Fit or Fat?

I've been thinking a lot lately about food--mainly because I'm trying to cut back on it--and more importantly, the portioning of food, the times of day we eat food, the way we purchase and store food, and so forth. So I'm not just sitting around daydreaming about ice cream. Well, sometimes I am. But that's not the point.

I've often thought that meal planning would be the key to weight loss--for me, anyway. I've never really had a firm meal schedule and I tend to eat whenever the heck I want to. When on diets, I try to control my mealtimes, and usually I push breakfast as late as I can stand it, lunch well after noon, a small afternoon snack, and dinner around six. Granted, all of these meals, on a diet, are small. But the main strategy here is to eat as often as possible. To keep less time between my meals, however small they might be, so I don't have as much time between meals to sit around watching the clock. And I do watch the clock. I tell myself, you can have a granola bar at three. So I try to occupy myself. But every five to ten minutes, unless what I'm doing is incredibly engaging, my eye wanders to the clock. It's ridiculous. It's obsessive. But that's what dieting is.

I've never had a healthy relationship with food. We've been somewhat codependent, really. I don't just rely on food for nutrition and energy, but for pleasure--and while I do think that food should be enjoyed, I know that it should be enjoyed in small doses and only when needed. But it's hard to reconcile what I know with what I do. So I try to plan. I try to tell myself: breakfast at eight, lunch at one, dinner at six. I try to tell myself: eat like a king in the morning, a prince at noon, and a pauper at night. I try to tell myself: you can have x, y, and z food items and you can eat them whenever you like, but when you've finished them, that's it. I try to tell myself a lot of things.

Part of the reason I've been thinking about this is that I've gained a few pounds in the last couple of months. Pounds I only recently lost, unfortunately. And I don't want to be a yo-yo dieter. I want to learn healthy eating habits, and from that and exercise I assume weight loss will come. Yes, I would like to have the body of a supermodel, but I am not willing to starve. Nor am I willing to give into food and let my body do what it will. I'm between a rock and a hard place, people. And that hard place is probably a box of fudge.