Deciding to Be Thin

This week was much the same as last week, except that I did consciously try to eat less and get more out of what I do eat by choosing more wisely from among the various options I have for the day's food.

For example, I'm allowed three to four fruits and two milk choices per day.  I have to decide how to spread those five to six items out over the course of the day.  I typically like to have my fruit as snacks, but sometimes I have one fruit at breakfast, then another in the morning and a third in the afternoon, which leaves one for evening snack, if necessary. 

But the afternoon is the longest part of my day, since I have lunch at 11:30 but don't have supper until 6:00.  So from 12:00 to 6:00 I have to eat snacks about every two hours to keep my blood sugar up.  Usually I have my first snack at 2:30.  It would stand to reason, then, that my next snack would be at 4:30, then supper at 6:00.  That's two afternoon snacks.  If one of them is the fruit, then what would the other one be?

Well, I've been eating yogurt in the afternoon, but I can only have the yogurt if I haven't had a milk at breakfast.  If I did have a milk at breakfast, then I can still have the yogurt, but only if I don't have a milk in the evening.  If I don't have the yogurt, though, what can I have?  Fruit is my only other option, unless I want to eat a vegetable.  I could also save part of my lunch meat to eat, but three ounces is already a small serving, and a part of that might not last the rest of the afternoon.

Unfortunately, sometimes I find myself hungry at 1:30, and then 3:30 and then again at 5:00.  But if I eat three snacks instead of two in the afternoon, I'm sure to have no foods left for my evening snack.  It's a dilemma.

The goal is to keep from being hungry, mostly because when I get hungry I get weak and sometimes fuzzy headed.  It's funny, though--yesterday afternoon I had some coffee (something I very rarely do) because I was sleepy, but I found that it also took away my hunger for a little while.  I guess that's the appetite suppressant feature of caffeine, and why it's used in diet pills.  I wonder how it works . . . ?

One thing I used to do which did not work so well is to eat my yogurt and fruit together in the afternoon.  That was tasty, but not too smart, because it eliminated the fruit that I was saving for later, which meant that I had to eat an additional fruit that day.

But I don't like to eat the yogurt alone.  So I've started eating my yogurt with celery sticks, as a sort of dip.  That solves the problem of the lonely yogurt without using up the fruit.  Maybe other types of vegetables would work for that too.  It's something to consider.  It would have to be a bland vegetable, though, like cucumber sticks, so the taste of the yogurt is not overpowered.  Peppers wouldn't work, but maybe zucchini would.

The point of describing all this minutiae is to show how important these types of decisions are to changing our eating behavior.  As Shirley emphasizes over and over, unconscious eating is the enemy.  Shoving high calorie food into my mouth every time I get hungry is effective for eliminating hunger, but is not a good long term solution to the problem of low blood sugar because it has negative consequences, not the least of which is weight gain. 

A person does not have to be fat if she has low blood sugar.  There is a way to eat a reasonable amount of food and deal with metabolic imbalance.  It just requires planning, preparation and monitoring of food choices and portion size.  It requires conscious decision making every day. 

Oh, sure, reckless abandon can be fun, for those people who rarely indulge, who can handle occasional blow-out sludge fests.  Those people can go back to their normal eating routine the next morning with hardly a look back.  However, if you're reading this blog because you need to lose weight, you're in the other group--the group where every day could turn out to be a day of reckless abandon followed by a night of regret and a morning of amnesia.

So I'm going to keep making conscious decisions about what I eat, and I'm going to keep telling you about it.  See you next post.