I've been hesitating a lot about whether to write this post, but I decided to just do it. So here we go.
I love food. I love food. All kinds, really, and there's nothing I wouldn't try at least twice. I say "twice" rather than "once" because there are plenty of things that after having tried them multiple times, they've really grown on me. An example is the second big tub of yogurt I have in my fridge right now. I got the first tub last week only because it was on sale - $2.99 for 16 oz. of full fat, plain and unsweetened whole milk yogurt from a local dairy, where the cows are actually raised and grazed in pastures. Now, I love me some plain, full fat yogurt, but the first few bites of this stuff were too much for me. It was very sour, and tasted more like a cow than I usually like my yogurt to taste. I figured I wouldn't be able to finish the rest of the tub, but I stuck it back in the fridge anyway because I hate wasting food.
Over the next day or two, I tried it with a little sugar mixed in, and with a little sugar and vanilla mixed in, and with some strawberries and a dusting of sugar, and it just kept tasting better and better, until I was quite literally licking the tub empty before throwing it away. I had to go back to the grocery store yesterday, and it was still on sale for $2.99 and I bought a second tub with no hesitation.
I love to eat, and I will eat anything, and I get great pleasure out of it. I am also a great proponent of the adage "all things in moderation", and I'm generally pretty good about sticking to that. The thing is, I regularly eat more fruits and vegetables than the average person, I think, but I also eat a lot of crap, because I love sweets. This was a minor problem being in France, because while the fruits and vegetables are out of this world, so are the pastries and breads. And cheeses. And everything, really. And when you're only there for a relatively short amount of time, it's very easy to convince yourself that you need to try a different pastry every day, because darn it, there are so many pastries to try!
The upshot of my time in France is that upon weighing in on my return - and I mean that in the literal sense - I had gained a good 10 pounds from where my weight usually is. I will make a slight digression here and say that I used to be quite overweight. Now, I will also say that I tend to carry weight fairly well, because I build muscle easily, so I think I usually weigh more than people might guess. The most I ever weighed was probably in the 8th grade, when I topped out somewhere in the 170s. And for a 5'3" female, it doesn't matter how much muscle you're carrying, 170+ is overweight.
When I transferred to Uni High, I worked really hard to get in good shape. I've written about this before, but I started running and kept it up every day the summer before I started there, and I started actually paying attention to what I ate. The weight came off pretty easily by just cutting out junk and watching my portion control, and over the course of about 5 months, I probably lost about 40 pounds. That sounds like a lot, but that's exactly what it should be, now that I look back on it: 8 pounds a month is about 2 pounds a week, which is what doctors recommend, so yay for me.
Anyway, this was hard, because I got a lot of flak for it, to tell you the truth. I felt great, and I was so healthy and eating really well, and people kept asking me if I had an eating disorder! It was kind of unreal, because for the first time in my life, I was actually eating really well, and that's when everybody started scrutinizing my food intake. But after I got my weight down around 130, I gradually quit paying attention to what I was eating, and my weight's been relatively stable ever since. This is largely due to my running; as long as I put in some decent mileage every week, I can basically eat whatever I want (within reason), and I tend to stay somewhere between 128 and 135, which is within my healthy range.
Before I left for France this last time, I was creeping up towards 135, due to eating more and running less than usual. I go through periods where this happens, so I wasn't really concerned about it. A little bit of diligence and I would stop gaining weight. Well, 6 weeks' worth of pastries later, I get home, step on the scale, and I'm at 142. That was a bit of a shocker, actually! I don't think I've weighed that much in at least 7 years, or maybe since high school when I first slimmed down. The number doesn't lie. Time to actually reign things back in.
So how to regain some control with my eating habits? The "all things in moderation" thing clearly hasn't been working, because my idea of "moderation" has gotten far more lax over time. "Moderation" had come to mean a treat every day, and the caloric toll of my treats has been increasing such that they're not actually very moderate anymore. Add to this the fact that there's a fair bit of research coming out suggesting that bread products are probably pretty bad for us, and the fact that it makes intuitive sense (to me anyway) that our bodies are probably not designed to deal with the amount of sugar we throw at them.
At the same time, I do not like extremism. I am not a fan of "diets". I would never claim to be an "-an" or an "-ist" with regard to my food intake, because I think we should eat some of everything. In moderation.
Except maybe bread products. Maybe that does mess with our insulin response. The idea has always made some sense to me, but I've always been too attached to bread products to test it out. However, having gained a good 10 pounds in the past few months and somewhat gorged myself on breads and sweets for the months of June and July, I'm ready to let the pendulum swing back in the other direction and see what happens.
For this reason, I have decided not to eat any baked goods or other wheat products for at least one month. I started last Friday, meaning I've completed 8.5 days of this experiment thus far, and I must say, it's going smashingly well. I'm back down to 137 pounds already - so almost back into what I consider my healthy range - and I'm just not nearly as hungry as usual. It's pretty amazing, actually. I'm eating a ton of fruits, vegetables, eggs, and yogurt, and I'm feeling really good; I think my body is responding favorably to the higher fiber, lower sugar, and corresponding even blood sugar levels. I'm already reaching the point where sweets and junk just don't sound very good anymore. And I'm eating so much delicious food that I can feel really good about. Here's what I remember eating yesterday:
scrambled eggs
mushrooms sautéed in butter
coffee
a mango
big bowl of blueberries and yogurt
several slices of watermelon
salad of chopped zucchini, tomato, avocado, butter beans, and parmesan cheese
few handfuls of nuts
iced coffee with milk, vanilla, and a sprinkle of sugar
salad of kale, red onion, dried cherries and cranberries, sunflower seeds
more watermelon
beef jerky
2 big mugs of tea (one red, one black)
large bowl of popcorn
The reason I decided to actually make this post is two-fold. One is that if I write it down, actually putting it in a public forum where people can see it, I'm much more likely to stick by my resolution. It's very tempting for me to keep it a secret that I'm not eating bread, because I generally think such resolutions are weird. Because I don't subscribe to what I feel are arbitrary diet rules, it makes me somewhat embarrassed to be sticking by one, for once. But I feel it's a worthwhile experiment, and I'd like to actually carry it through. July 22nd was my first breadless day, so I'm going to keep going until at least August 22nd and re-evaluate once I get there whether I'd like to keep the experiment going.
The second reason is that I'm hoping people will be sympathetic, and maybe even supportive, if they know what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. I'm headed to Illinois next week (August 3 - 10), and I'm still not sure whether I'm entirely wedded to the idea of sticking by this thing while I'm there. It'll be a challenge, and I really don't want to be That Person who appears to be looking for attention for their weird dietary practices and restrictions. I hate That Person, I really do. But at the same time, I'd like to challenge myself in this way, and see whether I can really stick by it. So I'm going to try it and see what happens, and I hope people won't think that I'm being That Person, and I also hope I'll stick by my resolve to keep this experiment going despite my fear that people will think I'm being That Person.
I'm tired of talking about this (and I also need to quit typing and take a shower). But let it be known, once and for all, that I do not have food issues, and that this is an experiment in regaining some self control when it comes to sweets, and also in just seeing what happens if I'm forced to replace the bread products in my life with more fruits, vegetables, and protein. Nothing more, nothing less.
