Saturday, August 7, 2010

Saving a Starving Child in India

Entry #10

Okay, this is no longer any fun. It's 6:05 p.m., I've just finished my dinner and my calorie total for the day so far is 1195. I was really hoping to have a Skinny Cow ice cream tonight, but they are 100 calories each. Do I give in and go over my daily calorie total of 1200 or do I suck it up and stay far far away from the freezer? Even I don't know the answer to that one yet. We'll have to find out in my next blog entry.

Yesterday I fell off the wagon a bit. The first grade teachers at Dent had a morning meeting and then decided to go out to Taco Bell for lunch. I was going to beg off, but decided to join them. There was time to check the menu online before going, so I dashed back to my classroom and did just that. I was surprised to find a number of items on the menu that are very reasonable in terms of calories. I settled on the steak burrito supreme fresca and a side order of rice. This isn't the part where I go headlong off the side of the wagon. That happened when I returned from lunch and went back to my classroom.

Earlier that morning at our meeting one of the teachers was sweet enough to bring some treats. She brought in a big bowl of grapes and some low fat blueberry muffins. As she is unwrapping the muffins she mentions that they are lowfat so I could have one. I had told her a few days prior to this that I was watching calories. I felt badly about turning down the muffin. I wasn't in the least bit hungry but took a small amount of grapes anyway. As the meeting was ending she insisted that we all take a muffin so she didn't have to take them home with her. I decided to take one and save it for breakfast the next morning. Yeah, right.

When I returned from lunch I saw that lonely little muffin sitting among the clutter on my worktable. Without giving it much thought I picked it up and ate it. It was soooooo good. The whole time I'm eating it I'm thinking about how I'm not hungry and shouldn't be doing this. The bright spot in this situation is that my diet wasn't derailed by eating the muffin. Often something as simple as eating a muffin or a single cookie would be enough to decide, "Well, I blew my diet today by eating that cookie/cupcake/candy bar, etc. so what's the use? I'll go back on my diet tomorrow." Of course, "tomorrow" most likely didn't come for a few days or even sometimes, weeks.

My options when offered the muffin the second time were to, again, refuse it, or take it and then throw it away when I got back to my room. I almost did both. But then the guilt factor kicked in. I would have felt badly turning the muffin down the second time, especially after she mentioned bringing them with me in mind. Had I taken one and tossed it, I would have felt guilty about wasting food. We all remember the horror stories our parents told us when we were young about the starving children in India. I wonder how many of them were saved by my eating that muffin?

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