Time to get serious about diet again

Lately, I’ve been noticing that some of my clothes fit tighter than they used to. The scale, even when considering the 3-pound effective uncertainty in day-to-day weight, also suggests I put on fat. (While I would love to believe I built so much muscle that my jeans are tight, I have a pointer saying that’s not it – I know I have been eating too many calories for a while.)

This is not a huge surprise to me, since I know I’ve been eating more food period and allowing myself more splurges in the last month or so. I went on vacation, where my mother had a line-up of my favorite Swedish foods that are hard or impossible to buy in the United States, which I then promptly expanded in the first grocery store we went into. (Smoked reindeer, freshly baked rye crispbread, skorpor, thin slices of reindeer meat, rosehip soup with almond biscuits, smoked mackerel, smoked kippers, cinnamon rolls with coffee, you get the idea. I then also took the opportunity to eat a “potato”, a kind of pastry, my grandmother fed us cake and two kinds of cookies with coffee, we drank something with someone nearly every night… the calories racked up for sure. And at home, I worked overtime and we let our regular diet slide before that – more takeout, less cooking. Weekend treats made a comeback. So I’m not surprised I put on some fat.

So. It’s time to get serious about diet again. Good food, treats as treats – not often. Make the plans to have the ingredients to cook simple, quick and nutritious dishes every night. Make the lunches. Make the menu, make the grocery list. I’m still a size 4, but I’m not stupid. I can see and feel that I can’t eat like this forever if I want to be healthy. There’s no immediate emergency, other than perhaps eating rather than throwing out the delicious locally grown organic produce we already paid for in our CSA, rather than getting takeout. That’s money in the trash right there!  So with that… I’m going to make that weekly menu.