Hello my friends in food! Today I planned to share how I lost 100 pounds with diet food swaps and recipes. Then I decided that what I needed, weren't more weight loss tips but comfort food swaps. Maybe you need this too. And the good news is, turns out, that as I was organizing recipes, I realized that eating comfort food, REAL comfort food was part of how I lost 100 pounds, too.
What comfort food kind of is and isn't
The usual comfort foods we think of are junk food, fast food, sweets or salty snacks. And I do love me some Lindt Lindor chocolate truffles--double chocolate, oh be still my beating heart! Which is probably beating harder from all the sugar and saturated fat! So one or two of those isn't going to derail weight loss, if you figure it into your calorie restricting budget. In fact, permitting myself some select treats occasionally is part of how I lost 100 pounds.
A Caution about Food Deprivation
Enjoying favorite treats in moderation is a good way to prevent going into food deprivation mode. That's when you feel deprived and resentful so you cheat on your diet and yourself to make up for what you feel deprived of. That's not a good thing. So eating a few treats is good for weight loss. Food deprivation is also about being too hungry as well. When I overdid the calorie restricting, I'd sometimes get shaky and disoriented. I'd actually start to faint. I would stuff food in as fast as I could to stay conscious. It took a lot more than it normally would for my brain to register satisfaction because I was so food deprived. And my blood sugar had dropped so low.
Comfort food for your brain
So the only thing that gets the blood sugar back up, is sugar, or carbs. What has happened is that your brain is starving from eating too little. Because argue any way you want, your brain fuels on sugar. I had to eat four bowls of Frosted Mini Wheats once when I was pregnant and my blood sugar dropped. So that's not good. What is, is to eat enough and the right kinds of sugar that your brain needs to function. And the most brain comforting foods I know of are fruits and good, healthy seed and protein bread. My favorites are Aldi Protein bread, greenish bananas for resistant starch and Medjool dates. These balance fiber with sugar to be calorie forward. I skip juice because it's all the sugar without any of the fiber, vitamins, skin and other good stuff.
Comfort food comforts like a warm blanket
And getting around finally to my point, what I'm usually needing, in the line of comfort food is something warm. Like a bowl of chili or cheese cauliflower soup. Now I know, diet wisdom says to eat cold foods to lose weight. Your body burns calories warming it up to body temperature. But the downfalls sometimes outweigh the benefits. Warm food warms the heart and soul. So if part of how you gained weight was through trauma, especially childhood trauma, you need that warm blanket. What a lot of us experienced was hunger, cold, neglect, exclusion. So now we need inclusion, satiation and self-care.
