That seems like such an odd statement for someone who is trying to make healthier choices in her life. I have a sweet tooth. Not just a sweet tooth, a sweet and FAT tooth! It can't just be sweet, otherwise a couple of teaspoons of sugar would take care of cravings. It's got to have something more, usually something creamy or fatty to help with the satiety level of the dessert.
If you asked most people who know me what my favorite dessert is, I guarantee the vote will be pretty evenly split between cheesecake and anything chocolate. What most of them don't know is they are WRONG. Those are the two desserts I will usually order when I'm at a restaurant and we are getting a dessert. Occasionally I'll get an apple crisp, or a slice of pecan pie, or pineapple upside-down cake (Thanks Megan for adding that to my list of yummies!).
No, my favorite dessert of all time is Strawberry Shortcake.
It seems so basic, really. Strawberries and sugar, a biscuit, and whipped cream or vanilla ice cream if you are REALLY good. It's so much more than just the sum of it's ingredients. The sugar makes the strawberries release their juicy goodness without losing all of their tartness. The biscuit soaks up the strawberry juice, making it a flavored sponge of goodness. The whipped cream adds the creamy fat flavor I crave. Strawberry shortcake may be available all year long, thanks to the wonders of intermodal transportation and the California growing season, but it's only really, really good when it's June, the local strawberries are in season, and it's too damn hot out to move or think. So strawberry shortcake is what I eat until it cools down enough to eat a real dinner.
One of the reasons I don't do well when I'm dieting is I feel deprived. I understand there are sacrifices one must make to achieve a goal, and I'm willing to do that, most of the time. Every once in a while I want a dessert.
Dessert should not be a reward for doing something you should be doing anyway. Dessert should not be what you get if you eat all your dinner. Dessert is a treat at the end of the meal, once in a while. It's not a lifestyle.
So what does Dessert have to do with all this?
Well, it has to do with how I view food. Dessert was the ultimate bribe in my house growing up. I looked forward to Thanksgiving because my mother baked at least 5 different pies because not everyone wanted pumpkin pie. (Pumpkin, Squash, Apple, Blueberry, and Lemon Merinque) I got to try a slice of each! (She added Mince pie at Christmas for my memere, but I tried that once and never tried it again!) If I was good and ate all my dinner, I got to have dessert if we were having one. If I didn't eat all of it, no dessert. (The argument that there was too much food on my plate and I wouldn't have room for dessert if I ate it all cut ZERO ice with my mom!) I can remember telling my mom I'd left a "pie shaped space" in my stomach for a slice of pie and if I ate any more dinner it was going to fill up.
Sweets became a reward, and have remained a reward for a long, long time in my life. That's something that needs to change.
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Dining Out
Last night was the first night in a long, long time that we had dinner at our kitchen table. A dinner we cooked. Granted, we just cooked the rice and re-heated a lovely Tikka Masala we got at Costco, but it was still something we didn't order from a restaurant.
I'm ashamed to say that we havent' really done much cooking in the house in the last 9 months. Yes, that's what I wrote, 9 months. At least. And there is really no excuse for it. Oh, we had plenty of *reasons* not to cook at home. We were too tired, Eric was working weird hours, I was taking classes, all the meat was frozen, we had no power for 6 days (that was a legitimate reason), the kitchen was a mess, the dining room table was completely buried. On and on the reasons went. What they all boiled down to was one thing: we were being LAZY. We didn't want to come home and think of something to cook, prepare and cook it, clean off the table and lay down plates, and then clean everything all up and do it again the next night. We didn't want to bother with thinking about what to do with all the food in the freezer and the pantry and the refrigerator. We didn't want to dirty pots and pans and dishes only to need to wash them and dirty them the next day.
I am, of course, exagerrating slightly. We have made a few meals here and there, we've tried to do better. But we are slipping back into the "dining out every night" routing and it MUST stop.
Part of the reason is the money. It's damn expensive to eat dinner out every night. At a modest $20 a meal, that's $140 a WEEK we could be doing something better with. Add in the fact that it's usually more like $30 a whack, and that's a car payment EVERY WEEK.
Part of the reason is our health. My blood pressure is finally back down into the healthy range, 115/60. Eric, on the other hand, is up around 138/90. I finally got my numbers to drop by going cold turkey from fast food and soda for three months. Eric has finally given up drinking Diet Coke. Well, almost. He's down to 1 20 oz bottle a day. He still eats fast food because he's on the road all the time and he doesn't have time to get a decent meal (or he thinks he doesn't have the time.) We are both very overweight, with me in the Morbidly Obese category and Eric just nudging into Obese. Mostly we both have these apple bellies, and most studies agree that's not good for people who have heart problems in the family. Also not good for our backs.
