high-calorie food cravings

i am actually in pain right now from the hunger pangs.

we just arrived in vermont after a four hour drive. on the drive up i had a half-gallon of carbonated water and about a pound of raw leaf spinach (i was eating spinach leaves like they were potato chips.. pretty funny.) my wife and son were in the back seat eating burrito and real chips. after about an hour of this, i felt totally full yet unsatisfied from the spinach - i looked at the mega-sized costco bag and realized i had eaten half!

suffice it to say that i had eaten a lot of food.. not a lot of calories though.

here at the ski house we have a few boxes of macaroni. wow. looking at that macaroni is like looking at piles of cash money, free for the taking. but boiling up a box and eating it would literally triple the number of calories i've consumed today (i'm guessing about 1300.)

the nice thing about this diet i'm on is that there is no fine line between cheating and staying on course. let me explain.. if i were allowing myself limited quantities of something like macaroni, it would be too easy to eat more than i was supposed to, and it is difficult to determine exactly how much i can eat before i'm cheating. but when i'm allowing myself NO macaroni, there is no question about where you cheated. if i eat even one strand of linguini, potato chip, breaded and fried piece of fish, or slice of pizza, i know that i had cheated. i know that i will have cheated before i ate it. it takes premeditation.

so instead of eating a little and avoiding eating a lot due to cravings, i instead eat nothing and avoid eating something due to cravings. much, much easier. but the cravings are just as bad, and right now they're especially bad. so this weekend, i brought with me to vermont a lot of vegetables, plus a couple of acorn squashes and a little bit of fruit. i also brought some bean-based soups and tomato sauce. low-calorie stuff. so the higher-calorie foods that were already here will stay uneaten (at least by me) this weekend, and that's the end of it.

anyway, it's hard for me to get exactly what my weight is because i don't have access to a balance scale and most bathroom scales aren't accurate at my weight. but i do have goals, and they're based on weight. i just need to find a place to weigh myself with a balance scale.

my first big milestone in this diet of mine is 300 lbs. i actually expect to get there relatively quickly, because i expect the initial loss of weight to be at a faster rate than the loss towards the end of the 4-month period, for a variety of reasons. hopefully by the end of march. at any rate, 300 lbs is an elusive goal for me. even back in 1999 when i lost all that weight and people were calling me "thin," i was still about 305. truth is, i haven't been less than 300 lbs since my senior year of high school. when i was 20, i ballooned to about 400 lbs.. i lost a lot of weight at about age 23, got down to the neighborhood of 330-350. that is pretty much the range i've been in for the last 6 years, in which were times when i was 320, times when i was 360, but mostly 340, give or take 10. my ultimate goal is to talk about fluttering between 230 and 250.. and at 250, i'd be saying "i've gotta drop about 20 lbs." that would be a good problem to have.

oops, that was a tangent. back on topic, my first big milestone will be 300 lbs. at that point, i am going to have a celebratory day. i'll eat a ton of macaroni, pizza, and maybe some barbecue too. oh, and a burrito. the foods i've been craving so severely the last week. i want to treat myself by satisfying those cravings, but only when i deserve it. and my threshold for deserving it is a weight i haven't seen in 13 years when i was 17 years old - 299 lbs.

but until then, i have to stare at macaroni and blog about cravings.