Junk Food Junkie

I have been a junk food junkie my whole life. I think that it started because my mother can't cook. When forced to cook she makes the blandest food ever. Seriously. I was at my parents' house last week and as a treat I made meatloaf for the family. As I sat down to eat with my brother and my sister A2, and A2 was all, "This is really good. I mean really good. Mom's cooked soup every night for the last week. We haven't eaten real food in a week." Yeah. So is it any wonder that, as a kid, I spent most of my allowance on McDonald's instead of eating at home?

Unfortunately this necessity morphed into a habit, one that persisted througout college, where fast food was the only food I could afford, and into the post-college years where, unfortunately, it started catching up with me. I am not one of those people that makes an effort to exercise. In college, the peripatetic lifestyle worked to my advantage and I kept my svelte figure even though I subsisted on hamburgers and tacos. Then I started working, sitting behind a desk for eight hours every day, and my only exercise consisted of going down the stairs from my apartment in the morning, and back up the same stairs in the evening. That's it. Is it surprising to anyone that I put on 25 pounds in three months?

Well it was to me. It was hard for me to accept this change. I kept thinking that it would just reverse automatically without any effort on my part. After all, I had always been thin, why couldn't I just keep on being thin?

I didn't do anything about it for a while, but then I turned 25 and I felt the need for a change. So I stopped drinking cokes and gave up sugar and fast food. It worked like a charm. I was actually losing weight rapidly and it was awesome! Two months after I went on that diet I got pregnant and I had the worst morning sickness ever. I lost like 10 more pounds in three months. I didn't really gain much weight during my pregnancy, and after the baby was born he nursed like a fiend, so my weight pretty much stayed the same, but, having a new baby and no time, I went back into fast food and coke mode.

When the Moosh went down to nursing just twice a day, all that weight came rushing back en force. I put on 15 pounds in no time. I still had no time to cook, and the only restaurants open after 10:30 PM are fast food places.

But now I've switched to evening shift and I have time to cook. So for about the third time in six years, I've given up the junk food and the eating out. Maybe I can keep it up for a while. At least until the next kid is born.