Monday, April 12, 2010

Small Victory Celebration!

Time for another one!

Yesterday was not the best calorie day.  I'd done well enough through breakfast and lunch, but I'd been ravenously hungry all day.  I think it might be almost my TOM or something.  Then after lunch, I ate a huge scone with butter, which left me with something like 300 calories to spend on dinner.

Dinner was already being cooked in the slow cooker, and it was pork barbecue, Carolina style.  On the face of it, this may not sound like the healthiest of options, and it isn't.  But a small amount of pulled pork on a whole wheat bun with heaps of broccoli really isn't a bad choice, and it's pretty safe from a calorie perspective.  I guessed about 450 or 500.  That's not 300 calories though, and there was no way I was going to smell pork cooking all day and then not eat it.

I decided to say screw it, I'm eating my barbecue and going over my daily limit by 200 calories or so and it will be fine.

Let me just say I make a mean barbecue.  Dinner was magical.  The victory, however, came after dinner when I realized that even though I didn't stick to my daily limit, it didn't even occur to me to have more barbecue.  I had a single sandwich, it was awesome, and then I stopped eating.  That was it.  No dramatics, no wrestling with conscience. 

One of the things that calorie counting has taught me is portion control, but I never dreamed it would be so ingrained already.  If I looked at two sandwiches on a plate now I'd probably feel sick.

This revelation comes as I'm just about to jet off to Pittsburgh for four days of some good old fashioned college nostalgia and a lot of fried food and very little exercise.  I'd been worried about what this trip was going to do to my weight plan and I knew I wouldn't be able to hit a gym.  But now that I know what "enough" is and I consume "enough" without thinking about it, I am a lot less worried. 

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