I have a fairly new friend who is my neighbor. She is incredibly sweet and funny and I love spending time with her. She has been great these past couple months helping me deal with my boyfriend (I’ll talk more about him in another post.) She has had a rough several years and is just recently coming through the other side. I think the things she has been through have given her a wisdom and a sensitivity. She is a diagnosed bi-polar and is pretty heavily medicated. She is also a recovering addict, so doesn’t drink or do any sort of drugs besides the ones prescribed to her, which right now is good for me because I was heading down a road of partying a little too much. It really is crazy how much can happen in a year, yet how stagnant it can be as well. I’ll write some more on that in another post too.
Anyway, when she stopped using illegal drugs and went on the prescription ones to control her manic depressiveness, she put on quite a bit of weight, so she is a chubby girl as well. Not as big as me, but definitely bigger than she would like to be. So we talk about going on long walks with our dogs, swimming in the pool for exercise and just eating healthier, but we are both lazy and find it hard to get started.
Today was sunday and I made some coffee and headed over to her balcony to start my day and chat. We talked about how poorly we had been eating recently and how we both have had some stomach issues because of it. We talked about how we really needed to start eating better. “But wait, I am really craving McDonalds. McDonalds or fro yo.” And then we decided to go to The Sizzler for lunch. Yep the Sizzler, with their all you can eat salad and taco bar. All you can eat desserts. We planned to get the all you can eat Shrimp with it, but that would have cost us $24 a piece. Now I am waaaay to cheap to spend that kind of money on a marginally ok lunch even if it is all you can eat. So we opted for the 6 piece shrimp meal that ended up with drink and tax to be about $14. That was including the salad bar. We stuffed ourselves until we were stuffed. And feeling a little ill. Then we ate dessert. In my defence, I did bring home four of the shrimp and most of my baked potato for the boyfriend.
The funny thing is, that before I even went over to her house today I had been thinking while I was doing my dishes. I remembered a book someone had given me when I was a chubby teenager. I think it was called Feeding the Hungry Heart. It’s all about basically people who use food for comfort and how to break out of that. I definitely use food for comfort. When I am stressed/unhappy/lonely/bored I want a pint of ice cream or a bag of potato chips. Food is the one drug I can’t seem to kick. I KNOW what I need to eat to eat healthy, but I don’t do it. The beginning of the book says to start out by giving yourself permission to eat whatever you want. And while I was doing the dishes, I started to wonder, if that was really the only message to took from that book, because I pretty much eat whatever I want, and I am huge! Maybe I never finished the book.
So, when we left Sizzler feeling overfull and a little ill, I said, maybe that should be all we eat for today. But then at 8pm, we decided we still had that McDonalds craving, so we went to the drive-thu. I got fries and a double cheeseburger. And so now here I sit, overfull again. We laughed the whole way back from Mickey-Ds, but we both know this has to end. I dubbed it Sunday, Gluttony day.
So, I am going to make a commitment in writing… tomorrow (well actually today, because its now one am) I will eat all whole foods, or very minimally processed foods. I will start with one of my power smoothies – its so healthy- and I will finish the day with a spinach salad and maybe I will have poached eggs on whole grain bread for lunch- I’ll have some sensible lunch anyway.
And for all that are interested, I will post my smoothie recipe.
