One Thing at a Time

I was going to do some work tonight, because I have a looming deadline and a nagging uneasy feeling that not putting the time in today will result in having to work until midnight tomorrow, but then I also determined that I really needed some ME time.

It’s been weeks now. I’ve been working long days, and had a work event that required me to work the weekend and then the next weekend I had family events both days, and then, these days half of every Sunday is always reserved for food prep for the upcoming week which also means somewhere in there I need to do the shopping. (This weekend I am sleeping in, dammit!)

I am hoping that the planning and shopping and time that goes into prepping food to ensure what you eat is healthy and wholesome will get easier as time goes on. Become more habit.

See, thinking about that just reminded me that I needed to take tomorrow night’s protein out of the freezer. Ugh, so much to keep track of! (BRB)

Historically, I can only keep this up for so long and then I don’t have time to plan or can’t get to the grocery store and the most I can manage with what’s in the house is one or two meals that week and we end up eating at Pizza Ranch instead. Or I get to the store, but I can’t seem to fit in the prepping and cooking, and everything goes bad before I can use it and I feed it to the deer and the raccoons instead.

I am determined to try to make this work. I mean, it’s working so far. I lost five pounds last week and I didn’t even work out. (One thing at a time, man)

“I’m not losing any weight,” J said to me tonight, over our dinner of baked porkchops and wild rice pilaf and broccoli salad.

“Are you sticking to the meal plan?” I asked him.

“Meal plan? What meal plan?”

“Are you eating outside of the meals I plan for you each day?”

He looks a little guilty.

“Well, I did have a danish today, and a milk. And last night I had one of those pecan chocolate things. I do feel better though, that’s why I thought for sure I was losing.”

The truth is, that J is already pretty thin and I don’t think he needs to lose any weight at all, only he thinks that. The goal was healthy lifestyle habits, not weight loss, it just happens to be an extra bonus for me.

I also might have a secret desire to prove to Dr. Passionate About Cholesterol that I can bring my numbers down with diet and exercise and fish oil. Something about how he told me I wouldn’t be able to do it with fish oil and diet made me want to prove him wrong. This is a strange feeling because all along doctors have been telling me I could do it with diet and exercise and that did not inspire me to actually do it with any consistency. But now someone told me I can’t and something fierce inside of me engaged. I’ve brought my cholesterol down with both fish oil and diet, but never using both together. Not for long enough to make a difference, anyway.

Perhaps the hope of proving him wrong will sustain me and keep me going while I figure out how to rearrange my life around meal planning.

Because there are a couple more things on the healthy lifestyle docket. The next one is smoking. I know, you would think we would make that first, right? What with the CANCER and the NINE DOLLARS A PACK and the fact that you’re basically an outcast when you’re smoking anywhere but your own garage. But no, it was not first on my agenda, because if there is one thing people tell me about giving up smoking, it is that you always gain weight. This means that first, I need to get a head start on the weight loss, so I can quit smoking and not freak out about weight gain.

It also might have something to do with the fact that despite the aforementioned trials and tribulations about food prep, quitting smoking is, oh, ninety-eight million times harder.

So I’ve been told, anyway, because I’ve never once tried to quit.

I told my sisters, while we were cleaning Grandpa’s house last weekend that I was thinking of quitting, just needed to figure out how I want to do it.

“Here’s an idea,” my youngest sister Megan said, “why don’t you just not smoke?”

(She is a smart aleck)

“I think you should get hypnotized,” my sister Tash said, “My friend at work did that and she said they made it so that smoking a cigarette made her feel like she was going to throw up. That was it, she did it one time and she never smoked again.”

I contemplated that information the same way I have contemplated all the other ways- drugs, cold turkey, quit for life programs, patches, gums, etc. I still am not sure.

J has been saying, for a few years now, that he’s not going to be a smoker after age fifty. He turns fifty in March, and I figure its better for both of us if we quit at the same time- temptation and all that. Plus, we have a lot of habits around smoking that we need to retrain ourselves away from, and we need to do that together in order to spend time together like we do now (when we’re smoking).

I think I might be giving myself a pep talk. I’m going to stop that now.

Anyway, there’s that on the list and then of course I have to work exercise back into my schedule because I quit making it a priority a while back. (I repeat, “One thing at a time, man”)

This changing your life business is a lot of work.

(Wanted: Meal planner, shopper and chef willing to work for the pure satisfaction of making my family healthier. Salary, benefits and bonuses will become available as soon as I win the lottery)

In good health,
Nic