Comments (20)

By kilax, May 19, 2009 6:47 am

I get a lot of comments at work like, “your lunch is so healthy,” “your snacks are so healthy,” “you always eat so healthy,” “do you count carbs or calories?”* “what do I need to eat to lose weight?” “when is your next run?” “what do I need to do to start running?”**

I think that people think I am some sort of… health freak? They see me walking around with an apple, or eating my homemade granola bar, or getting fresh veggies out of the fridge for lunch, and think I am super focused on eating healthy ALL THE TIME.

Ha. Ha ha. I WISH! While it is my goal to get closer and closer to eating a healthy, fresh diet most of the time, I am totally not there yet.

I have two secrets to share:

1. I want to run the Chase Corporate Challenge 3.5 miler in 28 minutes.
2. I’ve gained 4 pounds in the last 4 weeks.

The second secret pretty much cancels out the first one.*** Because, I can feel the small amount of extra weight and it is slowing me down a bit during my runs. I can feel it shaking in my butt.

AND, it’s NO BIG DEAL! I was stressed out, I was eating emotionally, blah blah blah, what did I expect to happen? Mathematically, I knew my calories in was higher than my calories out, even when running 20+ miles a week. I just chose to ignore it for awhile. Because I am human, and I cannot eat perfectly all the time, no matter how hard I try. And I don’t even WANT to eat perfectly all the time. How boring would that be?

Anyway, it makes me laugh at work when I get SO MANY comments on what I am eating and how healthy it is, because I do not “eat healthy” all of the time and I don’t think of the food I eat during the day as “healthy,” I think of it as the food I want to eat – fruit, veggies, whole wheat crackers, granola bars, cereal, veggie dogs, etc.

The good thing is, when people keep saying that to me, it encourages me. It keeps me going. It reminds me that I do need to be making conscious, healthy choices most of the time. And not just “for show” (which it’s not), but because I want to.

So even though the comments do get annoying from time to time (I mean, come on, can I just prepare my lunch in peace?!), I am going to channel it into good – encouragement.

And I am going to quit all of that mindless gosh darn**** snacking.

*Give me a freakin’ break. I am NOT afraid of carbs.
**My punctuation kind of went to crap in this paragraph.
***So I think I will try to finish in under 30 minutes.
****This is me not swearing.

Comments (9)

By kilax, March 7, 2009 8:03 am

On Thursday afternoon (okay, AND Friday, but this story relates to Thursday), I started feeling a bit snacky. I felt an eating binge coming on. I’m sure it was a result of lack of sleep and avoidance of the work task at hand. I exhausted the remainder of my snack stash at work – a serving of pretzels and a few various granola bars/fruit bars.

Then I decided I wasn’t done, so I grabbed my little coin purse and trekked my way back to the vending machine. I got there and stared at it. The top two rows of the vending machine have salty snacks – mostly chips. And the remaining, I don’t know, five or six rows, are ALL sweets.

I gave up sweets, making it very difficult to find anything I wanted. This is where a normal person would stop the quest and go back to there desk, but I stood there for quite some time and noticed someone else in there, kind of looking at me.

“I can’t decide what I want,” I told him. He didn’t want to use the machine, but seemed curious that I was standing there so long.

“Well, you gotta narrow it down,” he said. “Do you want salty or sweet? Once you decide that, there are other decisions to make. For example, if you choose sweet, then you need to decide if you want something chocolatey. And if you do, will it be nuggety, nutty or fruit-flavored?”

I thought that guy was pretty funny. I realized what I WANTED was M&M’s, but I couldn’t have them, so I went down to the snack shop in our building.

I found the same situation there. More sweets than anything else. My craving for something sweet intensified while I was down there. But I resisted, and grabbed a bag of Gardetto’s.

Yuck. What a disappointment. First of all, they weren’t what I wanted. Secondly, I felt super self-conscious eating them at my desk because they are so crunchy (you know what I am talking about diane!). And thirdly, they leave a super nasty after taste in your mouth. And they don’t really have a good “before taste anyway. I hate that I just had to eat something, and picked something that didn’t even hit the spot.

So, I confirmed something about myself – I have a sweet tooth. When I get snacky, I crave sweet treats. You know what I was thinking that day? “M&M’s sound good. Warm, chewy cinnamon rolls sound good. A Deerfield’s Bakery donut sounds good.” I wanted something sweet and soft or sweet and crunchy.

