Laura Rainbow Dragon
Moderator
I'm putting this here to keep it separate from my main log. I know we have Bees who find talk about food--especially dieting--triggering. I don't want to chase them away from my main log or have to regularly spoiler all of my food talk. So I think the best solution is going to be to maintain a separate thread, here in the Kitchen, where food is what we talk about.
There's also going to be some talk about body weight in this post, although that's not going to be a primary focus of this thread. Going forward I may just post my weight data as a spoilered line in my main log, since that will be a once a month thing, not a daily thing.
Okay. Here we go:
Back when I was living with my parents and helping to care for my disabled father, I got into some not great eating habits which led to a bunch of undesired weight gain. It was a stressful period of my life overall, I was responsible for feeding my father often at times which were sub-optimal for my own meal schedule, and the house was always stocked with ready-made sweet and salty snacks which I reached for far too often.
I managed to get my diet, and my weight, back to a healthy place when I committed to eating only homemade food and to eating only 3 meals per day. This worked great for me for a couple of years until my father's deteriorating health led to a crushing amount of stress, and I underwent gum surgery which resulted in dietary restrictions for several weeks, and my diet fell apart. I tried to get things back on track again in 2023. But that was the year in which my father died, followed by my mother getting sick, followed by several months of living in fear of having my home ripped away from me, followed by my home actually being ripped away from me (in a cruel and callous fashion by a blood relative). So things fell apart again.
By the end of 2024 I had a new home. But I'm still under no small amount of stress due to financial insecurity and being stuck in rental housing in a market in which renters are getting a very raw deal. Plus my new kitchen is tiny. So I still struggle with my diet (and my weight) being nowhere near what I want them to be. This thread will be my log of my efforts to change this.
By January 2026 I want to be back on an Only Homemade diet.
I'm not certain yet whether or not I will recommit to eating only three times per day. Doing this definitely helped me in the past. But my schedule is different now, and three meals per day may not always be the best fit (particularly on Mondays when I have an evening Aikido class). I definitely need a plan other than "reach for food whenever I feel like it" however. December will be a month to experiment and figure out what will work for me on a sustainable basis.
Another thing that helped me when I was working on losing weight was to make my midday meal be a large salad every day. I don't know if my finances will allow me to sustain such a diet now though. This is another thing to consider and experiment with in December.
I'm going to begin by simply logging what and when I do eat, and maybe commenting on how that goes. My diet will not be all homemade for now, because I currently have potato chips and some freezer meals in the house which I'm not going to throw out. I also have a bunch of canned soups. But since they have a shelf life of multiple years, I'm not going to try to eat them all up in December. They are basically my emergency rations for days in the future when I need to eat something, and homemade is not, for whatever reason, an option. (If I'm going to break from an only homemade diet, for whatever reason, canned soup is the least disruptive thing I can choose, in terms of finances, nutrition, and storage space.) I do, however, intend to stop purchasing any more pre-made foods immediately.
Let's see how this goes!
There's also going to be some talk about body weight in this post, although that's not going to be a primary focus of this thread. Going forward I may just post my weight data as a spoilered line in my main log, since that will be a once a month thing, not a daily thing.
Okay. Here we go:
Back when I was living with my parents and helping to care for my disabled father, I got into some not great eating habits which led to a bunch of undesired weight gain. It was a stressful period of my life overall, I was responsible for feeding my father often at times which were sub-optimal for my own meal schedule, and the house was always stocked with ready-made sweet and salty snacks which I reached for far too often.
I managed to get my diet, and my weight, back to a healthy place when I committed to eating only homemade food and to eating only 3 meals per day. This worked great for me for a couple of years until my father's deteriorating health led to a crushing amount of stress, and I underwent gum surgery which resulted in dietary restrictions for several weeks, and my diet fell apart. I tried to get things back on track again in 2023. But that was the year in which my father died, followed by my mother getting sick, followed by several months of living in fear of having my home ripped away from me, followed by my home actually being ripped away from me (in a cruel and callous fashion by a blood relative). So things fell apart again.
By the end of 2024 I had a new home. But I'm still under no small amount of stress due to financial insecurity and being stuck in rental housing in a market in which renters are getting a very raw deal. Plus my new kitchen is tiny. So I still struggle with my diet (and my weight) being nowhere near what I want them to be. This thread will be my log of my efforts to change this.
By January 2026 I want to be back on an Only Homemade diet.
I'm not certain yet whether or not I will recommit to eating only three times per day. Doing this definitely helped me in the past. But my schedule is different now, and three meals per day may not always be the best fit (particularly on Mondays when I have an evening Aikido class). I definitely need a plan other than "reach for food whenever I feel like it" however. December will be a month to experiment and figure out what will work for me on a sustainable basis.
Another thing that helped me when I was working on losing weight was to make my midday meal be a large salad every day. I don't know if my finances will allow me to sustain such a diet now though. This is another thing to consider and experiment with in December.
I'm going to begin by simply logging what and when I do eat, and maybe commenting on how that goes. My diet will not be all homemade for now, because I currently have potato chips and some freezer meals in the house which I'm not going to throw out. I also have a bunch of canned soups. But since they have a shelf life of multiple years, I'm not going to try to eat them all up in December. They are basically my emergency rations for days in the future when I need to eat something, and homemade is not, for whatever reason, an option. (If I'm going to break from an only homemade diet, for whatever reason, canned soup is the least disruptive thing I can choose, in terms of finances, nutrition, and storage space.) I do, however, intend to stop purchasing any more pre-made foods immediately.
Let's see how this goes!
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