Get Back on the Stupid Horse

It's just a world of weight-loss angst out there. It seems like almost no one is doing well with their weight loss goals at the moment. And this time of year... in the Northeast anyway, you just want to curl up by the fire, hibernate, and add on a few layers of fat to get through the cold winter. (Ok, reality check...: we still don't have a fireplace, and it was 78 degrees in upstate NY yesterday, but this time of year makes me feel that way anyhow.)

I''m not losing weight, and I feel really lousy. Michael is not losing weight, not eating properly, and feeling really lousy. The theme here... general misery.

I don't think that this is the same problem. We used to eat pretty much all the same things all the time (yeah, Nina, get a clue... if you eat pretty much the same thing as someone who weighs nearly twice as much as you do, you are not going to lose weight). Over the last few months, we've pretty much given that up, for a whole variety of reasons but mostly because Michael's been feeling so lousy that the foods that he can tolerate are a small (and variable) subset of things that I'm willing to eat, plus some more carby things that I'm really not willing to eat much of.

My problem, on the whole is that, let's face it, I am eating too much, and I am eating too much fat, and I am occasionally just mindlessly eating things that I have no business eating. Let's take yesterday's botched eating attempts...
1. started the morning with smoked salmon and cream cheese on multigrain, high fiber crackers. These crackers are not the worst thing in the universe, but that's about 16 carbs right there, and usually I skip them. But this particular salmon was not the best, and it's really better on a cracker, so that was my "reason"... and it "needed to be eaten." Sigh. Nothing "needs to be eaten."
2. Came home for lunch. Had some cottage cheese and leftover steak that I'd made last night. This would have been kind of ok, but I ate about twice as much as I needed to. Why? No idea. The one clear idea was that I needed to have some proper lunch before I went to my student meeting... and that didn't work out at all because...
3. Went to student lunch meeting. Ate two revolting slices of pizza, quickly and like there was no tomorrow. I have no idea why I ate this. I am usually pretty good at skipping this kind of thing, but it was like a reversion to some earlier, more compulsive time.
4. Came home. Ate the rest of the leftover steak "because I won't be back for a few hours and I might be hungry."
5. Went and gave a two-hour exam (would I have starved in two hours? Very likely not.). Came back and had dinner about an hour later... pork roast and salad. Ate most of the crackly skin off the outside, which I have to say was really yummy, but nothing but a ton of fat.
6. All of the above doesn't include the cream in my coffee, and the other bits of cheese or whatever that I probably picked up as I was cooking. And a few sugar-free chocolates.

I am actually quite embarrassed to write that all down. I was not eating like this a few months ago.

I need to do some major rethinking about what and how, and probably most importantly, WHY I'm eating like this. I am eating too much fat... and, yes, you can of course eat far too much fat and far too much food, even if it's a low carb diet (actually, I did ok on carbs yesterday). There's just some point where you're eating too many calories for weight loss, and where you're providing your body with far too much easily accessible fat to make it burn the stored fat. I need to completely retool what I'm eating, because I am simply Not Getting Anywhere, and I feel just awful. Not surprising really.