Quite a title, huh! Well I had to pull a Tough Love on myself for our 16th wedding anniversary. Alpha Hubby was willing to take me to the only romantic restuarant in our area. It’s one we always go to for our annivesary – Swiss – where you can have amazing cheese fondue (yes I swiped the recipe) and schnitzel. They always give us a romantic table lit by candles in the corner.

It was a tough decision. My body wanted to go. Oh yes, it did! It demanded it. But I made a Tough Love decision to tell it NO and stay home for my romantic dinner. It was the only way I could control what I ate and not blow my LBD journey.

So instead of going out and being serve amazing food – high in fat and calorie content – and for sure appetizers and desert, I sat down to this, the table:

Then the healthy food choices, thankyouverymuch – I especially love the packing box in the chair – tres’ romantique:

And, I even had this – portion control of my  steak *sigh* – (actually it was PLENTY):

Soooo – while I had an amazing and very romantic dinner with Alpha Hubby – verrrrry romantic (wink wink) – I didn’t gain any weight or lose any ground.  As a matter of fact, by the time the weekend was over and I nervously got on the scale – I’d actually lost 2 pounds.

CELEBRATE!!  It was so worth it, telling my body NO!  Not only NO but HECK NO.  Because by Monday, I had no regrets and no ground to make up – and that is something to CELEBRATE.  I didn’t even miss the restaurant.  I didn’t even mind doing the crystal, goldplate and china that evening (they can’t go in the dishwasher).  Everything else could wait!

Let me tell you what a victory this is – any time before this, I would have blown off the little voice inside my head saying, “Don’t blow it” and gone on out to eat, justifying it all the way.  “I deserve this because I’ve been good.”  Or even, “It’s my anniversary and I’ll be darned if I’m not going to celebrate it up right.”  Nope.  I thought ahead, made a wise decision and am so glad!

Here’s to that Little Black Dress journey – it is changing my lifestyle!!

Well, I guess I shouldn’t call shopping doom except sometimes when I shop, if feels doom-y and is occasionally a huge waste of money. 

I know I am going to be facing some of my former enemies.  They are NOT going to go easy on me.  They surround me and taunt me, yelling, “Buy me, buy me, buy me.  You know you can’t resist me!  Nanny nanny boo boo! We’re going to take over your shopping buggy!”  Can you see why I hate grocery shopping?

OK, maybe it isn’t QUITE that bad but sometimes it feels that way.  How else do you explain how I can get home from shopping and find things in my grocery bags that I KNOW I didn’t put in there? Take Monday, for instance.  I made the mistake of going to the grocery store without eating breakfast first.  I set myself up.

I am doing really well eating whole foods and healthy.  I have EVERYTHING out of the house that should not be eaten while I’m on this Little Black Dress Diaries journey.  There aren’t even any frozen candy bars in the freezer, hidden behind the bags of broccoli.  Really!  So – how did I get home Monday with a frozen pizza?  Seriously – I want to know!

I know I didn’t put it into my shopping buggy – I wouldn’t do that to myself because it isn’t on my list of approved foods.  Everyone knows a frozen pizza has too many empty calories and is chock full of mega-chemicals so you KNOW I wouldn’t even consider buying one.

Except *sigh* I did.  I convinced myself t was actually the better of all the evils I was faced with. My stomach became a dictator – “Feed me” it cried.  “Get me something to eat!   Something you won’t have to fix when you get home since you know you can’t wait!  Chopping healthy vegetables will take too long.”  Who knew a stomach could whine so loud?

Grocery store food delis slay me if I get within smelling distance of all that fat-filled, salted for-sure-not-healthy-for-you food bar.  And walking past frozen cookie dough on the way to frozen vegetables takes strength I am not sure I can maintain very long so I run past (no, not really).   Somewhere in the back of my mind while purchasing multi-colored peppers, jalapenos, onions, broccoli, and the like, I justified that a frozen pizza would do less damage than anything else I could eat.  I mean, I pass several fast-food joints on the way home – all of which have given me the siren-call and pulled me onto their cliffs of death.

Problem with eating healthy, and getting off processed foods and chemicals is that your taste buds change.  It gets to the point you can actually taste the chemicals in processed foods.  It forever ruins you… well, I guess that is the wrong perspective now, isn’t it!?! 

