Saturday, November 17, 2007

Like My Boys

You'd think I'd have it figured out by now: There is no silver bullet.

Maybe it's written somewhere else in this blog, I don't know. But the truth (that none of us really wants to hear) is that there is no easy or fast way to lose weight.
And yet, every day, I hear of this diet and that diet, some new, some really old, all promising to make us melt the fat away -- in weeks!

Know what? They all suck.

Why do they suck? Because we were designed to put on weight. The caveman who gorged himself the best and who put on the most weight was the one most likely to survive. Therefore, when we diet, the body goes into all-out "starvation alert" mode. After a few days/weeks/months of cabbage soup, grapefruit, carrots and celery, or other ridiculous diets, we go back to eating real food, go apenuts with it, and get even bigger than before.

I'm fat again. My belly flops around, and so do my chins. I can't look in the mirror, so I give myself only cursory glances, to make sure I don't go out with bedhead or stains on my clothes. But I don't check myself out. 'Cause, well, bleah.

Because I have not been able to exercise much, I haven't burned much of anything.
Lately, I have been "good" until about 4, and then starvation wallops me so hard that I can't stop eating. Then, I have a huge dinner. And then I sit.

I watch my kids. The older one eats about 1/2 to 1/4 what I put in front of him (and I offer tiny child portions, not what I've seen many other parents set in front of their kids.) He won't eat much bread, cheese, or baked goods. His Halloween candy is sitting in a bowl in the kitchen, in the open, untouched. He even said he wanted to throw it out (!) He drinks lots of milk (sometimes instead of a meal) and prefers OJ with seltzer as a beverage. He will eat fruit, but not bananas. He'll ask for ice cream and, out of a cone with a kid-sized scoop, he will eat half and abandon the rest, to melt.

My little one will eat 5 (I kid you not) eggs for breakfast, with or without bacon. He also will eat dried cherries and almonds, every single day. Mid morning, he eats a yogurt with a banana. As a snack, he asks for grapes. 9 times out of 10, he will refuse lunch.

Neither will eat more than a few bites of dinner, if that.
They are both muscular and very slim; you can see their little ribs.
They are proof that the only way to be slim is to never take in more than you can expend.

I need to eat like my boys.

1 Comments:

Blogger Penny said...

You are so right. Kids have that inbuilt ability to control their portions sizes that so many of us adults have lost.

Hugs :)

4:53 AM  

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