The Evolution of a Thinner Me

Alright, raise your hand and tell the teacher… Cecilia has cheated on her Best Life Diet… again, kinda sorta…

Let’s see, I think I’m into week 2 of Phase II and so far I’ve eaten french fries as a side dish to my chicken salad, fried calamari as an appetizer to my chicken lettuce wraps, went through a fast-food drive through for a breakfast combo meal and now I belong in the principal’s office.

How did it happen? It’s called cravings & when you’ve been without something for a while, you just want a little piece of it. Well it seems I wanted a little piece of everything this past week. I was good about the salad, but the fries were just calling my name! The crunch, the warmth, the saltiness of those little sticks of goodness. I just had to have them. And they tasted sooooooooooooo good!! And then the fried calamari! Oh my goodness, who could resist? And what’s one of our six foods that we are avoiding for Phase II? Yep. Fried foods. The breakfast bit included FRIED hash browns. These hash browns are the best in my world. I could eat FIVE in one sitting… but I didn’t .  I woke up late and couldn’t eat a proper breakfast at home, but I was starving. I needed something good to eat and it wasn’t going to be oatmeal. I sat in the car and chowed down like I was dining in a 5-star restaurant. It was more than delicious.

I like to blame the momentarily bits of fried food insanity on my business trip: Oh Seattle totally threw me off course! Oh I’m just getting back and gotta get back in the groove! But really I have to just blame myself. I thought, I craved, I ate.

Honestly, there are times that I’m thinking I’m so tired of this diet and thinking of when to workout and thinking of what I’m eating and thinking of the stresses of work and thinking of my road rage and driving and thinking wow, I’ve been on the patch for about a month now. I’ve been thinking so darn much these days about EVERYTHING, my brain is fried. So fried I can eat it.

So where’s the GUILT? Oh, the guilt is lounging around in my belly, staring up at me and laughing. But honestly, it’s only momentarily. I feel guilty when I’m writing in my food journal and sending it to Janis to review and count up calories. The guilt comes in when she replies and comments that 2800 calories is not the daily amount we want to take in for this diet. LOL. GUILTY!! But again, I learn to forgive myself and keep going. If everyone wrote down every morsel that they ate each day for someone else to even just read, I think they’d be a bit embarrassed. We put so much garbage into our systems, it’s ridiculous. BUT SO GOOD!! And we pay for it when we decide that elastic-waisted pants are better than jeans.

So now, I’ve decided that falling off the wagon isn’t THAT bad and I’ll only suffer a few bruises, but not shed any blood. At the end of the day, I’m still focusing and I’m still aware of what I put into my body. And I’m taking full responsibility for it. And I move on.

What I’ve learned is that as much as I love telling myself (and other people) how perfect I am (ha ha, wink, wink), I know that I’m not (no kidding!). I know that I’ve accomplished so much in the past two months, things I’ve never thought I’d be able to do & I am proud of myself! And I also know that it’s a-okay to treat myself to a little bit of the not-so-good-for-you foods. And that cheating, slipping and falling of the healthy wagon will just make me work HARDER in focusing on the Best Life Diet and make it work for me. Baby steps. This is a life-style change that I’m aiming for and I know I can’t do a 360 in 6 weeks. Some people can, and that’s AWESOME! But I know myself well enough to know that this all takes time.

‘Til Tuesday my friends

~ cecilia