Case of the Mondays

Usually Mondays bring a sense of dread because it means the weekend is over and it's back to the daily grind. However, I was psyched to start today; since my Eat Clean journal starts over every Monday, I feel like I get a brand new start, and Lord knows I need one this week!

Let's start with Friday: after a long, tedious day, I was supposed to squeeze a workout in, but did I? Nope. What did I do instead? I watched stupid Farrelly Bros movies and ate ice cream and dark chocolate Reese's mini PB cups; and I ate A LOT of them. Why did I buy the PB cups? I was craving them and I promised myself I wouldn't go overboard, that I would track every...single...one. Yeah, that idea flew out the window 5 mins into the 15 min drive home. For dinner, I ate 1/2 a homemade enchilada, made with lean meat and cheese so that wasn't bad, but then at 1AM I was STARVING. I am ashamed to say it, but I ate a bowl of Easy Mac, some leftover Chinese, and some more ice cream. Scary thing is, you would think I was stuffed but I wasn't.

Saturday was a little better, but only because I actually worked out. The eating went well until Mark & I went out for dinner. We wanted to try the new burger place and you know what? It sucked. Even the fries sucked (who f's up fries?!). The most disgusting part? Even though I wasn't thrilled with the fries, I ate them... ALL of them!!

Yesterday: again the workout was good. The eating wasn't too bad until I started thinking about those little Reese's PB cups sitting in the pantry. They were whispering to me, I swear. I figured, what's 1 gonna do? Apparently he wanted some company...8 friends to be exact. They tasted so good but made me feel like crap!

You know, it's funny; I know what I'm supposed to do, how I'm supposed to eat, and yet I self-sabotage CONSTANTLY. I put so much work into my exercise routine and I don't do it any justice by continuously eating crap food. Half the time, I don't even want it but I eat it just because I can. I was thinking about the reasons why and I've come to the conclusion that I'm kind of rebellious when it comes to food. When I actually thought about whether it's always been like this, I realized it actually has been. When I was little, we weren't really allowed to eat many snack foods so when I would go to a friend's house, all I thought about was all the junk we were gonna eat. What normal 10 year old does that?! Instead of being excited about going to the park or playing baseball, I was more excited that we were gonna be able to eat popcorn AND ice cream. On the afternoons after school, my cousins and I would sneak to the deli next door to buy candy with whatever little money we had and I would eat it at their house so my mom wouldn't know.

Unfortunately, these habits carried into adulthood. If I buy something like PB cups, I don't stop at 1 or 2 because (and this sounds weird) I'm afraid they won't be there tomorrow. The reality is, I think I'm rebelling against myself and my restricting ice cream, candy, you name it. I don't even know if that makes sense but it seemed like a logical explanation. I'm not even super-restrictive with my food (obviously), but I think a major part of my anxiety/overeating/rebelling comes from being a Nazi about my calories. If I go 40 cals over, I berate myself and make myself feel guilty.

I think what I'm going to do moving forward is still count calories but eat mainly clean foods to make up my day. If I'm still hungry after my 1800 cals, I will allow myself a 100-200 cal HEALTHY, clean snack to satisfy that hunger. It might work, it might not but this is a journey, you don't know what path is right until you take them all, right? We'll see what happens...