Day 4

Meat was not a problem. Trying to eat food without additives in this culture is incredibly difficult. Especially if you find yourself out and starving. I ended up eating a half a bag of carrots with Finn.

Quitting soda is almost as hard as quitting smoking. Not the internal craving but the external cues. That shit is everywhere. Everywhere, dammit! Saying no to myself makes it easier for me to say no to the kids though. I would cave and give them garbage all the time because I wanted it myself.

This experiment is so much about small victories. I was making corn muffins for Finn this morning and took a bit of batter. A couple of moments later I realized what I had done and started down the "I already had one so one more won't hurt" path. I stood there looking at the empty batter bowl (one of the joys of my eating life is empty batter bowls, as a child my spatula wielding aunt was my sworn enemy, there was nothing worse than hanging around the kitchen as my grandmother made brownies and see all those glorious leftovers for me and my sister, we would draw a line down the middle of the bowl with a finger for fairness sake, only to have my aunt come in and ruin it with that wood handled white plastic top spatula saying "ma, look how much you're leaving") thinking, how badly do I want this? I seriously stood at the kitchen sink for a good long while, trying to decide if I should indulge in a bit of scraping. I finally decided to skip it and then make a point to see if I felt like I had missed something or felt deprived. Of course I didn't.

On the other hand, later in the day I had a screaming headache again and I did take some excedrin. It seemed better to take that than to suffer all night and feel discouraged and talk myself into taking more liberties. I think the little swipes and nibbles are more damaging in the long run because you don't think about their cumulative effect.