Don't put THAT in your mouth

Stress eating. I does it. I know that I do it and yet….I keep on doing it. When it got close to finals in law school? What did I do? Eat when I wasn’t hungry. And I didn’t eat rabbit food like lettuce and carrots. Oh no I ate fast food, ice cream, pizza, etc. All while telling myself that I needed to eat quick food because I didn’t have time to have anything healthy. Because of my stress eating? I am twenty-five pounds heavier graduating law school than when I started law school (I wasn’t exactly a stick when I came into law school either). Ugh. I am at the heaviest I have ever been in my life and it feels awful.

I know what I have done in the past to lose weight (count calories, go to the gym, not drink as much, etc.), but as I get older it is going to be harder to lose that extra weight. I made it a goal this year to lose weight before my 30th birthday in December and I am hoping that after the bar exam I can stick to it. I am a schedule-loving girl and when I worked prior to law school it was easy to drag myself to the gym after work every day so that I missed the bad traffic on my way home. I am hoping to do the same starting in less than a month.

One of my possible impediments? BF. He is absolutely THE BEST COOK EVER. I keep telling him that he is chef stuck in an engineer’s body. But…..this means he doesn’t use margarine or Pam instead of butter, he makes sauces for vegetables instead of just eating them steamed, etc.

Another impediment is simply wanting to spend time with BF. This will be the first time since we started dating that I won’t have any homework or studying to do at night (oh boy I can’t wait!) and he won’t be traveling during the week. We can actually (gasp!) spend time together. Because he commutes one way and I commute the other way we probably won’t join the same gym. That could be quality time we spend together after our work days are over.

BF and I do try to get out a lot on the weekends for athletic endeavors. My first birthday present from him was to learn how to ski because if I lived in a ski state, then I had to learn. Recently, we bought kayaks and have been enjoying getting out on the water as much as possible. We both have golf clubs and I would like to teach him how to play tennis after we are settled into our new place.

I just need to tell myself that the gym is for ME. Time for ME to spend getting healthy and losing weight. And maybe my compromise with BF and his cooking is that two days a week during the week I get to cook something healthy. I found a lot of recipes in The Biggest Loser cookbook that are delicious. That way if I eat a healthy breakfast and lunch, then on the couple of other days that BF cooks, I can eat foods that are a little more caloric while still losing weight.

I also have already told BF that I am instituting the “salad rule” after the bar. At the beginning of the week, I will wash and cut a bunch of lettuce, along with chop up lots of fresh veggies in advance of the week. Every night with dinner we will have a salad on the side of whatever we are eating.

Hopefully in the 3 ½ months before my birthday I will start to see some progress and work towards the goal that I set for myself in my last year of my 20s.