A marathon, not a sprint...

I've been eating like a crazy person since my husband's been gone on a trip, doing just terrible with my diet. I was reading something this morning, though, not from any diet book but from a book on caregiving. There was a phrase: "Caregiving is not a sprint, it's a marathon." The whole gist of that is its for the long-haul, so a caregiver needs to pace herself, take breaks, have reasonable expectations, or else she'll burn out long before the end.

 

While that is true for caregiving, it also applies to getting healthy and dieting. Looking back to the beginning of this disaster with my diet, when I'd been doing so very well for months, I decided to go in high gear and cut my calories back more than what I was doing. I wanted to see bigger losses, partly because of this new thing with prediabetes.

 

I didn't do anything terribly drastic, but that small change threw my "alter ego" into rebellion. It screamed, 

"I hate change! I was managing just fine on what we were doing and I was giving you a pound a month loss. But no, you couldn't be happy with that. You want to see a pound a week loss. Well, baby, that's not reasonable. And besides that, I'm tired of this whole dieting thing. I quit. You are on your own. Don't expect any help from me. Infact, I am going to sabotage everything you do from now on. And that's that."

 

That's exactly how it's felt lately, like a case of mutiny. Every night I've thought about the next day's plans, and every morning I start out well, but then the battle begins. So, I've revised my plan once again. I'm ready to try the light dieting I was doing, forgetting about big losses, and if I can get back to a pound a month I will stay with that. Maybe Esmerelda will call off the rebellion.

 

My appetite seems to have increased, even exploded since my husband's been gone. But not just with me. The birds have been going crazy outside, carving away the seed block until it's down to nearly nothing. They'll probably finish it off today. It should have lasted another week. So tell me, how do they know he's gone?