And the wait goes on.

mugAnd may I say… I love eBay? Well anyway… it’s fun to say I won another item. Actually, I’m not so sure Wes thinks I “win” items — for every time I win, he loses a little ~wink~ and adores me, I suppose. This time my purchase was a Christmas with Southern Living. I know… it’s funny that a girl who lives in the Northwest would prefer whatever is from the South (and, ahem, that would also include a bit of Southern California, btw). It’s my mama’s family, I suppose. I had wanted that particular book bcz I had read through it at our friend’s home a couple weeks ago. I liked the way some soups and breads were prepared. So… I googled the book when I came home… and, voilá! eBay.

I bid on the item… I watched, nervously wondering if I’d win the item that had no bidders, and then went to bed (the suspense was too much by morning!). While I was sleeping, I won the bid. O, and Wes was surprised when he opened his mail to see: congratulations…!

That was last week and yesterday afternoon, I was browsing through the new (to me) book that had just arrived in the mail and I was delighted with all the recipes! Recipes, recipes, recipes and *nothing* for this girl to eat!! This is still, in fact, the third day of my Umpteenth and One diet — I think I nearly gained five pounds just reading the recipes in the 2001 edition of the Christmas with Southern Living. Instead of trying anything, I just read and planned things I might make this fall. I *really* was looking at the dinner menus. Really. I’m sort of making an attempt to climb out of a rut of same ole-same ole meals and be more creative regarding dinnertime for our family. They deserve better and I should be doing better… after all, I *do* strongly advocate creativity and the family meal table!! I don’t want to be like a plumber with a clogged drain or a dentist whose kids have bad teeth or a pool guy with a green pool… ooops, that *did* happen!!

So, anyway… My husband has an entirely different palate than I do… I would eat a variety of salads, chicken, sweet tea, Mexican food or cereal at every meal (and the nine remaining children at home would join me happily!). He would eat fewer sandwiches, less Mexican food, no cereal, no graham-crackers ‘n milk, no sweet tea or plain tea tea, no cucumbers, or chile or baked beans, hushpuppies, or cottage-cheese-anything, grits, greens, hominy or any other things like that. But amazingly, and sweetly, when we do have a few of the above items when he’s home, he humours me and eats them―as if he loves them! He likes “home-style” cooking, Italian, and some Greek… a little Chinese and some more Italian.

He doesn’t ordinarily consider a sandwich to be dinner. Same goes for cereal, peanut butter on Ritz crackers and apples, or popcorn or chips and salsa… unless it’s a side accompanied by a chile relleno or a tamale.

So… it sort of cramps my creative style a tad bit. That, and I need to see pictures or need to have tasted the food somewhere before I can make it, bake it, cook it or serve it in our home. You would think after decades of melding our lives together, that we’d want to eat the very same things! I guess that’s why we love to go out to dinner… we try stuff we’d love to cook ourselves or stuff we don’t usually make at home—and we sample each other’s foods.

I received a nice letter regarding this Umpteenth and One diet… and a suggestion was made for the Carbohydrate Addict’s diet… and that’s actually sort of what I am doing now. A blend of that and SouthBeach. The Atkins’ was a bit too out of reach for me; it was a bit difficult to live in and cook for a large (in number) family—but that’s the diet I did a few years ago when I lost 30 pounds. The thirty pounds I didn’t know I had actually gained. The thirty pounds I gained and lost a couple of dozen times. I think we all do a sort of self preservation dance: O, I’m so fat—well, I’m not that fat; O, I need to lose weight—well, I know I can go on a diet tomorrow; O, maybe it’s not that much weight—wow! It *is* that much?!?!? Then… usually I’d do something about it—that, or I’d be pregnant and have all those well intentioned plans to not gain so much with that pregnancy… and the weight goes on…

So, I lost weight (again)—and at that point—that most recent diet, it was as if I purposefully sabotaged myself when I reached my goal-weight and the pounds slowly crept on over a couple of years. Then, when I wasn’t feeling so well before my surgery and in the sedentary months following that, I gained a few more. So, now, my goal weight is a tad bit more than it was then and when I get there, my goal is to stay there long enough to be “in control” at that weight and then perhaps lose 5 or 10. I appreciated that letter (thank you, Sheila) and the accompanying stunning “before-and-after” pictures… the pictures alone gave me hope as I saw before my eyes the beautiful, incredible, shrinking woman. That letter and Barbara Curtis’s wonderful progress are incentives to me to press on. Well, and so is this almost embarrassing candid public confession weblog. I am purposefully making entries… both to encourage other mothers and to humble myself to the reality that not only do I need to lose weight… I need accountability in doing so.

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0 thoughts on “And the wait goes on.

  1. Pamela, thank you so much for your openess and humbleness to write about this. I am in the same boat with you. Trying and trying, struggling, calling to the Lord, then thinking I am not that bad off and I don’t really have to loose weight, being convicted to get rid of that excess weight, starting over and basically going through what you described. Thank you for letting us be part of your struggle.

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