I usually try to eat a healthy diet (except for a once-a-week indulgence in beer and deep-fried food on Friday evenings). But I adore all types of food, and I especially love that glorious full-tummy feeling after a big luxurious meal.
So my food intake has always been a balancing act. I’m lucky to have a forgiving metabolism, so I rarely gain more than a few pounds before realizing it’s time to (re)adjust. But I have a definite cycle:
- Healthy food in healthy portions
- Healthy food in portions that slowly increase until the plate looks comfortably full
- Generous portions of mostly-healthy food with frequent treats
- Big satisfying portions, with unlimited snacks and treats, woohoo!
- *sound of squealing brakes* …and back to healthy food in healthy portions
Unfortunately, there’s a big ‘culture shock’ between steps 4 and 5. When my portions are suddenly reduced to normal, the plate looks sadly empty; and it takes a while for my brain to adjust to how ‘normal’ looks.
Part of the problem is that I don’t actually want to adjust. My inner spoiled brat is perfectly happy with lots and lots of food and treats, so she constantly tries to undermine the efforts of my inner (and rarely-displayed) adult. Last week I thought I had everything under control, but then this happened:
My inner brat is definitely getting trickier, but I think I’ve got her subdued… this time. Please tell me I’m not the only one with an inner spoiled brat!
Book 17 update: I’m on Chapter 26 — over half finished the book, hooray! Bullets are flying, and the guy Aydan just saved might turn out to be an enemy. There’s always something…
Author Diane Henders 
That moment when your brain is trying to convince you to go ahead and finish the cookies so they won’t be a temptation… Oh, yeah… Your pain is shared.
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I’m so glad I’m not the only one who does that. Same with potato chips: “Eat them all today, and then I won’t be tempted tomorrow”. I figure that instead of eating a bit too much every day, I can eat FAR more calories than I need in one day and my body will be completely overloaded so it can’t possibly absorb them all. …Right…?
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I’ve been on your fourth cycle for a number of years now, Diane, and recognise that cataclysmic change going into step five… and I’m on the cusp. EEK! But soon, my clothes will fit better again! 🙂
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There are always rewards to Step 5, but it’s too bad it’s such a shock to the system! 😉
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Haha. At least you’re going through cycles. I’m forever stuck in #4! I just love eating too/so much! 🙂
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Eating is my favourite thing in the world! If only I could have a detour valve on my stomach, so I could eat a healthy amount and then divert the rest: “No calories in this, it’s going through the detour!” 🙂
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My inner brat demands chips and ice cream constantly so I’m always on smack-down alert. I have NO metabolism at all so if I were to give in to her demands I’d look like the south bound end of a north bound bus! Not a good look. But neither is the inner brat becoming the very outer “be-yotch”. Because then Michelle becomes “Mitch”(rhyming with….) and it gets down right ugly. So every once in a while I have to cave a little give her something. Ok I sometimes give her more than a little something — and then I’m sick and I blame her for it all and she goes back into hiding. It’s a complicated relationship but it works, usually. And I know I’m not the only one to have named her inner brat so no judging hahaha!!!
Love the cartoon!
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I’m glad you got a laugh at the cartoon! Chips and ice cream are on my ‘irresistible list’, too. Chips I can avoid most of the time, but I don’t even dare to try to cut out the ice cream. That would turn my inner brat into something FAR nastier than ‘rhyming with Mitch’! All I can do is keep the serving size down to a teeny scoop. If I have one every day, the inner brat actually gets tired of it after a while. (Mind you, ‘a while’ is counted in months-to-years, so there’s that.) 😉
Hubby gave me an ice cream maker last year, so really I’m just being a dutiful wife by using it frequently. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
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Sure, when I was your age I could do that circle game, but after 7 decades my body is much slower to forgive. My “Covid pounds” weren’t leaving when I showed them the door so I did something I had never done. I actually paid money for a diet plan. That’s what desperation has done to this tightwad. I have lost about two thirds of the gain, but I have never endured such self-torture and don’t plan on needing to do it again. On the other hand my memory hasn’t improved with age. The spoiled brat is still strong in this one.
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Old enough to know better; young enough to do it anyway. At least, that’s what I prefer to call it. 😉
Despite the personal and monetary cost, your investment in the diet plan sounds worth it. If you managed to lose pounds that didn’t want to budge before, you’re doing something right! If only it wasn’t so painful…
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WordPress is eating my comments again
And I can’t remember everything I wrote I’m gonna copy them before I post from now on but I do have an inner child an inner teen and an inner adult though it’s only just developed and an inner b**** she’s been with me years. It’s funny when they all want biscuits but different ones
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Stupid WordPress! I’m sorry about that. I found your original comment in the spam folder and marked it approved, so it’s in #1 position now (below). Thank you for trying again — I hope from now on WordPress will realize I want your comments!
