Intermittent bingeing

Okay I promised to tell you about my diet.  Even though I know that it will have professional dietitians cringing in pain.

Generally speaking, my reaction to stress is stress eating.  During Gloria's final illness and death, I definitely wasn't trying to diet.  As a matter of fact, in the month before she went into the hospital, while she wasn't eating very much because she had stomach pains and nausea, I, not having to provide meals that Gloria would eat, was eating out more than usual.  So I definitely wasn't dieting then.  And I wasn't dieting while she was in hospital.  So I was rather surprised, after Gloria died, to find that I had in fact lost a fair amount of weight.  I still wasn't trying to lose weight.  I figured that that was a one-off.  But I also found, a few weeks later, that I was still losing weight after Gloria had died.  So, I figured that I might as well take advantage of the fact that I had lost some weight, and get serious about dieting.

A diet works if it works for you.  And I have also observed that dieting is a fairly selfish, and self-centered, activity.  You have to figure out what will work for *you*, and what *you* can eat, that will still allow you to eat less than usual and lose weight.  There is, of course, the recently popular intermittent fasting diet.  This allows you times when you can eat, and times when you don't eat.  My baby brother is really big on the intermittent fasting diet.  He thinks that it is the greatest thing since sliced bread, although, of course, he can't eat any bread right now.  I don't exactly follow the intermittent fasting diet.  I have my own version of it, which I refer to as intermittent bingeing.

I weigh myself every couple of days.  I have, in the past, noted that it's not a good idea to weigh yourself every day.  Weight fluctuates and varies according to some weird schedule of its own, and it gets kind of depressing when you do all the right things, and you still don't lose weight.  So it's not a good idea to weigh yourself every day.  But every couple of days I weigh myself.  And, if I am a lower weight than I have been at any point on this diet, I reward myself, for eating vegetables and salads when I would rather have burgers, by having a fast food pig out.  Yes, I know it is completely unhealthy.  Why couldn't I binge on something more healthy?  Like a big salad!

Well this is the way it works for me.  I binge on unhealthy fast food.  If, that is, I have hit a target, the target being a lower weight than I have been at any point on this diet.

So far it has been working.  Not all the time: and sometimes it can be rather frustrating when I've had a binge and lo and behold I've gained 15 pounds from one unhealthy meal.  But I try to remember that weight fluctuates, for reasons of its own, on schedules of its own, and that eventually it will come back down again.

The walking probably doesn't hurt.  I'm walking quite a bit.  I'm walking long distances at times.  I am, in fact, walking while I am dictating this.  I am walking back and forth around the corner of the Strawberry Hill branch of the Surrey Public Library, in a path that keeps me within the zone of their wifi, so I can keep doing the dictation.  And I'm walking slowly back and forth while I'm dictating this.  I'm probably not putting in a heck of a lot of miles doing this but at least I'm somewhat active rather than just sitting down and dictating.

Anyway, that's my diet.  I do try to eat somewhat sensibly on days when I'm not bingeing.  I try to eat vegetables, which is getting somewhat easier as some of the gardens are starting to produce something to eat.  At one point I was going to the dead vegetable bin at the local grocery store, and whatever was on discount, that was dinner for the day.  However they don't do as much discount vegetables anymore, so it's a good thing that the gardens started producing.  I've also started stocking up on large bottles of vegetable juice (Gloria and I always preferred Mott's Garden Cocktail over V8 or house brand veg juice) so that I can go to the fridge and slug down a drink of vegetable juice, at a time when I would normally go for crackers, or bread, or a handful of toasted corn.  I figured the vegetable juice is probably a better idea.  Hopefully this will work reasonably well.

No, I am not particularly regular with this diet.  Yes, there are days when I raid the candy drawer.  Which still has some stuff in it, although it's starting to get pretty old.  Yes, there are days when I raid the cracker cupboard.  But I'm trying.

Not everyday is just vegetables and salads of course.  I am, occasionally, creating a meal, with actual meat and potatoes in it.  And I've got some frozen boxes of vegetables to augment those particular meals.  When I do that I generally try to do it only once a day, and I try to ensure that I'm not overdoing it with the potatoes.