Color Me Fit: weight loss, fitness, exercise

Sometimes, it seems to me that weight loss and learning better eating/living/exercising habits is much like training your dog: she’ll pick up some things faster than others, and it’s almost impossible to tell why she’ll be quietly waiting for you to walk out instead of running in your legs to be the first out, and why, on the other hand, you need to teach her a thousand times to sit when you say “sit”, because she just doesn’t get it.

The same thing happens to me with certain food-related behaviours. For instance, baking a cake and not licking the spoon and casserole once I’m done with it.

My birthday is tomorrow, which is a holiday in France, hence why I’ve done what I’ve done today. At the place where I work, it’s the custom that people bring something to eat and/or drink for their birthdays. Everyone does that, and nobody cares about what you bring (a Vietnamese colleague once brought home-made nems). In my case, since I don’t have much space to cook complex meals, but also don’t have money to buy croissants and the likes for 15 people, I decided to bake a chocolate cake.

So I got up half an hour earlier this morning to bake, and I did so before breakfast. That’s the key part: before breakfast. Which means that when I was done and had put the cake in the oven to cook it, I was ravenous, having been surrounded by sweet smells of chocolate-flavoured dough, and I was really, really eager to eat.

But I still didn’t lick the spoon. Not even dipped a finger in the casserole I had used to prepare the dough. I simply put hot water in it in the sink, then went to make coffee and fix myself muesli with berries and a little milk.

It’s not the first time this happens; today, it was just more noticeable because I was hungry–with real hunger due to having just slept 8 whole hours, of course. I used to lick the spoon, I used to dip it again to lick more of the chocolate dough, and I also even used to discretely not put as much dough in the moulding plate as I should, so that there would be more for me to lick! (Maybe it’s a habit I had taken from when I was a child, and was allowed to eat what was left, so I always hoped there’d be a lot left. I don’t know. It was a little pathetic.) Then, it just happened that two years ago, when I started this blog and thought for the first time in my life to be serious about my weight because I wanted it (not someone else, and not just circumstances either), I took the decision to put an end to that habit.

It’s been two years, and I haven’t licked a spoon of dough since then when baking, which doesn’t happen once in a blue moon only, I admit.

Maybe I’m really like a dog, and I’ll have to learn all my new, healthy habits one by one, and some will stick better and faster than others.

In the meantime, I can probably go on working on not touching those pains au chocolat waiting for us all in the kitchen of our office building… since, after all, there is also a delicious, home-baked chocolate cake waiting for us at 5 pm!