Since I gave up sweets I’ve been having half an orange in the afternoon (along with carrots and celery). I thought now might as well be a good time to eat “closer to the earth” as well. I get so sick of eating processed crackers and bars. And even though I look for processed food without high amounts of sugar in it, it’s hard to find. There’s still a lot of sugar in there.

Most days I am totally fine eating my healthy snacks, but every once in awhile I get these awful urges that I just have to eat, eat, eat! They don’t come that often. But I hate it when they do. I wish I was better at controlling them. I feel awful putting bad things into my body that I don’t really want. Especially because I run so much. Usually that is enough to make me not do it, but not all the time. Ugh, I am blabbing.

I don’t know if I learned anything from all of this, or if I just feel better sharing my guilt here.

Side note: Should I feel guilty that I felt good yesterday when I overheard my cute and skinny coworker confess that she ate one roll of thin mints the day before, and the other roll the next day? Of course, it was immediately followed with “Now I have to work out, like, twice today!”

Comments (18)

By kilax, November 6, 2008 5:03 pm

I keep little serving size containers of snacks in my drawer at work. It’s mostly carbohydrates – triscuits, barbara’s bakery shredded oats, pretzels, sometimes a granola bar or animal crackers. The idea is that these snacks are there to supplement my hunger if I need them in the afternoon. I try to eat fruit, vegetables, and sometimes dairy products before I resort to these snacks so I don’t overload on carbs.

I’m finding it is both beneficial and harmful to always have a snack there.

It’s beneficial because I am always prepared – if I am unexpectedly hungry, I know I have something small and somewhat healthy that will tide me over until I get home for dinner. I don’t have to leave my office in search for a “healthy snack.” Sometimes, that is hard to find!

It’s harmful because I know the snacks are always there. Sometimes, I will start thinking about a snack, when I am not even hungry, and my mouth will start watering. It’s really hard then, to tell myself “no,” when I want it so badly.

I’ve tried only bringing one snack at a time, but that always turns out to be the day I am hungry for more. And it’s more convenient to bring a bunch of them in at once so I don’t have to carry one every day.

I’ve been really stressed out lately. Stressed out about things I don’t want to discuss here, right now.

Yesterday, around 4:00 pm, all of the stress got to me. I was trying to prepare for a meeting and was having a hard time getting the documents I needed from someone. I started eating my snacks. One by one, until they were all gone, and I had reached my day’s goal of calorie intake! I wasn’t eating the snacks mindfully, I was shoveling and barely chewing.

After I was done with my snacks, I felt the urge to keep snacking. I was worried and scared. I hadn’t felt that urge in a long time – the urge to stuff my face until I got sick of it. I used to have that urge everyday! I wondered if something was changing in me – if all of my good eating habits were going down the drain.

I went downstairs to our building’s convenience store, searching for something to munch on. I knew, in my mind, that I was just frustrated and stressed out. I thought about the emotional eating book, and the fact that I was just trying to brush aside those feelings and focus on something soothing.

But I didn’t care. So I kept searching for something to eat, and finally settled on a package of pop tarts. Do you know how many calories are in a package of pop tarts? At least 400! I even thought about that, but still took the package back to my office.

Then, I got back to my desk. And put the pop tarts in my drawer. And thought about how I wanted to eat dinner with Steven and exercise afterward. And how I was going to feel really crappy if I ate those stupid pop tarts.

I decided not to eat them. Before I left, I put them in the kitchen for someone else to have.

So why is this story so long and drawn out and even worth telling? Because it is a BIG DEAL that I did not eat those pop tarts, and fall into one of my binge eating patterns. I think if I would have eaten them, I would have had something else to eat on the train, then snacked on some stuff at home before Steven got there, then had dinner with him, then snacked some more afterward.

Usually, I can’t stop once I start. But this time I did.

And I don’t think this stress is going to go away, so I have to remember I have the power to say “no” to mindless eating. I know this may sound silly and dumb for those of you who do not struggle with this, but mindless eating has always been a huge problem for me.

Do you keep snacks at work? Do you find it beneficial or harmful? Do you “mindlessly” eat them?