You wine some, you lose some

Good morning from rainy, nasty Washington.

I have not actually fallen into a pit, eaten myself into a coma, or otherwise abandoned my blog as I'm sure many of you had assumed.

I've just been consumed by other things. Which actually leads me, in a strange way, into what I want to write about today.

I've figured out how to eat normally without totally blowing my diet.

This all started when Chadd's mom came into town a little more than week ago. Since Chadd works night and Kimberly and I have the benefit of getting along very well, we decided to go out for drinks and dinner.

But before dinner, we took about a 45 minute walk up to the zoo and back. Then we perused the Dupont restaurant selection, and finding nothing that made us go "ooh" on Connecticut, we moved over towards 18th and found a little bistro called Rosemary's Thyme that combines American grill with Mediterranian (sp).

We sat down, had a glass of wine, then ordered a salad to split. That was it and because we had all the time we needed, we decided that if we wanted more food, we'd order more.

Halfway through the salad, we decided that we probably needed another bite of something. So we ordered a roasted vegetable pizza. Having seen a pizza that went by earlier, it appeared that these were thin crusted, mostly topping laden pizzas. Good news on the roasted veggie front!

Because it takes about 20 minutes for your stomach to register how much food you've eaten, by the time the pizza showed up, I was approaching full, but needed a topper. I probably had a slim slice and a half and was done. It didn't hurt that we were talking a million miles an hour, either. Always eat with people you like; it not only makes the meal more enjoyable, but the more you talk, the slower you eat, and the more likely you are to realize that you're full.

The weekend progressed in a similar fashion. When we ate, it was punctured with conversation, we ordered by courses, and had an enjoyable. time. I'm sure I made up all my calories in wine...but you wine some you lose some (ha ha....okay, give me a break, it's monday.)

Regardless, what helped too is that since we were so busy, we were mostly just eating little bites of things here and there.

Things continued well last week as I cut back on my snacking, stayed good for lunch and dinner (I had made soup on Tuesday along with some eggplant something something).

Saturday was an epic fail, though. After a day of painting and tooling around the apartment, both Chadd and I realized we were really hungry and it was getting late....so out came the papa john's coupons and I pretty much inhaled pizza.

And that's okay.

This week I'm back on track, continuing to watch what I eat. Always ordering a salad before I have anything else (90% of the time, I'm satisfied), and trying to get back to the gym while work fights aggressively to keep me lazy.

Bottom line: once you know what you're eating down to the ounce, scoping outward is more of a challenge of maintaining scrutiny, eating less when eating worse, and not throwing a plan of attack out the window.