Week 5 Check-In: Finishing the Food on Your Plate

Well, the scale only went down 1 lb this week for a total loss of 15 lbs, but I'm very happy. It seems, my modus operandi is to gain a few pounds over the weekend and then slowly lose it during the week. I think it's because during the work day you are in a "controlled food environment" where you can either eat what you brought or buy a quick meal on the lunch hour. But during evenings and weekends, there are many more free time temptations caused by cooking favorite meals for relatives, attending parties, going to events, and grocery shopping.

One event that caused a few temptations this week was when my daughter, Jennie and I went to see the roadshow of "So You Think You Can Dance." It was fabulous! Sitting in row 13 on the main floor, we saw all the best dance routines of Fox Broadcasting's Season 4 television program, including Bleeding Love with Chelsie and Mark, Imagine with Will and Katee, and the slamming door routine of Katie and Twitch. Here's a picture from the concert, taken by my daughter's cellphone camera.

Back to food ... of course rushing to the concert after work left little time for good food, so I made a special effort to stop at a Whole Foods store and pick up a healthy meal to eat for dinner. But at the concert, I did indulged in one glass of white wine and popcorn.

The popcorn only came in one size and that meant the container was definitely oversized. Luckily, Jennie helped me along by saying, after I'd eaten about half, "do you really want to finish that popcorn?" I stopped in the middle of my automatic eating, looked at the popcorn container and thought, "It really is a lot, and the popcorn actually looks old and stale." So I then said, "No" and threw the rest away.

You don't know what an achievement that is for me, first because popcorn is at the top of my "love" food chain, and second because I hardly ever allow myself to discard food.

I come from the generation where my parents used to badger me with "clean your plate, think of all the starving kids in China, Africa, or some other far away land." So it's emotionally hard for me to let go of a plate of food, but through my 100 lb journey and the help of loved ones, I'm getting better at it.