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I still don’t have an inner adult, my inner child just runs amuck (amuck, amuck, amuck). No discipline going on anywhere in here. Maybe my inner child needs a nanny.
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I like that idea! Let me know if you find one — I could use some help riding herd on my inner brat. She also tends to run amuck (amuck, amuck, amuck). LOL!
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My inner brat is more spoiled than your inner brat! … wait, that’s not a good talent, is it …
I love the cartoon!
After my husband died, I didn’t care about eating or cooking for over a year. My eating habits got very unhealthy. Just the last month I’ve gotten the energy to do better. So far, so good. My best move to date is to avoid having treats in the house. I can still have a treat if I really want it, but I have to get up, get in the vehicle, drive to the store, bring it home and THEN I get to eat it. I’m just too lazy to do that. But the option is always open, so I don’t feel deprived. My laziness is becoming a virtue. Imagine 🙂
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That’s hilarious! You and I are two peas in a pod: I do the same with snacks. I can’t have chips in the house at all — if I do, I gobble them up instantly. But I’m also too lazy to drive to the store just to get them. Hooray for us and our clever strategy! 😉
And I’m glad you got a chuckle from the cartoon. It really happened almost like that, except that I had already heated the plate and carried it to the table before I realized that eating the ‘oversize’ half of the portion while standing at the counter did not, in any way, negate its calories. It’s too bad it didn’t though — wouldn’t it be fabulous to be able to flag calories past at will?
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Indeed 😀
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I always help my wife with her diets by eating all the extra food so she won’t be tempted. It’s a sacrifice, but someone has to do it.
and I vote for more drawings on your blog. 😉
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Hubby always wants more cartoons, too. Problem is, I only get a cartoon idea a few times a year. Blog posts might be scarce.
And hooray for you, protecting your wife like that. I should protect Hubby, too. It’s only right. 😉
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I call it “feeding the beast.” The beast isn’t satisfied until he’s fully fed. If the beast has a bigger salad at dinner, then the beast won’t be scouring the pantry three hours later looking for something less healthy than salad. 😐 I could use some help with metabolism, though. Some days, I wonder if I was born with any at all!
My better half, though, has been waging her own food battles. She got sick after dinner a few months ago, to realize that she’s now unable to eat anything with gluten. (It’s a common issue with her chronic anemia.) Adding the pre-diabetic issues (hereditary), we’ve had to make changes. The worst part of all this is that it is expensive to eat healthy.
At least our weather is starting to break. I’m possibly doing a road rally next month and have to prep the old “winter beater” car if I make the trip. (Look up the Lemons Rally and you’ll see what I mean. 😁 ) But I have to get out in the weather and work on the car in the driveway, since the garage is used for storage. We get anywhere from 20° to 60° temperatures and frequent rain or overcast skies, so working on things is a challenge.
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Okay, I just spent far too much time on the Lemons Rally site — what a blast! That would be SO MUCH FUN!!! Wrenching on your car in 20° weather in your driveway? Ngh… not so much fun. But possibly tolerable if it’s for a ‘good cause’ (such as the Lemons Rally). 😉
I feel your pain with the gluten-free and other dietary restrictions. I’ve had to go gluten-free and dairy-free several times for a few months at a time, and it’s a giant pain. I can only imagine how tough it is to have to do it permanently, because you’re right: It’s also expensive. I actually ended up buying an electric flour mill so I could make my own GF flour — it’s much cheaper to buy a giant sack of rice/oatmeal/whatever than pay through the nose for specialty flour.
I like your name for ‘The Beast’, and I’m totally impressed that you eat salad for supper! No matter how big and lovely the salad was, my ‘beast’ would be growling and looking for ‘real’ food an hour later.
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The Rally should be a blast. I’m most likely doing the April rally (Rocky Mountain Breakdown) if things go as planned, but kiddo and I are planning to do the Rust Belt Ramble in July since it’s shorter, and starts in our area. The car, unfortunately, needs piston rings and the cylinders honed, aside from any livery I decide to decorate it with. (We bought it with 180k miles on it, with questionable maintenance prior to our ownership, and it burns way too much oil to take on a long distance trip.)
