Day 22 - Are we there yet?

     Only 8 more days left and I'm filled with an excessive amount of emotion. A small part of me wants to just call it good and throw in the towel early, part of me wonder's what comes next, and part of me is melodramatic and thinks that I won't survive another 8 days. Honestly the hardest part about this little adventure is cooking all the time. We had gotten into a routine of calling for delivery when we just didn't feel like making food. This got me thinking about when this all started (the habitual convenience food).
     As I've said before, I didn't grow up this way. Mom always made dinner and we sat around the table and ate it. Pizza was for special occasions. I didn't eat out a lot in college either, unless they were running a special like cheap cheeseburger Tuesday. This probably started 8 years ago with my first teaching job. I was at school ALL the time and I quit smoking, plus had a steady income. It was the perfect storm. I replaced smoking with food, ate to relieve stress, and found eating out to be much faster and more convenient than cooking at home. I also ate in front of the TV instead of at the table. At the time, I didn't think about the habits I was forming and just how hard they would be to break later. It always seems to much harder to culture the good habits rather than the bad ones, and now, here I am trying to re-write eight years of bad food habits.
     In the grand scheme of things, 22 days of healthy eating is just a drop in the bucket. I've got to keep pushing myself to make good decisions for my health. Of course I plan to indulge a little over the Holidays, but for the most part, we are going to try and keep a few things out of our diet on a more permanent basis - dairy, processed sugar, and refined grains. After the 30 days are up, just eating corn salsa and re-fried beans is going to be a treat! This is going to be an uphill battle, but at some point, we will reach the top of the hill.