It's never "just a food"

I'm prepping for dinner and am reminded how many times I used to say "well, I've only had..." or "well, it's just [insert random food here]..." to excuse my previous portion sizes. I am a big dinner eater, something that I've had to account for with calorie counting.

I try to keep reflecting on how I gained weight to keep myself from falling into the same traps. Not to belittle myself (my self-esteem hasn't been better in my entire adult life!), but as a reminder. I wasn't a fat kid. In fact, most people believed I was going to take after my petite mom. I hit puberty, shot up in height, and finally gained an appetite. I had always been picky, and so in some ways I feel like that naturally helped to control my eating habits. Those habits withered away, especially as I started working and being able to buy whatever food hit my fancy. My weight shot up and then I got into the restricting-binge cycle.

Looking over my food today, I can still hear the little voice in my head. "You've only had oatmeal today..." and "your lunch was *just* a quesadilla". Let alone if younger me knew that my oatmeal was sweetened with Swerve and my quesadilla was made with zero carb tortillas. I had absolutely no concept of what reasonable calories were. And that also ignores the fact that I totally hand waved away my sugary drink issue. Now I make my coffee at home (and calorie count it) and I've switched from Dr Pepper to Dr Pepper Zero.

My macros for the day so far are 55g fat, 55g protein, 112g carbs, and 36g fiber for ~1092 calories. We're doing homemade "zero carb" tortilla pizzas for dinner that will probably be another 600 calories (what can I say, I love cheese!). My maintenance calories are 2000 plus I'm breastfeeding my 11 month old, so I definitely have more wiggle room than a lot of other people my size, but it really has been eye-opening when I feel like I want to make excuses to eat more when I've had enough.