Feeling Better

Hey everyone. Or at least my one reader. :)

I'm feeling much better today. Tuesday and Wednesday were NOT good days. I subsisted on chicken soup and baked cheetos. I know that probably sounds bad but it was one of the only things I could keep down. Yesterday I was feeling much better but I was absolutely ravenous, and I ate like it. I probably consumed 2500 calories. I guess I just needed that nutrition that I had been missing for the past two days.

So I weighed in this morning at 188 (-3), which I'm fairly happy with given the fact that I was really at 191 last week and didn't report it, and also considerting that I ate a lot of food late at night. I guess I thought I might lose some extra due to the fact that I basically didn't eat for two days, but I made up for it yesterday.

Enough about that I guess. So my dad is coming to town this weekend with my stepmom, which will be nice but almost always turns into a stressful situation and ends with a ton of eating. My dad is a big guy, and mimicking his eating habits is part of the reason why I have such bad habits myself. He's developed Type II diabetes in the past year and even though he's married to a nurse, he barely does anything to control it.

Let me back up a little. My parents were divorced when I was 6, and my mom moved my sister and I to Colorado when I was 9. So I haven't really lived with my dad in a long time. In fact I don't really have any memories of actually living with him. But when he did come to visit, our visits always centered around food. We just didn't really have anything else to do. It's not that I don't love my dad, because I do very much, but his visits have always been a time of stress for my sister and I. Food just mitigated that stress a little.

He was very bitter that my mom got remarried and moved to Colorado. My sister and I both think it was for the best; we get along great with my stepdad and we had an awesome childhood growing up in the Denver suburbs. It was probably very different than what our life would have looked like growing up in a small town in West Texas, where my dad still lives today. I'm a well-adjusted child of divorce and I know in my heart it was what my mom needed to do to be happy. But my dad, he just doesn't see things that way.

Anyway, when he comes to visit its been hard to find activities to do with him. It's better now that he has my stepmom, but he's still very controlling and wants to spend every single moment with us. Now that we are grown women and have lives of our own, that is becoming more difficult. It usually goes something like this: He gets in on Friday night, we go out to dinner and then maybe go for ice cream. Saturday morning he gets up and putters around while we sleep, then we go eat lunch. We may go shopping or see a movie in the afternoon, but we definitely have some sort of snack. Then we go out for a big dinner, with dessert. Sunday same thing. It's all focused around food! It's like that's the only thing there is to do.

When we were still really little, we used to have to go visit him for six weeks every summer. My mom said we'd come back and we'd have each gained like 10 pounds. Our little faces would be all puffy. I guess it's a comfort thing; it's all we know how to do when we're with him.

Honestly I doubt this will ever change. We'll probably do the same thing this weekend. But I'm going to do my best to make good choices and set a good example for my dad. He needs to know that I won't love him any more or any less based on whether or not I get an ice cream cone. I'm not a little girl anymore. I know how to make good choices. Sometimes its just hard not to fall back into old habits.