my work in progress: eating, part three

Told you this was going to be long!  I think this is the post I've dreaded the most. I've considered not posting this at all, because it's really embarrassing, but maybe someone else will recognize themselves here and know they're not alone.

Continued from last week...

Eating, Part Three

I’ve talked about my eating habits, but I haven’t yet shared what I actually ate.  I mentioned that I would finally share that with you all what I used to eat on a typical day before my weight loss surgery, so I will now.  It's pretty embarrassing, but I think it needs to be done.  I won’t talk about childhood eating, since it was they typical junk food and such.  Adulthood is when it really came into its own.

Are you ready?

So, let’s say Bob went camping for the weekend. He usually left right from work, which meant we was gone when I get home from work.  That left me Friday night, all day Saturday, and half of Sunday to indulge.

Let’s start with Friday night.  On my way home from work I would pick up something from McDonald’s.  If I were going to be ordering a meal, like pizza or sushi, I would get just a double cheeseburger and a 9-piece chicken McNuggets. Then I’d go home and order sushi.  I would order two mango shrimp rolls, a spicy tuna crunch roll, a shrimp tempura roll, and a lobster tempura roll. Yes, FIVE rolls. I would also get an order or either crab rangoons or fried chicken wings.  I would eat about 70% of that and eat the rest the following day. After all, I had McDonald’s before that so I was already on my way to being full.  If I wasn’t ordering a meal later, I would get a double cheeseburger, a 9-piece chicken McNuggets, and a Big Mac value meal.  And I’d eat it all. Once in a while I would have some nuggets left over, which I would eat before the end of the night.

Saturday morning I would go to the grocery store and buy a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and some other snacks.  On my way home I would stop at McDonald’s and buy my breakfast, which I would eat at home.  I would order the steak, egg, and cheese bagel value meal, an extra hash brown, and a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit.  And I’d eat it all.

Lunch might be a trip to McDonald’s or Duchess.  If I went to McDonald’s I would get a Big Mac extra value meal, a double cheeseburger, and a 9-piece chicken McNuggets.  If I went to Duchess, it was usually a Crispy Chicken value meal and either a hot dog or a 9-piece chicken nuggets.
I would then snack throughout the day on whatever I bought at the grocery store.  Usually chips or maybe a bagel.

Dinner would usually be some form of fast food or delivery again.  If I had sushi Friday night, I would usually order pizza on Saturday night.  I would get a large or medium pizza and an order of Buffalo wings. I was never able to eat a whole pizza (I know that’s the image people have in their heads when they see an overweight person), so I would eat the wings and maybe three slices of pizza. Maybe an hour later I would have another slice.  All accompanied by a couple cans of diet soda.

Then Cindy would come over for a “movie and ice cream” night.  We would break out the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream—one pint each, no bowls. Sometimes we would also have homemade popcorn, popped with oil and loaded with Land O’ Lakes butter and salt. So delicious!

Sunday morning was another trip down the road to McDonald’s for a steak, egg, and cheese bagel value meal, an extra hash brown, and a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit.

Sunday afternoon Bob would get home from camping and we would usually go out for a late lunch, where I would order an appetizer and meal, like usual.

After eating all this food, I would be absolutely busting full.  It was as though I had just eaten Thanksgiving dinner--twice.    I ate like that so often that it distorted my perception of feeling full.  It was so far off that I didn’t think I was full unless I was almost ready to puke. (It's something I have to be very conscious of, even now that I've had weight loss surgery and lost over 120 pounds.)

I also ate a lot at work.  When I started working as a bank teller, I was in the downtown area.  My branch was across the street from a restaurant, Roberto’s, which served everything from pizza and burgers, to steak and seafood.  I eventually got in the habit of going across the street to Roberto’s just about every day for lunch.  I would order a Philly steak and cheese grinder with heavy mayo, and an order of fries with a side of tartar sauce (if you haven’t tried tartar sauce on fries, you should—it’s delicious!).  Several years later I was working in the administrative offices of the bank. I worked in an office building that had a sandwich shop downstairs.  I would go there before I even went upstairs to work.  I would order a sausage, egg and cheese on a toasted sesame bagel and also a buttered hard roll.  I always felt self-conscious ordering all that, so I would usually tell the clerk that the roll was for later, or that I couldn’t make up my mind about what I wanted to eat that morning.  That was a lie, of course. I ate all of it as soon as I got upstairs to my desk.  At lunchtime, I would often go to the Italian deli or to the sandwich shop downstairs and get a big sandwich, a bag of chips, a bottle of diet soda, and some sort of sweet.  That might be an average lunch for a lot of people, but it was a lot of food when I was still full from breakfast.

To be continued...