Wednesday, June 7, 2017

Birthday Binge 2017...

We all knew it was going to happen. Don't act so surprised ;)

My birthday was amazing. It really was. I started it out on the right foot by teaching a Zumba class and was lucky enough to have 15 great friends come to celebrate with me. I was truly touched to walk into the aerobics room and find that my 3 dearest friends and Jilly's Losers teammates had shown up early and decorated for me. Balloons, a banner, streamers on the fans...and DONUTS! haha! It's like they know me. (All pics were taken POST workout, so don't judge my sweaty skin and red face. The outfit was pre-planned so you can totally judge that :P)



Because my team was still finishing up a relay challenge for Jilly's losers on Monday, a good portion of my day was spent exercising...which made me not feel so bad about all the deliciousness I ate. Aside from Zumba I also managed about 16 miles on the bike, 30 flights of stairs and a bunch of pushups, crunches etc. But you guys don't care about that do ya. You wanna hear what I ate. How weird are you!

On Tuesday I was genuinely nervous about jumping right in to the sweets, so it was late afternoon before I had anything to eat at all. But eventually I decided I could handle it and I let the fun begin. The first thing I did was split a maple bar donut with my hubby. Amy had brought them to Zumba knowing I was bummed about missing national donut day. I felt so loved haha. I ate it slow and it was perfection. I got to try caramel M&M's for the first time and they were pretty good! Hubby had set aside a pack for me when they first came out, bless his heart. My kids had also gotten me some rolos...because chocolate + caramel = my happy place. I had one more small chocolate donut later on, but that was all the sugar I had on Monday. I was more interested in the carbs.

CARBS CARBS CARBS. Seriously. Since Taggarts was closed on Monday, we went to our favorite cafe...Sills. I had half a scone w/ honeybutter, 1 small pancake and some hash browns. (I also had bacon and eggs, but no one cares cause I've been eating that for the last 3 months!) It was a good thing I only had one meal that day because having so many carbs after 3 months of close to nothing filled me up super fast. It was worth every bite though.

Tuesday was a little different. Looking at the portions of things I ate, I really don't feel as though I ate that much, but my body disagreed. I had a single orange roll before my workout since that's all that was left after my children inhaled them the day before haha. It felt good to get in a workout after Monday's carb fest...and knowing what was coming! For lunch, I wanted pizza because I have truly seriously missed it. I LOVE pizza. Nathan suggested we get The Pie. Having not been there in at least a decade, I ordered the pizza that sounded the most decadent. It had cream cheese, chicken, artichokes, etc etc etc...and sounded amazing. I don't know if it was my changed taste buds or if The Pie just isn't my thing...but I wasn't a fan. I had 1 piece (without the crust) and was done. Though I did have 1 1/2 pieces of garlic bread (YUM). Nathan had also stopped at Great Harvest and brought home a loaf of pumpkin chocolate chip bread because he knows how much I love it...and I had a slice of that after lunch. But only one. I'm kind of impressed with myself there.

Before dinner, I had another handful of rolos and caramel m&m's to um...make sure they'd be out of the house and unable to tempt me once birthday binge 2017 was over.

Then came the part I'd been so excited about. We drove up into the mountains in Morgan and went to Taggarts. It's this tiny little cabin restaurant and it was crowded! It was obvious this place was a big deal. We even heard a guy walk out saying, "That's the best burger I've ever had in my life!" When you walk in, there's 2 HUGE dessert cases. We all picked out the ones that looked the best so we'd know what to get on the way out.

We ordered mozzarella sticks and red pepper/cream cheese poppers for appetizers...and honestly, I could've stopped there. The poppers were unlike anything I'd ever had before and I'm pretty sure I ate 5 of them. I was full after that...but I wasn't going to quit. I had ordered a chicken tostada because I kinda just wanted some veggies...but this tostada had more beans and rice and meat and cheese than any I'd ever seen. It was good, but not great. I'd prefer a Cafe Rio sweet pork salad any day, but hey..now I know. I ended up only eating about 1/4 of it before I called it quits. I did steal a few french fries from my kids though and THOSE were amazing. Of course their fry sauce didn't hurt either.

The biggest reason we went to Taggarts was for the dessert. Last year for my birthday, I didn't want to eat a whole cake, so I did a cake smash and barely got any in my mouth. That worked well. This year, I decided to go OUT for dessert so that we could just eat it and be done with it. But since we were all so full, we took it home. Annnnnd....since they had SO MANY that looked amazing and I couldn't decide...each of us picked the one we wanted so that we could just try them all.


Starting at the top of the pic and going to the right we got...chocolate cake, rocky road brownie, NY cheesecake w/ raspberries, turtle cheesecake, german chocolate cheesecake and carrot cake. I nearly went into a sugar coma just looking at them. But honestly...they looked better than they tasted (to me). My sister Heidi was right...no sugar for three months made them all taste WAYYYYY too sweet and I couldn't handle it! The only one that I had more than a  tiny bite or two of was the raspberry cheesecake because the cheesecake part balanced out the sweetness of the topping. The carrot cake was good, but still too sweet. Everyone else seemed to love them though because most of them disappeared by this morning!

So I went to bed feeling fuller than I had in MONTHS and honestly feeling pretty sick. But I had expected and planned for that. This morning I woke up with the mindset that my birthday was 100% over and it was right back to business. I was grateful for that. My biggest fear going into this birthday was that it would derail me and bring back all my cravings. It didn't. I went to Barre Fusion at the gym this morning to get in a good sweat (Thanks for kicking my butt Angie!) and then came home and had a 1 carb waffle with strawberries and heavy cream. And THAT...was the best "dessert" of them all.

The scale was up 4lbs from yesterday's weigh-in, but that's okay. I know it's at least 80% water retention from the massive influx of carbs and it will come off with a few days of good, low-carb eating. I'm honestly proud of myself. I needed to do this. I needed to be reminded of how much better I feel eating this way and how much my body dislikes all the junk I used to have on a regular basis.

So it's back to work. I decided to make another paper chain this morning to get my girls and I through another stretch of no sugar before my mom and sister come into town (YAY!) I'm proud of them for wanting to do it again! 17 days will seem like nothing compared to 96! But next time...there will be no binge and it will be nothing to write home about :)

No comments:

Post a Comment