A Hard Couple of Days

Ugh. Life's not rosy right now. This week has been a battle of the colon and its reluctance to function properly. I won't bore (or disgust) you with the details. Suffice it to say it's not been pleasant.

And tonight I realized that eating is just not fun/enjoyable anymore. Things that I expect are going to taste wonderful just don't. Yesterday I wanted to go to Bob Evans for breakfast because I wanted something different. I don't know what I was thinking because I can really only eat scrambled eggs. It tasted like rubber. The highlight of the meal was the one bite (seriously, it was just a nibble) of the sourdough toast that came with the meal.

Here's a list of the things that tasted really good to me this week:
- my Eggbeater omelet I have EVERY morning for breakfast
- the homemade soup we made yesterday
- apples

I think I could be satisfied eating my omelet in the morning and an apple for dinner. But then I wouldn't get in my blasted 60-70 grams of protein per day. Oh, the rules!

One of the side effects of the surgery is that your taste buds get out of whack. I'm hoping that reverses itself in time. Until then . . . I think I'm going to be cranky.

The Heartbreak of Dining Out

Update: As of January 17, I've lost 80 pounds. Try visualizing 80 pounds of hamburger. Yea. It's kind of overwhelming. And between December and January I lost seven inches total from my bust, waist and hips. Not bad for the holidays, eh?

So . . . dining out. It's been a tricky proposition. I get very distracted by all the noise, smells, color and I don't think about chewing or pacing myself. My worst experience was at Dragon Inn. They have really great food with nice, lean pieces of meat, which makes it easy to pick out. I had just swallowed a delicious piece of chicken and I knew I was in trouble. I could feel it go down. Usually I chew everything to a near baby food consistency and it just slides right down.

Once you swallow a chunk that's too big you have to wait for it to pass into your pouch and sometimes it's hard to know when that's happened. So I took another bite. Big mistake. The food just kind of stacks up and it's really quite painful. I know I get an awful look on my face because Tyler was just staring at me with a stricken look on his face. I sat there a couple of minutes, trying to beat down the nausea. Finally I thought, "Maybe a sip of water will help loosen it up." Biggest mistake yet. I really thought I was going to lose it. I wanted so bad to ask where the bathroom was, but I was afraid to open my mouth. Seriously. It was that bad.

The whole episode lasted maybe ten minutes, but it felt like an hour. As soon as I got home I sat down and ate some of my to-go box and was fine. Now when I go out, I cut my two to three ounces of meat into tiny pieces before I even take one bite and that's helped immensely. And I've found that most restaurants have good options. I'm still pretty much on an all protein diet, with a few veggies and an apple once in awhile. Applebee's has a wonderful garlic chicken breast that will feed me for at least two meals (to reheat it I put about a quarter inch of chicken broth in a small pan, cover and steam it on medium for about seven minutes - really tender).

So, while dining out can be a challenge it can also be a really welcome change to cottage cheese and deli turkey. For real.