The killer muffin!!! UGH!

I have a terrible sweet tooth and my downfall is baked goods, specifically pastries or cakes.  I try to stay away from these because I know I can't control myself very well, even today.

These were part of my daily diet forever and the old me thought nothing about getting in my car, driving to the store, and satisfying my sweet tooth at any time of day or night.  Many times I found myself driving to Marie Callender's to get a pie before they closed at 11 p.m.  I don't love pies specifically, but it was better than nothing when I wanted something sweet.  My last choice was to make something from scratch, like a banana nut loaf if I was willing to wait the hour it'd take to make it.

The new me has been pretty good at abstaining, particularly this past year since I started working closely with my trainer.  I say "pretty good" because I can't give them up entirely so I indulge once in a great while, but it's rare when I do.  I especially have to stay away from packages that contain more than one serving because I can easily eat the entire package in a day or two.  During my weight-loss journey, if I indulged in buying something but then found myself eating more than one serving at a time or obsessing over what was left, I had to throw it out in the trash to stop myself from eating it all at once. 

It's a constant struggle not to indulge all the time.  When I'm driving around town, I'll often think of getting something sweet but instead I get nothing, I eat a protein bar, or I get fruit.  Every time I go to the market, I always gravitate to the bakery section in the never-ending hope that I can find a low-calorie pastry I can have.  I never do.  Since I started tracking my calories, I read packages and I often think things like: "240 calories for one tiny cookie??!!!  Not worth it!"  It's disappointing to realize that a muffin can have over 400 calories.  Even a bagel can be over 350 calories.

It's hard not to give in, but I start thinking how much work it's been to get to this point, how much more I still have to lose, and how awful I felt when the old me indulged regularly.  That one cookie that has 240 calories means at least an hour on the treadmill.  So for a couple of minutes of enjoyment, it's an hour of torture to get rid of the extra calories.  Even though I have a craving for something sweet or doughy just about always, 99% of the time I leave the package behind at the store once I see how many calories each serving is.

Last week I had lunch with a friend and I knew what I was going to order after analyzing the menu online the night before.  When I got to the restaurant, I ordered my preselection without looking at their printed menu:  the Mediterranean chicken salad, dressing on the side, no bread, just water.  When the waitress asked if we wanted a bread basket, my friend and I both said, "Well, yes, we do want it, but don't bring it."  The waitress laughed knowingly.  Any bread indulgence was averted and I knew my meal was going to be 570 calories if I used the dressing sparingly, which worked perfectly for my daily allowance that day, even leaving me with enough calories to allow a Starbucks latte in the afternoon, too.  What I didn't realize until I ordered is that the salad came with a blueberry muffin.  You can't put pastries in front of me.  I can't resist them.  I ate it as my dessert and had to forego my afternoon latte because of it.  When I got home and researched the calories for that muffin, I learned it contained over 500 calories!  That small muffin was almost as much as my huge salad!  Suddenly that left me with almost no calories for dinner!  Needless to say, I blew my calories that day by a ton.    

I've been mad at myself since.  I had no intention of ordering a muffin, and it caught me off guard when the waitress said it came with my salad.  I should have told her to keep it.  The muffin was okay, it wasn't even that delicious.  It certainly wasn't worth blowing my calories for that day.  When I indulge, I make the conscious decision to do so and I work my calories around it, but when I don't preplan, it throws me off.  The only thing that works for me is to plan what I'm going to eat ahead of time.  Tracking after I eat something I haven't researched first never works because I always end up blowing my calories.

This is the second time I was caught off guard and I took the food instead of turning it down.  A few months ago I went to Subways for a six-inch turkey sandwich and a bottle of water.  The cashier kept pushing the combination meal on me because, "It's cheaper and you get a bag of chips, too."  I said no, but she kept insisting, telling me it was so much cheaper, and I let her talk me into it.  I ate the whole bag of chips in one sitting.  The bag was small, but the calories were huge.  I was mad at myself for days afterwards because I didn't even want the chips in the first place but I let her talk me into it.  Since then whenever I go to Subways and they pull the same thing on me, I keep repeating, "No, thanks," and I walk out with only a sandwich and a bottle of water.

There's something about giving up food that comes with your meal (like the killer muffin) that makes me feel like I'm wasting my money or cheating myself out of something.  However, if I accept the food and eat it, I'm sabotaging myself and I end up mad at myself for days afterwards - particularly when I didn't want it in the first place.  

All I can say is:  there will not be a third time!  Tracking my calories is more important than anything else, even if it means "wasting" some food.