It's All About that First Year

I went to lunch today with friends and having a mad craving for pizza (my second favorite food next to sushi) I ordered a small which was also listed on the menu as a "personal" pizza.  Okay, it was not huge, but it was about 9 small, square pieces and it was the best pizza like ever.  And I managed to eat all of it but two pieces.

Wow.

It was an intense reminder of how much more I can eat now than I could the first year after surgery.  Only now can I so clearly see how imperative the first year really is.  It is in that first year that we have to learn what is so important and for me, that was mainly getting into the habit of exercise, because the weight management is not always going to be easy.  If I were not the exercise addict I am now, I would be in some serious trouble.  I still love food.  I sometimes feel annoyed when I get full if I am eating something I especially like.  But I have changed the way I eat 95% of the time.  Oh, there is still that 5% time when I can eat almost a whole personal pizza, but then what I did was REALLY watch my food intake the rest of the day and made sure I worked especially hard in kickboxing tonight.  The pizza came with a price and an unspoken promise that I was going to not allow the pizza to win my entire day.  I loved every bite of it, but I know the calories it carried with it.  So yeah, I can eat it.  But yeah, I am going to make sure that eating it is not going to send me into a downward spiral of bad eating and not exercising.  Not an option, kids.  Not going back there and I will bust my ass to make sure it doesn't happen.

I can emotionally eat with the best of them.  After taking my mother for her final surgery on Monday, not only did I want a cigarette afterward, I wanted food in a bad way.  The cigarette was a definite NO, so I found myself in the Chex Mix thing I blogged about yesterday, BUT I had enough sense to realize what I was doing and got myself outside for a walk.

You have to use the first year to learn the tools you have to have for LIFE. And even if you have let things go and have put weight back on, it is never too late to learn what you need to do to get the scale moving in the direction you want it to, but it will not happen without work.  Know it, accept it and get it done.

Some Ho just outbid me on three books by John "the Penguin" Bingham on eBay.  Ticked me off, but I was not going any higher than $17.  His stuff was recommended to me by one of my YMCA instructors.  Though I don't take her class anymore, we ran into each other last week and got to chatting about running and apparently, he has a walk-run method that really interests me as that is pretty much what I have been doing so far. So I'll keep looking.  Sadly, the library does not carry his stuff.  Hmph.

Biggest Loser fans, is Jillian Michaels not amazing?