DeeDoo’s Digital Scrapbooking Blog

Don and I have been faithfully following our new healthy lifestyle for several months now. We have both lost a few pounds and the daily exercise routine is toning up our muscles slowly but surely. We both feel better physically, and mentally we are satisfied with our new lifestyle because of the obvious rewards. I can safely say it’s a habit now, one that we don’t want to break.

Having said that, I must note that viewing food-related television has ‘almost’ been off-limits for us while we have developed our new healthy eating habits. (We still tune in to watch the ‘challenges’ from time to time).

In the beginning, I’m not sure either of us could have stayed with our program if we had continued to watch the Food Network and HGTV chefs prepare the fat-laden, high calorie, albeit delicious and tantalizing, entrees and desserts. We had resolve, but it was a shaky resolve. Very fragile. Eye candy on the food shows and the descriptions of the foods would have been too much for us! Paula Deen was our kryptonite!

So, we avoided food-related programming like the plague. No more Paula Deen. Wah!!! Sadly, many, if not all, of the cooking shows give little regard to the amount of fat and carbs used in the foods they prepare. Mostly they want to make it look and sound delicious. They want to make us drool and think we HAVE TO HAVE THAT DISH!! They want to sell the show and cookbooks and dishes and any number of other food-related items they can tie into the fame of a particular cooking show host. And, boy oh boy, they have been extremely successful in this endeavor. I have a Rachel Ray cookbook, and the recipes are all delicious, but deadly to any kind of controlled calorie diet plan. Sure, you can conceivably limit your portion size on any of these dishes, but, hey, you have to be able to SEE it on your plate to get it onto your fork–the rampant calorie count forces such small portions that I’m pretty sure I would never be satisfied.

Perhaps we should be strong-willed enough, have such strength of character, that we could watch such programming yet resist backsliding into our old habits. Sounds good, but hey! The truth is that if we have REALLY changed our habits, we shouldn’t be very interested in watching those shows, anyway. And after these few months, neither of us do want to watch them! Isn’t that a surprise! We don’t even think about it. In fact, watching Paula toss in ‘a little MORE butter’ to audience applause has totally lost what little appeal it ever had. Maybe we are actually developing a stronger will where food is concerned, after all! Get out!