Thursday, April 16, 2009
IF you don’t succeed, try, try again?
Dear Food Diary,
Yesterday, I got up and put the final touches on materials for a meeting in the afternoon, dealt with some last-minute email and so on, then raced out of the house, realizing I was late for my first meeting of the day. I did have the presence of mind to have a cup of tea and a piece of low-carb bread with almond butter on it, but even as my heels were clacking down the sidewalk towards the car, I thought, “Shit, I’m doing it again. I’m leaving the house without preparing for a day of running around, and I’m going to end up hungry and dizzy and nauseous. So I devised a plan that would kind of keep me going throughout the day.
Meeting 1: Matcha soy latte, no syrup (unsweetened), with a half-packet of some stevia-based sweetener.
Pit stop: Office to pick up mail. A glass of water at the coffee bar while I waited.
Meeting 2: Got there 5 minutes early, so headed to the coffee shop to use the facilities. Ordered a turkey sandwich, ate the filling and left the bread.
Meeting 3: 2-hour meeting with coffee and cookies. Sat as far away as I could from the temptations and drank from my litre-bottle of water.
Pit stop: Starbucks, en route to next meeting. Needed the facilities but ended up ordering a no-syrup vanilla roiboos with soy, and a chocolate croissant because it wasn’t busy and I felt expected to order something. I know, intellectually, that I shouldn’t have ordered the croissant. I can’t explain the emotional trigger, but I do recognize it and usually don’t let it get the better of me; it’s got something to do with having just led a meeting, a sense of “whew, that’s over, I can relax”, and something to do with ... self-reward, maybe? I have tried for a long time to put my finger on it but can’t quite. The croissant was delish, but as soon as I’d finished eating it, I regretted ordering it. I’m not bulimic, but if I were, this would have been a time I would have taken matters into my own hands.
Meeting 4: Coffee meeting, but I kept it simple and ordered a San Pellegrino.
Pit stops: Need to pick up my computer from the repair shop, and en route think to myself that I should get some more protein into me. I go through the McDonald’s drive-through, buy two chicken snack wraps, eat the chicken, and throw out the wrap part. As I eat it, I wonder how many carbs are in the sauce.* Later, I vow to stay away from McDonald’s. Thank goodness there is no food at Best Buy.
Home: The last piece of meatloaf and a few green beans in front of the computer while checking email and waiting for a colleague to come over to work together on a project deadline.
Here’s the kicker, and the part of my relationship to food that trips me up every time: I ate, and it was 10:30 PM. My colleague left, and I had a huge mental exhale. The “go go go go” pace of the day had raised my cumulative anxiety and frustration levels. Frustration at being behind, anxiety about meeting the deadline. And there was a lingering smell of chicken and garlic in the air. I cooked up a stalk of celery, a quarter onion, and some chicken. It may be a low-carb cheat, but it’s still a cheat. I didn’t need it; I ate it because as I was eating, I could feel my frustration level drop. Significantly. It’s a hard one to give up - having a cup of tea doesn’t have the same effect.
Net effect: up 2 lbs, and not drinking enough in combination with forgetting my supplements left me feeling bloated and dehydrated. Ughhh.
* I checked the McDonald’s website, and find that the chicken strip - this is the meat portion! - contains: “Chicken breast filets with rib meat, water, seasoning (salt, sugar, food starch-modified, maltodextrin, spices, dextrose, autolyzed yeast extract, hydrolyzed [corn gluten, soy, wheat gluten] proteins, garlic powder, paprika, chicken fat, chicken broth, natural flavors (plant and animal source), caramel color, polysorbate 80, xanthan gum, onion powder, extractives of paprika), modified potato starch, and sodium phosphates. Prepared with liquid margarine: Liquid soybean oil, water, partially hydrogenated cottonseed and soybean oils, salt, hydrogenated cottonseed oil, soy lecithin, mono- and diglycerides, sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate (preservative), artificial flavor, citric acid, vitamin A palmitate, beta carotene (color). CONTAINS: SOY AND WHEAT.”