Monday, August 27, 2012

Monday Musings: A Confession

So I must confess. I am on a diet. Some of you know me and know I am anti-diet.  Ideally we make lifestyle changes and lose weight slowly.  I am making those changes. Yet, I am aware that I do want to lose at minimum 20 pounds. So it's there.  I need to be honest about that while also focusing on the healthier eating habits I learned from Mindless Eating.

And the diet I'm on is fairly drastic and a bit crazy especially for me.  We are loosely following the 4hour diet by Tim Ferris.  This web page here gets you the basics. You don't eat any grain carbs as well as fruit and cheese. Some nuts are good for snacks. You can eat beans, meats, eggs, and veggies.  On cheat day anything is fair game.  I picked this one as a starting point because I want see how I feel if I don't eat wheat in particular.  I tend to go for starchy and grainy snacks if hungry.  I've been feeling bloated and lethargic.  I can over due the dairy as well.

I admit I am a bit hungry in between meals.  It was worse the first week but easier the second week.  Since I believe in changing the rules  if I want to I do have 1/4 of greek yogurt during the day to curb hunger if I need to as well as a handful of almonds or pumpkin seeds. I can have a piece of chocolate and a glass of wine in the evenings too.  I do use milk in my coffee as opposed to cream. I've dropped the amount to 1/4 cup this week.  I might up it to 1/3 cup again as it's just not as satisfying. Food should be satisfying or why bother?

The hunger I have is different than the sugar crashing hunger I got before.  I'm hungry but I don't feel like I have to eat right now or I will die.   Now that I don't eat cheese every day when Stephen makes me an omelet on Saturday the melted cheese is divine. Everything I eat just tastes better.  Some of it could be all the great local produce.

I'm not craving the breads or cookies even.  Last Saturday Stephen made one of our favorite oatmeal cookies and I had one.  I didn't want another.  He did take the rest to work on Monday so we wouldn't be tempted. The kids made brownies and it wasn't a hardship to say no. I except that I hate to say no to my kids when they cook!

What was hard to not do was to nibble the crumbs in the pan.  That wasn't because I wanted the crumbs it was habit. I love to nibble.  Even though I don't want to go have a big bowl of pasta with sauce.   I find it really hard to not toss two or three pieces of the pasta in my mouth when I put the pasta away if the kids made some.

So one of my new food rules is to only eat when I am hungry and only if it's on the list.  So I only snack if I am hungry.  The other is eat more veggies at least 3 cups a day. Which I need to do on this diet but I want to keep doing forever.  The last one is kind of two rules together eat until I am stated by eating smaller amounts.  So I'm putting less on my plate than usual.

It sounds like my meals could be boring and bland but I promise you they are not.  So I'll be sharing what I eat.  I'm a foodie at heart.  I love food.  I take it as a challenge to make simple everyday fair delicious.

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