Mostly the reason is that I don't really like not having control of the food that goes into my body. I mean, I like having other people cook and clean up the mess, but I also like knowing what goes into what I'm eating. Mostly I like to know that things I'm allergic to ARE NOT going into the food.
So I'm setting an intention that I will plan our dinners every week, using up the food we have in the house, and making healthy meals for us to have at dinner and take to work for lunches.
I'm ashamed to say that we havent' really done much cooking in the house in the last 9 months. Yes, that's what I wrote, 9 months. At least. And there is really no excuse for it. Oh, we had plenty of *reasons* not to cook at home. We were too tired, Eric was working weird hours, I was taking classes, all the meat was frozen, we had no power for 6 days (that was a legitimate reason), the kitchen was a mess, the dining room table was completely buried. On and on the reasons went. What they all boiled down to was one thing: we were being LAZY. We didn't want to come home and think of something to cook, prepare and cook it, clean off the table and lay down plates, and then clean everything all up and do it again the next night. We didn't want to bother with thinking about what to do with all the food in the freezer and the pantry and the refrigerator. We didn't want to dirty pots and pans and dishes only to need to wash them and dirty them the next day.
I am, of course, exagerrating slightly. We have made a few meals here and there, we've tried to do better. But we are slipping back into the "dining out every night" routing and it MUST stop.
Part of the reason is the money. It's damn expensive to eat dinner out every night. At a modest $20 a meal, that's $140 a WEEK we could be doing something better with. Add in the fact that it's usually more like $30 a whack, and that's a car payment EVERY WEEK.
Part of the reason is our health. My blood pressure is finally back down into the healthy range, 115/60. Eric, on the other hand, is up around 138/90. I finally got my numbers to drop by going cold turkey from fast food and soda for three months. Eric has finally given up drinking Diet Coke. Well, almost. He's down to 1 20 oz bottle a day. He still eats fast food because he's on the road all the time and he doesn't have time to get a decent meal (or he thinks he doesn't have the time.) We are both very overweight, with me in the Morbidly Obese category and Eric just nudging into Obese. Mostly we both have these apple bellies, and most studies agree that's not good for people who have heart problems in the family. Also not good for our backs.
Mostly the reason is that I don't really like not having control of the food that goes into my body. I mean, I like having other people cook and clean up the mess, but I also like knowing what goes into what I'm eating. Mostly I like to know that things I'm allergic to ARE NOT going into the food.
So I'm setting an intention that I will plan our dinners every week, using up the food we have in the house, and making healthy meals for us to have at dinner and take to work for lunches.
Monday, June 18, 2012
Food Journals
Eric has decided that we both need to keep food journals to help us keep track of how we are eating. He is correct, my portion control and food choices are much better when I know someone else is going to be reading it and possibly making judgements about it. However, I'm not quite there in my head as far as the "if you bite it, you write it" part of food journalling. Even if we are not focusing at first on the portions, it's just a hassle to do this if you don't carry a notebook with you everywhere. Sure, I can use my Nook but I don't have WiFi access everywhere. My phone has a couple of apps for food tracking, but one is rather an exchange diet tracker, it doesn't track the exact food so much as I ate a serving of protein or a serving of fruit or vegetable. The other does track specific foods, but they are SO specific it takes forever to get the right one, AND it requires you to put in a portion size.
Which are all excuses I use to NOT do my food journalling.
My reason for not doing it is much simpler. I don't want to right now. I want to get the house cleaned up before my sister comes up in July. I want to get the yard back under control after several years of neglect on our part. I want to practice my guitar and spin poi and do all sorts of things that I haven't done in a long time.
It doesn't take long to write in a food journal. It doesn't even take all that much energy to do it. It just takes a small smidgen of my brain to REMEMBER to do it.
Which are all excuses I use to NOT do my food journalling.
My reason for not doing it is much simpler. I don't want to right now. I want to get the house cleaned up before my sister comes up in July. I want to get the yard back under control after several years of neglect on our part. I want to practice my guitar and spin poi and do all sorts of things that I haven't done in a long time.
It doesn't take long to write in a food journal. It doesn't even take all that much energy to do it. It just takes a small smidgen of my brain to REMEMBER to do it.
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