Yesterday was supposed to be a low-calorie, low-carbohydrate day, but things didn’t go as planned. I gave in to kind of a strange craving that I have intermittently, overindulged at a work pizza party, and engaged in a little emotional eating last night after some disappointment at work. In the end, I gained over two pounds, which isn’t a surprise given the number of missteps yesterday.

Every once in a while, I have this weird craving for summer sausage and Swiss cheese on crackers. The desire for this particular food combination stems from nostalgia, I think: I have a memory of eating it as a child. For some reason, my brain tends to conjure up one memory in particular: I’m sitting outside at a table on our back deck one summer evening, and we’re eating crackers with cheese and sausage. I was probably somewhere around eight years old at the time. This is a comforting memory for me (I have a lot of memories of time spent with my family that are comforting), and I think there’s an emotional link between the memory and the craving.

Anyway, I got this craving yesterday, so when I went to the grocery store in the morning, I got some Swiss cheese and summer sausage. I did skip the crackers (carbohydrates), but beef sausage combined with cheese is not a good dietary choice because it’s high in fat and thus high in calories (not to mention sodium). Highly processed meats like sausage are really never good choices as they are highly inflammatory and linked to things like colon cancer, so I should have known better, but I indulged.

The pizza party at work was a surprise, and I’ve been craving pizza ever since starting this project nearly two months ago because I haven’t had it in over two months. I’m not sure what it is about pizza, but it’s one of my favorite things. In addition to the combination of flavors, I like the texture of the crust and the fact that it fills me up. But this was not great pizza, and I should have avoided it given the calorie and carbohydrate load, but I didn’t. Eating mediocre pizza reminded me that, if I’m going to stray from good eating habits, I need to make sure it’s worth it.

I was supposed to have just a salad for dinner, but it was a rough day at work and there was some unexpected disappointment that I struggled with during the course of the day, so I had more cheese and sausage in addition to the salad, and I also had a few single-serve cups of ice cream. The ice cream had been meant for today since today will be a “cheat” day due to having lunch with a friend, but it was just sitting there in the freezer after a bad day at work, so it was gone shortly after I got home last night.

I think today will be my “goodbye to sugar” day, so I’ll pick up something sweet to indulge in before trying to avoid any significant sugar intake for the remainder of this project. This will probably result in another day of weight gained rather than weight lost, but I intend to bring more discipline to my weekend eating, so hopefully I can lose a bit of weight on Saturday and Sunday. We’ll see.