Dieting…D is for Disaster

Ok, quick post tonight as I should be in bed and the wife just reminded me that I have to take the trash and recyclables out.  This wouldn’t be a big deal if I’d cleared my driveway anytime in the last two weeks but currently getting the two massive bins to the street requires me hooking up an entire Iditarod dog sled team just so that I can get back to the house by morning.

Last time we were talking about working on making less bad choices instead of making great choices.  This isn’t exactly the kind of Michael Douglas from Wall Street, rah-rah talk you hear from most fitness “gurus” but since we aren’t olympic champions or even remotely capable of self control, we set our sites a little less stratospherically.

One of the conversations that I’ve had with myself was about eliminating eating out…at restaurants…just making sure you’re still paying attention.  I just realized I typed “eliminating” when I should have typed “reducing”.  If I want a god damned Kopps cheeseburger I will have one.  Ahem…anyway, most people operate on a three meal a day kind of cycle.  This is basically what I do with snacks thrown in to try to prevent overeating at my main meals.  Breakfast is rarely an issue but every now and then I hit the drive-thru on the way to work; no big deal.  Dinner as of late hasn’t been too bad either.  My wife and I don’t mind cooking too much and we don’t tend to make a lot of really terrible food stuffs since we would have to physically throw the malevolent ingredients into the pot or pan ourselves and generally we have enough self preservation instinct to stop lard from becoming a food group.

Lunch.  Lunch is my Achilles’ heel.  I just can’t wait to get out of the office and eat something ruinous.  My lunch cycle used to look something like this:

Monday – Chinese buffet

Tuesday – Pizza place

Wednesday – Indian buffet

Thursday – Somewhere different but still awful

Friday – Chinese buffet (Double Dragon bookends baby!)

Now, not only is this obviously a great way to torpedo any attempt at weight loss/fitness/diet/training but it’s not a cheap way to get through the week.

I figured that I needed to find a way to entice myself to make the right choices and simply arguing that bringing my lunch would be cheaper and healthier wasn’t sufficient.  What I did determine though was that I could basically make myself ANYTHING I wanted for lunch and it was still healthier and cheaper than what I’d been doing.  I could get a burrito and a soda at a restaurant for $10 or I could bring a 1lb Ribeye steak and a can of soda from home for the same price.  The large portion sizes served at any restaurant meant that no matter what I brought from home, the restaurant option was always the worse of the two choices.  You could argue a big greasy pork sandwich from home would be worse than buying a salad with no dressing but let’s be realistic, I’m not going to get a salad with no dressing…at least not at this stage.  I still eat out many days but I’ve found that by making something for lunch that I actually look forward to eating, I’m far more likely to keep myself in line.

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