Three Point Five Down!

I weigh exactly three point five pounds less than I did at last week's weigh-in. Yahoo but not good enough to suit my wild craving to be Thinner Me NOW! Still, it is above the recommended average of two pounds per week, so I suppose I should be a teeny bit proud of myself. And, truly, I am. I am learning how to eat differently than I have my whole life and that is the true success.

As a Formerly Thin Person, I have never had to worry about what I ate, or how much. I grew up with a sweet tooth that knew no end of cravings, and a body metabolism that was remarkably forgiving of my late night Sugar Binges. I remember being a skinny nursing school student at Georgia Baptist in Atlanta. My equally skinny (but with more generous breasts and more voluptuous curves) roommate Lisa S. and I used to go to the snack machine in our nursing school lobby nearly every night. We had discovered that if we pushed Number Nine early in the month, just after the machine vendor filled it to the brim, we could put in a couple of quarters and the entire row of Chocolate Iced Honey Buns would drop goodies for us in the narrow silver bin below. We knew, on a cellular level, that what we were doing was technically stealing, but we rationalized that it wasn't our fault the machine was giving up her whole row of goodies for the price of one bun, and we were pathetically, chronically broke. We were also, for the record, hungry about ninety percent of the time. I gorged on those Honey Buns so much that now, nearly 30 years later, I cannot stomach the thought of one, much less an actual bite of one.

I started eating fast food with a vengeance the minute I left my mother - and her incredible home cooking - behind for college. No one could match my mother's homemade biscuits, soft and warm with hot butter and sticky syrup dripping down their sides. Her fried chicken was the best in the South, as far as I was concerned, and her mashed potatoes sent me into throes of ecstasy. I could eat plate after plate and never gain an ounce. I thought I was into the Holy Grail of Eating. I could eat it all and never show the effects. Because Mama's food was so irreplaceable, and because I never managed to learn to cook at all, much less like her, I decided that fast food was my answer. Cheap, easy, and quick. I never thought about the future, that some day I would pay for all those McDonald hamburgers, fries and shakes...or the greasy-delicious Kentucky Fried Chicken and biscuits.

I sit here today in wonder at my total lack of concern for how my body would look, feel and be once that Holy Grail Metabolism slipped out of my grasp. God help me. Lol. God help us all when people have to look at me in a bathing suit! LOl

For today, my goal is to drink water. Lots of water. And to journal my thoughts in prayer form. Help me, Lord, to love just a tiny part of myself again, and help me to lose more pounds this week.