Regrouping

Despite my last post talking about how there's room for improvement in my plan and actions where weightloss is concerned, positive changes did not happen last week. I took the week off work, for maybe the first time ever during the 4th of July week, and I really lived it up. I did great on Monday, but that was the only day I stayed 100% on plan. By Tuesday I had decided to take the week off from my low carb life. There were restaurants (and even a margarita one night), there were chips and even ice cream. I ate when I wanted to, whether I was hungry or not, and I learned that eating higher carb food makes me so bloated and uncomfortable that I rarely felt hungry, but I still ate. My stomach was miserably bloated all week. I was actually looking forward to getting back on keto so my stomach would feel normal again. I can't believe I used to live like that all the time and it was just my norm so I didn't realize how much better I could feel. Anyway, there was an element of fun to eating carefree but I paid the price in discomfort. So today I got back on track with keto and fasting. I went back and forth between wanting to be super strict this month and wanting to leave a little slack. I did a super strict month in October with no sweeteners except when I'm eating and no cheat meals all month, and by the end of the month, I was in progesterone (PMS) phase and wanted to eat the entire earth. I ended up letting my weekends go a little farther than I should have since that and I do wonder if it was too strict. So I'm not super sure what this month will be like, but one small change I cam make is to go back to not eating bread when we go for our Saturday pre-grocery shopping lunch at Jimmy John's. They have the option to have any sub made inside lettuce instead of bread, and that's what I did for a long time, but lately I've just let weekends be higher carb so I eat the bread. And I can usually find a way to make our home-cooked family meals on the weekends cleaner or omit things on my own plate to stay lower carb. I still think about trying to get off using liquid stevia in my water but I think giving up too many things at once will make me not want to stick with it and my goal is to make better choices most of the time for the long-term. And maybe that's as complex as anything needs to be. I am noticing how easily my brain got reconditioned to want to graze today. The only way to break the conditioning is to not give in. I am back to 2 meals a day and I'm aiming to not snack but I do have some cheese in case I have any issues. I think skipping dinner is much harder mentally than physically, but I'm starting to get used to it, I just have to keep myself busy, then I don't even think about food. I have also made some Snake Juice, a homemade electrolyte drink, and hope it can help with my salt cravings. So that is the a loose idea of the changes I am making, less indulgences on the weekends, less snacking, more fasting. I am not trying to fix everything in one month, but hope to have other things (like exercise) to focus on in coming months. It would be so easy to slip back into old habits of eating on autopilot, but that honestly didn't make me happy, and now that I know how it makes my stomach feel, it motivates me to work through the fleeting thoughts about all the tastey things I am not indulging in.