Die With A “T”

Garfield – the cat, not the president – was right. Dieting is “die” with a “t”, and it sucks. It doesn’t help that my meds foul up my “hunger” trigger. On a good day, I’m not hungry at all, but on bad days, I feel like I’m hungry all the time.

I saw the dietician this week and it’s as I suspected. I need to increase my vegetables and decrease the fats and sugars. I can almost live with that. I’ll be using a sugar substitute, Splenda, in my coffee and maybe for lemonade or iced tea. The stuff is a bit expensive, so we’ll have to see how that goes. I use whitener in my coffee or real cream. I’m told that will have to stop, but it’s not going to be easy. I don’t like using milk for my coffee, especially powdered skim milk, but that may be what I have to resort to in order to get some of my ‘fat’ intake lowered. Not fun.

Increasing the vegetables will be easy, now that summer’s coming. I prefer to eat a lot of salads when it’s hot out. My dehydrator sits on top of the fridge now, instead of high on a shelf. I can dig out the food slicer and slice up some fresh veggies to dry for snacks – carrots, celery, cucumbers, etc. If I dry half of what I buy, I can suck on a carrot for several minutes instead of crunching down two or three of them in that time. If I get the pieces small enough, I can mix the veggies with bits of dried fruit – apples, raisins and such – and then add both to a bag of mixed nuts. I should be able to add some extra nuts to the mix, walnuts, peanuts, etc. to better suit what I like to eat. I could probably make a Waldorf salad or two this summer, too. Just as a change.

The main problem is that I don’t eat three meals, exactly. I have one meal and “graze” the rest of the day. I have a couple of pieces of toast, then an apple, then maybe a sandwich or a bowl of oatmeal and that takes me from 6am to 4pm. Supper’s around 6 and is the big meal of the day. I’ve always been like that. The only time I’m willing to eat three “proper” meals a day is if I’m physically working my butt off. I ate two meals a day when I was in the military and only active a part of the day, but when I was out haying with farm friends, three meals was mandatory. I woke up hungry after a day in the fields. That would last for the week it took us to get the hay baled and into the barn.

I think what I’m going to do is make up some menus and use them as a basis for my grocery shopping. Making menus is a pain, though. What if I don’t feel like making soup? What if I don’t feel like cooking fish on a particular day? What if it’s too hot to do any cooking at all?

We’ll see what happens, I guess. If nothing else, maybe just getting a bit more exercise and eating more vegetables will get me from 200 lbs. (91 kgs.) down to something more reasonable, like 145 lbs. (65 kgs.). I don’t expect to be able to get down to the weight I was when I was 18, but the ability to tie up my own shoelaces without losing my ability to breathe would be nice.