Food, Glorious Food

Breakfast, they say, is the most important meal of the day.

In fact, according to some random website Google just found for me:

"Breakfast is one of the most important meals of the day along with brunch, elevensies, lunch, afternoon tea, high tea, tea, dinner, supper, light snacks."

And if Google found that, then it must be true. Everyone knows that anything and everything found on the web can be taken as fact. And that's a fact.

It is also my wife's view. Well, if you add in the nibbles and occasional excessive snacking in-between meals. Personally, I pretty much eat when I'm hungry and stop when I'm not. Occasionally I snack in-between.

My wife, however, does not like herself. She believes that she is fat and overweight. I will not divulge what her weight or measurements are, although I will say that the amount of weight she wishes to lose would not cause her to become "underweight" for her age/sex/height.

She spends a lot of time thinking, planning, brooding and stressing about her weight.
(Sometimes, I feel slightly "jealous" that she can spend so long thinking about her problems and not ours/mine)

I try very very hard to help her as much as I can, because it is such a big issue for her. Personally, I just want her to be happy.

Unfortunately, she is always in two minds about it.
1. Long term - Be good, get thinner, be happy with self
2. Short term - Want nice yummy food

And when you're in the here and now, it tends to be the short term view which takes precedence. After all, there's time to sort out the long term view tomorrow.

And so I find myself stuck in the middle.

I know she won't really feel happy with herself until she's thinner.

She's been on and off diets more than most people switch on their lights.

But every time, and indeed all the time, I try to help her. When she's trying to be good, I try to avoid eating in front of her (even if I am hungry). I try to get rid of as many snacky foods out of the house as I can - I used to have chocolate and stuff around but I no longer do - I buy it and take it straight to work. I guess it doesn't sound much, but it feels a lot. I'm always willing to listen to her and help her with whatever decision it is she's trying to make.
But one of the hardest parts is telling her "No". I mentioned yesterday she had takeout. It had been just over an entire week since the last time. She started asking about it a couple of days ago. She announced on Friday that from Saturday she was going to go back onto an extremely low cal diet. And it was only fair that she was allowed "one last meal". I didn't let her on Friday. She's started that extremely low cal diet and had one last meal at least three times since the honeymoon. Each lasted a couple of days. (She did manage a few months on it before the wedding, but fell off the wagon a few weeks before hand)
I didn't have complete faith that the same thing wasn't going to happpen again (which I think was reasonable), and on top of that, you don't really want to pump your system full of all those extra "toxins" just before you give them up for who knows how long, that just makes the "withdrawal" worse.
She sulked a little about that, but not too much. (Sometimes she REALLY sulks if I don't let her have what she wants, so I let her have it, and guaranteed the next day she'll sulk because she's had bad food)
Anyway, Saturday I thought she did well and she stuck to it all day.
By Sunday she decided she didn't think she could stick to it after all so she'd go back to just trying to not eat excessively.
And you already know what happened on Monday.

It's all just hard work. She's a difficult lass to keep happy, and there are so many things she's unhappy with that are out of my control. But I still put a lot of effort in, and I guess that's one of the reason's I feel I could do with something to recharge MY batteries a little more often.

Sorry, I know this has all been a bit rambly. It's just a fairly significant lump of the overall problem that I thought I'd go into.