BOO!

For about a year now, I've been trying to lose 10 pounds. I am not having marked success. This is where I can tell that I am the F-word. My metabolism, it ain't what it used to be. And, let's be honest: this whole mom-gig is not helping matters either.

Back in the day, when I was slim, I often had a bowl of cereal around 5 pm and called it dinner. And then I didn't eat again until morning. The end.

My husband, he of the big dinner plate, was horrified at this behavior. Where was the meat? Where was the salad? The veggies? The potato permutation? What you are doing, woman, cannot be called dinner....get thee behind me, Satan! Blah, blah, blah....

Sometimes I would eat dessert and call that dinner. You know, 5 cookies and a diet Coke or something along those lines. But that was all I ate. I did not eat a 3 course meal and top it off with 5 cookies. That would have made me fat.

And so it has.

Cooking for other people, especially for kids, always means you end up eating more than you need to. With my current metabolism, I could get by on three Ritz crackers and a hardboiled egg. But I don't.

It is abysmally difficult to cut back when you are used to eating a certain amount. And I am more than a little p.o.'d that my best eating years were sandwiched in between bouts of violent morning sickness. What cruel irony that pregnancy, normally a nirvana of eating for most women, was a minefield of nausea and food aversions for me. All three times. All nine (ten) months. It was so bad with my last pregnancy that I only gained 16 pounds, all of which I lost in the first week post partum.....but somehow, 2.5 years later, my butt is still pregnant. Go figure that.

So, my scale ambushed me this morning. I've been working out harder and more often, I am trying to eat sensibly, and this morning I found I have budged not even one pound since last week.

I seriously wonder what would happen if I just had cereal for dinner. Would the kids mutiny and throw their pork chops in the trash? Would my husband turn me in to the dinner police? Can you even go back to how you ate in your 20s and expect it to work? How come Giada De Laurentiis cooks up a storm but doesn't look like Ina Garten?