Food with brakes.

I woke up today and the scale was back up to 145.2 pounds, probably due to what happened last night.

Last night I went out to dinner.

It was Mother's Day, and we were celebrating actual mothers in the family (the hubbs' two sisters that live in the area).  We went to one of my favorite restaurants, The Machine Shed in Rockford, IL.  It features meat, meat, and more meat on the menu, with downhome country cookin' as its draw to get customers in the door.

The food can only be described as orgiastic.  It's that good.  Piles of meat and potatoes with gravy everywhere, man.

Which is why I approached the meal with more than a little trepidation; I mean, this place does not fit AT ALL into my eating manifesto.  I was worried I wouldn't be able to keep my eating under control.  So I decided exactly what I was going to eat before I got there:

• A salad.
• A BBQ Brisket sandwich with sweet potato fries.   (And they always put too much meat on the sandwich, so I knew I would take some off.)

That decision saved me.

You see, this place brings you free food before your food.  Cole slaw, cottage cheese, and a basket of buttery warm rolls and sweet bread.  Plus, the people with which I was eating ordered appetizers before their actual entrees as well.

There was way too much food before the food.  But I was steadfast through all of the food, telling the waitress to bring my salad when the appetizers came.  As the plates of fried food of all kinds (chicken, shrimp, and even cheese) were shuffled around the table, I sat there quietly, staring down into my salad and trying to keep up with the conversation.

When my entree came, I ate about half of the fries and then started in on the sandwich after I had taken a strip of brisket off of it.  I ate my sandwich, but felt like I was going to burst at the end.  It was then that I wondered how everyone else could have eaten so much around me, yet I was full after eating much less.

A friend of mine recently recommended the book, It Starts With Food.  I'm about a third of the way through it, but I like it so far.  It's full of sciencey goodness related to eating (most of which I know already, so I zippity-zipped through it), but there is a phrase that they use in this book to describe the types of food you should be eating: "Food with brakes."

In the book, meat is considered a food with a brake; in other words, it is one which fills you up and gets you to stop eating.  And believe me, I felt stuffed by the time I finished that sandwich.  I couldn't eat another bite--I didn't even want dessert, which is highly unusual for a sugar addict such as myself.

A lot of my dinner companions couldn't finish their own meat-and-gravy-laden entrees either.  Maybe it was the meat that did us all in.

But I am happy that I made a decision before I left about what I would eat and I stuck to it.  Even if I am up 0.2 lbs today, it could have been a lot worse (you should have seen me pile it in after a 20 mile training run).  I was tempted to run again today because of that slight increase, but wiser heads prevailed and I went down and lifted instead.

My upper body is pretty much ablaze with soreness right now.  Not my best decision all day, but at least I know I am making more right ones with my eating lately than wrong ones.