You can have your cake and eat it too
I had a large slice of cake this week but it didn’t break the diet.
Bob Dylan was right. You can have your cake and eat it too. This week is my birthday (no, please. No fuss. But if you must something big and expensive). I got a free piece of cake from Costa to celebrate. I chose the chocolate orange Easter cake with mini eggs. I was going to slice it up bit by bit and have a small piece every day. Or maybe find someone to share it with. Did I do this? What do you think!?
I did mean to eek it out. But I haven’t had cake since Christmas and it was only nine o’clock in the morning. Having coffee and cake for breakfast was an indulgence that was well worth it. Felt naughty and deeply decadent. Thing is... I didn’t gain weight the next day. Because I ate it early so had plenty time to burn it off? Perhaps. I didn’t adjust my calories but I did eat more or less the same number as I had the day before. Right now I’m eating about 1600 calories a day which is a lot when you don’t have much weight to lose. But it’s coming off! I’m walking over 10,000 steps a day and making sure they are either a speed session or gruelling uphill ones. It’s working.
I do think it’s much easier to lose weight in Spring. And it’s felt very Spring like this week. It won’t last. Spring always fools us. Comes early then disappears and from sunshine in March we get snow and frost in April. Sometimes. So I’m not assuming Spring is here for good but it’s here for now and that’ll do.
I’ll be having more cake at the weekend. A big pink one with icing, buttercream and jam, made by Fiona Cairns. I’ll be washing it down with fizz, something else I haven’t had since Christmas. And there will be chocolate taken. Then I’ll start again next week. A diet can survive cake and it should. If you like cake that is. Deprive yourself for too long of one of life’s loveliest foods and you can make yourself miserable. I’m convinced carbs give me a buzz. Carbs combined with fat that is. And cake as well as chocolate hits that sweet spot of sugar and fat.
Apparently this is a combination which doesn’t occur in nature so our brains never developed the mechanism to cope with it. That’s why when you mix carb and fat it’s entirely possible to go on and on eating them in a way it isn’t if you eat them separately. Could you eat a pot of cream on its own? Probably not. But you could eat a tub of ice-cream! Pasta without anything added would soon get too boring to eat. Add butter and cream and you can eat and eat and eat it.
Knowing this is powerful, useful, information. It helps you understand why some foods are seemingly addictive. They give us a buzz. I recall once eating a hot chocolate brownie with ice cream and cream in a Frankie & Benny’s and I swear I felt a glow on the left-hand side of my head.
The key to long-term diet success isn’t going without carb and fat combos; it’s having them occasionally and knowing why it has to be just occasionally.
Easter is coming up. I love Easter. It has all the plus sides of Christmas without having to be cooped up indoors and without any family obligations or need to buy presents. I’ll be having an Easter egg. You bet I will. And maybe a toasted hot cross bun slavered in butter. Then I’ll get back on it.
Getting back on the diet is what many of us find so difficult when we’ve let ourselves off the leash for a bit. If you can do that, you’re as good as home free.
Enjoy your eating. More next week.