12W12S11: Um

Yeah. I have not been doing very well. I'll just 'fess up to that now and we'll figure out how to deal with the guilt later. I'm not completely off the rails crazy, but I have been having a hard time staying focused and committed -- mostly, when I know there are candies or cookies anywhere around me, I just can't will myself to stay away. So it's like starting over every day.

At least I'm not giving up. At least there is that.

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Oh, hey, remember way back when I started this thing, and I said I was working toward the Wegman's "half-plate healthy" meal planning style? (See "Step/Week Eight.") Well, it turns out they might have been on to something, because the USDA recently changed the food pyramid to resemble that setup. Now it's "ChooseMyPlate" and, wouldn't you know it, half the plate is reserved for fruits and veggies. Even though I am not being 100% as careful and diligent as I should be, I still try to base on my meals on having plenty of fruits and veggies, so I am ahead of the curve here.

You know -- I know plenty of people don't care for the current President and First Lady, but I keep seeing Mrs. Obama on Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel talking about eating healthier and making better dietary choices, and it's amazing how much of a difference this is already making in my house. Seriously. When I was a kid we had Nancy Reagan shouting at us to just say no to drugs, and I'm not entirely sure that it made a whole lot of difference. All it did for me was make me paranoid. But the Obama Administration's focus on positive reinforcement and good choices and activity and ownership of your diet is pretty refreshing, to me. Hopefully my kid will grow up with a better relationship to food than I had, with more of an emphasis on eating the right things and less of an emphasis on abstaining from everything. The concept of a "sometimes food" is pretty foreign to me, but it makes complete sense.

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No weight change since the last time. I am taking this as a good sign -- the "no news is good news" approach. I have not been exercising and I already admitted that I haven't been  uber-careful and I have been eating my feelings more than I am comfortable with, but I will keep at this until I get it right.