Freedom

I'm going to go ahead and apologize now for the lack of pictures with this blog post.  Since I'm not an ace photographer, I know you're not here for the pictures, but still.  They add a little something, right?  Well, for those of you who don't know, I am currently about 1,200 miles from home helping a friend out with a her first new baby.  But since my last post was about getting back to basics, I didn't want to wait a whole week before posting again, so here I am!  And although I am recipe-less in this blog post as well, I hope you still find something worth reading about.

The best thing about being here is (other than getting to spend time with a good friend and playing with a new baby that doesn't keep me up at night) is the freedom of not browsing my kitchen for good things to eat.  The down side (other than keeping track of my 17-month old in a non-babyproofed house) is not having the freedom to browse the kitchen for good things to eat.  Make sense?  Just hear me out.

I have a love-hate relationship with my kitchen.  When I was a working mom this wasn't a huge deal because I primarily home in the evenings, and that's not when my snacking hour strikes. Since I'm a daytime snacker, I would have a few healthy snacks available at the office for me to choose from when hunger hit.  It was relatively easy to make a good choice when I only had three things to choose from, and none of them were chocolate.  As a SAHM, I have a whole kitchen of food to choose from!  If I don't see what I want, I can make what I want, right?  And seriously, how many of us don't know where the chocolate chips are kept?  It's so easy to opt for the sweet snack if it's on your list of choices.

As I have been traveling and thinking this week, I realized that if I am going to be successful with weight loss and healthy eating as a SAHM, I need to follow the same rules I had as a working mom.And one of the big ones I have not been following is that I'm not planning my snacks.  I know it sounds trite.  We've read the advice in every doctor's office magazine weight loss article known to man.  But just because it's trite doesn't mean it isn't true.  And amazingly, as I have been a guest in someone else's home, I have been doing just that.  I don't raid the pantry.  I have a few things that I picked up from the store to have as snacks, and guess what?  That's what I am having! And it's remarkable how free I feel.  The funny thing about rules made for our benefit (like the ones good parents give us or the Commandments) is that abiding by those rules doesn't limit us at all - it frees us to do the things that we really wanted to do all along anyway.

And so, here's my new snacking rules as a SAHM:

1. Plan and prepare snacks at night for at least the next day (preferably for the next couple of days).

2. Schedule times for the kitchen to be "open" and "closed" so I'm not constantly grazing.

3. Each snack should combine food groups to make them more filling (i.e. a small apple and 1 oz. cheese is more filling than a large apple alone!).

4. Each snack should be no more than 150 calories.

With a little hard work and self control, I'll be back on the bandwagon in no time at all!