The thing is, if you start obsessing about how many calories are in everything you eat, you stop enjoying your food. Now some places print calories on their menus, I've seen the disbelief in friend's faces followed immediately by misery and disappointment that the dinner they wanted actually contains over 1000 of the little blighters. It ruins the whole eating out experience for so many people.
Whilst I'm aware how many calories are in things, I tend not to care too much. In fact, after genuinely "going healthy" for quite some time, I'm having some sort of mini rebellion/new challenge where apparently I am seeing how much food I can get through whilst managing not to gain weight.
Many of my running and triathlete friends talk about having a "calorie neutral" day or "guilt free cake", this is where anything you eat that you consider to be naughty can be offset by burning the same amount in exercise. If you're trying to lose weight and you really don't want to miss out on treats, then I suppose it's a good tactic, but the problem for me (this week in particular) would be that it's not possible to run for 49 hours each day to achieve the desired results.
It's been a stressful week, and I have been a bit low. Instead of blasting out some hardcore training sessions, I have opted mostly for getting drunk and scoffing anything I fancy. If I had thought about it more carefully I should really have bought shares in jaffa cakes at the start of the week and then at least if it wasn't going to be a calorie neutral week it could potentially have been a cost neutral one. Tubs of ice cream, many, many biscuits, muffins, haribo, cookie dough, takeaways.. it's all been had this week. On Thursday I managed to go to the supermarket and subsequently eat everything I had bought before I even got it home, this included a box of chocolate fingers and a double pack of jaffa cakes as well as a chicken tikka wrap.. and I only live a ten minute walk from the supermarket!
It's a bizarre concept really, comfort eating. It doesn't even really give you any comfort, it just makes you a little bit more sad when you keep running out! My good friend Sam said something earlier in the week which you could construe as quite profound; in response to somebody saying something about aforementioned "guilt free cake", she said "there's no such thing as guilty cake, food is our friend". It's true, we all need to eat and we shouldn't feel guilty for doing so. But perhaps I took the quote a bit too literally, actual food is not a substitute for friends!
Goal for next week: spend more time with healthy friends, actual ones!
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