It occurred to me on the way home from work yesterday that I didn’t have much food in the house. Or, to put it another way there wasn’t much food in that I could actually eat, which isn’t necessarily one and the same thing. It was day two of my new year, and I needed to head off the can’t be arsed to cook so I’ll just eat [insert highly unsuitable foodstuff HERE] situation that I knew was brewing.
I was on a roll…porridge for breakfast, salad and couscous at lunchtime, and a blank canvas for supper. Oh, and absolutely no junk, which hadn’t exactly filled me with joy as I’d gone through my day. Walking down the corridor at work yesterday with my afternoon cuppa I would have sold my granny for something sweet to go with it, you know?
I’ve got to re-break all those habits that I’ve slipped back into, and it’s a bit like starting from scratch. There’s always food in the office and really, come on surely one cake bar can’t hurt if I count the points? Except it’s hard to have just one, they’re gone in a heartbeat after all and anyway how is it even possible that something you can eat in under half a minute can contain a quarter of your daily points? In spite of all that, just recently I seem to have had difficulty forming the word no.
To be fair, it was a bit easier to say no yesterday, because I’d had an email from God of Pain first thing in the morning inviting me to a post-Christmas weigh-in with the intention of helping me to review my goals…cue bowels turning to liquid. The thoughts galloped through my head like a fucking freight train. Oh my GOD he’s really going to freak out on my ass, I’ve gained another seven pounds since my last bollocking and now I’m going to get his disappointed face which is even worse than his pissed off face…
Actually he’s pretty understanding about the bingeing – he knows a food addict when he sees one. But there are limits and I don’t want to start pushing his buttons. So I ‘fessed up in my return email. I figured it was better to manage his expectations and give him time to wrap his brain around the fact that I’ve packed six months’ worth of dodgy food choices into the ten day holiday window, and I’m now carrying the results around in my pants.
So, as I hit the supermarket last night off the back of my second clean day, I was doing okay. Right up until I clocked all the reduced holiday food. As I poked around in the meat section looking for chicken, my eyes were drawn to all the yellow stickers which were practically screaming BUY ME!! Mini venison pies with buttery shortcrust pastry, reduced to pennies. Filo pastry parcels bursting with goats cheese and onion marmalade, reduced to pennies. Christmas selection boxes with all manner of goodies inside, reduced to fucking pennies. And I couldn’t buy any of it.
As I stomped back to the car clutching my chicken and vegetables I felt like howling with rage that I’d had to pass on a mountain of fat-girl-wet-dream food. It wasn’t fair, in fact at that moment life felt very unfair and I narrowly avoided having a full on diva strop right there in the car park as I raged about the fact that I was a) fat and b) on a diet.
I’ve still got a face on about it to be honest. It’s hard. Being good sucks. I went to bed last night and dreamed about mini venison pies. That said, I survived day two…and there are no points in mini venison pies if all you do is dream about them, right?
Come on day three, let’s see what you’ve got.
