I should be used to this: Things are never going to go smoothly. (Now, repeat after me: Things are never going to go smoothly! Things are never going to go smoothly!) More ups and downs were inevitable, and I don’t just mean trips to the basement! Yes, I have continued exercising, but the results haven’t been as clear or as obvious as they were last week, no matter how much I hoped they might have been. Last Thursday it had felt so good to feel good, and I hoped those feelings would be ongoing if I kept exercising. And maybe they would have, if only I hadn’t lost it on the diet side. I made a few mistakes in what I ate this week (and discovered that my favorite forbidden food–chocolate ice cream–affects me almost immediately) and I had to sit down and take a long look at the hole I fell in after I’d eaten it. An exercise routine is easy to stick to because I have a long history of doing so (mostly on but sometimes off since 1992, but always on after 2004, when I was diagnosed with MS). My new diet is harder to stick to though, and I’m still trying to find new and better ways of eating to replace old and established ones. Keeping my meats separate from my potatoes and pasta is especially hard, and fifty years of habit is tough to overcome. Some days I do really well, and others, well, I see an ice cream container and think “Oh, what the heck!”
The problem with brief glimpses of the future has to be how brief they can really be! And last week’s advances were brief. After the ice cream I’ve been trying to dig out of the hole it left me in, and I’ve begun to wonder if any future holes I’m going to fall into are going to get deeper as more time goes by. It’s been three and a half months since I had my amalgams removed, and I’m wondering if dietary transgressions hit me harder now than they used to. They seem to, and I know the ice cream certainly did. I’ve avoided eating pork easily, mostly because that takes time to cook, so it’s a choice that gives plenty of time for reconsidering whatever mistake you’re about to make. Besides, there are alternatives, from turkey sausage to turkey bacon. But ice cream? Well, that’s just too darn easy: Open the lid and the deed is done! And before you say “Don’t even keep it in the house!” I have to say I’m living with two other people who also have a say about what is being kept in our house. My diet restrictions are not theirs, and no ice cream for an eleven year old is punishment!
So, here’s my thought: I need to find something I can make that will take the place of traditional ice cream. I can use cream, and I can use honey or agave. There must be something out there I can find that I can make to take the place of what I occasionally crave–though maybe not for the chocolate part! Whipped cream with honey is great, and I have developed a real fondness for that. Maybe I can whip a little fruit into it and see how that tastes. If I freeze it, it might even be enough to assauge the pain of missing ice cream. It’s worth a shot, I guess.
I’ll let you know how it goes when–and if–I find a solution.