This weight loss business is daunting. I feel already as if I’m going to absolutely DIE during the process; that’s how emotionally dependent I am on food. But it has to be done – I don’t want four hefty EMS guys to be required to hoist me on the stretcher that carries me out when I go toes-up.

I realize I’m an emotional eater. This may have its roots in my childhood, when my mom was frequently debilitated by severe migraines and I was left to eat too many “meals” of peanut butter straight from the jar with a spoon. It definitely hit a crisis point during my marriage to the Fairie Prince, when I was learning how to cook, and living with a man who just wanted to be left alone while I was longing for conversation and cuddling (and not necessarily in that order, either!). I would sit and eat while he sat and watched tv with his back to me. A spoonful here, a pinch there… it adds up quickly.

I have also realized that I hate cooking for just myself. It seems so tedious and boring to fix one-serving meals instead of great lovely quantities of things… but if I cook quantities, the leftovers call to me from the kitchen and I’m  back with that one-spoonful-here-one-pinch-there crisis. Or, in the case of a lot of my favorite foods, like soup, a bowl now and another bowl later. It doesn’t do me any good to say, “Put the leftovers in the freezer” because I do not have a freezer; I have a small (4.4 cu. ft.) fridge that fits under a countertop, and it has only a narrow little icebox on top.

Breakfast bores me – well, sort of. I love to eat breakfast out, when someone else is exerting themselves to prepare it (God bless all restaurants that serve breakfast!), but I hate having to prepare breakfast at home. Plus, I have absolutely no appetite for a couple hours after I wake up; in fact, the thought of food makes me feel sick, early.

And, finally, I’m my dad’s daughter, and I’ve developed indigestion, which makes me feel as if I need “a little something” in my stomach more frequently. Dad popped Rol-Aids frequently from my earliest memories of him, but lived on them even more in his later years. Yuck.

So. How to manage this? — I think I’m just going to have to hold my nose and cook little meals, every single day. Blech! – I’m going to go by the store this afternoon and pick up some chops, divide them into freezer bags and stick them in that little ice box section, next to the ice trays. I can thaw out a chop per day, right? Or part of a chicken breast or a thigh. I’m really wanting soup, right now, with our temps dipping into the 20s again (they were in the 70s for the past several days) – maybe if I’m really careful I can freeze the soup in ziplock bags, too? Worth a try.

What I will NOT be doing is eating “diet” foods. Have you ever looked at the labels of the “nonfat” or even “lowfat” foods in the grocery store? Those things are loaded with a bunch of weird toxic chemicals that become necessary to replicate the smoothness or flavors lost when they remove the fats in the foods.  Nope! If I’m going to poison myself, I’m going to do it with real food, not fake chemical compounds masquerading as foods. Yes, I’m going to have to become portion-conscious as never before. But I can manage that with a great deal more cheer than … fat-free yogurt artificially sweetened with Aspartame. No!!! thank you, anyway, but NO!

I already eat whole grains, not white bread and only rarely white rice, so I’m good there.

Exercise: the walking has been hard because of knee pain, but I’m stretching before getting out of bed in the morning (I’ve moved to the daybed which has a foam pad on top of a bunky board, so it’s like sleeping and stretching on the floor, almost) – and I’m using free weights a bit. Soon I hope to be able to comfortably switch to my Total Gym. Yeah, I bought one of those things a bit more than a decade ago. Love it, but in the past couple years have found it harder to get on/off than to actually use it, so it’s still propped up in the corner of the spare room.

Updates will be continuing soon.

Y’all have a good day, now.