Food/Diet Talk

Unless we prac­tice lov­ing feel­ings toward every­one we meet, day in, day out, we’re miss­ing out on the most joy­ous part of life. If we can actu­al­ly open our hearts, there’s no dif­fi­cul­ty in being happy.
‑Ayya Khe­ma, “Be an Island”

I’ve lost one jeans size since start­ing Weight Watch­ers. And I’m eat­ing more than I ever have. That still seems odd to me.

Most of the cred­it, hon­est­ly, goes to sam­bear. He want­ed to keep doing the food prep and shop­ping instead of let­ting me do it, but he’s real­ly changed what he’s cook­ing. That means every­one is eat­ing more health­ily, although we still have lots of food. We’re retrain­ing our taste buds. I have to say that pas­ta with pesto, while tasty, still isn’t as much of an “oh, yum!” for me as fet­tucine alfre­do, but it’s only been a few weeks.

I did switch from cheese grits in the morn­ing to oat­meal. It isn’t as emo­tion­al­ly sat­is­fy­ing, but it’s a bowl of some­thing hot. I’m find­ing that I can’t eat near­ly as much oat­meal any­way. It’s just too heavy!

Odd thing, though—I always made more grits than I could eat. I don’t know why. Some­thing was­n’t psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly sat­is­fy­ing unless I could see lots of food and eat my fill while hav­ing more left. It’s the same with the oat­meal. I can real­ly only eat one serv­ing, at the very most. I have to make two, though, or I feel deprived in some way. For­tu­nate­ly, it’s cheap stuff.

I’m very lucky in that I’ve nev­er gone through any time in my life when I tru­ly did­n’t have or could­n’t get enough to eat. I’ve cer­tain­ly deprived myself of food often enough, but there’s nev­er been an actu­al scarci­ty of it. A friend has men­tioned some­one she knows who can­not feel as if there’s enough food in the house unless she can see it all, due to scarci­ty when she was a child. That isn’t the case with me.

Now that I’m real­ly pay­ing atten­tion to it, I’m find­ing that I’m much more of an emo­tion­al eater than I thought I was. I think about food more now. And I’m pret­ty good at know­ing the dif­fer­ence between real hunger and mouth hunger, but that does­n’t make it any less annoy­ing when I’m just “munchy” and know it. I’ve nev­er been ter­ri­bly prone to eat­ing when I am just munchy, but for some rea­son NOW I feel deprived, and I don’t think I did before. I have no idea what that’s about.