Good Habits Can Easily Fail

For two and a half years I have mostly eaten a healthy diet almost everyday. I basically gave up processed sugar and most white flour even though, given my choice they would be at the top of my “what am I craving?” list. There is no other way for me to have lost 100 pounds and kept it off since my natural state is more balloon like than heroin chic.

I also have been fairly disciplined about working out, not because I like it, but because I like to eat and I know that of at this confirmed stage of menopausal middle aged white lazy ass life if I am not moving constantly I am gaining weight no matter how little I put in my mouth.

Now I am at camp which for most people would be an active-a-rama-thon of running, jumping, swimming and dancing. Well, maybe yesterday when I played SCAG a game of kicking a soccer ball through giant croquet like hoops 100’s of yards apart and scoring it like golf, that’s what the name SCAG stands for, Soccer, Croquet And Golf. Although it is some good walking it is a fairly slow game with lots of standing around waiting for your opponents to kick, so in essence it is not much exercise. Then I went for a two hour hike of the 300 acre camp. Again it was a slow meandering walk with an instructional talk so I hardly broke a sweat. In the afternoon I sailed, well you know how much movement was involved with that. By the end of the day I had gotten only about 18,000 steps, many thanks to the post dinner kickball game. Sounds good until you throw in the eating.

At camp we eat family style. You walk in the dining hall and the food is already sitting at your table. Although there are plenty of healthy vegetables and always a salad made from greens from their own gardens there is also usually a homemade bread and some potatoes and then a yummy and naughty dessert. If I were eating at a restaurant I would have no trouble keeping away from the foods that call my name but somehow at camp I eat what is on the table, even though I mostly stay away from those things without trouble at home.

Perhaps if I had a scale and got on it every morning and saw what was happening to me I might be better at passing the corn bread on to my neighbor. Today I hit an all time low. I ate a blueberry muffin for breakfast, even though there was homemade yogurt that comes from the milk of the camp cow, which I also ate. Then lunch came. Feeling the guilt of my muffin I skipped the bun for the chicken sandwiches and the cole slaw and just put the grilled chicken on my salad. Hooray, my normal-at-home-healthy-guilt-free-lunch.

I needed that since I had hardly moved all day spending morning activities getting a massage, needle pointing at fiber arts and cutting out my cheese board at wood working with an electric scroll saw.

Just as I was feeling like I was under control a large pan of gooey chocolate walnut brownies was placed right in front of me. Next to me sat Ruth from New Castle, England who I have come to learn likes sweets too and across the way was Micheal who said the reason he ran five miles that morning was to counteract his love of sweets. One small brownie led to another and another half and then some finger licking a cup of coffee with real cream and one more bite of brownie. How quickly hard fraught habits can disappear.

Feeling full and slightly sick I forced myself into a swim suit and walked to the lake to paddle boat myself to loon island a good forty five minute bit of work and then swam back and forth to the dock four times. No way I worked off even one small brownie. It’s time to not succumb to the allure of food that is just placed in front of me. God, it’s almost time for dinner.