The easiest thing in the world to do, at least here in the USA is to eat carbs or other crap for your meal. On a day when you are busy from sunup to sundown, like we were this weekend, to just go out at the end of the day and grab pizza and a big coke is as American as apple pie. We didn’t get apple pie, but we could very easily have done it.

No amount of planning in the world can help when at the end of a very long day neither you nor your significant other can stand the thought of waiting to eat until after you cook. In that case it would be great if the majority of things you could eat out were healthy choices, made with real food, containing no sugar or artificial ingredients. Sadly, I do not live in that world.

Here is where the beauty of looking at the diet I am on as not a diet, but a lifestyle change. Eating my half of a large pizza this weekend, and my large Coke (with real sugar, no less) cost me nothing in the grand scheme. I have not created a new habit nor reinforced an old bad habit. Lucky for me, every weekend is not like this one was, and I normally have plenty of time to cook and eat properly. This weekend was different, and we consumed so much energy this weekend that we almost were required to make up the deficit in our energy by consuming carbs. I know that I felt no ill effects from it in the form of sweaty sheets or inflamed hands. I can only think that doing as much as we did our bodies did something else than what they normally would have done after a normal sedentary weekend.

I don’t have to reset my sugar free day counter to zero. I don’t have a day counter. I don’t have to ratchet down my calorie counter to compensate for the extra carbs I ate this weekend. I don’t have a calorie counter. I am not worried about the weekly weigh in or waist measurement. I don’t do that, because once I got back into my thirty waist jeans I didn’t see the use in keeping track of those things any more.

I am now going back to my regular routine of planning today’s meal using the real fruits and vegetables in my pantry. Today’s meats and fats will be my usual grass fed variety, so that my omega 6 to 3 ratio will be in proportion to the needs of my body. Today’s carbs will be the rolled oats that I had in my muesli and almond mild this morning. Eating like a typical American this weekend cost me nothing, because I am not on that journey, I am on this one.