" I'm not going to look in the mirror and get disappointed that I don't look the way I want to now. It will come. But it will take a while. And you know...that's ok. I'm changing. When the changes come and are visible...then great, but it's ok if I don't see them yet. I just know that everyday I'm going to make better decisions." from a post on SparkPeople message boards.
I want to get into the groove of the above poster. I want to not be so frustrated and disappointed in myself because I still have a belly. I want to be able to eat one serving of food and be satisfied.
But let me state that this can, and will happen, its just a matter of time and a battle of wills with my passionate self.
I'm a sensualist, in that I love tasting, smelling, feeling, hearing and seeing beautiful things, and even ordinary things. I find joy in the sound of the creek in our backyard, the smell of fresh concrete and the sound of children laughing. I adore the feel of velvet and satin, combed cotton or fluffy chenile against my skin.
And I love the taste of food.
I have no problem eating healthy, mainly because I grew up eating healthy foods that my mother prepared. She also managed to bake a number of great treats in her kitchen, and I indulged my sweet tooth often, because the steroids I had to take for asthma left me with no feeling of satiety. I was always hungry, didn't matter if I'd just had dinner or not. But I did eat something from the four food groups at every meal, and I learned to love the flavors of fresh food. We got all our meat from my grandparents farms, so I also grew up with real Angus beef that wasn't fed any hormones or antibiotics. Yet I wasn't very fond of beef, and for the most part I ate small amounts because I wasn't all that fond of the taste of steak (though I always loved roasts and stews). We always had a truck patch in our backyard, and grew a lot of our own veggies, as did our neighbors, so we'd swap pounds of tomatoes for pounds of pole beans and cucumbers for beets or muskmelon (anyone outside of Iowa calls them cantaloupes). Since moving to Seattle, a whole world of seafood tastes have opened up to me, and I've come to adore sushi and salmon, tilapia and tuna.
My problem with eating good food has been that I love it too much...I eat more than one serving of blueberries, more than one serving of fish, more than two servings of broccoli.
Now that I'm in boot camp, Janice is having none of this excess portions, and came to my home yesterday to show me how much I can eat.
She showed me that in making a cup of my pinhead or steel cut oatmeal, and then eating the resultant several cups, I am eating somewhere around 8 servings of food, which isn't a good idea calorie wise or belly-wise. She grabbed a small plate from my cupboard and showed me that I could eat a fist-sized serving of each food, protein, carb, veg/fruit, for each meal, but that was all. No seconds or thirds of pasta, no 3 cups of salad.
I am going to have to get used to not being so enamored of my taste buds that I keep eating until I am full. I will have to be a bit hungry until my stomach shrinks up, something I am not looking forward to at all. The sensualist who is passionate about beautiful food and all the other senses is going to have to tone it down when it comes to my lust for taste.
Ah passion, its such a double-edged sword, especially for someone with an Italian heart.
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