Night Binge

A weird thing happened last night.

I was sleeping happily after doing okay with food all day. I could've done better, but I had fruit for breakfast, a big grilled chicken salad with about a half serving of low fat dressing for lunch, and two slices of pizza (as opposed to my usual three with a whole bag of breadsticks) for dinner. I felt full.

Then I found myself gobbling ice cream from the freezer with literally no recollection of how I got there or decided to start eating.

Maybe I didn't have enough calories yesterday. I didn't want to eat anything else after the pizza, even if it was healthy, but I would've sworn I wasn't hungry.

Maybe it's just that I went shopping yesterday and didn't buy anything unhealthy except the little pint of ice cream for my boyfriend. When I go shopping, I usually get myself a few kinds of binge food and spend the night eating them -- cookies, chips, cake, rolls, crackers, anything full of carbs and fat. I didn't do that this time, and I always feel deprived after I skip a grocery store binge.

This worries me a little. It's happened before. I'll be eating healthy for a couple weeks and then wake up to find my face in a bowl of sugary cereal with whole milk.

But the important thing to remember is that one slipup isn't that bad. Sure, it sucks that I can't choose or fully enjoy what I mess up on, but the half pint of ice cream I ate was only about 340 calories. I stopped there, even though I could have gone on to eat the rest of the container and thousands of calories of Coke and chips and bread.

Even better, I managed to avoid eating the leftover pizza for breakfast, and I am determined not to give in. If no one else eats it by the end of the day, I'm throwing it out.

So, I choose to be proud of what I accomplished instead of ashamed of what I didn't. It's not "okay" to eat pizza and ice cream all the time, but it's great that I stopped myself and cut back.

And guess what? When I got on the scale this morning, it read 151.6. That's down 2.6 pounds from my starting weight (154.2) yesterday.