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I do not currently have any buddies. My weight, however, has shown a dramatic 100-POUND decrease, since I changed the numbers. i have no scale, and I'm not interested in getting one. I will know as I lose weight. I have to do it from the inside out this time.
Yesterday I ate green tea for breakfast, then one of those ricotta/cottage cheese/spoonful of peach yogurt bowls of stuff. It was good. Lots of supplements: mega vitagel (all you need and MORE!), milk thistle to cleanse my liver, flax seed oil for whatever that does fat-wise. Something. Mobilizes fat, I think. Something in the intestine maybe.
I made bean soup for lunch (2 cans beans, 1 small can rotel diced tomatoes with jalapenos, low-sodium V-8 juice, simmered a long, long time) and it was good. I still have some for lunch today. I felt I was doing well. THEN the landlady stopped by to see my laundry piles on the floor, and gave us a PUMPKIN BREAD LOAF she made herself, for Halloween. It's like, I have removed all temptation, I am home alone most of the time now with no snack food to bother me, not on the road grabbing burgers. I have trained my hubby not to bring me candy with the rented videos, not to pick up ice cream at Walgreens. But then a pumpkin loaf walks up to the door, and there it is.
It was a tough struggle. I have 18 days into this diet, which is technically a 42-day commitment. Nearly damn half way. Pumpkin loaf is emphatically NOT on the "allowed foods" list for me. Yet there it was. I thought, just one little slice wouldn't hurt. My daughter, who was on the phone when the loaf arrived, said one little slice wouldn't hurt. It's made with a vegetable! I've used that excuse before. But no. I knew I wouldn't stop at one slice. And even if I somehow could, it would be a tiny leak in the dam. A slippery slope. A bunch of other metaphors. It would make it twice as hard to not eat something with both white sugar and refined white flour again. I'm not even eating sugar or flour at ALL at this point. Then I would.
And it would mean that my 42-day commitment meant only that I'd "try" and not that I'd do it. Then my daughter said, You are stronger than that pumpkin loaf. And I felt she might be right. But honest to god, the struggle of not eating it made me cry real tears. My husband offered to throw it away for me, to drive it over to someone else as a gift, anything to make me stop crying. I said no. I told him he could eat some, but I would not. He said he'd never do that in front of me. Instead, he cooked me some grouper filets (pan fried in a little olive oil) and steamed some mixed veggies, which I ate with a little leftover saffron rice. I realized that one reason it had been so hard was that I hadn't eaten my real dinner yet. After dinner, the pumpkin loaf seemed so much less interesting. It was still sealed in its baggie. I had a handful of red grapes before bedtime.
During the night, I awoke to find myself in bed alone. I saw the light from the refrigerator go on briefly, then off. I heard the sound of a pumpkin loaf sliding out of a baggie. At least he spared me the satisfied sigh. In the morning, I told him to take the rest of it with him to work, to hand out to his friends, and he did.
So I'm awake and ready to work at my computer now, and I just had a glass of tomato juice and I'm making a cup of green tea. There's nothing in the house but me, a grapefruit, and that leftover bean soup. I'll be OK.
Oh wait, one more thing. Over the weekend I wore my black jeans that I haven't been able to squeeze into since last spring. I'm still a size TOO, TOO LARGE, but now at least I don't have to wear those stupid polyester stretch-waist pants I've been living in. The black jeans make my ass look good, big, but good. I have a full length mirror on my bathroom door now, first time in many years I've let one of those into the house (came with this apartment) and I look at my naked body sometimes. I'm very droopy, breasts pointing downward after 3 years (cumulative) breast feeding + 20 years of overeating. I have a gut. Wide hips. But it's not a hideous body, just a bulky one. I hate my double chin and upper arms. No, wait, I LOVE my double chin and upper arms. I love and nurture them. They'll be good to me as well. I love all of me. I am sexy. Old, saggy, but sexy as hell. I get angry sometimes when I think of those classified personals ads I used to read, the men I used to talk to, those men with beer bellies and bald heads, all wanting a woman who looked like their daughters. A woman who looked like good breeding stock. I've already bred my chillins and I done lost my figger, but I"m still sexy as hell. Oh, what they missed out on! My husband seems to respond to the warmth of my body, my smooth skin, something that radiates off my upper chest -- heart chakra energy. It turns him on. He couldn't care less about chins, arms, lumpy thighs. It's all paradise to him. Thank God for him. And thank God I can wear my old jeans again.
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