healthier tara = good: day one

First of all, don't worry. I'm not going to blog about my plan every day for the next 2 months. I just wanted to talk about Day One as I have some thoughts. First off, I was expecting it to be completely terrible. I love my food and we always have lots of good food in the house and I like to eat it. I'm lucky that I don't have any food issues (ie: food guilt, eating when I'm depressed etc) that a lot of women face. And I don't have a lot of food addictions and am not a junk food fanatic. My real weakness is potato chips but even with that, I really only like 2 flavours enough to buy and we don't buy them all that often. My sweet tooth is pretty wimpy as I can't handle stuff that's overly sugary therefore I hardly crave it. So right off the bat, I'm starting off from a fairly decent place in that I don't have any real demons to squash. That being said, losing 10 pounds is harder than losing 100 pounds (as anyone on the home stretch of a big diet will tell you) and can often be the most disheartening part of this kind of plan.

My biggest concern was just not being able to eat our favourite things whenever I wanted. Bowls of pasta at my mother-in-laws have to be out in addition to visits to the fromagerie, cappucinos and heavy-cream and butter laced marsala sauces. I have a fancy food weakness and assumed that all my meals would be boring steamed vegetables and tofu that I would hate.

Another concern was the seemingly tiny portions. A tablespoon of peanut butter with my apple did not seem like nearly enough to last nor did the low ounce count of my dinners seem even remotely close to satiating me.

I was wrong.

I discovered on my first day that it works the same way as craving something, running to the fridge only to find you have a tiny bit of it left. You make it last. Guaranteed if you handed me an apple and a jar of peanut butter and told me to eat it, I'd be scooping out PB on each slice like it was going out of style. But given 1 tablespoon and told to make it work, I rationed it out and had some left over and didn't feel cheated in the slightest. My dinner last night was grilled chicken marinated in balsamic vinegar and honey, baked sweet potato and steamed spinach and it kicked ass when I thought it would be lame-o. My salad at lunch had avocado and blood oranges with a lemon vinaigrette and was one of the best salads I've had in a long time. Not to mention that it was gigantic. Last night I was issued 3 cups of popcorn as my snack and that turned out to be the perfect amount. So overall, I thought I needed more food to be happy and content when in reality that is not the case.

Let's hope it carries through past the first day...