Sunday, January 31, 2010

I can never go back!

Sunday dinner today was a culinary experiment that turned out pretty dang good. I’ve got so I just log on to one of my favorite “healthy recipe” websites, type in a short list of the meat and veggies I have in the kitchen, click enter, and through the miracle of the WWW, up pops 25 or 30 nutritious dishes to choose from that are based on the ingredients I have on hand. Today I made roasted pork tenderloin, and something that can be best described as the carrot’s answer to creamy tomato soup. I also whipped up some kind of low cal, low fat, creamy-cauliflower dish. The soup turned out like nothing I’d ever seen before but it was pretty tasty. The whole meal totaled to about 400 calories, which is not bad for what is traditionally the biggest, richest, meal of the week.

The other night, I tried on a few leather jackets that I’d had stashed in the closet for several years, and would you believe that they all fit? I also slipped into three more pairs of dress slacks that I’d previously outgrown and they fit as well. I still have a good ways to go to get into most of my suits, dress shirts, and spot coats, but it won’t be long until I can wear them all.

I stayed up until 2:30am that same night reading my old journals. I found that back in 2000, I weighed 340 lbs. A few months later I was down to 280 but I was only there for a short time. Sadly it was another failed attempted at crash dieting that ended with me getting heavier than ever. The good news is, what I am doing now is not a diet! My healthy habits had a beginning but they have no end. I do catch myself once in a while craving some of the massive quantities of junk food that I used to eat, and I think briefly that “when this is over, I’m going to get me a bunch of that”, but then I snap out of the destructive reverie and remind myself that this is not a diet. There is no looking forward to a time when I can go back to eating the way the “old me” once did. Sure I’ll indulge in a small amount of some of those kinds of foods, but I can never go back to the way things were.

7 comments:

Tristi Pinkston said...

Brent, that is so awesome. And leather jackets are cool. :)

Will you share your recipes with us?

Brent Boswell said...

I'll do better than share the recipes...I'll tell you were I get most of them. Log on to www.eatingwell.com, type in the kind of meat or veggies you have and it will give you some great ideas. All the of the recipes list the calories and so on at the bottom. Very handy.

hi, it's me! melissa c said...

That dinner sounds awesome! Come over and cook for us! I am def. going to check out that website. Thank you for posting and great job in getting down to where your old clothes fit. I just did that same thing and man, it felt good!

Sandra said...

For me the mindset change came when I decided to think about it this way:
If I had cancer or some other life threatening disease, I would do what ever I possibly could in order to return to health. Then I would continue doing whatever it took to remain healthy.

But I do have a disease- it is called unhealthy eating and I am abusing my body, so I will eat in a way to bring me back to health and then stay that way.

It makes saying no to the office donuts, candy, pop, etc that much easier. When someone offers, I just look at them and say, "I can't eat that." They usually assume I am diabetic, I don't offer an explanation unless they ask, and then I just say, "I can't eat it because my body does not react well to it." And then they quit asking and the dilemma goes away (until I am at the grocery store and then I have to have that convo in my head.)

Tristi Pinkston said...

Thanks for that link, Brent!

Anonymous said...

Keep posting stuff like this i really like it

Jenn Adams said...

That's Awesome!! It really does have to be a paradigm shift.