Salad

Defeying stereotypes as usual I am a fat girl who loves salad. When I was pregnant with Umbrerto all I thought about was the Greek salad at the Homestead. Summers in Charlotte are all about the salad as it´s too hot to eat much else. I experiment with not just salad dressings but salad ingredients. I love using a vareity of greens and adding different food stuffs--almonds, a vareity of cheeses, bell peppers, mushrooms, etc. And there is really nothing like the fresh taste on a hot summer day. Rabbit food maybe but damn rabbits have good taste.

Now we don´t have much salad in Mexico. Most resturants, if they even offer salad, offer very bland choices with one kind of lettuce. And at home there is little in the ways of ingredients. I think H´s mom thought we were a little nuts when we requested spinach leaves for our salad. After a week all I could think about was salads. I bought some red leaf but it was a poor subsitute for the normal leafy vareity I usually have to play with. And because I couldn´t have it, it was all I wanted. Whenever, I got hungry I wanted a salad. Nothing else really hit the spot.

Finally at Happy´s I saw it. The salad. It was perfect--spinach leaves, mushrooms, advacdo, tomatoes, and bell peppers. I was so grumpy that I had settled for pizza when that yummy salad was avaiable. And I ended up eating the salad even though I was totally full. Yes, I overate on salad. And the next time we went to Happy´s I got another salad. I find that I often long for the days we go to Happy´s simply so I can have a salad. And the salad is delicious enough to long for...

Becuase I´m learning to come to terms with my fat girl self, and learning to eat as opposed to binging, and trying to avoid all diets (there´s a ton of posts on all that later), I recognized the lesson beneath my salad craving. Deprivation can make you crave anything. We really do tend to yearn for what we don´t have. I like salad anyway but my obession here is akin to what I normally feel for no-bake cookies. The issues is that I can´t have it as often as I would like so I want it all the time. When I tell myself, or when I really just can´t get something, I end up wanting it with a scary intensity. Maybe this is why I gained 40lbs in no-bake cookies...they were the only food that I really felt I could not have on WW (oh that and bagels). Everything else I could rationalize into smaller portions, or at least find a low cal. options. But no-bake cookies? There was only them, and when I quit dieting it was really only them! Now that I can´t get salad...it´s all about salad.

Yesterday we went to the zoo, and I ended eating a hamburger for lunch. It was really good, and I didn´t feel overly full when done. Normally I´d beat myself up for eating a hamburger, for makign a bad choice. I´d ignore the fact that this is what I really wanted to eat. Yesterday, I refused to abuse myself. I acknowledge that it wasn´t healthy but that it was good, and it was what I wanted to eat. I also recognized that it was likely to keep me too full to eat other good things I might want to eat. And indeed, I didn´t get hungry until about 9 that night. I ate a salad: red leaf lettuce, tomatoes, apples, and cheese covered with a balsmaic vingerette. It was delicious.

Added note: We´re going to Veracruz tomorrow, and we´ll have high speed internect connection in our room. Look for a link here sometime this weekend to see our Flickr page!