Good tip on getting a flour mill–thanks! We’ve wanted to try almond flour but with a cost of $8.99/pound or even more, that’s not happening. But rice, corn, oats, etc. would be well worth doing at home. I saw that KitchenAid has a grain mill attachment–that might work well for us. We don’t use flour a lot, but it sure would help to take the sting out of buying small amounts for several times the cost of wheat flour.
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The instructions for the mill I bought say you shouldn’t grind nuts or oilseeds in it. There’s no way to clean the steel grinding wheels, so any oil residue would end up going rancid and spoiling everything else you run through it. The oil residue would also get clogged with grain dust and gum up the works. I’m not familiar with KitchenAid, though — maybe their attachment handles nuts and oilseeds better (or can at least be disassembled for cleaning).
Honing cylinders, what fun. (Not.) Will you do that yourself? I think we have a honing tool somewhere out in the garage, but I’ve never used it; mostly because when we took the pistons out of my 53 Chevy we discovered there was a hole blown through one of the cylinder walls. We ended up getting it bored and sleeved. Not a DIY thing (for me, at least).
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I have a meat grinder/pasta maker attachment for the KitchenAid that can be fully disassembled, but I haven’t seen their grain mill up close yet. Since it works from a power take-off on the front of the mixer, there’s a chance it might be possible to disassemble it. However, I think that we would be sticking to rice, corn and oats, as she’s had trouble digesting some nuts and seeds anyway. I agree on the oil residue–it doesn’t take much of that rancidity to get into the rest of the food, and I’ve smelled when the packages of walnuts have gone bad in the pantry. Ugh.
The honing is all up to me. This honing tool I purchased is like a bristle brush with abrasive balls on the ends. It only takes a few passes to do a proper crosshatch. The only drawback is that the tool only fits certain sizes of cylinder bores, so if I had to do one of our Honda K24 engines (vs. this D17 in the Civic), I would need to buy a larger one. It’s a bit more work to get to the cylinders, but not impossible–once I get the cylinder head and oil pan off, I can unbolt the connecting rod from the bottom and push the piston out the top of the engine. I have a piston ring tool which will compress them enough to get them back into the cylinder. I think the hardest part will be keeping the abrasive out of the crankshaft area, and keeping track of the connecting rod bearings so they go back on in the same location they came off of. I’ve already had the cylinder head off when I replaced it a couple of years ago, so it’s not a difficult job. Just tedious, as there is a lot to disconnect. It’s the fouled up oil rings causing half the oil burning problem, and the worn-off crosshatching causing the rest.
On another note, the welder I ordered arrived today. If you don’t hear from me past mid-summer, assume something drastic has happened. 😁 Or I may turn into that oldtimer who buys silverware from the thrift stores and makes garden art out of them…
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A welder, woohoo! What did you get? We’ve got an ancient buzz-box that was my Dad’s and still works fine, and we have an oxy/acetylene setup; but for years Hubby and I have been coveting one of those 3-in-1 Mig/Tig/Arc units. I have no idea if they’re useful or just another example of ‘does everything, but nothing well’. But they SEEM like a good thing. And they’re a tool. MUST… HAVE… MORE… TOOLS…
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Your not the only one. I have an inner child, a spoil brat, a inner parent not sure where that came from as I don’t have kids. I also have the super b****, but for me she’s a friend.
I’m currently trying to loose some of the outer me well reduce me in size it’s working I’m kinda seeing a difference but it’s hard I’ve never been a fan of exercise but have tried to do something everyday and so far for the last 40 days I’ve managed to do something everyday I’ve watched my weight go up and down. I console myself with muscle weighs more than fat but I’m not sure how long I’ll believe it. The weight is coming down slowly which is good my legs never in bad shape are more toned and trim. Just have to loose the belly and tone up the rest of me. I have to say the trainer on the wii fit is wonderful and such an ego boost pity he’s not real and can’t actually see what I’m doing but he tells me I’m perfect and doing well.
Other than that yet again I’m looking at what I eat and have days when I don’t eat enough and says when I eat too much.
I’m also looking for a new job yet again but hey ho no one seems to object to purple hair so far anyway
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What’s not to like about purple hair? 🙂 Good luck with your job-hunting — I hope you find your dream job.
Wow, I’m so impressed with your diet and exercise program! It’s so hard to make changes like that. If you’ve managed to stick with it for 40 days already, that’s awesome. And how cool that you’re already feeling more fit and seeing some good-lookin’ muscle tone!
It’s funny that you have an inner parent. I never had kids, either, but sometimes that inner parent surfaces anyway. (Not very often, though. It’s probably a good thing I never reproduced.) 😉
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