Monday, January 09, 2006

The Number One New Year's Resolution In America

In an attempt to eat healthier, my family has decided to cut back on what we eat at dinner. Specifically, to cut out the pasta/rice/potato, and just eat a main course and a vegetable. We're not doing a low carb diet, it's just that we don't really need carbs at night. Especially since we tend to eat dinner on the late side, and who needs to fill up on all that food and then go to bed an hour later?

I don't really believe in low carb diets. Short-term I guess they work, but I don't think it's healthy to deprive your body of carbs long-term, and just doing it short-term doesn't really make sense to me. If you don't change your eating habits, you'll just gain it all back anyway, right? And I've decided it's really about time I did change my eating habits.

See, the thing is, I like food. No, I mean I really like food. And if I don't make a choice to make a change soon, my body will make the choice for me, by becoming diabetic. And I just like food to much to want to live with the eating restrictions that would come with being diabetic.

So, like a awful lot of other Americans out there, I'm now counting points.

I've done Weight Watchers before, successfully, until something happened to make me stop. The first time I got a kidney stone, and if I added up how many points all those glasses of cranberry juice I had to drink were, I wouldn't be able to eat anything at all. So I stopped counting. Or I went on vacation, and everyone knows you can't count points on vacation. But you're supposed to start again when you come back, right? But I didn't.

You won't find me at a Weight Watchers meeting. I joined once, went to the first four meetings, then stopped. Just long enough to get the little chart-thingy to figure out how to factor in exercise. The only thing that was beneficial about the meeting itself was the weight-in; the pep-talk afterwards doesn't really do anything for me. And I'm not going to pay $10, or $12, or whatever it costs these days, just to have a stranger jot down my weight while I stand on a scale. Having my husband jot down my weight would be a heck of a lot more effective, and free, but I'm not ready to resort to that yet. Nope, for now I'm going to go this alone. At least the looking-at-the-numbers-on-the-scale part.

I've decided I'd like to lose 5 pounds a month, which I think is reasonable. I can't tell you how many months I'll be doing this for, because that would be too much like telling you my weight, and if my husband doesn't get to see the numbers on the scale, neither does the internet. Only my daughter knows, and she'll never tell, because I've got the goods on her too. But suffice it to say that I'll be doing this for awhile.

So, anyway, the dinner thing? I'm not really a cook. I know it's just following directions, and I'm a good baker, so if I can follow the directions to make say, an apple pie, I should be able to follow the receipe for "Braised Endive with Lemon", right? But up until now, dinner consisted of a main course (meat, poultry or fish, usually just marinated or Shake 'N Baked), some sort of pasta or rice side dish (pre-packaged, just-add-milk-and-butter) and a canned vegetable (microwaved, with butter). No wonder I need to lose weight, huh? Can you say "Too-Much-Butter"?

If we're only having the meat and vegetable, I guess it's about time I learned to cook vegetables. Besides the green bean casserole with the canned green beans, canned cream-of-mushroom soup, and canned French-Fried-Onion-Rings, which is the only vegetable dish I know how to cook. So tonight, courtesy of the Weight Watchers cookbook, instead of a heated-up ham steak with a can of peas and butter, we'll be having Orange-Glazed Ham, with Mushroom and Bell Pepper Saute. And salad, which I've promised my daughter will always be on the menu in case she doesn't like whatever weird vegetable I've managed to cook up (or blacken).

I wonder what people in other countries make for New Year's Resolutions?

Posted by The Gradual Gardener :: 2:18 PM :: 3 Comments:

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