Deprivation

Matt and I enjoying dinner out

 I've mentioned before that I love food.  I love the taste, the experience, and the ritual.  Matt, my dad, and I went out to dinner a few days ago, and I mentioned that sitting on a shaded patio enjoying some sangria may be close to my definition of perfection.

I know in my head that I shouldn't equate food with happiness, but it's a great experience, and I don't want to give it up.

So any diet that requires me to give it up is destined to fail.

It's a cycle I've been through a lot.

I find a new "miracle diet".  It's easy.  All I have to do is eat lettuce and grapefruit for 3 meals a day and avoid being in the same room as carbs, and I'll be a super skinny model.  I can do this.

And I do do it, for a couple days.

But then someone brings cupcakes to work.

And my resolve cracks a little.  But whatever, I can do this.  It's just one cupcake.

And it all goes well for another few days.  But then I get hungry, and when I get hungry, I get HANGRY.  And I lose most, if not all of my self control.

I end up eating everything in sight, and then all of the sudden, I'm back where I started.

So this is a really long way of saying that deprivation diets don't work for me.  Any long term weight success is going to be something that lets me treat myself.

This really came home to me last week.  I ate a lot.  I had beer and wine and pizza and burritos and dessert and generally had a great week.  I had a lot of fun.  

In the past, if I was "cheating" on my diet-of-the-month, I would have just pretended this didn't happen.  Then I would have been embarrassed to face the scale, and it would have spiraled into 20 pounds before I got back on track.

But not this time.  This time, I watched my portion sizes, I tracked it all, and I worked my butt off in the gym.  If I knew we were going out to dinner, I had a reasonable lunch, and I didn't have chips before dinner AND dessert - I made a choice.  And at the end of the week, I still had some activity points left over - I had burned more calories than I consumed.  Still, I was pretty nervous.  Because while I had tracked and worked out, I still felt like I was eating a ton.

When I stepped on the scale this morning.

*Drumroll please...*

- 3 pounds!!!

I know I can't eat like this every week.  That's not sustainable either.  But it makes me happy that I can have weeks like this and continue my progress.  This is working.  I'm so much happier than I would be if I was only eating grapefruits.