Well I'm back on my "new" closely watched maintenance plan per my recent "slippery-slope" episode. That's what Rachel calls it when you go into maintenance mode, "slippery-slope territory", and combine that with the holidays coming up - it can be a recipe for disaster if you're not careful. Rachel keeps close tabs on me these days which I have to say does keep me marching in the right direction. Every day we talk about food and what I will be consuming that day. Now mind you, these are not general conversations about food, they are pretty specific. "What did you have for breakfast, What did you have for a snack, What will you be having for lunch?", and so on. And if she doesn't like my answers, she modifies it. We often plan out the day's meals in the morning, calories and all. Now you might think this is a little over the top, but for me, it's really helpful. I just look at what's on the list next and eat it - usually keeps me on target. This is not to say that I never vary from the plan, because believe me, I do. Sometimes, after we've planned out an entire day's food, Rachel will text me and ask how lunch or snack was and low and behold, I've already varied from the plan. Within a few minutes, the phone rings with the voice on the other end saying, "It's only been an hour, how could you have varied from the plan already???" I don't know how it happens, it just does.
So yes, planning food for me is helpful because most of the time I do pretty much stay on target. It's kind of like having your meals planned out for the week. It's so much easier when you already know what you are going to have and don't really have to think about it. It's the same concept but instead of week by week, it's day by day, meal by meal. Like I said in my last blog, I'm still in the "I've reached my goal - time to celebrate" mode so food planning is a very necessary part of my life right now.
This brings me back to my last blog, maintenance really is hard, way harder than I thought it would be. It makes me think about what my my father always said to us growing up whenever we said something was hard, "Nobody said it was going to be easy, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it." He had alot of profound words of wisdom for us during our formative years. And interestingly, I find myself repeating them to my own children now. But I guess it is true, people often don't do things or quit things because they are hard. But it's conquering those "hard" things in life that give us the most satisfaction. So I march forward hoping that some day this all will become "easy" and just second nature. I don't know if it ever will, but I hope it does, because it is hard!
So I have an unfortunate story to share with you. The other night I decided I was going to make these "healthy" mini muffins that I like (see the picture to the left, you'll see shortly why they look that way). They actually are relatively healthy as chocolate treats go (whole wheat flour, egg whites only etc.) and pretty low in calories. We recently finished a major kitchen renovation (2 months without a kitchen) so I've been wanting to bake some things that I haven't had for a long time. I mixed up the batter, put it in the mini cupcake tins, and baked them in my new convection oven. Ahhh... what could be better than to bake a chocolate dessert in your brand new kitchen! I checked the muffins often, since I am still getting used to the new oven, and finally decided they were done. First pan comes out, no problem, they look perfect! And then it happened...I pulled the second pan out and as I lifted the tray out of the oven I hit the edge of it on a bit of an overhang where all the control buttons are. The tray falls to the floor and lands upside down! And there, splattered on my new floor are my precious, healthy, relatively low calorie, chocolate mini muffins. As I stood there looking at those muffins splattered all over the floor I thought to myself "5 second rule" (which according to Myth Busters, is actually more like a 60 second rule). Normally, I would have scooped them right up and put them directly into my mouth. Unfortunately, like I said, the kitchen is really newly renovated to the point where the new wood floor had not been vacuumed or mopped thoroughly yet. So I did scoop those chocolate mini muffins off the floor and sadly threw them into the garbage. It wasn't the fact that I had to clean every little crevice between the floor boards where the chocolate managed to seep into that made me so sad, it was the fact that I had to throw chocolate away! It can be a cruel world out there sometimes, but as we all know, life is not fair.
