Determined To Succeed

Day sixty-four.

Good Monday morning, my friends. Today is the day we nationally observe Columbus Day, a day which I hold highly suspect since we seem to celebrate a guy who “discovered” people who were already here, “discovery” of a land already discovered by Leif Ericson hundreds of years before, and his contributions to religious intolerance and the Middle Passage/Atlantic Slave Trade. I do not mean to offend anyone who truly believes the myths and stories of Christopher Columbus in a blog about weight loss, just trying to educate as much as I can just like I try to do in matters of weight loss.

All that being said, and with all due respect to all parties involved, I do have something of a taste for Italian food. I can’t tell you how much, over the last few weeks, I’ve had the itch for pizza. Dammit! I have been this/close to picking up the phone and ordering up a sausage, mushroom, green pepper and onion pizza (with extra cheese) and plopping down to watch a movie or two. I also have to say that this taste for Italian led me to absolutely devour a couple of healthy helpings of the sausage and peppers provided at a party I attended Saturday night. Yummy and tasty, but I ate waaaaaaay too much.

Luckily, a couple of things happened:

1) I didn’t give in to my taste for pizza (or for a regular ice-cold Coca-Cola, for that matter)

2) Even though I ate my way to a tummy ache this past weekend I still continued to lose a few more ounces, a powerful motivator, indeed.

So I am, indeed, in a quandry. I guess the best thing to do is to nuke a Lean Cuisine pizza and just have the best of both worlds. I know, it’s nowhere near the same as a good pizza but it would knock the taste for a good “piece-a-pizza” (as my mom, JoAnn, would say) out of my mouth…at least for a little while.Or, I could have a nice portion-controlled serving of pasta with a garlic (and sausage) marinara. Mmmmmm, that sounds good, too. But, dammit! There I go again. It’s not even 10:00 a.m. and I am already thinking about dinner. Oh, well.

I do have to take little victories where I can get them, though. Like getting through the past few weeks without having a regular Coke. That has been hard, but thanks to Coke Cherry Zero and Coke Zero (I can’t stand regular Diet Coke) I have satisfied the taste for a soda without the calories. Also, being down a total of another 6 ounces is a Godsend especially the way I ate this past weekend. Sheesh! It was like I lost my mind at that party – meatballs, sausage and peppers, taco dip (which was good since I made it), desserts – and had never eaten before. Thank God I ate well around that party and ate very well for dinner (London Broil and Butternut Squash rice) last night.

Now today is for working out and getting back to that routine. Yep, I’m putting on the gloves for a great “round” of boxing and doing some, if not most, of my mixed martial arts routine. That should be fun. Then it’s back to the grindstone of writing and trying to do my best to stay away from my own strong food cravings.

Which leads me back to my taste for Italian. I know all I have to do is exercise a little “Bill Power” and get over my craving for pizza, but I’m human and it’s hard to do that sometimes, especially living so close to an Italian restaurant where you can smell the garlic sometimes wafting through the air enticing you to just drop my for a bite. But I will control my cravings for a big bowl of pasta this or a few slices of pizza that. I have to or the only thing I will be “discovering” on Columbus Day is the fact that my waistline will start growing back out and I sure as hell don’t want that.

If you have a holiday have a good one and do yourself a favor and Google “Christopher Columbus.” You may or may not agree with the arguments for or against a holiday recognizing him but one thing would be certain…you would have probably opened your mind to new things and “discovered” something you never knew before.