Carbohydrates

People frequently complain about gaining weight over the holidays, and that makes so much sense, given the general notion of joy equaling rich foods, heavy with butter, sugar and meat – all very customary around Christmas time. It’s also cold and dark in the mornings when we get up, and it’s cold and even darker when we come back home from work or school, so it’s understandable that we resort to comfort foods (few of which, unfortunately, seem to be calorie light-weights) to give morale a much needed boost. But it is unsurprising we feel it later on the scale or at the waistband.

I guess I must be some sort of freak, because it’s not really the holidays but the year’s darkest months, January and February, that get me in trouble. Eating for comfort is one aspect, but my working longer hours because of my lunch breaks spent at the park or community forest now, instead of at my desk, is another. Working late means eating more. Simplest of math.

To me this means carbohydrates. I don’t do well on a protein-heavy diet, such as Atkins and keto, especially not in the winter when I crave something comforting and filling. Over the summer I might be fine eating salad and a piece of meat or fish for dinner. But in the winter, I need to have carbs. Rice, pasta, polenta, potatoes, bread … Any of those will do the job, but to say I can easily resist freshly baked goods would be lying. I’ve gotten better about cake, because anywhere that’s not a hipster organic bakery, this automatically means wheat flour, which I try to avoid. Unfortunately, I know how to bake cakes, too, and I use other types of flour.

It might be a losing battle. My solution for now is restraint, and to have less of the stuff than I would have done when I was young. (Spaghetti Carbonara plus the contents of a bread basket for lunch?! Yup, that was me, and I was still skinny. Youth metabolism, sigh.)

So, if you have any solutions for a methadone program for carbs addiction, please let me know, but don’t come at me with eat more meat, that just won’t cut it for me. Legumes are not a solution for every day, but I like them, I can live with eating more of them, and I am.

So much about the food conundrum, which I’m so very well aware is a luxury first-world problem. We are very lucky to be able to be this picky, also neurotic about our weight, and I know that.

Moving on to crafts, which keep my hands busy, my mind at peace, and if all goes well, give me (and you, I guess) something pretty to look at when I’m done.

This yarn was an impulse purchase at a cheap store, where the motley colors and fluffy softness strongly suggested to be used for making a new couch cushion, which I hadn’t done in a long, long time. I tried out a few stitches and made my daughter choose, who decided for this:

Knit two, purl two, repeat. The end. That cushion took only a couple of hours to make, but I had to take breaks in between. My fingers get tired really fast when I’m forced to work with anything thicker than a 3 or 4 needle, and this was probably a 7 or 7,5. Charlie promised to leave the cushion alone, and so far he has, despite the suspicious demeanor displayed in the pics.

I’m also steadily knitting new color block socks on the side, whenever I’m just sitting and doing nothing else, playing with colors as I go. The blue ones will be for my daughter, and the yellow ones I will probably wear myself. Few people really like yellow, even though it’s such a happy color. Not easy to wear when you’re light-skinned, but I suppose on my feet it will be just fine.

And now my dog feels I really need to stop writing and take him out to pee:

Gotta run, thank you for reading, lovely people, bye :-).