I´m astonished about myself

I have never been a fan of budgeting. In my native family, there was one person who was a veritable bookkeeping fiend, who kept tabs on everything from money spent on groceries to how much gas our car had used per kilometer. Everything was duly recorded, and woe to the perp who didn´t fill out the required lists, or whose lists didn´t add up.
It was enough to make me shy away from anything that looked even remotely like such a list. I didn´t like being made accountable, neither in the literal nor in the figurative sense.
It took me a long time to re-learn that budgeting is something that can make life easier, instead of harder.
What changed everything for me there was the realization that a budget isn´t meant to chastise you after the fact for going out of control. It´s meant to keep you from going out of control in the first place. And the control it keeps you under needn´t be something external. It can be your own.
These days I, too, am a listmaker. Not to keep tabs on anybody else, but to keep control of my life.
One place that helps immensely is my food intake. It is a really satisfying feeling to sit in front of my netbook in the evening, add up what I ate during the day, and then look what I may still eat. As I have the same thing for breakfast and lunch regularly, it´s the evening meal where I tend to get over my caloric limit. So, looking first what I may eat has been a big step forward for me.
It is actually what makes my weight, right now, go down rather steadily at a rate I haven´t seen since last year. Not grabbing that string of cheese, or "just a handful" of nuts, or "just one" chocolate bar. Not munching on peanuts all the time while preparing dinner. I had developed quite a number of self-defeating habits that I wasn´t really aware of just how bad they were, calorie-wise.
Seeing that, for example, the innocent-looking cut of cheese I ate when coming home "just to pass the time till dinner" was, on that day, what gave me the most calories, not the chicken breast that was dinner, made me realize that I was, actually, taking in a lot  more calories grazing while cooking than I was supposed to eat at all if I wanted to lose more weight.
Having to write down every morsel, every peanut and every cookie, and then seeing immediately how they affect my calorie count, is helping me to keep within my limits. And I have started to really budget, that is, think first, eat last.
That way I don´t end up wondering every morning where the (high) number on my scales came from. It´s amazing how much one can overeat without noticing it. I am, today, determined to never again become a victim of the Sneaky Peanut or the Stealth Cookie.
Being accountable to myself for every morsel I eat is the trick. Then, ther is hope for me of getting rid of the rest of my excess baggage, too.


Julia