Food! Food! Food!

Thanksgiving and the parties around my mom’s birthday have given me some five or six extra pounds around the midsection, a not-so-little gift which I would rather like to return. It always amazes me how much easier it is to gain weight than to lose it, and having never been much prone to dieting, I feel very helpless about how to proceed.

I train at the gym three times a week and go to pilates twice. I jog sometimes around my home, walk the dogs and go on hikes. I think of myself as a fairly active person. It seems to me that my weight ought to remain low due to all this exercise, but for some reason this theory simply does not hold.

Taking a look at my eating habits does not make me feel much better. I eat a lot of chocolate, though now that I’m in love with this brand of chocolate called Taza, I eat less. It’s very dark chocolate and gritty, being stone-ground, and somehow one piece of it suffices. I feel like I eat a lot of vegetables throughout the day, but looking closely at yesterday, for example, reveals that I had a bit of salad for breakfast, then a few cooked carrots for lunch, and a couple cucumber and carrot sticks for dinner. Not that much. My mood falls even lower when I consider that I always pour olive oil on my salad, and that the goulash from lunch had been sautéed in canola oil before cooked.

I’m going to make chicken soup today with lots of veggies inside, and this thought makes me feel a lot better. I guess in order to eat healthier I’m going to have to make an effort to eat at home oftener, to cook myself, and to add more vegetables to everything I make.

I have one friend who, whenever I’m upset about my weight or comment on looking fat, tells me that our weight fluctuates in winter and summer, that it’s natural to gain or lose as much as seven pounds at these times. She also says to talk about myself in the way I want my daughter to talk about herself. That’s a big statement, because I definitely would not want Eden to have issues with her weight. Ever, if possible.

I feel very ambivalent about these extra pounds. I wish to accept myself the way I am, with a belly or without, but it’s very hard. I think mainly I want to feel healthy, fit and strong, and I guess I don’t right now. Perhaps keeping the balance of eating as healthy as I can and working out is the important aspect, and my weight is not much more important than as a side product. Today I can’t quite reconcile myself to this, but tomorrow, as always, is a new day, the perfect day to start.