Falling Behind on Blogging and Dieting

It has been interesting to note that both my falling behind on my dieting and my blogging have both related to being more social, drinking a bit of alcohol, and eating a bit of food that isn't on my diet.  This has served as a reminder of perhaps what I see as one of the biggest difficulties that dieters face - living their normal lives while losing weight and getting healthy.

If I were left to my own devices, with plenty of time to cook, work-out, and didn't have to be anywhere , I think that I would be able to stick to both my diet and my work-out plan with very little problem.  However, that is not my life unfortunately, and a wide variety of things conspire to get in my way.

Let me start with a discussion about being social.  I live in New York City.  Here, being social often means going out to dinner, meeting up at a bar, or going out to an event.  It is very hard to not drink, stick to my diet, eat when I am supposed to, and avoid the things that I am "not allowed" when I am far away from home.  Plus, meeting friends at restaurants it is like watching food commercials on television when I am hungry, except that I can actually shove all of that delicious food in my mouth and gorge.  Also, drinking water is great when I am moving throughout the day on my own, but when I am at a bar and everyone is having a beer, clinking their wine glasses, or doing shots, drinking water is a bit hard to do.

The other thing about living your life is that it makes it very hard to prepare the foods that you want to eat in advance.  The appeal of processed food, which isn't so great even in terms of the healthier options, grows and grows as you get busier and busier.  It is also easy to sit a table with friends and munch on chips or other appetizers that appeal, and it isn't like you can pull out your own stuff to munch on.

All of that said, I wasn't out of control, but I definitely was not on target this past weekend.  A night of drinking on Thursday (only three beers), and a day at the movies (popcorn with no butter) followed by some wings and spring rolls did not necessarily help me on my path to 220 pounds, but I am not going to beat myself up over it.  I may beat myself up over the bowl of macaroni and cheese I ate last night though - I figured since I had already had a bad day on the diet that I might as well.

This I think is the problem with eating one cheat meal - it makes the next one that much easier.

Other than that, I haven't lifted in a few days, although I did cardio on both Saturday and Sunday.  Hopefully, this week gets a little better.  I'm going to do a push workout in my apartment in a bit, take tomorrow morning off from cardio, and hopefully rock out on Tuesday.