Losing weight: this time, I'm serious

Weight change from beginning of program: -5.2 LBs
Goal: 39 LBs to go

Activity: grocery shopping

Temptation: wine
Fruit and veg: 4 (goal is to have 5 0r more every day)

It's time to get serious and get these 40+ pounds off of me. In mid-May, I started trying to seriously take control of my eating issues. I read Geneen Roth's book Breaking Free of Compulsive Eating, and it made a huge impact on me. I'm trying to eat only when I'm hungry. That sounds easy enough, but when I focused on it I realized that I am rarely hungry. I eat because it's time to eat, I'm stressed, I'm happy, I'm mad, and mainly because I want it.

For the first few weeks, I couldn't tell when I was hungry. It had been so long since I felt hunger I didn't recognize the signs. That alone proved to me that I have a real issue with food.

The book pointed out that there are very few times when I'm eating something that I will never eat again. If I'm at a restaurant, I can eat a few bites and take the rest home. If I'm somewhere out of town, I can get a recipe and duplicate it (or at least come very close to it) at home. Since reading the book two months ago, I have not eaten everything on my plate at a restaurant.

The styrofoam containers I have brought home with restaurant leftovers in the past two months will probably be the straw that broke the camel's back for eating through the ozone layer.

This blog will document my daily successes and failures. I didn't get this overweight overnight, and I won't lose the pounds overnight. Mid-life issues make things even more difficult. But my plan is to get to my goal weight by October 2010 because I'll be celebrating a milestone then.

Here we go...

Healthy breakfast (yeah, right) : leftover baked potato

Lunch: A thin 30 year-old coworker suggested Caribbean Cuisine, a hole in the wall that serves authentic Caribbean cuisine (surprise, surprise). I had a patty, which is apparently a traditional Jamaican street food. I got the vegetarian patty (they also offered beef, pork, and chicken), and it was similar to an empanada made with cornmeal and stuffed with sauerkraut and diced carrots. That was interesting. My entree was curried shrimp with rice and peas (some kind of brown legumes mixed into rice) with a small salad and cooked plantains. It was good, albeit super spicy. I craved a Dairy Queen Blizzard all afternoon because I thought the milk would cancel out the spicy shrimp and the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups would satisfy my sweet craving, but I held out and made it home without eating any sugar.

Dinner: Gazpacho over Doritos (2 servings).

Activity: Went to Costco and Kroger for weekly shopping. Managed to bypass the individually wrapped pieces of German chocolate cake at Kroger. Instead, I got some freshly baked multigrain bread to eat with vat of hummus I got at Costco.

Polished off a bottle of wine when I got home. I'm testing varieties for our next batch of vino. The Riesling I had tonight was quite sweet, which means that it went down WAY too easily.

Good deed for the day: A few days ago, I talked to my 80 year old friend from Dallas. During the conversation, I told her that I had harvested too many cucumbers to eat. She told me how much she liked cucumbers. So I wrapped up a few cucumbers and sent them to her. She got them today, and she left a voice mail that said, "You beg and you beg, then all your cucumber dreams come true."