Feeling Human

So today I am finally starting to feel like a normal person again.  It is now day 6 and I'm finally coming out of the food fog I guess I've been in.  It is hard to say how much of how I felt is because I ate terrible and how much was because of what was going on with my body.  The two combined just created a deadly combination for me.  It amazes me how much what I eat affects me.  It affects my mood, my ability to thing, how I feel physically, my energy levels, my emotions.  Everything.  I wonder if everybody is this easily affected by food or if my food choices just affect me more than others.  Maybe it's just because I'm paying attention to it so closely now.  I'm really paying attention to how food makes me feel.  Today was the best day I've had in a long time as far as how I have felt.  I almost feel like a normal human again.  My emotions are coming back (instead of feeling numb) and my energy was a little higher throughout the day and I didn't crash in the afternoon like usual. 

As I've been doing the whole 30 over the past six days I've decided that I want to do something more realistic for the long term.  I don't want to just do the Whole 30 and then stop and go back to my bad way of eating.  I've already proven that if I have no rules to govern what I eat, I just eat bad all the time.  So I'm sticking as close to Whole 30 as I can but tweaking it if I need to.  For example, we went to my In-law's house the other day and I went to great lengths to make sure that what was cooked was Whole 30 appropriate.  I bought the meat and pretty much made the whole meal, but when we went to season the meat and veggies all the seasonings had sugar or corn starch in them.  I suppose I could have just used salt and pepper, but we were feeding 7 people and I wanted to take them into account too.  So I decided to use the "what you can when you can" method and we went ahead and used the seasonings.  I think that is what it means to do "what you can when you can" (or Wycwyc. If you haven't heard of it head over to Ronisweigh.com  It's her idea of how to be healthy and live your life, pretty much doing what you can when you can.  She wrote a book about it you can check out on Amazon).  I always figured that method didn't work for me, and in it's own context it doesn't.  It isn't enough for me as a stand alone concept, I pretty much say "great! no rules, time to pig out".  But used in context of trying to live the Whole 30 (or paleo-ish) lifestyle all the time instead of a brief moment in time.  It changes the meaning and how you use that mind set.  Besides, lets be honest, it's not the sugar in the seasoning I use for my meat that made me fat. 

I have been having a very difficult time fighting the urges to snack.  Snacking when I am not hungry, and snacking on junk food is a bad habit that just got worse as I went through the difficulties of the past several months.  I just want to snack all the time.  Snack on candy and crackers and chips.  Delicious but deadly for me.  It's not until I forced myself to stop that I realized just how bad it had gotten.  I wanted to snack all day long.  It's getting slightly better now.  Today was the best day, but I am sure there are plenty of tough days ahead of me. 

One challenge I had to figure out how to handle is movie theaters.  Do I or do I not buy popcorn and soda at the movie theaters?  I love it, but it's certainly not healthy.  So I decided that if I'm going to the theaters with just my husband then I am not going to buy anything.  But if we go as a family then I get a treat.  Today we took the kids to see Zootopia and I had one soda and we shared one large popcorn (I think Lily ate most of it) and we didn't get a refill.  Then I went on and stuck to my plan the rest of the day.  That is how a treat is supposed to work.  Occasionally you eat one thing and then you keep going on with life.  Unlike what I tend to do which is let that one thing turn into two and then three and four and then end up binging on food.  I am not the type of person that can have a treat every day.  It causes me to get off track and throws me for a loop.  So now the task at hand is to keep going with my Whole-30/Paleo-ish way of eating and really make it work for me. 

What I love the most about it is that you don't have to count calories.  I have figured out there are basically two ways to lose weight when talking about what you eat.  You can either track your calories and eat less of whatever you want to eat.  Or you can restrict your eating to certain foods but you don't have to track.  I have discovered that I actually prefer the second method.  I think it is the best method for me because it makes sure that I am eating the right foods, my body feels its best when I am eating these foods and I never have to feel hungry or feel like I can't eat anything because I have hit my calories for the day.  It also helps with the part of me that can't handle treats, so I just say no because I'm an abstainer and it's easier for me to just not eat it than to have just a little. 

So I'll end on a high note.  You aren't supposed to be weighing yourself on the Whole 30 but I figured I've already broken the rules and I think I want to weigh myself about once a week to keep everything under control.  Today I weighed in at 168.8 which is down nearly 7 pounds from last week!  Talk about a lot of bloating and food and water weight, and we hope some fat too.  I am feeling better and my pants are already fitting a smidgen better just not having all that excess junk in me.  Hopefully I'm on the up and up.  I'll leave you with this cute picture of Chloe.  She got in her dance costume for the recital coming up in June