So I gotta be honest – I’m about 2 and 1/2 weeks into the Heart Healthy diet, and it’s getting to that mental point where I kinda just want to eat something REALLY salty. Because I LOVE salt, and there is that mental game we play where anything we are limiting suddenly becomes highly desirable. This is where things get tough. Yesterday, the rubber met the road.

One weekend a month, the kids go to grandma’s and my husband and I have date weekend. This particular weekend is date weekend and yesterday, Charlie and I went a-wandering. We started out at one of our favorite breakfast places and I wanted something delicious and I also tried to get something that would be mostly heart healthy: huevos rancheros. They make these with a crunchy taco shell, black beans, poached eggs, cheese, and avocado. Mostly low in sodium and pretty darn low in saturated fat. I ate half the plate and took the rest home. So far, so good.

Mid-morning we walked around a park and got a tad chilly in the fall air, so we went to a local coffee shop and I wanted a pumpkin steamer. To be true to my heart healthy diet, I elected to have it made with soy milk (though fat free milk would have been fine) to avoid saturated fat. So far, still good.

Then it got tough. We drove up to Tacoma to check out some stores and about mid-day hunger set in. I had a craving for some super-not-heart-healthy tortilla chips with nacho cheese. Cheap, not-even-food, concession-stand machine, plasticky pasteurized processed cheese product straight from 7-11. Definitely not conducive to meeting my nutritional goals for the day, particularly since I knew we had plans to go to another restaurant for dinner and I needed to save sodium and saturated fat for that. But I was started to listen to the devil on the shoulder: “You’re sick of watching your sodium. Come ooooonn…you’ve been so good for 2 and 1/2 weeks! Just don’t worry about it.” He was right – I was sick of limiting my sodium! So there! I’m going to eat it and I don’t even care!
So I ate it. And it was just as satisfying as I anticipated it would be. Alright, worth it. Maybe for dinner I’ll try to pick something more carefully.

We went to a nice restaurant for dinner and I thought I might to try getting a lean meat with some steamed veggies and maybe a roll or something. Then I got my menu and there it was – my favorite food. Seafood fettuccine. Ooooohhhhh boy.

At least I got the salad instead of the chowder…right?

I got it. I had to. It was amazing. In the whole day I overdid my calories by 300, exceeded my sodium goal by over 900 mg (I had 138% of my daily goal!) and blew my saturated fat out of the water by more than quadruple with that cheesy nacho goodness and creamy white wine butter sauce.

If I had high blood pressure or high cholesterol, this one day probably wouldn’t have been too big of a deal as long as it didn’t happen super often. If I had congestive heart failure, my sodium binge could have hospitalized me. Here enlies the mental game of a “diet,” which also tends to be one of my least favorite things about the idea of dieting. Diets are likely to promote this pendulum swing from restriction to bingeing. For me, it’s much more desirable to focus on including lots of the things that are really good for me than focus on restricting things that aren’t as good and overall promoting healthful moderation, for this very reason. But it’s super tricky if not restricting something could land you in a hospital bed or worse.

Things are back to normal now that I got my crazy day out of my system, but anyway, I wanted to make sure I kept myself honest and took note of this mental game – even dietitians are not immune to the psychology of “dieting!”