Liar Liar Liar!

I’m a liar when it comes to food. And it’s actually very easy to trick naturally thin people because they don’t have the faintest idea how easy it is for someone trying to loose weight to slip over their daily guidelines.

Example the first: The Vegetarian Burrito

Every Monday my husband likes to eat at Chipotle, the takeout Mexican place near our house. I order the vegetarian fajita burrito; which has sautéed green pepper and onions, lime rice and tomato salsa. It’s about 500 to 550 calories and it’s an okay dinner for me to have.

How easy is it to ruin it? I casually tell Ted to add on some guacamole. A single serving of which adds nearly 200 more calories. How about some cheese? Another two hundred. Sour cream? A hundred more. These three items also pack in somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 to 30 grams of fat.

From the outside the burrito looks the same, but adding any of the three transforms it into a fat bomb that effectively kills my entire day and can pump it up to over 1,000 total calories. And since Ted can eat any of the aforementioned with no weight gain whatsoever, he has no clue that when I tell him to get them on my order, he needs to stop and question me.

Of course, since I’m a food liar it’s also pretty easy for me to go “no, it’s fine – I can have that” even when he does remember to go, wait a second – are you sure you want to eat that? I guess the person it’s easiest to lie to is myself.

Example the second: The Lie of Omission

This is the secret eat. I’m home alone or awake late by myself, and I snack. They call this bingeing, the only reason I’m not considered bulimic is because I don’t purge afterward.

The other day I stood in the bathroom and it occurred to me, just for a second, how easy it would be to just “get rid of” my mistake. I understood the sense of powerlessness and hopelessness over one’s behavior that can lead to that kind of destructive action.

This is what they mean when they call it “food addiction”. I can joke that in addition to being a food addict; I’m also hopelessly addicted to breathing, sleeping and drinking water (because it does sound that ridiculous). The truth though, is that binge eating is a serious eating disorder that has nothing to do with hunger. And healthy though I may be now, it will chop years of my life in the long term.

I laid down a new rule recently; no eating when there are no other people around. Now I just need to stick to it.