I know what you're thinking. Bacon ice cream?Mindy's really lost it. That's exactly what Jon thought. He made that scrunched up 'you are crazy woman' face right up to the moment he actually tried it. Then he ate two bowls. I'm telling you, it's delectable.
The recipe I used is from David Lebovitz blog living the sweet life in Paris. So many fun recipes on there I'm going to try. I really enjoyed the candied bacon all on it's own. I suggest making double what he calls for because I PROMISE you will be snacking on the stuff. If you don't want to go to the trouble of making your own ice cream you could always just mix it into a tub of maple ice cream or even just a good vanilla. David uses all half and half which I find is a bit too much for me. I think the next time I make it I'll use whole milk instead. I've really always preferred it that way anyway.
As for the 'other important things' part of the post.....
I read an article by Geneen Roth recently in Good Housekeeping that I HAD to share. It's about food and body image. While that's important, I also think a lot of what she had to say translates really well into how we interact with others and how that can be improved so I'm posting it here. If you get a chance you should really check out some of her books. The woman makes a lot of sense. Anything I added is red and in parenthesis.
Fat or Fiction By Geneen Roth
Last month as I was walking along a beach in Monterey, CA, I came upon a lone seagull making a huge amount of noise. ThenI noticed that he was standing beside another gull-a dead one- and I thought, Oh, he’s crying seaghull tears because he ldost his mate. His cherished partner. The love of his life. Maybe gulls are like swans; maybe they mate for life and when they lose their one and only, they are bereft, desolate, inconsolable.
So I stood there saying soothing birdy things to his as tears rolled down my cheeks. Love is so challenging, I thought. It turns you inside out, breaks your heart, leaves you alone on a deserted beach at 6 AM, crying. As I stoode there weeping loudly for love, for the gull, for me, I couldn’t help but notice then when other gulls approached, the grieving gull cried even louder. How protective he is of his love, I thought. How kind he must have been to her when she was alive. But then I noticed one tiny bit of behavior that, in the unfolding drama, I had been ignoring: The desolate gull was eating the supposed love of his life. Eating her! I realized then that his shrieking was not about his sadness, but aobut his beliigerence: He refused to share his food with his friends.
What a bum, I thought, as I stalked away.
From cherished spouse to cannibal louse in one spilit second-and nothing had changed about the gull’s behavior. Nothing objective, nothing external, nothing real was any different from one moment to the next. All that had changed was my interpretation of wha the was doing.
What does that have to do with emotional eating? Everything.
Years ago, my friend Kai was walking down a street feeling rather cheeky about herself, her svelt curves, her flat stomach. Gazing at her reflection in the store windows, she felt proud of her body, happy to be herself. So happy that for lunch that day, she treated herself to French fries with her turkey sandwich. She even ate dessert. The she went back to the doctor’s office where she worked and decided to weight herself. To her horror, she’d gained six pounds in a month, and suddenly, all those kind, loving feelings she was having about her stomach, her thighs, her life turned into disaster scenarios. Oh no, she thought ¸I am out of control and I don’t even know it. I can’t even trust myself to know when I am feeling good and when I’m not. When my body is at its natural weight and when it’s busting apart at the seams. Ihave to diet immediately!
The next day, when she walked into work, the doctor told her he’d discovered that the office scale was off by seven pounds. Which meant, of course, that not only had Kai not gained six pounds, she’d actually lost a pound. And suddenly, she felt fabulous again. From fabulous to horrible to fabulous, and nothing external had changed except her interpretation of a number on a scale.
There are two take home messages from these stories: On e of them, the easiest one, is to throw out your scales. “Gulp”, you say. “I can’t. How will I know what I weigh?” The same way that Kai knew. Because it’s your body. Because you live in it. Because you know how you feel in it. Because your clothes feel different when you are at different weights. You don’t need a lifeless piece of machinery to tell you whether you are allowed to have a good day or a bad day, whether you are allowed to feel proud or ashamed of yourself. You get to decide. It seems to be built into the weight-loss drama that a high number on the scale translates to misery and a low number on the scale translates to euphoria, so a first step to realizing your self-worth is to stop engaging g in what makes you feel bad.
But throwing out your scale doesn’t address the root of the problem-the mistaken way we interpret events. And that brings us to the second take-home lesson [this, I think, applies really well to our relationships with others as well]: We must recognize when our behavior, thoughts, and feelings are utterly determined by our interpretation of what we see.
Most of the time we are telling ourselves fantasies and then acting as if those fantasies were true. Most of the time, we are so caught up in believing that our interpretation of reality is fact that we don’t even realize it’s an interpretation.
Consider how different your life would be if you altered your interpretations. Consider how you feel when you look at your thighs [or your spouse/brother/children/co-worker]. Made of flesh and bone and muscle and-sigh-fat. In the split second between when you look at them [or hear what they have to say] and what you end up feeling about them, you’ve interpreted what you’ve seen [or heard], judged it, and created a negative self-image [or image of them] that you then swear is THE TRUTH.
The real truth is that all self loathing [or negative feelings toward others] is an interpretation. All reactions to your body size [or to the words/actions of others] are interpretations. All worrying is an interpretation. Every time you lapse into feeling worthless or fat or wrong, [or superior, or offended] every time you imagine disaster scenarios and then get yourself worked up about the horrible outcomes, you are interpreting a set of circumstances, twisting them in a particular way, and reacting to the way you twisted them, not to the way things actually are. It’s not that bad things don’t happen. It’s not that carrying excess weight doesn’t burden your joints or keep you from fitting into the skinny clothes in the back you your closet [or that sometimes people aren’t just thoughtless or rude]. It’s just that when you interpret reality according to you fantasy, you get so worked up and so frantic that you are less capable of seeing clearly and dealing with objective facts. The next time you find yourself sloshing around in the melodrama of your life, reel yourself back to reality by asking yourself these three questions:
• What are the FACTS of this particular situation?
• What is my interpretation of those facts?
• What am I feeling that is based on my interpretation-rather than on what actually happened?
If necessary, ask a trusted friend or family member to help your determine what’s true and what’s a figment of your imagination.
You will soon discover that most of your feelings are based not on the facts, but on how you’ve interpreted the facts. And what a blessing it is to discover that your anguish is self-created! Because when you begin discerning fact from fantasy, your life becomes lighter, freer. You’re less likely to allow emotions to lure you to the kitchen where ice cream, cookies, or a bag of cheesy chips is calling your name [or into another fight with someone in your life], because that crazy tsunami of dark feelings just won’t be there. You’ll no longer live at the mercy of the numbers on a scale [or the words/actions of others] or the drama they inspire you to stage in your head. Instead, you’ll be able to stop overeating [or feeling hurt/angry/unloved/offended] and take more pleasure in food [and life], because there will be no bad feelings to stuff [and because you will begin the process of learning see things for what they really are instead of what you've imagined them to be].
And that is a fact, not a fantasy.
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