Thanksgiving is tomorrow.
I am thankful for…
OK, there are other things too… but I’ve never been good at these sorts of lists.
Food-based celebrations are always a little fraught for me.
Let’s face it… pretty much everywhere on the planet, food is considered an appropriate reward for good behavior, or a necessity to celebrations and get-togethers.
Did something go well at work? Let’s take the group out to lunch as a reward. Is it your birthday? anniversary? Here, have some cake.
People WANT to feed other people. It’s human nature.
But to me… none of that is a reward.
So… I did something good, and as a reward, you want to take me out to lunch?
But I already had my food panned for the day. I have my can of soup. I know how many calories is in it. I know what my post-lunch and then afternoon snack are going to be.
Now you want to take me out some place where I have no idea what the nutritional information is. You want me to have to guess my way through the menu… find something that “looks” like it might be healthy enough and have a similar number of calories as what I already planned. Let me go ahead and tell you… it’s probably not going to be anything very “good”… a salad with some chicken on it is usually the only safe bet in most restaurants. I would be MUCH HAPPIER if you had just said thank you and left me alone to my soup.
Handily… my boss is well aware of my eating preferences… so any impromptu outings they do while he’s in town, will stop by my office “just to check” to see if I want to go, but there’s no expectation that I will. So there, they have fulfilled the need to be gracious and invite me, but don’t actually expect me to go along. If the boss is coming in and wants to do some kind team dinner or something… he gives me plenty of notice. I’m not against going out, per se… just let me work it into the overall plan.
I mean… lord knows that I love me some cake. But I don’t want to have it as a surprise. I need to make sure that it fits into my overall eating for the day. Which it totally can, but not if it’s spring on me at the last minute when I’ve already had 3/4 of my daily intake!
So, speaking of things that require advance planning.
Thanksgiving is coming.
Historically, no matter what I “intend” to do, I end up eating too much on this day of excess.
So I thought I had better have a plan going in this year.
Handily… my nutrition tracker really helps with this… it’s easier to see exactly what you can do if you have a better idea of what each item is going to “cost” you.
There’s some things I love about Thanksgiving. My Mom’s mashed potato stuffing… Her Mashed Carrots and Turnips (I know, it sounds gross, but I love them)… Cranberry Sauce…. Mac and Cheese.
But even though I DEFINITELY want to eat all these things. There’s no reason I should eat so much that I am going to make myself sick.
So This year, I have pre-registered what I am eating for Thanksgiving dinner with my calorie counter.
It’s still a lot of food. But I’m hoping that going in armed with a measuring cup and a plan will help me to STOP eating before I am so full I want to throw up.
I have, in the past, tried to just go with the salad… but then I feel like I missed the “meal” after that, and I end up going back for the higher calorie stuff anyway.
Here I get to have all the less healthy stuff on the plate at the same time as I am loading up on salad… I think this is a workable plan that will let me get through the day without feeling either sick or “bad” about my choices.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Since I signed up for this food tracking thing, it’s been giving me a big red bar on my sodium intake every day.
It seems that no matter what I get, it’s all got a ridiculous level of salt in it.
But it appears that the only option to get food with less sodium is to actually grow the vegetables yourself, slaughter your own chickens, and cook every morsel you consume from scratch.
So I go to all this trouble to choose “healthy” foods that are low in fat, calories, cholesterol, carbohydrates, blah blah blah, and then they are killing me by adding salt to all of it.
You just can’t win.
Bah!
I made some brown rice last Sunday. I like to add a half cup of it to my dinner now… you know… now that I am “Post-Creamer” and am having to figure out ways to add more calories to my day that are not comprised entirely of modified corn syrup solids and hydrogenated oil.
So anyway, I made a cup of rice, which is a little bit more than was needed for the week.
So this morning, I’m sitting here thinking about the last half-ish cup of brown rice sitting there in the fridge.
We don’t eat dinner at home on the weekends, so I know I’m not going to get a chance to eat it before it gets too old.
But the thought of tossing it was all “WHAT!? YOU ARE GOING TO WASTE A HALF CUP OF PERFECTLY GOOD RICE!!???”
Don’t even get me started on the starving children in Africa – as if I could send them my half cup of rice.
So it also happens that I had one single lonely packet of apple cinnamon instant oatmeal left as well.
Of course, I did what any good depression-era house wife would do… I made the packet of oatmeal with twice the water, then I added the rice to it.
It actually made kind of a tasty breakfast… kind of not too sweet and nutty.
So now you know… if you run out of oatmeal, you can always add in a little brown rice. Or, conversely, if you are desperate to use up that last half cup of rice… add it to some oatmeal 
That’s my tip to you from the part of my brain that lives in 1930.
I believe I have mentioned before that I am a sucker for numbers.
Well… I am getting a new toy that is going to put me into paroxysms of information joy…
This armband is worn all the time and constantly feeds the wristband with information about how much exercise you’ve done and how many calories have been burned over the course of a day.
Combined with the web site which tracks food, it will tell me exactly how much I should eat to maintain my desired weight.
I’m constantly whinging about having a “slow metabolism”… now, that could be true, or it could be my imagination just based on how much I would LIKE to eat vs. how much I actually CAN eat (and stay the same weight).
This little baby will give me all the info that I need to either a) understand that I am kidding myself, and that if I really want to eat all the cake in the world, well, I’ll have to work out more… or b) bring all this info to my doctor and say “look here! this isn’t right! Fix it!”
