I've spent a good portion of my life on a diet. I recall dieting in third grade, drinking Tab with those asterisk-patterns soaring down the glass bottle, bringing something putrid called Slender Now for lunch and hating it so much that I opened the top of the special lemon yellow real Tupperware shaker and poured it out on the swingset sand at school. I had never not thought about weight, bodies, dieting. Weight Watchers is an old family friend, one I knew back when she was more a strict nun type or a ballet teacher, swatting at our figurative knuckles when we considered those forbidden foods like peanut butter or bananas.
Now she's all grown-up: Weight Watchers and when I am being "good" I am eating my favorite breakfast: a wrap, real peanut-butter and a banana. Sometimes I sprinkle cinnamon on it all before closing it up and reveling. That breakfast is 6 Points+ and wholly Weight Watchers approved. Some things change drastically, others like my automatic reference to "being good" as if what I eat in a day has moral or ethical implications , are slow to evolve.
I have barely been dieting for two years. I still reach for skim or 1% pretty automatically, but I have enjoyed margaretas with my Mexican food, and the pleasure of a man who thinks I am pretty groovy when I am pretty curvy. I have never been anywhere near underweight, and while I was not overweight two years ago, I was at my very hard-won average. Now I am twenty pounds heavier and far from those days when I worried if I was up one pound, I am now a little indifferent. I got engaged two months ago and I cannot afford indifference.
So I am appealing to the power of the proclamation. I am proclaiming here that I will exercise for 3 or more days a week and I will begin tracking what I eat. For my check-ins with you, Dear Tasters, I will post what I have done on Fridays: both weight lost or not and what I did in terms of activity. And I'll keep you updated on cool products, neato recipes, tricks, tips, sighs and celebrations.
Step One: I made a mini gym visit on Friday and I went to the store and bought my favorite healthy foods: spaghetti squash and a new flavor of Bolthouse dressing, yellow tomatoes and pink lady apples. When I hit Trader Joe's, I will stock up on the necessary and addictive sundried tomatoes that they carry and I will attempt to help my dear Sweetcakes and all of you help me to find my enthusiasm for this very exciting set of tasks that lie before me: some writing, some health-conscious, some volunteer work, in short, a life, rich in all the ways that my frozen dessert just cannot be, for now, anyway.
I'll end with a little product review: If you like the creaminess of ice cream, skip the fat-free, lowcal Arctic Zero. If it's the cold-sweetness you crave, grab a pint of their (heftily-priced) Vanilla Maple and sprinkle some kosher salt over it, (just a touch will do.) It's a nice, nearly guilt-free treat. I like their coffee, also. Don't bother with the cookies and cream, it tastes like neither.
