Committing to Yourself. And Saturday food.

The best post I've read today is here, at Dr. Michael Eades' blog. It's about, among other things, how it's possible to be really good at committing to other people and absolutely lousy at keeping commitments to yourself. And I can so completely relate to this. I've spent the last three years being obsessively committed to eating properly, but the fact of the matter is that 90% of why I do it is all about Michael, because I can't expect him to do this if I don't. Obviously I am more than capable of keeping this commitment, which means so much to me. But I don't lose weight, don't really get back in shape, because the extra bits that it would take to do that are about doing things that are for me alone, taking time for me alone, keeping promises to myself. I haven't much been interested in doing that.

I keep the promises that I make to other people, to the greatest extent that I can. I am the most loyal friend that you'll ever have, the best person to absolutely trust. But I am not a good friend to myself. I'm not even particularly comfortable with the idea of trying to make a commitment to myself, and I think that probably says something.

And it makes me sad.

Some days I almost see through a different window, into a reality where I care a little more about me and a little less about everybody else. And somehow I imagine that it would all be a lot better like that, that caring more about me would actually make it possible to care better for everyone else. But it's hard to do something that seems almost unrecognizable just by knowing that you should.

Anyway. Enough endless introspection for today. Let's move on to food.

So, the usual quiche/protein shake for breakfast.

For lunch, I made this fantastic cream of broccoli soup with a little hot Italian sausage. This was so good that I wrote the recipe down here. I really need to put some notion of scale into this; this is actually a tiny bowl, a dessert bowl, but it looks huge in the picture.





Then the next thing that we knew it was nearly 6 p.m., and we were really hungry, so we had this... celery, and a little less than 1 oz. of Pié d'Angloys cheese on Finn Crisp crackers (7 net carbs for the 2 crackers). And a glass of wine, the rest of yesterday's indulgence.




Yesterday, I made this terrific fish stock, which I mostly froze to make chowder next weekend (I really meant to take a picture of the HUGE cod bones that I bought at the store yesterday, but I forgot, and I suppose that they were a tad horrifying anyway). Anyway, the stock smelled so great that I thought I'd try my hand at making a velouté sauce with some of it. So this is salmon with a lovely dill cream sauce on a bed of wilted baby spinach, plus some broccoli (mainly because my son, who is not on the whole a picky eater, is not a fan of greens or crunchy things, so we needed a supplemental vegetable).

And I had a small piece of cheddar cheese and about an ounce of pork rinds before I went to bed.

One thing that occurs to me in looking over these food diaries is that nearly always, there's some food I really could have skipped. I mean, yesterday... I could have skipped the cheese/pork rinds. I was going to bed, I wasn't that hungry, and I wouldn't have noticed in a half hour when I was asleep anyway, so why add the extra calories?