Food

I love good food. I love shopping for it, I love cooking it, and I love eating it.

But before all of this happened I was actively trying to lose weight, and I was being very careful about food and what I ate. I had a routine and an exercise regimen that was working for me. I lost around 20-25 pounds.

My knee surgery made my exercise regime impossible for a few months. And staying home has made it much harder to regulate what I eat. On top of that there's the stress-eating and comfort foods.

It's been hard to reliably have fresh groceries for making dinners (I used to go to the store almost daily, now we go maybe once a week) so we've been relying on delivery and take-out more than I would like, and eating a lot less fish. (That's probably the hardest thing right now for me, we used to eat fish several times a week, which was both delicious and good for weight-management.) We started using Imperfect Foods for produce delivery, which has been a little hit-or-miss so far, but it is helpful to have fresh produce when they deliver mid-week.

It's funny because in a lot of ways I have more time to cook now - I 'get home' from work as soon as I turn the computer off, rather than needing to worry about a commute, shopping, etc. But I have so much less energy than usual, I am just constantly exhausted from stress, worry, and balancing work with kid-management. So we eat a lot more pasta and other quick-to-make meals than I would really like.

I've also been baking a lot more than I usually would, a friend turned me on to an amazing chocolate chip cookie recipe that I've been making most weekends. I know it's bad for me, but I need the comfort of both baking and eating. (And my nutritionist says that it's more important to look after my mental health right now than to count calories...)

Mercifully I haven't really been gaining back the weight I lost, so far at least, and I should be able to get back to my exercise bike in earnest pretty soon which will help.