Oh Snap...or Rather Snap Ouch

Today is day five of this weeks goals and I have not consumed any soda; dammit, I mean pop. But I haven't gotten very far with the kitchen. I did get a lot of healthy things to eat, although I haven't been as successful about making my lunches and taking them to work as I want to be. But I can forgive myself for that and the lapses in healthy eating I may have had because my goal this week wasn't to completely overhaul my diet and start eating clean and healthy. And the lapses are justification for it. Previously I would think in a dramatic, bawling, over the top way that I had failed and use that failure as a reason to fall back into horrible eating habits, which in part would consist of consuming the vast amount of empty calories in pop. Instead I've stepped back, assessed what I've done right, been content in comparison to what I ate last week, gave the rubber band on my wrist a snap for considering giving into the temptation of drinking pop and gone about my merry way.

So, my rubber band trick is working. I'll walk past the pop machine and if I find myself strongly desiring one, snap. On my first night back at work it was the worst. I did well with the pop machine, but on my lunch I had to fuel up my vehicle and on the way to the gas station I habitually though I should pick up some pop while I was there. It resulted in a snap of the rubber band. I've also been using it to avoid the many boxes of girl scout cookies remaining the back of the van. Every time I think about cracking open a box of those I get a snap, which has been more often than pop. Nothing against girl scout cookies, they're awesome, but when I open a box I tend to eat all of the cookies it contained. There's a minimum of 900 calories in those boxes. I need those less than I need pop.

I'm not an advocate for negative reinforcement, but I do know if it works for me I should use it. And I don't think that it's the wincing from a potential snap that keeps me from persisting in bad habits. Honestly the snap hurts less than the rubber band snagging the little arm hairs on my wrist. To me the rubber band is a reminder of what I'm doing, and I see it as often as I look at my watch (which is far more often than it should be, but that's a whole other blog).

And so I can say oh snap when I walk past the pop machine like it's an a$$hole trying to get my attention, and snap ouch when I'm tempted but know better.

Starting to Organize the Insanity

I decided it’s time to refocus this blog, it was just a clusterf*** of thoughts I was having at different times. I’ve decided (in manifesto to myself that I may or may not publish in the future) that it’s time to get my sh-stuff together. Hopefully this blog with be a reflection of that happening. We shall see…

This week have two goals, cut out soda and organize the kitchen so I can use it to make the foods that I know that I need to make in order to get myself healthy and happy again.

I need to not call it soda, I’m from the Midwest and we call it pop, so really I need to stop drinking pop this week, for many reasons. I think that the reason I drink so much in the first place is because it’s a sort of comfort food. It sort of gave me my first feelings of freedom. My parents wouldn’t let us drink a lot of pop because it was expensive and therefore only allowed it for themselves. I remember drinking a lot of tap water and not much else because I didn’t really like milk and I’m pretty sure that they didn’t have juice in the house. Maybe the powdered lemonade or dollar gallons of punch, but not much else.

So, on the occasion that my parents kept their word and gave me an allowance (I did plenty of chores, maybe not in a timely manner, but more than enough to earn the bi-weekly two dollars that I rarely received), I would often get a glass bottle of pop from the gas station along with the cheap candies that usually never cost more than a quarter (I personally love thinking about how we regularly got candy cigarettes, and how so many people these days would just abhor the idea that we loved acting like we were smoking). There’s something ingrained in my mind about the freedom of being able to afford pop on my own and how more satisfying it was to drink it because it tasted like something I had earned. Looking back on it I may have just loved the change from ice cold metallic tap water, nevertheless I think that I continue to get that feeling every time I buy a pop. Especially since I most often seem to revert back to drinking it when I’m having a stressful evening or I just happen to very freaking tired.

Every time I drink it there’s a part of me that remembers the carefree weekends my sister and I spent drinking two litters of Pepsi and eating gigantic bowls full of peanut butter M&Ms. We would stay up until three or four in the morning drawing, talking about and watching anime from the caffeine and sugar highs. I think those feelings were what allowed us to work at Wal-Mart overnights without any problems. Deep down we knew remembered those nights and it allowed us to make it through all those droll nights at Wal-Mart, stocking the same shelves over and over like hamsters on wheels, regardless of how obnoxious our latest overnight manager was and how much we knew we hated the job.

That may even be what allows me to keep my sanity working overnights without her now. Every time I open a bottle of pop something in me remembers those nights, and every super sugary sip reinforces those memories.

Well, it’s time to stop that. I think that I’m going to get a rubber band and put it on my wrist. Then every time I think about getting a pop or a ridiculously sugary food throughout my work night (or even outside of my work night) I give it a snap and start associating that with the old “sugar high” as opposed to the freedom and carefree nights of my youth.

I’m sure that there are other ways (hopefully more positive) but how am I really going to reward myself. Certainly not with any kind of food, I really need to retrain my mind not to be rewarded with food, nor do I want to use money, mostly because I won’t keep that promise. I’ll just buy junk I don’t need or put it in a jar that I will somehow fish the money out of later, regardless of how it’s sealed.

In the meantime, rubber band pain it is.

 

The second thing on my list is getting the kitchen organized. This is for two reasons, I need to know what junk I have in my kitchen and need to get rid of, and I need to get my useful gadgets down where I can use them.

Since I started working my husband has slowly taken over the kitchen, this means easy to prepare, preservative packed garbage food. I know how to make cakes and frosting from scratch, yet there are cake mixes and containers of frosting in the pantry. There are canned foods, boxed foods, and stuff I would never consider “stocking up” on because I could easily make them myself, I certainly don’t need a shortcut to make them because I typically can’t stand the taste of these shortcuts.

So, I’ll go through it and see if there’s a way that I can weed out the gross stuff that’s going to shorten our lives and continue to make us sick, and start phasing in the stuff that’s going to start getting us healthy.

Then I need to get my gadgets off of the high shelves and on the shelves that we just bought for the porch. I would rather freeze my toes off on the porch in winter than worry about breaking my neck trying to get my rice cooker from the top of the kitchen cupboards. Among those gadgets are my steamer, bread maker and slow cooker, all things that I would be more willing to use if I didn’t have to worry about putting them back after I was done.

It will be awesome to start making myself fresh baked bread again.