Losing weight — and keeping my blood glucose in order — would be so much easier if the pantry and refrigerator weren’t filled with food I don’t need to be eating.
Willpower would be good, too, but I confess to not having a lot of that: If it’s there, and I like it, I eat it. Even if it’s something I shouldn’t be indulging in.
My husband does the grocery shopping. Which is good, because I don’t like to do the grocery shopping. I’m not sure he wants me to, either. He is the coupon king and I just go in and get what I want, regardless of coupons or sale items.
The problem is, he picks up what’s on sale or has a coupon, whether we need it or not. “What are we going to do with pomegranate-mushroom baking sauce?” I’ll ask.
“It was on sale.”
Thanks to his insistence on grabbing sale items (hopefully that also have coupons), the pantry, refrigerator and freezer are stuffed. In the case of the pantry, whatever items can’t be crammed into those shelves have overflowed to a cupboard I could use for storage and shelves in the hallway that were meant for storage. Storage, that is, of small appliances and large bowls; not for the world’s largest collection of peanut butter, soup, pasta, and diced tomatoes.
The problem is not so much that the cupboards are stuffed; the larger problem is that there is no space for what I want. Is there space in the refrigerator to cram in that salad? How about some tuna fish for the pantry? Sugar-free frozen pops for the freezer? The answer in all cases is likely to be “no.”
It would be great to nuke a frozen entrée and have that with a salad for lunch. If only…
He is thoughtful. He brings home things he knows I like. However, while I like many of the foods he searches out just for me, they’re frequently in my “oops! be careful” category. So I eat them up in order to rid the house of the offending cuisine — only to find that he’s stocked the larder with more. I finally had to tell him a couple of days ago (again) to please stop buying certain food items.
Maybe he will. For a while. Or perhaps he will hear me when I say I need space for the foods I buy. I can tell you he doesn’t listen when I tell him to stop bringing so much food home! We have so much I can’t find anything! I even have to be careful to wait until he’s away from the house to put food out for agencies collecting for the food bank; he’s been known to go through the bag and remove items he doesn’t believe I should be giving away. (If you have 10 jars of peanut butter, what’s the problem with giving away two of them? Besides, they were on sale.)
What to do, what to do? It drives me nuts, but it’s one of his few faults (aside from working too late every day, using the stationary bicycle for clothes storage, taking over part of my clothes closet, letting his mail pile up on the dining room table…and I’ll just stop there). Perhaps it’s part of his nurturing side. He also overbuys for the cats. Probably from a closeout table, but hey…
Do you think it would work if I told him he could indulge me, but with only one item instead of enough to fill whatever empty space exists? And in small containers only? My philosophy has long been “one package, one serving” — no matter whether the package is one ounce or one pound.
Yep. I really have to get him to change his habits. And whaddaya mean, I need to change mine instead? Can you just imagine the wasted food if I were the one to change?