Best part? When I posted on facebook that I wanted one, I found out a friend of mine had one she didn’t want anymore, and she’s selling it to me for half price. Woot!
So now we have come to the time of year when I look up and say “Holy Crap, I guess I’d better burn all these vacation days before the year turns over and I lose them!”
I always mean to take my vacation days sprinkled throughout the year… but inevitably this and that happens and I’ll say, oh, well, I’ll just go ahead and work on that day or whatever.
So I often get to the last quarter and fins myself with a surfeit of vacation days to take. This year, I only took 5 vacation days and my two personal days, so I had ten more days to burn (oh, yeah, I do work for an awesome company with great benefits).
These things don’t roll over*, so I end up taking a bunch of random three day weekends.
This year, I will not be working a single five day week in November or December.
I love random three day weekends. See, people always know you are off on the weekends, so there are plans made and things to do and events to attend, etc.
Not that these things are not enjoyable… but then when random Monday off with no plans rolls around, boy, howdy, I surely do enjoy sitting around the house for an ENTIRE DAY with nothing to do and nowhere to go and no guilt to feel about missing anything important.
Even when I eventually get bored and go ahead and log into my email and deal with a few work things here and there… by golly, it’s ever so much more fun to do that while sitting on my comfy couch with my blanket and heating pad than if I were in my office.
I will now continue with my regularly unscheduled couch sitting. Right after I get a cup of cocoa.
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*It’s probably a good thing our vacation doesn’t roll over, or I’d just end up with months of it to take when I finally retire. I’ve been with my company for 7.5 years and have maxed out on the 13 weeks of sick time they allow you to save up. What can I say? I’m a saver.
So with all my whinging about the apps available for blackberry, I decided I should at least check out the app site to see if there IS anything good I missed… And Hey! I found this WordPress App. And it’s actually pretty good! So here I am, blogging from my phone. Ain’t technology grand?
Oh Blackberry… How I loved my curve when I first got it.
OK, I still love it.
But I feel like I could love it so much more if there were only some decent apps for it!
Why is everything only available for iPhone and Droid?
Now, I’m not an “iPerson”, which means I most likely will never get an iphonepodpadgod.
But I had hopes that one day my phone might be able to do such things as host a decent facebook app, or allow me to “check in” places and show everyone who knows me that I have stopped to get my oil changed or whatnot.
Recently, I found out that I am using a second rate calorie counting site… why? Because the best one only works on iPhone and Droid.
Stupid smart phone.
Well, my company allows me a new phone every two years, so maybe in a year I can get something better.
In the meantime, it’s half-assed Blackberry apps for me!
So for a long time now I have been immersed in the “Body acceptance” blog-o-sphere. I was subscribed to blog feeds and news feeds and read all this stuff every day. I was a contributor to a group blog that talked about fat and fat issues in this country.I had another blog where I talked a lot about weight topics, etc. I spent a lot of time reading and writing about these things.
And I quit.
I dumped the feeds. I resigned from the group blog. I set that other blog to private.
I just couldn’t take it any more.
Day after day of horrifying stories of how we supposedly civilized people treat each other just based solely on physical appearance.
Did it make me feel outraged and want to change things? Well… yes… but.
I’ve seen how slowly change happens. Social Justice is hard, hard work. So mostly, instead of outrage, I ended up feeling fear. Fear and worry about how I can try to keep those things from happening to me. Yeah… don’t get mad at the system… figure out how you can conform to the system to keep from being mocked and humiliated. Way to go, social activist!
Plus, that’s a lot of reading… all those blogs. I got to the point where I was barely reading any blogs at all.. mostly skimming, hardly ever commenting. Kinda defeats the whole purpose of blogging.
So, as I said, I quit.
Dumped the feeds.
Went back to just my original core blogs. Hey – I’ve even managed to have time to comment here and there this week!
So, yeah, fine… maybe I’ll never be a “good activist”, but sometimes you just gotta pick your battles, and maybe I’m just not cut our for battling.
But this whole “no more powdered non-dairy creamer” thing is really a bitch.
Routines are stubborn things, and I desperately want to stick to mine.
I was going to the break room to make a cup of herbal tea and my brain started down the “Well, maybe ONE proper cup of tea with creamer wouldn’t be so bad… just one…“
The “Just One” argument is a slippery slope, my friends. I cannot go there.
I additionally signed up for an online calorie tracker so I could make sure I am eating enough to replace the ridiculous number of calories that went away with my beloved damned creamer.
This has the added benefit of showing me JUST EXACTLY HOW MANY CALORIES I HAVE LEFT TO EAT THAT I COULD TOTALLY USE TO JUST HAVE THE CREAMER, ALREADY!!!
Why is it that high fructose corn syrup is not, you know, counted as an actual vegetable… it’s made of CORN! Why is it apparently the root of all that is evil in this country (or so the news would have us think).
So between the calorie tracker and the complete lack of being able to have a nice cup of tea, I have pretty much done nothing but sit around obsessing about food, snacks, tea, eating. What I am eating now, what I will be able to eat next, and if I put in all my food for the day, what if there’s some room left over and how am I going to spend those calories because there is TOTALLY 5 pounds of Halloween candy left right now, and I want some of that too.
I hate my brain today.
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