Despite my rather robust appearance, I am not an entirely healthy person. I have arthritis, I get frequent headaches, my stomach likes to severely rebel on me from time to time, I have problems with my blood pressure (hypertension runs in my family), I grew up with asthma, and, because that wasn’t enough, I now have pulmonary hypertension, which is incurable. But, despite this, I’m still in a better place than, say, my best friend, who has a laundry list of medical problems, poor kid. I often wonder why this good, sweet, opinionated-but-still-wonderful person, a woman who is truly like a sister to me, has to suffer with all these illnesses. It’s not fair. So, yeah, in light of that, I’m doing okay. And I should, by all accounts, be doing even more okay about 100 pounds from now. It’s going to take a little while to get there, though.
What’s the one thing most people want to do when they’re sick – besides curl up in bed or on the couch and binge watch something on Netflix or Hulu? A lot of the time, they crave some kind of comfort food, a food that maybe their mom gave them when they were little which made them feel good (if not necessarily better). Having that food now throws you back to that simpler time in your life. While it may not make whatever you’ve got going on go away, it will take you back to that simpler time and the memory alone soothes you. Unfortunately, most comfort food is not exactly weight-loss friendly.
When I was little, the comfort food I got was a plateful of bacon or a couple of hot dogs slathered in mustard (Gulden’s Spicy Brown Mustard, as my father refused to buy anything else!). And since I would get sick three or four times every winter, I ate a lot of bacon and hot dogs (that explains so much, doesn’t it?). Now that I’m older, I can totally appreciate a nice, warm cup of soup with a simple small sandwich or salad on the side when I don’t feel well but still have an appetite. These days I rarely cook bacon at home (and even then, I use a microwave. I can’t stand all that bacon grease all over the damn place), and I have finally hunted down the ever-elusive Hebrew National 97% Fat Free Hot Dogs (thank you, Target!). It’s a taste I’ll have to acquire – they’re not bad but they’re not what I’m used to. However, they are ridiculously low in points – 1 frank equals 1 SmartPoint – so I will develop a taste for them to appease the occasional longing for a dog. Combine it with Sara Lee Delightful Multi-grain bread (another low point gem!) and French’s Yellow Mustard, and you’ve got yourself a really satisfying, low point meal.
Now, more often than not, when you’re under the weather from a cold, the flu, a flare up of your pulmonary hypertension, like I’ve been suffering from this week, or anything equally nasty, the last thing you want to do is get out of bed, schlep into the kitchen and start banging around the pots and pans to make yourself something to eat. You don’t even want to be bothered programming the microwave. So, you let your fingers do the walking and you find your Seamless, GrubHub or Uber Eats app on your phone and – voila! – a bacon cheeseburger deluxe with sweet potato fries and a diet Coke are on their way to you. (Don’t act like you don’t know many people think they can balance out a calorie-dense meal by having a freakin’ diet drink!) If you’re watching your weight or committing to a lifestyle change, that’s so totally bad, right? I say no. Don’t lose your shit; let me explain.
If you’re sick, the chances are your appetite is at zero for a couple of days. So when you do feel like eating something more than chicken soup and crackers – and you think you can keep it down (or in) – having some comfort food isn’t going to undo all of your progress so far. Sure, when you next get on the scale, your weight may have fluctuated (and I say “may have” because I’ve had a few days where I wasn’t so good the night before and the number on the scale managed to go down, not up, the next day. It’s weird but it happens, and I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth). That fluctuation could be from a variety of reasons, such as the food was very salty so you retained water or you didn’t go to the bathroom yet, but you’re not going to be 10 pounds heavier, and if you go back to watching what you eat and drinking more water and going to the bathroom, you’ll see the number go down again. If you’re tracking what you eat, make sure to write down your comfort food meal – you should hold yourself accountable for everything you put in your mouth. And, most importantly, forgive yourself and let it go. Tomorrow is a new day and a new chance to get back on track. Having that meal of your favorite comfort food (your “Mommy, I’m sick” meal) will give you a nice boost, something you need when you’ve been feeling like death, but it should be done with the understanding that this isn’t something you can keep doing, otherwise you’re going to go back to looking how you did before the weight loss. And if you have two comfort food meals in the space of a week, like I did this week because I wasn’t physically up to going food shopping, that’s okay. Think about it: two meals out of the 14 to 21 normally weight-loss friendly meals a person has in a week is not going to permanently derail your progress (unless you go nuts and abandon your healthy ways – please don’t do that). Again, it is very important that you don’t make yourself nuts with guilt over one (possibly two) comfort food meals. Guilt leads to stress, stress leads to eating, eating leads to…well, you get the idea.
Making peace with yourself about veering off course every once in a while is a necessary part of getting your head on straight about this lifestyle change you’ve embarked on. I think that to be successful on any weight loss program, you have to believe that no food is off-limits – but massive portions of food are. If all you want is the taste of a nice cheeseburger, then have the damn cheeseburger – singular – not one of those monstrous triple cheeseburger mountains I’ve been seeing advertised lately. Honestly, who needs one of those things? Even at my heaviest, I never had more than a double cheeseburger and that was a rare occurence. A triple just seems like overkill. Anyway, a cheeseburger and fries or a slice of pizza, or a hot dog with everything every once in a while isn’t a bad thing, especially if you’re at a friend’s house for a party or a BBQ. The keys are moderation and telling yourself you’ll be back on track tomorrow (and tracking what you ate) and making peace with it. Besides, changing your lifestyle and creating a better, healthier you is a process, a journey, and journeys typically take a while. You’ve got time to correct the aftereffects of any little food indiscretions you may have had along the way.
Being sick sucks – trust me, I know – but if a comfort food meal can take your mind off your misery for a little while, is that really so bad? I don’t think so. When you’re sick, you want to take your comfort where you can find it. At least, that’s how I see it.
Until next time, remember: every day is a chance to hit that reset button…
The Reset Button: A WW Journey 