Freshman 15 Must Now Be Freshman 25

OK, so my total weight loss is currently at 23.4 pounds. I haven't written for over a month because I just didn't. I'm not sure why. I'm still hard at it and am ever-so-slowly re-approaching that 25-pound loss I achieved, oh, um, last August.

I did very well after the last post, losing every week until this past week when I put on 1.4 pounds. The thing that trips me up every time is eating away from home. As long as I plan and prepare my meals, I do fine. Once I go out to eat, though, I struggle.

Last week we had a staff retreat at Colby College, a private school in central Maine. Private schools, I have learned, pride themselves on their food. Colby is no exception (although Bowdoin College students will proudly boast that their food has been ranked the best in the country). We've been to Colby for three years now and the food was not as good this year, although the variety was still astonishing compared to my college experience in the 1970s.

I'm convinced that students now have to battle the Freshman 25 instead of the Freshman 15. The Colby dining hall is organized into "stations" (my word; I have no idea what the food-service folks would call them). There's the salad bar, which included potato salad and cottage cheese, among all the veggies. There's the pizza & pasta zone, the fried/grilled area, the ice cream (soft & hard serve -- available at every meal) zone, and so forth.

I knew I'd be facing the dining hall along with all the munchies later when the staff got together to party. I planned ahead. I was going to eat sensibly but allow myself to have some soft-serve ice cream. I love soft-serve ice cream and generally don't all myself to succumb to its charms (hence my assertion that it has got to be the Freshman 25 these days). In addition, I bought some Fritos, looked up the Points value and promised myself I'd eat only two handfuls (about 4 Points).

My planning was not for naught because I did eat reasonable portions of soft-serve ice cream and I did eat no more than two handfuls of Fritos. So why did I gain weight? Because I couldn't balance the other things I ate. I typically eat whole grains for breakfast and lunch along with vegetables -- I couldn't get the whole grains I needed to help me to feel full. So I over-ate.

Saturday night I went to Hadlock Field for a Sea Dogs game. We had dinner there, so I faced another eating-out dilemma. Food choices at a baseball game are typically poor and this was no exception. I weigh-in on Saturday mornings, so I have the rest of the week to recover from that mis-adventure. The problem is that once I eat poorly more than a day or two, I have serious trouble getting back on track. I prefer to eat well. I feel better when I eat well. But once I start to eat poorly, it's very hard to stop because I begin to crave those poor foods in unhealthful quantities.

Today is Monday and I'll nestle into the comforting arms of routine . . . except for tomorrow morning when I'm going out for breakfast.