back from France

One of the reasons I began South Beach was that I got a gig singing Gilda on this amazing island in France called Belle ile en mer (beautiful island of the sea, directly translated) it is special to me for many reasons not least because I met my sweetheart there six years ago. With regard weight, weight removal and trying to be a normal person about food, I have quite a few interesting observations. I lost 20 pounds between my audition in January and the opening night of production in July, the weight loss was far faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar slower than my impatient self could take but here is the good news, it is coming off so friggin' slowly that it seems it is not coming back with any haste either, I know this because I went to the island with all kinds of good intentions which included six days on and one day off to eat whatever I wanted, that was a super reasonable idea I think and it lasted around 36 hours, luckily I was not anywhere near delusional enough to plan workouts, except the easy walk to the nearest boulangerie where you could get pane au chocolate so beautiful you 'wished you could rent a room with it' (I heard a really funny irish comedian say that and I had to quote it. as it is utterly true) it also only cost 85 cents, fresh out of the oven.... my mouth is watering...mmm, warm pane au chocolat, okay must get a grip, anyway I consumed a vast amount of those, I was also utterly in the thrall of the Brittany's coke, it is called Breizh cola, and the two os us were BFFs, I had one a day and we never got tired of one another, like all sodas in Europe it has real sugar and not high fructose corn syryp in it, along with the odd Grimbergen dark beer which was as delicious as I remembered good dark beers to be...I won't even talk about the pizza with shrimp, pesto, smoked salmon and lashings of melted cheese which I noshed with gusto at least once a week, okay so here, after the list of heavenly edibles is my observation, I put on 1 and a half pounds. I couldn't believe it, when I got home I changed the battery of my scale as I just can't fathom that is possible, compared to the 2 weeks before I left where very little even passed my lips and I was walking up to three hours a day in the blazing heat and I never lost a single pound!!!!!! So yes, intensely frustrating, but a huge relief when I got home. I am trying to be grateful, instead of deeply resentful, that a summer filled with amazingly decadent French cuisine did not sky rocket my weight as I believe it would have before I had tried to correct my sluggish metabolism. Perhaps I am becoming normal?? and I do not need to obsess about every morsel, perhaps it is true that american food is of such poor quality that we cannot help but add poundage when we consume it, perhaps it was just the heavens giving me a bit of a break... I dunno... but suffice to say I decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth, and the second I got home I jumped back into phase one, I had some hunger issues and craved alcohol at first which is in fact a sugar craving cleverly disguised, but other than that I was fine, and I am back on the straight and narrow, although last night I had a mouthful of my honey's creme brulee... luckily it wasn't very good so I could resist pretty easily, dreaming of France and their amazing love affair with pleasure instead.