Christmas Vacation

Christmas Vacation

I apologize for the lack of blogs, but apparently a vacation was very necessary-free of all types of work.  There is a lot to share about Christmas.  Let’s start with Charleston.  Charleston is a beautiful, quaint town in South Carolina that serves a lot of seafood.  I am neutral towards seafood- I like crustaceans better than fish, but I don’t eat much.  The food here, though, was amazing!!  I loved every bite.  I definitely reaching full multiple times during the trip-but never stuffed.  I also managed to stop half way through almost every time.  Here is just a few things I ate: shrimp corn dogs, fried green tomatoes, mushroom risotto, mussels, clams, scallops, shrimp, shrimp & grits, and fried clams.  We also went out for dessert one night at a dessert, coffee, and beverage restaurant-which was wonderful.  I had half my latte, three bites of cheesecake and two of the berry cobbler.   Everything was amazing.  I will not be interested in seafood in central Texas for quite a while after indulging in the food here-it won’t compare.

At home over Christmas and New Year’s was more like what I eat here-but less meat.  I’ve experimented with different types of food and here is what I notice: the more processed, the more sugar and carbs, the less it fills me.  Am I the only one who’s eaten a slimfast bar or quaker oats bar and felt like I might as well have not eaten ANYTHING?  I CAN eat the stuff-I had two bites of cake, a few bites of chocolate, and five bites of the desserts in Charleston.  It just doesn’t fill me up-with may be the exception of the dessert in Charleston (which may have been more fat!)  It is when I try to have a meal consisting on mostly carbohydrates that I can’t get rid of my hunger.  Here is what else I notice-fat fills me up quickly.  I eat it & end up eating ridiculously small portions.  It does seem to be similar to the French diet.  I was talking to my parents & my heritage is mostly from Luxemburg and Scotland.   People in Luxemburg eat diets very similar to the French.  The Scottish apparently eat a lot of mutton.  I haven’t tried the mutton yet, but the diet similar to the French seems to be working.  I am curious if other traditional diets that do not reflect my heritage would also fill me.  Does a traditional Mediterranean diet work for everyone or just people in the Mediterranean?  Does each culture evolve to eat just what their culture eats, or can we ea t a variety of diets and be satisfied, so long as it is not the Western diet?  I have definitively ruled out processed food as a way to satisfy hunger-I’ll continue to explore different cultures to see how they affect me.

There have been some exceptions to the carb rule though: the grits and shrimp and the mushroom risotto.  Both are evil carbs-yet I found both amazingly satisfying and filling.  I only ate half of each & was full without much food for the rest of the day.  Probably the best correlation I’ve found between lacking hunger and food choice is taste.  The foods that taste amazing fill me up the most.  Not the foods that taste pretty good.  Not the foods that I thought I really liked, but once I started paying attention, really didn’t taste that good after all-the foods that taste AMAZING!!  There are about twenty-five reasons this could be: fat content, type of fat, psychological response-who knows.  Is it the food content itself-something that makes it taste good that also fills me up? Or is it my response to it?  It feels like I have died and gone to heaven; like I feel when I’m in love.  The first week when I was eating all that good food I was in a state of euphoria.  I found myself less angry in traffic-doing really well.  May be this response shuts down my hunger response?  There have been some exceptions though: the fried oysters filled me up at first, but I was agitated and hungry by mid-afternoon. 

One more thing: I weighed myself this afternoon and I weigh two pounds LESS then I did before my trip when I weighed myself in the morning.  I lost weight without trying at all.  I probably will weigh even less tomorrow morning when I weigh myself.  So far I have lost about 4 pounds in 22 days!