Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Mystery Lunch

Do you believe that eating should be spontaneous? By this I mean, you notice it is 11:55 AM and this observation prompts you to ask, “Gee, what should I have for lunch today?”

I am rarely spontaneous about eating. You could say that I plan my meals, but that would be an understatement. A more accurate description would be that I have an ironclad lock on my meals. Be it breakfast, lunch or dinner –even snacks – the form and content of my daily intake is rigidly prescribed. I follow detailed nutritional guidelines that my nutritionist has laid out for me and I also limit all foods that I have found to be problematic.  Essentially, I eat the same stuff, in the same way, day after day. I follow these rules when I go out to restaurants too– and it is often quite a feat to fit restaurant meals into anything resembling a diet friendly to keeping lost weight at bay.

Yet though I keep this strict daily discipline, I’m beginning to think that, deep-down, I believe eating should be spontaneous. This could explain why I get so agitated at things like surprise Boss’s Day celebrations. Yes, it was over the top, but there was fresh fruit and I could have eaten that without any damage to my weight maintenance efforts. It’s true that I would have had to endure the indignity of passing by vast quantities of sugary baked goods, sorely testing my willpower, in order to reach the fruit, but here’s the real thing: I had already eaten my allotment of fruit for the morning and I was determined not to disrupt my eating plan for the day. If that sounds anal and absurdly inflexible, well, I can see how you might see it that way.

Let’s look at this in a larger context, i.e. my entire life before 2007. Before I embarked on my final weight loss undertaking, the only way I ate was spontaneously. At any given moment, I had no idea what my next meal would look like; I consumed whatever was easy and whatever was there. The result of this practice was that I ate very few vegetables or fruits and copious amounts of bread, pasta, cheese and junk food. It’s no wonder that I eventually topped out at 253 pounds. Part of the task of the last six years has been learning to put some sanity and structure into my eating regimen.

But is it too much? Have I gone too far? I can’t answer that question other than to say that where my pre-weight-loss habits made me feel scared and out of control, my new habits give me a measure of comfort, even when they make for awkward social situations like what happened at the Boss’s Day celebration. I’m not yet confident enough to loosen the grip on my diet. If I did, I fear that my Inner Fat Girl would seize the opportunity to mount an offensive and regain lost territory as I regained lost weight.

You can never be too careful wherever Inner Fat Girl is concerned.

2 comments:

  1. "even when they make for awkward social situations like what happened at the Boss’s Day celebration"

    ???

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    Replies
    1. Everyone was excited about the big food event -- except me. I was the party pooper. That feels awkward. Maybe I make too much of it, but it's part of the struggle for me.

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