KOCHAM JEDZENIE!

Welcome back to my blog. Today's title, Kocham Jedzenie! is in Polish, for reasons I will come to later.
I love food. Always have, always will. It's one of the things I love.
All through the time last year I was trying to lose weight, my love of food never left me. That was one of the reasons that I never considered having bariatric surgery to help me to lose weight. I could never imagine just what not being able to try new foods and having a good meal now and again would be like. And then, of course, there are sweets and puddings. Don't get me started on them. There are times I could fancy a pudding for starter, a pudding for my main, and a pudding for dessert! :)
I love going to different places to eat and I love cooking food at home. I will try most things, and have done - sometimes in the strangest of places!
At the moment I have 78 cookery books of various types and am always on the lookout for ones that are a bit unusual.
The strange thing is that as I was losing weight I could not bring myself to look at any of them. Nor could I watch cookery programs on the television, which I also love to do.
Food had to stay out of my mind, even though that's all I thought about if that makes sense (not really Jackie, I hear you say!)
What I mean is that even though I was taking part in Change 4 Life and thinking about what foods contained, cutting back on fats and sugar etc. and learning how to change my diet to lose weight,I couldn't think about food as a pleasure. I found I was distancing myself from the pleasure of food. To read a cookery book or to watch a food program on TV was too much to bear. I needed to cut everything back to basics and look at it as a need and not a pleasure.
At times it was hard, at times it was boring, although I still did have chocolate and my weekly treat after after my weekly weigh-in. My focus was on the greater task that needed to be achieved but now I find that food is once again beginning to be a pleasure.
Hopefully I have tamed the beast and I can now allow myself to enjoy my pleasures again in a controlled environment.
Five days a week I still try to eat healthily and watch the fats and sugars, but now I enjoy what I like at the weekend. It seems to be working. I have maintained my weight since the end of October so so far so good.
My book shelves have acquired three more cookery books and I am trying to more beans and vegetables and less meat. "The Thugs Kitchen" is an interesting read and has some great recipes - if you don't mind the swearing (Steve calls it a cookbook with Tourettes:)).
Today (Saturday) we tried out a new Polish (hence the title) food shop that has opened up in Barnsley called Zhabka and I was like a kid in sweet shop. So many new things to try! And we will!
What I have learned so far is, yes you do have to take this seriously for a while if you want to achieve your goal, but it's only for a short time and learning to adjust to a new situation can be fun.
If you too are trying to lose weight at the moment I wish you every success and you never know. Between us we may just find a way to bake our cake AND eat it!
I'll be back soon, and as for that title, you must have guessed by now - I LOVE FOOD!