I’ll be honest and upfront about my eating, portion control has never been a strong point, I love sweets, and Trader Joe’s Ripple chips or Wavy Lays chips are way too easy to eat (though I’ve gone from a bag at a time to a small bowl – some concessions to being an old fart have been made).

Also I don’t eat out all that often. When you have someone at home that creates great meals and makes the time to do it, it just ain’t necessary very often. All these things do mean that losing weight is a struggle at times, since I’m about 15 pounds over where I want to be.

Plus, when you add in the expense of eating out, it becomes something we just don’t do all that much.

This week TheWife is visiting her sister out of state and I’m left on my own for the most part. Nothing serious, I know how to cook when I have to, but I’m also using this time to see if I can get rid of a few extra pounds that don’t seem to be wanting to leave, with how we eat normally.

Wednesday are the day that I go to my D&D session at Spellbound and I decided to go ahead and eat out. I stopped at an Oriental restaurant that we used to go to and ordered their Szechuan Chicken and fried rice lunch special. I figured that I’d eat it before the session began.

However, I got to Spellbound a lot too early and decided it was too gorgeous to just sit inside and walked around downtown Waterville before eating. Yeah, downtown has been cleaned up considerably and changed a lot over the past few years. While walking I noticed that a bakery was open and went inside to look around. They had coffee and a case full of wonderful desserts that included some cherry topped cheesecake. Now I haven’t had cheesecake in years! But alas, I was attempting to be good and I left without any.

Getting back to the food part of this grand story.

The Szechuan Chicken and fried rice, there was a helluva lot of it and WOW were both salty tasting. We don’t add much salt to any of our meals (well other than the chips), as we’re supposed to be on a lower sodium diet blood pressure and all that kind of noise.

After eating three quarters of the luncheon special, I started to feel like shit.

So, I got to wondering if they used MSG, they didn’t used to? Not sure why but I’ve usually struggled with too much MSG, so I have a feeling that it was used a bit excessively in the fried rice. But even the chicken dish tasted pretty damn salty to me as well. I put it off as not being used to eating carry-out and while my face was a bit flushed, I didn’t feel that much the worse for wear.

I decided to take a little walk again, to see if that helped and while outside decided to get a coffee at the bakery. Well that black coffee also turned into a goodly slice of that cherry topped cheesecake. Yeah, self-discipline and food has never been a strong suite with me. At almost $13 for the two, I don’t believe the coffee was THAT expensive, so I hoped that the cheesecake was delicious.

The game hadn’t started yet but others were starting to trickle in and I finished off the rest of the Szechuan chicken (I couldn’t let it go to waste) and then started in on the Cheesecake and coffee.

While I made a valiant effort, I wasn’t able to finish the cherry cheesecake, I just couldn’t do it! It was simply too rich, but it did taste delicious.

Just about the time the game was ready to begin, I started to really feel like shit again. Between all the Szechuan Chicken, fried rice, cherry cheesecake and a black coffee, I felt bloated, fuzzy headed and thirsty as hell. Not great way to start a game where you need to use your imagination.

I headed out to get a Gatorade and that helped a little, but I was still feeling like crap and the fuzziness didn’t go away until almost an hour later when I went back out front and got a Dr. Pepper. The sugar spike broke the fuzziness.

I thought that I was going to eat something sort of healthy, but it turned into a shitshow kind of eating out afternoon. The portion sizes were huge compared to what I typically have at home, the ingredients weren’t what I was used to and when I started feeling like crap, my choices didn’t get any better.

Needless to say, I won’t be doing that kind of eating again for a while.

My body just can’t handle eating this way anymore. It seems that when I eat out like this, I end up suffering for the rest of that day. Then the next day, I get to watch the scale turn into a roulette wheel and end up tipping in at 4 pounds heavier than I was yesterday morning, and then today (TMI alert), I’m on the terlot way too much.

You’d think I’d learn and just stay away from that kind of eating, but I never seem to. Six months or so from now I’ll do it again and promise myself never again…until next time anyways.

I don’t know how I used to eat this way as often as I did and yet I know that I did.

Now I wonder about how often others are eating this way too often. If so, I just shake my head and wonder if they feel like that all the time because it seems that so many eat out or do take-out foods. It does look that way too often from looking at many of the waistlines that I see around me at the gym or in stores.

Is the typical American diet truly this horrible?

What about you, have you changed your eating habits over the years?

When you eat out do you notice a difference in how you feel when you make meals from scratch at home?