I’m probably dating myself with the Righteous Brothers reference but who can forget Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis in that smokin’ scene…

In my life there have been as many shades of “full” as there are shades of “white” at the paint store (those into home repair know EXACTLY what I mean). The main contenders: 1) the “gross-full”, where you seriously can’t put one more morsel in your mouth without expelling the entire meal (”better get a bucket”); 2) the “pretty darn full” where you groan aand physically push yourself away from the table to emphasize to others around you what is going on inside you; and 3) the most-often-seen ”regular full” where you have that thick heavy feeling in your stomach and your inner voice is saying to you “hey pig, you did it again”. I have fine-tuned my “full” scale over the years so I know exactly how much guilt to pile on myself after any meal.

Now, thanks to the Best Life Diet, I get to say goodbye to you, my “full-o-meter”. In Phase II, I am fine-tuning not my full scale, but my “hunger” scale. What a novel idea…to eat when you are hungry. By cutting out six key ingredients (see Cecilia’s awesome post on what they are and how she has done it)…without all that sugar and white flour and soda, my “innerds” (a.k.a. insulin levels) are becoming normalized and I’m actually starting to feel hunger….and eating when I’m hungry. Cool, but it gets harder. Now the tricky part–I need to eat when I am hungry (but not too hungry) and stop at a level that is neither hunger nor fullness. Um, ok…HARD! 

The Best Life Diet has a hunger scale from 1 to 10 (1 being most hungry, 10 being most full) and our goal in Phase II is to try to eat when our hunger is at a level 2 or 3, and stop at a 5 (for dieting) or 6 (for maintenance). This will definitely take weeks for me to figure out how different I feel from a level 5 to 6…but can we also ponder how hard it will be to stop eating when you have only moved 3 notches on the hunger scale? Yeah. Tell me about it.

So this is my quest for this month. Tonight I had some wheat ravioli with arrabiata sauce (careful on the sauces–make sure you are around 70 cals for a serving) and shredded chicken and a little wheat baguette (about 140 cals on the bread–pretty much the carb limit). It was about 550 calories but I was above a 5 when I was done…so it was hard for me to know that I could have all those calories and do fine in the diet, but not eat all of them because I actually approached the satiety required before I finished. So it will be a constant trial and potential error–tonight it was a close call. I won’t go to bed beating myself up about a calorie overrage because it wasn’t–more so that I knew I didn’t have to finish my calories but I did. If it isn’t one thing, it’s the other.

I’ll keep plugging away–this is a critical skill to master in order to stay fit after I lose the weight, so I’m really going to work hard at it. I will not be perfect for a long time, but that is ok. This is a journey!