For the past several years, we’ve been lucky enough to go on an amazing vacation to Rehoboth with some of our very dear friends. And through a sheer coincidence of fate, it happens to be Restaurant Week when we’re in town. It’s fantastic, special three course menus at almost all of the restaurants, for set prices, highlighting regional cuisine. Very, very lucky all around.
This year when we left for vacation in the beginning of June,
I swore to myself I’d be “good.” I
charted out the distance between our house and each end of the boardwalk, and
then again from the boardwalk to the end of the main drag. I figured if I walked as much as I thought we
would, and if I ate well, I might even manage to come away from vacation
lighter instead of heavier.
On our Saturday trip down, we stopped at a nice restaurant,
and I proudly ordered a salmon salad. We
grocery shopped, and I kept an eye on what I put in the cart, making as healthy
of choices as I could. Even when we went
to the massive liquor store, I bought low calorie booze. That night we went to a local British pub,
and again, ordered fish with a vegetable.
Smugly. This was going to work.
Then came lunch on Sunday.
We went to Dogfish Head’s brew pub for lunch. And I was presented with their three course
restaurant week menu, and it all went to hell.
Fresh mozzarella? Deep fried soft
shelled crabs? Home made tiramisu? Yeah.
As I was spooning the tiramisu in my mouth, a dessert at lunch, I
thought to myself, “it really doesn’t get more decadent than this. It’s not even noon and I’m eating dessert.”
And with that began my downhill slide. I told myself that we were on vacation, my
diet could be on vacation too, I could truly enjoy myself. To eat with abandon, to throw caution to the
wind. But I felt horrible about it. Guilty.
Really, really beat myself up inside.
Even though I knew we were walking at least five miles every day,
sometimes more (we hiked a good bit as well).
I thought that it would counter balance things a bit, but every bite I
put in my mouth had guilt attached to it.
Then one morning, we were all hanging around the fantastic
front porch of the rental house, each picking away at our version of a morning
meal. It might have been a morning that
I slept in and the others walked to the beach towers, it might not have
been. But it was just a nice lazy day,
reading, drinking coffee, hanging out. I
had an assortment of foods on my breakfast plate – fresh berries, a hard boiled
egg, and a few slices of honey blueberry bread from the farmer’s market. And it hit me then that my friends, all
eating similarly odd concoctions of food, really didn’t care what I ate. They weren’t judging me. Admittedly, for as long as I’ve known these
people, I’ve probably been “most likely to order dessert,” but regardless, they
were not the people who were making me feel bad about my food decisions. It was me. And me alone. I’m the one who judges myself, and I’m the
one who makes me feel bad about what I eat.
So for the rest of the trip, I let myself enjoy the
food. We were on vacation for goodness
sake! I ate, I drank, I savored and
enjoyed every single minute of it. I
accepted the amount of weight I would gain back, acknowledged that there would
be a higher number on the scale when we went home, and just let it go. I think at one point I even tweeted about it,
that the person who you’re hardest on is often yourself. It was sort of a revelation. No guilt.
Just acceptance.
We came back from vacation and I lost the weight I had
gained, relatively quickly, but to be honest I think most of it was water
weight from the booze. I was back on
track. Again, smugly. I went into the end of the month at my lowest
weight in a decade.
And then, at the end of June came my high school class
reunion. (Which is another post all
together.) For a variety of reasons, not
all high school related (Matt had his first bout of the illness that eventually
put him in the hospital), it was a weekend of emotional eating. On Sunday, when I finally left the family
picnic, I stopped at one of my favorite childhood restaurants and got take out
for myself – pepperoni rolls, hummingbird cake, some sort of cheese based
vegetable casserole. Chocolate
milk.
We had friends over for the Third of July, and I ate like I’d
never heard the word “diet.” In fact, I
specifically asked friends to bring foods that weren’t healthy. All tied to emotions. All tied to being the fat girl in high
school, the girl who had to plan an event she didn’t even want to be at, the
girl who wanted to drown her sorrows in the company of good friends and good
food.
Hot on the tails of the Fourth, we went to Chicago for a
conference. And let me tell you, Chicago
is one hell of a town to go on a food bender in. We ate some of the best meals we’ve ever eaten
in our lives. I drank booze out of quart
glasses. Our last meal in town had seven
courses. But we walked. Constantly.
Our hotel was incredibly inconvenient to anything. And the first day alone my pedometer marked
13 miles. In flip flops. When I told fellow conference attendees the
places we’d walked to, more than one said “but you’re not supposed to walk
there. That’s what cabs are for.”
We came home from Chicago and Matt went right into the
hospital. I took over cooking while he
was sick, and I’m the queen of comfort food.
Cinnamon rolls for breakfast, sandwiches on fresh bread for lunch. Whatever he wanted to feel better, I made. He wanted Burger King on the way home from the
hospital, and he got it. And now, it’s
the end of July, and as I sat down last night after a heated and stressful neighborhood
council meeting, I ate a handful of homemade oatmeal cookies and acknowledged a
few things about myself.
1)
I am always going to be an emotional eater. What I need to do is to acknowledge that, and
balance it with exercise or something else, to not let me gain weight back that
I’ve worked so hard to lose.
2)
I can’t beat myself up about my relationship
with food. I’m the only one judging. I’m the only one I’m disappointing. I’m the only one who set unobtainable goals
without room for error. And I’m the only
one who can fix it.
3)
Considering how much we’ve eaten in the past two
months, I think I’m on my way to understanding what it will be like to “maintain”
after I finally reach my goal weight.
That’s been a pretty big fear of mine, given that I’ve done this in the
past and gained it all back, so that’s a good thing.
4)
It’s time to forgive myself. I have two more emotional hurdles to get
through in the near future, but looking at my calendar, once I survive to
mid-August, the rest of the year is smooth sailing. I have given myself permission to eat what I
need to in order to stay sane until then, and then I will re-dedicate myself to
weight loss and exercise. FORGIVE,
ACCEPT, LET GO.
5)
It’s also time to congratulate myself. Regardless of how stressful the past two
months have been, I’ve still lost (and kept off) forty pounds this year. It might not be the amount I wanted to based
on my irrational goals, but it’s still pretty damn good.