Fooood. It's good for you.

Dear Eating Well mag.  I LOVE you.  Signed, skinny b.

Sunday night, my super awesome hubby made a "Quick Coq a Vin" from Eating Well's site.  It was pretty awesome.  It's something that I've always wanted to try, and I'm pretty happy that we got to start out with a "quick" version of it.  OH, and it was only 288 calories!  Throw in the green beans (roughly 70 calories with the oil/butter) and some mashed potatoes (somewhere in the neighborhood of 130 calories), and that's a pretty good dinner!  Since it came from Eating Well, I don't have any trouble thinking that it's going to be really good AND it's going to be good for me.

One of the things that I'm figuring out is that it's totally still possible to have food like Coq a Vin and mashed potatoes and still push onward to get skinny.  Sure, it may not be exactly the classic (often, I've found that "classic" = "less healthy") version, but it was healthier and still delicious.  Knowing that there's gotto be a way to make just about anything good for me is a big deal, since I looooove food.

The hiccup though is that, even though the item is better for me, I still need to pay attention to the portion sizes.  Just because it's fewer calories for the portion size doesn't mean that I can sneak in a little extra and be like, "It's cool - it was healthy!"  :)  That's cheating.  It's cheating that's just really easy to do when you're learning how to properly portion food.  It's really easy to justify eating more when it's better for you.  That's where the whole portion control thing comes into play.  It's kind of hand-in-hand:  eat better, eat less.

The good news?  While I'm struggling just a smidge to eat the right sizes of everything (my personal exception:  healthy - read:  not butter-coated - veggies.  I'll eat two cups of those bad boys if the calories are right.), my belly, which is my trouble-zone has gotten smaller.  So much so that a jacket I bought just before I went to Europe is now baggy on me.  Sleeves are too long (guess my shoulders are getting a bit smaller!), the jacket is just baggy and looks totally slovenly on me now.  woop, woop!  :)  I'm now stuck with debating whether or not I want to get it taken in.  I got it for a buck at a consignment shop.  So, spending $20 to get it altered might be worth it since I really love the thing.  We'll leave it as TBD for right now.

While we're on the subject, I'm also kind of kicking myself at this point for only relying on weight and clothing fit to determine my losses.  I KNOW there are fewer inches on my frame now.  I think, starting this week, I'm going to start measuring (better get me a measuring tape!) to see what kind of progress we're making.  Stay tuned, it's gonna be exciting!