Some people diet successfully with a goal in mind. I guess I’m not one of them.
I have an event coming up in November, for which I figured I could possibly lose a few pounds. It should be simple; when you eat a lot, you gain, so eat less and lose. 40 days into my motivational dieting and not a pound has come off.
This means that, in an office full of bad foods, I avoided them and didn’t lose. Extra trips to stores to have a reason to walk more didn’t help. Filling myself with salads and no dressing didn’t help. Switching from 2% to 1% milk didn’t help.
Taking sodas (with their baggage of high fructose corn syrup and strange portion size issues) completely out of my diet didn’t help, either. In fact, I tried to come up with a drink of my own, consisting of club soda with a splash of lemon and lime juices which I called Urp Number 7 (because it slightly resembles its real-life counterpart, it does bubble, and it took seven tries to get the recipe right). This concoction was designed to be an accessory to the nearly 40 ounces of water and hot tea I drink daily at the office to stay hydrated. All it did was send me on more bathroom breaks.
The cafeteria at work has nice salads, so I tried a plate of greens with just spinach, lettuce, green pepper, mushrooms and about a tablespoon of fat-free vinaigrette. The bottomless stomach didn’t even register a hint of satisfaction.
In fact, I’ve gotten hungrier because of the deprivation. The other day I treated myself to a plain donut at the office; it tasted heavenly. When the office has had donuts six times since I started this program, I think I scored a B for only succumbing once.
During the program, I took the time to look at portion sizes of everything, and it doesn’t seem right that food labels aren’t true to packaging. Why can’t I have eight ounces of a beverage like iced tea for 100 calories, instead of wasting the other 150 on a larger bottle that I don’t intend to drink? Needless to say, bottled tea did not go on my diet shopping list.
Ice cream is off the list, too, but if one were to try portion control it is a son of a gun. A portion size is really little more than a mouthful, so most of us are having a dish or cone which is at least ten times what one should eat. And some folks eat ice cream every day. I don’t. Still, the pounds stubbornly cling and mock my attempts at success.
So I’ll go to the event weighing the same, but packed into a nice, strangling control garment.
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