Getting started

I made the mistake of telling Mr. Spratt that I had a health improvement plan too soon.  I'd been acting on it for a whole 8 hours when I told him, so I was starting to feel virtuous. He was very excited when I told him about my "blogging the weight off" idea.  "That's great, that's the kind of accountability you'll do well with," he enthused.  Then, glaring at my dinner plate, he continued, "so, what's your plan."

My dinner plate, a chicken sandwhich with tons of melted cheese and grilled, greasy bread and fries, glared back at him guiltily.

If this were a sitcom, at this point I'd have a wavy dissolve into a flashback occuring a day earlier.  In the flashback, I'm sitting outside on our patio, eating my lunch, and reading an article in Oprah Magazine about a woman named Tony Bark. Tony Bark is an exceptional woman -- physician, practitioner of the circus arts, befriender of Rwandan refugees -- who looks exceptionally fit and glowing for a woman of 52.  The article described her mainly vegetarian diet, which includes things like chia seed/maca root/mesquite energy cakes she eats for breakfast, and "brownies" that she makes with avocados, dates, and coco powder.  Let's say I was inspired, and suddenly realized that one sticks to insanely healthy diets like Tony's only when the idea that this is right and good is utterly welded into your psyche.  It is what enables someone to stick to a raw food diet when the overwhelming evidence (bread! pie! hamburgers! even steamed broccoli!) points in the other direction.

So I was inspired, not just to eat healthier, but to change my internal view of food.  I just wasn't sure what my rules would be. 

I made my way through the rest of the day eating big crunchy salads, sancking on fruit, drinking lots of water, and avoiding all the temptations available.  Then dinner came, and we decided to go to restaurant serving bar-type food for dinner.  There was nothing on the menu that even remotely resembled something Tony Bark would eat. OK, there were salads, but I had already had salad once that day. Which is how I ended up trying to look virtuous with a greasy sandwhich on my plate.

Now it is 3 days later, and my rules are starting to come into focus.  I'm eating filling foods that give me energy, not sap it.  I'm avoiding "junky carbs" that made up way too much of my diet before -- chips, crackers, etc.  I'm eating lots of nuts and fruit as snacks, and trying to stay away from my beloved cheese. I'm letting dinner be enough, and trying to stay away from snacking after dinner.  I'm trying to think of this not as a diet, with a weight goal that I need to reach as quickly as possible, but as a lifestyle change.

We'll see how it goes.

Introducing Mrs Spratt

Mr. Spratt, as you might imagine, is virtuous.  He wakes up at 3 am in order to stretch and work out before starting his day job.  When he's on vacation, he does tricep dips on chairs and lunges in the sand.  He rarely touches frosting or pie crust.  He eats 6 meals a day, usually including the correct ratio of fats, protein, and fiber in each one.

Although he does have a weakness for potato chips, as you can imagine, Mr. Spratt sets a pretty hard standard to live up to.  I've done lived with him for 5 years, and hung around him for 5 before that, and I regret to say that he hasn't really worn off on me, Mrs. Spratt.  Yes, I buy more organic foods than I used to, and have been known to add flax seeds to my salad and whirl up a smoothie or two, but I'm not in Mr. Spratt's league and don't really want to be that extreme. 

Mr. Spratt has a *slight* fixation on zombies, and is always planning what to do when he's faced with a zombie mob.  He aways tells me, semi-seriously, "I don't have to run fast, I only have to run faster than you."  It's a joke; I'd be zombie-food in a flash if they decide to rise up and feast on humans.  I'm not under any illusion that I could outrun them, and, if the zombie chips were ever down, I think Mr. Spratt would actually come up with a crafty plan to save us both. 

Twenty pounds overweight when I met Mr. Spratt, I've shed those pounds 2 or three times over the last 10 years. but my old habits and attitudes keep nudging them back on.   I recently re-read an article about a woman with an amazing commitment to health {I'll blog about her later in the week} and had an aha moment {yes, it was *that* magazine}:  she's stayed young, vibrant, and committed to her health because it is part of her intrinsic belief system that she do so.  All of my weight-watching, low-carbing, and other unsustained attempts to get healthy failed because I failed to change my intrinsic beliefs.

This journey I have planned is an attempt to shake those up. By blogging about my journey, I hope to reinforce and self-correct as I go along, so that by the time I'm 50 -- only 2 years away -- I can feel that I've re-adjusted my ways of thinking and the outcome -- my health, weight, and fitness.

Over the last 5 years, in particular, I've negatively impacted my health. A new marriage, new city, new baby, new work arrangement, and new family commitments have caused me to prioritize differently.  With 50 suddenly in my windshield, and the thought of having a college-aged son in my late 60s, I've got to re-prioratize.