Tricks and Treats: Day 60 of the DeFluffing
16 September 2012
I couldn’t make the scale say I’d lost any weight all week. Yesterday I decided even if I hadn’t lost, I could pat myself on the back, (Which is not nearly as hard to do as it was 60 days ago.) because not only can I wear my jeans again, but the muffin top lapping over my waist is GONE!!!! Yippee! I don’t need vests and huge shirts to hide my lumpy waistline. Victory!
I’ve hit these kinds of roadblocks every time I’ve dieted, and I’m an old hand. I had my first weight issue when I was 9 years old and just plain fat. Over the millennia, I’ve come up with some tricks. I’m a slow learner, but hopefully this time they’ll stick.
Trick Number 1: Hello, my name is Kath, and I’m a bread addict. Thankfully I no longer live in the San Francisco Bay area, so I can’t get Parisian Sourdough. If I could, I’d have my closet wired for internet, because I’d be locked in with rounds and rounds of bread and my writing. Oh, shoot. I just remembered; the gourmet department at the liquor store sometimes has a decent sourdough. Luckily we don’t drink much, and rarely go to the liquor store. Although, we probably need cooking wine. I’m pretty sure the cooking wine has gone bad. This could be critical. Is that liquor store open today, Sunday?
Denying myself bread is to put a date certain on when my diet will blow up. If I can’t have bread, I’ll be forced to get a semi-trailer load of Cheezits, a tanker truck of Pepsi, and throw myself a carb-party. So I use a trick that does not include stuffing a loaf of bread a day down my gullet. In my daily calories I include a couple of ounces of toasted bread: italian, french, kaiser roll. With a nice cup of creamed coffee, it’s the huge treat at the end of the day. ( I can tell you which grocery chains have fair bakery breads, and which are baking kapok into a loaf with a crust.)
Trick number 2: Every diet book says put smaller meal portions on smaller plates. That helps. All that empty space on my regular plate makes me eye The Prince Consort’s and think how many burglars in the basement I’ll need to ‘hear’ during dinner to get him away from the table long enough for me to even the score. So smaller plate, nicer Kath.
But if that worked at meals, what about dessert? Right now I’m obsessed with candy corn. (Duh! It’s fall. No candy corn is safe from me.) I found a very small Japanese tea cup in the treasures I inherited from my mother. (Yes. I know a sake’ cup would have been even smaller and more diet conscious, but I’m not that good at tricking myself.) Now the ten pieces of candy corn feel like … ten pieces, but they’re in a pretty porcelain cup that is at least as satisfying visually as the candy is taste-wise.
Kath, whose treat this week was when the mean old scale finally said this morning I’d tricked myself well enough for a treat. I’m now down 15 pounds since the beginning of the De Fluffing. Tricks and then TREATS!
