Nov
I just put up a post on my other (non-weight loss) blog about menu planning and the cooking I did this weekend, but I wanted to go into a bit more depth around it here.
Do you ever feel obsessed? With food, nutrition, organic, contents, ingredients…it’s a neverending list. Most overweight people that I speak with have so much knowledge about nutrition and how we should be eating, we just hit the roadblock in actually applying it to what is going into our mouths. (Raise your hand if you’ve ever said, “I know what I should do to lose weight – I just don’t do it!”)
I’m sort of over feeling obsessed. Especially because I think a big part of it is related to what other people think about what we’re eating – in restaurants, when I give my kids snacks at the park or playdates, what’s in my shopping cart at the grocery store…I’m OVER that feeling. Yes, of course, I want(and need) to eat in a more healthy manner. I also need to just eat less in general – regardless of what food I am eating.
When I really think about it, the worst things that I eat happen when I don’t have “good” things at home and go eat out. I obsess about having perfect food in the house, then don’t want to eat what we have and go out and eat complete junk. When I have relatively healthy things that I enjoy and can eat in moderation at home – this is the time that I take care of myself the best. I eat normal serving sizes. I don’t feel deprived. I don’t feel obsessed about everything that is or is not going into my mouth.
So, I decided this weekend to stop obsessing about having only {expensive} organic meat in the house and therefore not buying it much. Only organic produce, only organic snacks, etc. Yes, I do feel strongly that eating organic is the option I’d choose if I had all of the money in the world to spend. But, I don’t. So we’re(we being both of my selves;) meeting in the middle more and I’m relaxing a bit and I already feel so much better. I ate like a normal person this weekend(including a bologna sandwich on white bread – not the norm, but a much appreciated treat in this house and I counted the points).
When I stop obsessing, it’s like letting out a deep breath that I’ve been holding for a long time. It allows me to just cook some meals that I know we enjoy and have them in the freezer for easy dinners. It allows me to stop framing the meals that I’m planning in the sense of, “what would other people think of this meal” and lets me just choose things that I know we enjoy rather than what I “think” we should be eating.
Everything in moderation, even if it’s not perfect. I can definitely live with that.
p.s. That white bread? So not happening again any time soon. It was like eating air – didn’t fill me up in any way and so not worth the calories!
