Free Finished Being Fat: An Accidental Adventure in Losing Weight and Learning How to Finish by Betsy Schow Page B

vomit, then stay up with them the rest of the night, bowl at the ready. By the end of the day, my girls were alive and hopefully a little better and a little smarter than they were the day before. Me too. If that didn’t make me feel like a success, then nothing else I did ever would.
    I didn’t actually say that entire rant out loud, though I probably should have. Instead I proudly proclaimed my profession and made my exit.
    “I’m a stay-at-home mom. Worst paying job in the world, but the perks are amazing. Now if you’ll excuse me, I should get home to my two little perks about now. Lovely catching up with you. Good luck on your school. I’m sure you’ll graduate and get to be a mom soon.”
    I got up and left her flabbergasted by my abrupt and slightly rude departure. I was pleased with myself both for the personal revelations about my everyday accomplishments and for the restraint I showed by not bashing her head with the vase. I had faced down a demon, not Stacey, per se, but more accurately the feeling that I needed to be ashamed and apologize for who I had become. For probably the first time I could look at my life with a sense of accomplishment for what it was instead of a sense of loss for what I wished it would have been.

7
WHEN SHARING a DESSERT, ALWAYS ASSUME that 90 PERCENT of the CALORIES ARE in the OTHER PERSON’S HALF
    I can’t lie convincingly to another person, and I can’t play poker to save my life, but I am a master at self-deception. I could fool myself into thinking I was on the right track when in fact I was going the wrong way on a one-way street. That was one of the reasons my diet efforts always failed, because I lied to myself about how much I was really eating. Sure I counted calories. I knew one portion of Chex mix was 140; I just ignored the fact that their portion was a quarter cup and my portion was half the bag. But in my little food journal, I faithfully wrote down my one portion of Chex mix and patted myself on the back for my excellent tracking skills.
    Now that I was measuring every darned thing that went into my mouth, I could see how ridiculous my behavior had been. I had put blinders on to everything that didn’t gel with what I wanted. Sometimes, I knew I’d done wrong and feel guilty about it, but most of the times I talked myself into actually believing the BS I made up to excuse my actions. Here are a few of my favorite food lies and myths that I used shamelessly.
    1.You don’t have to count the calories if you are picking off someone else’s plate.
    I am a forever eating off my kids’ plates. They eat like birds, and there is something about a mostly untouched plate of food that I find morally offensive. I just paid five bucks for those nuggets and fries and, gosh darnit, somebody was going to enjoy it. Did I add it to my daily food tally? No, they ordered it, so they could pick up the caloric tab.
    2.Dropped food has no caloric value.
    It’s like the five-second rule. You choose to believe that there are no germs on that piece of food you just dropped. I choose to believe that the calories fell off on impact with the ground.
    3.Milk chocolate is in the dairy food group
    Says it right there in the name, doesn’t it? And you’re supposed to have three servings a day. My size servings.
    4.You don’t have to count the calories in anything you add to vegetables to make them taste good.
    Because that would be mean to make me eat brussels sprouts and then penalize me for the pound of butter I had to put on them.
    5.When sharing a dessert, always assume that 90 percent of the calories are in the other person’s half.
    After all you don’t know how those ingredients got dispersed in baking. I’m sure my husband’s half soaked up all the caramel.
    Now I laugh at the absurdity of these claims (although I still think the chocolate one makes sense), but I totally bought into them at the time. A few years ago, the doctor told me to keep a food journal so we could figure