[i wrote this ages ago and am basically using it as a placeholder while i build this blog :)]

lately i have been spending a lot of time studying food and nutrition and not just how it relates to weight and it’s loss or gain; or maybe i’ve been studying food habits?

it started with the idea, last december, that it was time to get my ass in gear and chuck the last 20 pounds. my goal was to start the summer at my usual end of summer weight (which i did) and then finish the summer ten pounds lighter than that so that my christmas weight would be my former summer weight.

i was really disturbed that i gained and lost about 20 pounds every year and that each year the ‘average weight’ of the year stayed a little closer to the ‘christmas weight.’ not to mention every woman over forty i know telling me that after 40 this whole control of your weight/body fat issue became significantly more difficult to manage.

so i decided to hit forty running as it were. be ready for it and already living the habits i needed to maintain an easy slenderness for the rest of my life. i don’t mean skinny by the way, i have every intention of staying curvy but i can nearly see my abs and that intrigues me.

the weight watchers system combined with the information contained in the gi diet seemed the way to go. points make far more sense to me than calorie counting because they’re easy to remember and count and because they contain the fibre and fat information in the food instead of just the calories. to me a crucial distinction.

then my cousin lent me the book ‘mindless eating’ and it all got a lot easier. there is so much deeply simple advice in that book it isn’t funny. you know that thing about smaller plates? it’s true. it’s true EVEN when you think you’re compensating for it.

so, like the time i quit smoking, i paid attention to the food habit changes as i made them. i noticed the difference when i started to really measure what i was cooking, to *see* what a cup actually looked like. turns out i wasn’t bad with some things because i bake but i was terrible with others. pasta in particular was a disaster of bad estimating.

after a while i noticed that one serving of something starts to be enough. you know how sixteen frozen fries seems ridiculous as a serving? way too little? a joke practically? well they fit in a regular sized coffee mug but without much room to spare. isn’t that what a serving should be?

i really find that putting food in it’s correctly sized container really is the way to go.

the best part about the habit of healthy eating is that it’s self reinforcing. you start to eat better and better food and you’re satisfied with far less of it. i prefer half a scoop of high end organic ice cream to three scoops of the cheap stuff… it really is enough because it’s so rich and awesome.

at this point i’ve bored all my friends with the things i’m learning about how humans eat so i’ll put them here where you can opt-in to the information instead of having it pushed on you.

to all of you who listened the last six months while i changed my life and my luck? thank you.