yikes!

I posted last week about hoping to get through the holidays and maintaining my weight loss, but I realized that it sounded a bit like rolling over and accepting that, from now until Jan. 1, there’s no way I can lose any weight.  So I decided last night that I would address the situation again this morning and make it clear that I’m still going to fight, and that there are many weeks in between now and the real crush of the holiday season.

And then I checked my email, did a double take, and looked at my calendar.  My email this morning contained: one dinner party invitation, an invitation to check out a new restaurant; a reminder that we need to find a time to celebrate my father-in-law’s birthday, a request to make a sweet potato pie for my father-in-law, and a reminder that we told my mother-in-law we’d take her to a new German restaurant for her birthday a month ago and that we still haven’t done that (this reminder was from my husband, not from my mother-in-law, just to be clear).  When I checked my calendar and put the dinner party date down, I noticed that it came at the end of a week which includes a work luncheon and an end-0f-season work dinner.

Holy shit, y’all!  Do you notice that I didn’t even mention Thanksgiving and its attendant road trip/weekend away in that litany of upcoming foodcentric events?

Now, I’m not going to look at all this stuff and complain about how full my life is.  Seriously, a lot of people feel lonely and miserable over the holidays, and I’m downright blessed.  But, if you’ve been following this blog for a while, it should be pretty clear that this–celebration, friends, parties–is my kryptonite.  I believe that we all have some strengths and some weaknesses when it comes to trying to lose weight.  Some folks have a talent for sticking their nose to the grindstone and ignoring temptation, for putting on blinders and seeing only the ultimate goal.  One of my strengths is the ability to really enjoy the journey–creating good healthy food and  taking pride in a solid workout.  Some people have a hard time envisioning a true lifestyle change, and when they hit the magic number they feel like they’re done, and then are ill-equipped to maintain.   I know that there’s no being done, so I try to pick an approach I can sustain over the long term.  The weakness to this approach is that I’m constantly balancing choices–do I enjoy this x, y, z now because denying myself would result in a binge later, or do I try to be strong and risk falling off the wagon for the rest of the weekend?

Whew, this post is taking a deeper [longer, sorry] turn than I expected, but I feel like I’m finally being able to put something into words here.  I think it all comes down to this: do you see food as evil or good?  Is your weight loss battle a fight against food, or a fight against the abuse of food?

I love food.  I know that, for me, there is a right way and a wrong way to treat food, but I cannot wrap my head around the idea that food is inherently bad, and that I should use it only for sustenance.  I have a friend who loses weight by eating Lean Cuisine for dinner every night.  I’m glad that works for her, but it absolutely does not work for me, on a seriously primal level.  I need to have my hands rooting around in vegetables and my mind excited by a new twist on a favorite recipe.  When I combine that love of fresh, healthy food with solid exercise, I can lose weight!

The problem is that I don’t agree with a sentiment I’ve seen posted on several blogs, which is that food can’t make you happy.  Folks, I am here to tell you: yes it can.  In the right context, it can make you downright joyful.  For example, the above-mentioned new restaurant.  It’s a new location, near a friend’s house, for my favorite Indian restaurant EVER.  And I have eaten at a lot of Indian restaurants.  So tomorrow night we’re going to go see our friends, and their sweet little baby, and we’ll eat delicious Indian food, and I’ll remember growing up in South East Asia and eating Indian food with my family, and afterwards I’ll call them and explain how the palak paneer had perfectly firm cheese and how the baingan barta reignited my passionate affair with eggplant. I’ll go to bed full and happy.  That is the right way to treat food, and to let it bring you happiness.  The wrong way would be to realize that I won’t exactly be counting points tomorrow, and thus eat a big lunch and sneak a candy bar midafternoon, and then return home from dinner and try to extend the genuine happiness by drinking a few beers.

I could go on about this forever, but the relevant point is this: the above scenario works, but only when it’s balanced with a lot of workouts and healthy meals.  In the next few months, I’ll have similar scenarios available to me on a near-constant basis.  How do I navigate my way through?  Will it be enough to vow to keep up with my exercise, and to only eat healthy food at home, while allowing myself to enjoy celebrations within reason?  Or do I need to try and locate some blinders, close my eyes to temptation, and grit my way through the holidays?