Oh, hello! I went over my calorie limit yesterday by 455 calories! Uh-oh. I could have gone over by about 190 calories, but -- my thinking went this way -- in for 190 might as well be in for the moon! Aaaargh! why do I do that? Well, of course I do it because the greedy little soul takes a mile when I give her an inch. I just had to have my square of chocolate, and I'd already eaten unwisely yesterday giving comfort foods to my poor baby self who had two -- count them, 2 -- teeth ground down to prepare them for crowns. Owwwww, I hurt. So I had -- no, no, that's not good, is it, to list all those unwise foods I chose yesterday so that I, and any readers I may possibly have, will begin to picture those things we're building good habits excluding -- we don't want to go there. So, suffice it to say, my diary is public should you want to know where I went wrong. I just went very wrong.

I need to learn a new pattern when I've gone off track. Instead of: "In for 50+ calories, might as well be in for 500," I should be thinking, "I'm allowing myself one more comfort for this difficult day, but at least I'm stopping at one more not three more servings of chocolate (and milk chocolate some of it was, too, not even the 70+% cacao stuff that's supposed to be ok for us to indulge in a little)!"

But on the bright side of my learning curve in the past day, I figured out I've miscalculated the calories for a favorite healthy food I've been eating frequently: grapefruit.

Now, I have super-sensitive taste buds and hot spicy foods are a real puzzle to me: Why do people like those foods when they cause pain in one's mouth. And sour and tart foods? They have always made my face screw up like a wrung out washrag. So grapefuit was a food I could not tolerate. Then a couple of years ago, I noted a grapefruit taste in a punch or something I drank; it was kind of nice. Later I tried grapefruit juice (probably sweetened) and it was of a unique and not unpleasant flavor. As time went on, of course, I eventually tried grapefruit itself again: not too bad I thought. Well, I tried a grapefruit this season, and I thought it was yummy so when I went to the store again and saw grapefruit, I wanted to try some more. And now, for the last two or three weeks, I've had grapefruit almost every day! And I cannot stop with a half grapefruit serving, oh, no I have to eat the whole thing once I've cut it -- and restrain myself from cutting another! I love grapefruit!

The CK food database lists a grapefruit serving as half a fruit, or about 3.5 oz. I thought the grapefruit I am buying around here was bigger, maybe even bigger than the large size on CK's drop-down list of serving sizes. I weighed my grapefruit. One pound! One typical grapefruit I buy around here (Puget Sound area) is one pound of fruit! I made a custom food for a one-pound grapefruit, doing my math using the CK nutrition data. I came out with 210 calories for a 16-oz grapefruit and I've been using that figure for welll over a week. Then for some reason I actually looked at the entry for my morning grapefruit the other day. Since then I've been thinking, "210 calories for a piece of fruit (even at two servings) is an awful lot of calories." So I reviewed my math today and came up with 147 calories for 16 ounces. Hallelujah, I'll have 63 more calories to use on grapefruit days -- that's enough for a square of 72% cacao chocolate! Whoo-hoo.

Onward and downward (scale-wise, that is)!