Eating and Weighing

My Dreaded Scale

To eat or not to eat; to weigh or not to weigh; those are the questions.  I have stopped living to eat (some), and started eating to live (some).  BUT am I eating to weigh?  This week I have been conscience of the dreaded scale not moving downward as quickly as I would like, and translating this into my eating.  Should I eat those nuts?  Will they stop the scale from mysteriously going down?  What about those beans?  Surely beans alone weigh a lot in my intestines; maybe the scale will go up?  Eating to weigh is bad and good I think.  I do fine some days and then other days like today, I feel like this whole eating correctly thing is like a very hard job.  I feel the pressure today to hold it together; like if I do not focus, the "eat whatever I want monster" will emerge.  Not a gigantic binge, but just whatever I want, which leads to a lot of days of eating whatever I want.  Back to the dreaded scale, I remember my morning weigh-in today, and how nice it was that I finally went down 1/2 pound.  I think about letting the "eat whatever I want for dinner monster" out, and then I think that maybe if I hold on and eat correctly, the dreaded scale will smile upon me and move down maybe another 1/2 pound in the morning.  I so want the dreaded scale to be down for many reasons: my little rose jacket hanging unworn in my closet, my blog I report to next Tuesday, my husband who is cheering me on, my shorts that I want to wear....oh the list goes on infinitely.

This is where I explain why in the world I am blogging about this.  Today I felt the scale pressure, and a little thought danced across my silly head.....it went something like this'" You are doing really well, and this scale pressure might be getting to you.  Maybe a little experiment is in order for, let's say, just one week.  Try weighing just one time instead of every day.  And what better week to try it than SPRING BREAK next week?! "

Now I know many people, including a very good friend of mine, cannot weigh more than once a week.  It would drive my friend crazy to step on the scale every day.  We are all wired differently, and I am thankful for that!  But for me, pressure and all, the dreaded scale really needs to be faced daily.  I know if I do not have that pressure to consider what goes into my mouth in a very tangible cause and affect way, by the result that I see every morning on the scale, I may begin to stuff my mouth a little too frequently.  I have a short term memory issue combined with a bad procrastination problem, that would enable me to forget what I ate in light of the fact that I could procrastinate eating correctly since my judgement morning with the dreaded scale is so far off.  A few days of that and my weekly weigh in might be disastrous.

So I guess I will continue to weigh daily, and eating to live along with eating to weigh will become part of my glorious lifestyle change.  I hope and pray that someday it will not feel like pressure and hard work, but just a normal way to live.   It is better, much better, than the old me EATING TO GAIN.  Never stepping on the scale, eating whatever I wanted, and growing quickly out of all my clothes.  Much better!

A few pictures of what we have been eating lately.

Breakfast this morning.  Oatmeal banana berry muffins with no flour,  The berries were great.










Lunch for my man and me.  Salmon salad and avocado salad with homemade dressing.  We really love this simple dressing on lettuce and avocados.  It feels clean and refreshing.  The dressing is just equal parts of olive oil, red wine vinegar, and half a fresh squeezed lemon.  Delicious.

Yesterday I made a homemade soup with a tomato paste, water, and chicken broth base.  It had adzuki beans, garbanzo beans, spinach, onions, carrots, garlic, and tomatoes in it.  It really was good, but it gave me the worst headache.  I think it was the tomatoes.  Sadness.  No on the tomatoes I guess.

My Chef Peter (11) made this for lunch yesterday, and asked me to take a picture of it.  He so loved the cleanse I did that he begged me to let him try it.  He actually did it from Thursday through most Wednesday at dinnertime.  He loved it, and it inspired this plate he called the fruit basket plate.

The day before we had broiled salmon and asparagus for lunch.  This is so easy, and good.  It is topped with garlic, Dijon agave sauce.