hits and misses

So, in the interest of good blood numbers ("Good numbers! No whammies!") and just continued better health, I've tried doing two things:

1. sort of rebooting the DASH diet and making myself eat more vegetables and fruits

2. Cutting back on sugar.


One thing I discovered about 1 - when I went home for lunch today, I had my little dish of red cabbage, and my unsweetened applesauce, and my spoons of peanut butter (Hey, it's very low in carbohydrates, and I get the hippie kind, which is just peanuts and a little salt) and a little cheese, and I decided I needed another vegetable.

So I thought: do I stirfry up a pan of spinach? Or open some corn (meh, no. Lately corn has not appealed, and anyway, some nutritional types argue it's not "really" a vegetable, but a starch).

So I decided to have some beets but did not feel like bothering with much fanciness like Harvard beets. So I just opened the can and put a few in a dish, threw on a splash of vinegar (most earthy tasting things are much improved with vinegar added) and heated them up.

Actually, beets are pretty good that way and they're certainly easy to fix.

I'm also finding if I save my fruit serving for "last" and pretend it's dessert, I feel a little happier about the whole enterprise. (I know, there are people who only ever have fruit when they have dessert but I am not one of those people).

(After the blood draw I will go back to having the occasional cookie or cup of pudding. I just want to kind of purge my blood of bad stuff - as much as reasonably possible - and I acknowledge I wasn't always eating so very carefully these past few weeks)

However, as I noted this morning: stevia on oatmeal is a no. If my numbers come back okay I will go back to having chocolate chips on it because they make it so much better.

I hope my numbers are okay because I don't want another period of extended mourning-for-parts-of-my-diet like I did with salt, and the concomitant obsessing over everything that goes in my mouth. I mean, most of the time I AM pretty careful (I don't drink more than one soda a month, and many of the "sweets" I eat are actually not that terrible....dark chocolate is one of my favorites). But I'm a perfectionist and it's too easy for me to get hung up on "OMG what if it is that spoon of sweetened condensed milk you ate out of the can when you were baking cookies for church that will have pushed your body over the edge and it no longer responds to insulin?" I mean, I don't have any of the SYMPTOMS but still I worry.

(And if anything, my waist to hip ratio has gotten smaller - I haven't lost much weight but I guess I've built muscle)