Monday 29 March 2010

Staying On The Healthy Eating Plan Despite Feeling Rubbish (Or At Least, Not Falling Off Too Much)

Its weekends like the one I’ve just had that make it exceedingly difficult to keep to any sort of healthy eating plan. When you’re full of cold, feeling miserable and trying to stop your body from doing all sorts of unpleasant things to you, the last thing you want to be doing is thinking about your next meal and how it fits in with your nice healthy diet.

In fact the last thing I wanted was food that fit into my nice healthy diet. I’m a chronic comfort eater, always have been, and feeling like death warmed up this weekend made me crave comfort foods. Except this time there was a subtle difference in what I was eating.

Where normally I’d reach for the chocolate and the cream cakes to cheer me up, this weekend I ate homemade savoury comfort foods. Homemade Chinese-style chicken noodle soup, made with homemade chicken stock. Turkey and bacon stew with pearl barley. Vegetable and sausage pizza, made carefully with about half the dough I normally use. And then I had a cheesecake, or rather, shared something that was supposed to be cheesecake with Sam.

FYI, if you have a cheesecake craving, Sainsbury’s packet mix cheesecake probably won’t hit the spot.

Anyway, even though I deviated slightly from my eating plan, I didn’t completely crash my diet car, if you see what I mean. And today, now I’m feeling a bit better (read, can actually breathe through both nostrils for the first time in four days) I picked myself off and got back on my plan, with a Slim Fast milkshake for breakfast.

Just shows that I can do it. The old me would have seen this cold as an excuse to quit, to go back to accepting that I’m fat and being miserable about it. Not the new me. I have a target, a goal that I’m determined to reach. And even if I can’t quite get there, I’m determined to get as close as I can.