What are your Trigger Foods?

Iris posted a great article this morning that made me think about my trigger foods and what I substitute them with.  My number 1 trigger food is Chocolate.  I get my daily fix for Chocolate from my quest bars and my vitatops.  My second trigger food is potatoes.  I sub my potatoes with green beans.  I buy green beans by the case and use different seasonings and low cal sauces to doll them up.  My third trigger food was bread.  I just say no most of the time or will sub with a wheat sandwich thin.  My fourth is pasta. I have tried many substitutions for the pasta but none were to my liking.  I mostly said no but once in a blue moon with have some of the real stuff.  I am very careful on this path plus I can not overdo or it will come back up on me.  And, number 5, I am a wonderful baker but I do not bake anymore unless it is a special occasion, birthday, holidays, etc.  This was a hugh trigger food as I love my own baking/cooking, I would bake every weekend and make cookies doing the week.  My kids had a hard time getting use to this.  I finally bought a box of frozen cookie dough and with treat them with a couple of cookies each everyone in a while.  

Committing to a life changing event is something that we don't always plan in advance for.  It is like having a baby.  We want one, don't really know how it is going to turn out and surely don't know if we can afford one but we do it and find that somewhere in life it all worked out.  That is like Weight loss Surgery.  It is a life changing event.  It is hard to plan for something that you have never experienced before.  But, we want it and we don't know how it will turn out.  We are not even sure we can afford it afterwards but somewhere and some how, we will make it work.

What are your triggers and subs for them? 

DESSERT. My grandmother fully believed that every meal should have something sweet to fini**** Cinnamon toast for breakfast, jello or pudding with lunch and pie or cake with dinner and lets not forget a bowl of ice cream and a cookie before bedtime. Occassionally I'll pick up some SF jello but I make a point not to eat it after my meal. It has to be a considerable time afterwards. It's not so much the food as it is the timing.

I can't keep store bought crunchy cookies in the house....they're from the Devil. There's some mental instability in my brain that causes me to CRAVE them in the middle of the night. It's like they are capable of waking me up from a deep sleep. Now having said that, I can bake up cookies by the dozen and rarely eat one of them. I may have a spoonful of the dough when I'm making it but rarely the finished product. The men in my life polished off the better part of 3 dozen last night.

Thankfully I've always been an unsweet tea drinker. I made the shift to decaf  during my pre-op phase and I've never looked back. If I feel really, really bad then I may sip on a coke zero. 1 will last me all day though.

I can say without a doubt my TRIGGER is SUGAR. It was more than a year out from surgery when I even ate something that had real sugar in it (and it was on accident). I waited and waited for the dumping to start. I was convinced that I was going to be that patent who severly dumped...thus avoiding all sugar forever. Bummer.

There's going to be some detoxing going on in my life in the next few weeks. I can warn yall all that it won't be pretty and it certainly won't be easy. BUT it will so be worth it.

- Iris

Iris, I have a feeling there is going to be lots of detoxing from everyone.  I didn't think about store bought foods but Nacho Doritos do not enter my house ever.......

What a great question, Tess (Hi Iris:)...Fortunately, I am not a sweets person...never really was.  I did eat sugar, but mostly in the form of sugary drinks...never a big cake/cookie/ice cream eater.  But when I do want some sweetness, I sub a Vitatop (thanks Tess) or a Quest protein bar, which I haven't had in a long time.  What I am though, is a savory or salty food lover and not chips, etc.  My biggest trigger food is HAM!  Any kind, but especially the ham on the bone that I have given up cooking unless it's for a large family meal.  If I cook one for my home, I will eat the whole thing in just a few days.  Salty, dangerous stuff!!

Pasta used to be a trigger, but as long as I don't have it in my house nor cook it, then I don't even give it a second thought.  I just eat the sauce and a salad or vegetable.  Since starting my plan to lose the regain and get to my ultimate goal, I've learned that you don't really have to give up any foods.  But if I can't trust myself to eat it in moderation, then I won't touch it!  Tough love :)

Oh Shelia....I will think of you when I am baking my ham for Christmas!  My hubby's company gave out hams as a Christmas bonus and he and my son, who works there part time, both brought hams home.  Ham is a no no for me too!  Too much sodium and I blow up like a puffer fish.  You should have seen my son's face when he found out he was getting a ham as a bonus especially since he went vegetarian.  He said it would have been nice if they at least through in some potatoes and broccoli too!

LOL, poor guy!  I'm feeling you, Tess.  I did one of the hams for our family Thanksgiving gathering.  I took none of it home afterwards, then wished I had but was happy I didn't.  But my daughter will be cooking a huge turkey for Christmas and that is lovely protein, so that I can handle.

I am sending everybody away with leftovers.  I hope to be ham free at the end of Christmas Day.  Also, my daughter and niece are making the sweets so I will not have any of those leftover either!

I feel ya on the ham. I did cook a small one just prior to Thanksgiving while we had the kids in. what was left was immediately divided into ziplocs and tossed in the freezer. Those will show up throughout the winter for soup.

Thankfully pasta has never been a favorite---it's one of the few things I can't seem to tolerate since surgery. I guess it continues to expand in my pouch. It makes me GROUCHY. Not many things do that.

- Iris

My number one and only one trigger is sweets from candy to desserts and my sub is Balance Protein Bars and the Atkins Protein Bars (Peanut Roll Bar). 

Now that I am back home with the entire family I made it clear I cook only for Sunday family dinners and all the left over food, desserts, and homemade bread must be taken home afterward which has made my two brothers very happy they even brought their own Tupperware to Sunday dinner. 

I love it!  You know that gives me a Christmas idea.  I think I will get colorful glad containers to give out to everyone to take leftovers home.  Thanks!