Anyway, I popped that pizza in the oven, baked it, took it out, took a warm, ooey-gooey slice, and bit into it thinking, “heaven” – and it was HORRIBLE.  It tasted downright chemically and too salty.  I finally took it all outside and threw it on the burn-pile – because I sure didn’t want it tempting me to continue eating it.  I guess the dogs got it ’cause it’s gone.

Do you have ANY idea how many times I’ve done that? Bought something food related, gotten it home and decided, “Nah, I’m not blowing my diet with this” so threw it away? I’m not going to tell you. It’s cha-ching nutz.

Oh and wait – how long do you think it took to preheat the oven then bake that pizza?  Over 30 minutes – time I could have spent chopping peppers and making a salad.  Skewed skewed thinking.

Little Black Dress Diaries journey lesson – never, ever, ever go grocery shopping on an empty stomach.  Those naughty foods will jump into your buggy every time, to go home with you to help you undermine your healthy eating!

HA! Gotcha there with that title, huh!? Well, I’m sorry if you thought you could find some reason to justify being a loser (snicker), but this is not that place. No, no! I’m not calling you a loser because you’re reading this. It was a trick title to sucker you into reading my blog, really! NO one is calling you a loser! Stop thinking of yourself as one. Really! You are NOT a loser. I’m just talking about weight loss . *Sigh* people are SO touchy.

OK, onward. I sometimes think people get so accustomed to being overweight that they forget some of the benefits of losing any excess weight they carry. So let’s review a few, shall we? (Warning: some sexual & personal content)

Benefits of losing weight:

1 – You never again have to worry if you’ll fit in that chair with the arms. Or that booth in the restaurant where you want to be comfortable without the table rubbing your tummy. Or wonder if that chair will hold you when it makes that creaking sound (hopefully, only wooden chairs do this to you, right??) Or hear your husband groan when you sit on his lap in that creaking chair.

2 – You can wear jeans or slacks without an elastic waistband. Imagine – real jeans with a button and hole, and a zipper! No elastic in sight. NO MORE PULL-UPS – whoo hoo. La la la, I’m a big girl now… well, no, not big…

3 – You can walk up stairs without breathing like a steam locomotive! You can get to the top of the stairs and begin a conversation without saying, “Hold on a minute, puff puff. I’ll be right with you, wheeze, wheeze.”

4 – You can find pretty new words to describe yourself such SVELTE which means “slender, especially gracefully slender in figure; lithe”. Doesn’t that sound so ladylike? Sure beats being a stevedore.

5 – The original meaning of the word stevedore entered the English language (via Spain or Portugal) through its use by sailors. It started as a phonetic spelling of Spanish estibador or Portuguese estivador, meaning a man who stuffs – so how about NO MORE WOMEN WHO STUFF? Of course, they meant someone who loads a ship but I got to thinking about women who load a plate at an all-you-can-eat bar, in public, overweight, while everyone looks on in judgmental disgust. In the background you hear, “Why doesn’t she control her eating?”

6 – You can have a romantic evening in that deep Jacuzzi tub without worrying about how you’re going to get out. You can sit there enjoying the bubblebath, candlelight and music without thinking of a sweet way of saying, “Honey, can you haul me out of here?” Or imagine not being afraid to sit on the ground or a low sofa? Not needing help getting up (or out)?

7 – Sorry about this one but some people deal with this. It is VERY personal. You don’t have to worry about personal hygiene ever again. You can… ummm … wipe certain places without being a contortionist. You can feel fresh and clean. There, I said it. While it isn’t really publicly talked about, it is a true problem for those those considered obese by the medical profession. Imagine the relief of never having to worry about or deal with that issue again!

8 – One of my favorite – you can bend over and paint your toenails a wild bright red or a beautiful feminine pink. You don’t need help clipping your toenails and you can easily rub scented lotion on your legs and feet without leaning sideways and breathing hard!

9 – You will no longer have a closet floor full of clothes you tried on that didn’t fit so you threw a fit and tossed them in the floor of your closet. Or even better your closet no longer resembles a clothing store with clothes separated into 10 different sizes, sandwiched between one end labeled fat clothes and the other end labeled skinny clothes. You won’t be late to work or dates because you can walk in and everything in your closet fits.

10 – And the top benefit of losing weight? You can make love to your husband without worrying about how you look naked. You can be more creative about your love life again. You can feel sexy and seductive without fear. You will believe again that all those sexy little nighties look good on you (at least HE thinks so). Best of all, there will be no more wheezy romantic little sounds like, “Get off, get off, I can’t breathe.”

Nuff said. Got any other benefits to add?

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