A new year!

The first week of the new year, the last year of the first decade of the new millennium. I had to think about that for a while. As with each and every new year I've made a resolution to lose weight. Actually this year and probably last it was to get healthy but for me losing weight would go a long way to that end. So I joined Weight Watchers on line.


But I need to back up a little bit. Last fall I did an on line program for emotional eating, called Shrink Yourself. And then I bought the book and read it cover to cover. It was a great program. I learned some new things about myself and remembered things I had forgotten. I made some changes. This blog and getting my siblings involved was a direct result of that course. I'm happier than I have been for a long time. My weight, however, stayed the same and I decided I needed a structured program.


The problem is that I struggle with how to eat. For several years I touted eating unprocessed whole foods while I drank Cokes and ate Snicker bars. I looked down on people who bought prepared foods while I ate fast foods on an almost daily basis. So, I began thinking about the way we ate as kids. Mostly we ate unprocessed foods except on Thursdays when Mom and Dad went out and we had chicken pot pies and fruit from a can, and baked beans from a can on Saturday nights and cream salmon on toast or tuna casserole on Fridays (the bread was not sprouted and the noodles were not whole grain) and for that matter the macaroni in the goulash wasn't whole grain either but at least it wasn't hamburger helper (not invented until 1970) and we never that I remember had potatoes out of a box, we had oven fried chicken but never shake and bake and we had fruit all the time and salad almost every night oh yea and ice cream and cakes and cookies and not to mention the candy bars from the daily shopping at the grocery store. So I guess my childhood was not as unprocessed as I thought and perhaps I need to cut out the all or nothing thinking about my food (and almost every other aspect of my life but we won't go there) and just get on with it.

I am renaming my blog. It will now be called Gail's weight loss and self help blog. Just kidding. It is still about Women of Great Taste. The problem with the book is that most of the recipes are not Weight Watcher friendly. But that's O.K. I found one I want to try this week that is. Country Cabbage Soup and I am sure that there are other recipes. The ones that aren't I will use as a treat. I am not going to go in order as I first planned because I need to be more flexible. But I am still going to cook my way through the book. I will let you know how the soup turns out.