Vacation!

We leave for Florida in less than three days! I can't wait to exit this winter blunderland. We are anticipating 12 inches tomorrow. Awesome.

I haven't really thought much about food for the trip. Right now, I eat what I want, but I generally want healthy foods. When I decide I want to have something unhealthy like french fries at a restaurant, I only have a few and that's plenty. I used to associate quantity with food. I wanted food that tasted good, and I wanted a LOT of it. In Weight Watchers, they told us we could eat anything we wanted, but we had to watch our portion size, and keep the program guidelines in mind to ensure a balanced diet.

I was never able to keep a generally healthy diet, with a few exceptions - you know, the way the thin people have always eaten??! That's the one. I was all or nothing, which is a theme in many areas of my life. I would be fanatical about sticking to my diet, but if I had a moment of weakness and ate something bad, I would fall off the wagon and throw in the towel. I couldn't mentally bridge that gap, and realize that my diet doesn't have to be perfect, just generally healthy.

I think the only reason I have been able to change my thinking in this area is because my appetite is small enough to control portion size now. Even if I have something bad, it's never really enough to do any damage, and because I'm not starving all the time anymore, it's so much easier for me to make the right choices.

The hunger I experienced, prior to having this surgery, was ferocious. It made me feel desperate, and I could not bring myself to care about dieting or eating healthy when I felt that way. I always thought this was psychological, and it may have been, but my MD says there may have been a medical reason for that as well. Good to know...now. ;)

If I were on a diet right now, and my weight loss journey is very similar to dieting, I would be panicked about my upcoming vacation. I would think that my trip would be ruined if I had to eat healthy the whole time, and if I gave myself permission to eat freely on the vacation, I would not return to my diet when my trip ended.

I'm so glad to be free of that thinking. I could care less about what I'm going to eat on vacation now. I'm sure I'll have some high calorie meals, but in general, I know I'll make healthy choices because I truly want to. Food does not have the power over me that it used to, and that is a pretty dramatic change in my life.

Signing off...

KC