Not surprisingly, my Facebook feed this weekend was filled with posts about holiday overeating.
Everyone jokes about it, beginning at Thanksgiving, but the laughing usually stops right after the start of the new year, when zippers are harder to pull up and spirits are on the way down.
Anyone who reads my blog knows I wasn’t waiting until 2016 to deal with my ever-expanding belly. I didn’t need a holiday to give me an excuse to indulge in my favorite carb-laden foods, which I’d been doing for much of this year. Give me wonderful, warm homemade bread, slathered with salted butter, and I’m in heaven. Place a just-out-of-the-oven, thin-sliced pizza before me, bearing three cheeses and sweet sausage, and I’m in ecstasy. Offer me a fresh, flaky pastry, swirling with raisins, cinnamon and butter, and I won’t hesitate to gobble it down in seconds.
But I knew that if I didn’t cut back my intake, I wasn’t going to be laughing if I got diabetes or had a heart attack. I also couldn’t bear to look at photos of myself any more. I was starting to resemble a quarterback, minus the muscles.
So here I am, about two months into my smart-eating routine, and I feel better than I have in a couple of years.
The only diet I’m following is the one to which my body has always responded best, and that’s a diet low in carbs, sugars and fat. This doesn’t mean absolutely no carbs, sugars or fat. I still eat foods such as popcorn (butterless), peanut butter, heavy cream in my coffee, and an occasional (tiny) piece of chocolate, but I eat them in moderation.