278 twice, but it hasn't stuck. I get secretive when I backslide and I tend to backslide at big events or when I'm sick. I think I finished a third of a sheet cake by myself after one party. This long rambling post is the beginning of complete food honesty for me, I'll be posting here daily to keep myself accountable. For the first time I'll be trying something new, timed goals. I was never able to control the variables enough to lose weight when and how much I wished but I think I can now.