Blurred days and weigh-in.

Sunday I spent most of the day in bed because I didn't feel well again, after being awake all night suffering from my pizza binge. Then I loaded up my stuff and my dogs and did the two hour drive back home. I didn't want to leave. I hated leaving my cousin alone, and I hated coming back to going to work at a job I knew I'd hate.

Predictably, I couldn't sleep last night after spending all day in bed -- even though I was exhausted from feeling sick for two days (headfirst first, then intestines). So at 5:45 I headed off to my first day, and it was worse than I anticipated. This place is insane. Lots of crazy policies that serve no apparent purpose, completely overbearing, it's like they're big brother. There are seriously security cameras fucking everywhere. It's kind of creepy. The building is set up poorly and I've never seen a place that provides less desk space and more employees per foot on the floor. They don't pay enough for me to put up with this crap! I'm really going to try to give it a fair shake, or at least make it through the week so I"ll have the rest of my rent money, but beyond that ... I don't know if I can hang. The basic job is soul-sucking enough without feeling like I'm under a microscope like that.

I came home and crashed from about four to midnight, even though I meant to only sleep for an hour or so. But that's okay, at least I slept. When I got up I was going to send my friend another scale picture and ask her to tell my what my loss was, but I figured I'm ready to handle the numbers. I didn't think I would yet. But I guess her telling me my weight was "just under" 300 pounds sort of prepared me.

Anyway, I pulled up the scale photo I'd sent her, and faced my fat. When I took the photo, my weight was 295.5 pounds. I then spent the next three weeks binging and lounging depressedly on my couch, not even working. So I'm sure by the time I actually motivated myself, I'd hit at least 300. But I didn't think to take another photo, so we'll got with 295.5 as my official starting weight. As of today, I weight 283.5, so that's a loss of 12 pounds. Not too shabby.

There are a number of things I need to be careful I don't succumb to now, though. First, I need to absolutely not start jumping on the scale all the time, because I know how that affects my little brain. Second, I didn't really try all that hard this month. I mean, I behaved most days, but I had the pizza incident, and overall I had six days that were less than perfect. And I don't expect perfection from myself, but I need to be sure I don't start thinking "if I lost twelve pounds in a month and screwed around that much, I can have a burrito today too, what's the harm!" It's very easy for me to fall in to that kind of thinking.

I'm not sure if the horrible job is going to make that better or worse, honestly. The fact that they have some restaurant come in to sell lunch and dinner just about every day will probably make it a challenge. Also the fact that it's two minutes from Perkins (which has that pie I so love) and Olive Garden, and it's five minutes from McDonald's. I'm planning to take lunch every day (at least as long as I can manage to stand their overbearing crap), but I know a day will come when I'm pissed the fuck off and I'm going to want to spend my lunch hour -- or right after work -- chowing down on some breadsticks and pasta. Of course, this job will pay my bills and nothing else, including food, so I suppose that won't be much of an issue.

I'm sort of surprised I had as few "bad" days as I did. In the past, one day of carb gorging usually ended up as several more before I reined myself in. I think some of it is that in the past, I've usually tried to squeeze in the kind of crap I shouldn't be eating, just within my "carb limit." And/or I've been really strict about counting things -- like weighing my carrots and stuff to try to account for every gram, which just gets wearing and time-consuming and makes me obsessive, which never leads anywhere good.

This time, I've been more relaxed. Yeah, sometimes I've still eaten stuff I shouldn't (hello, pizza), or I've used up all my carbs for the day (not that I'm adhering to a strict number) by having a burger with the bun. But generally speaking when I say more relaxed, I mean that I'm not obsessing over "I can only have half a pear because a full pear is 25g of carb!" or "I can only have a half a cup of carefully measures strawberries!" or "I can only have six baby carrots!"

Yesterday I just had a glass of milk before I left for the horrible job, just to have something in my stomach. For lunch I had some grape tomatoes, some baby carrots, a chicken breast and swiss sandwich on a sandwich thin, and a nectarine. I had some more milk in the afternoon, and was planning on cooking some chicken for dinner but instead I fell asleep. Not the best day, I probably didn't eat enough, but I didn't wake up hungry. I'll probably pack about the same lunch for today, maybe some strawberries instead of the nectarine. Or instead of the sandwich I might have my meat and cheese on NutThin crackers. Since I'm already up I might scramble some eggs for breakfast ... or not. The idea sort of nauseates me. I'm weird about eggs.

I've been eating a lot of fruit; I should probably eat more vegetables but god, do I dislike them. I like baby carrots; every once in a while I can deal with a salad, but not often enough to buy lettuce because it goes bad; I like tomatoes (of course not technically a vegetable, and I only like certain kinds anyway); sometimes I like broccoli and cauliflower; I can do green beans if they're just barely cooked so they're still crunchy. That's about it. I try to broaden my horizons and try squash and radishes and stuff and I just hate them all! They all taste really bitter to me.

Ugh. An hour until I have to get dressed and go to that job. I should probably shower.

Today I woke up feeling nothing ...

... except a craving for Qdoba. All I want to eat is a bowl of rice and three-cheese queso and chicken and green salsa and sour cream. This is product of the fact that I freaking love Qdoba, and also because I last ate about 24 hours ago. I've been hungry since I got up, but nothing sounds good. Except, you know, the burrito.

Yeah, yeah, somebody's probably gonna wanna bitch at
me about it and tell me how unhealthy it is. Go for it.

Well, for a while I wanted pizza. Then pancakes. Then croissants. If I just ate something I'd feel better, but I don't feel like I could choke down anything I have in the house. So I drank a lot of water, and I read, and eventually -- once Qdoba was closed! Avoidance is key for me! -- I went to the grocery store. Forty dollars of fruits, vegetables, dairy, and such later, I came home and made myself a little pizza on a low-carb tortilla. Honestly, I didn't expect to enjoy it very much. I expected it to be a pale substitute that made me crave the real thing more. But it was surprisingly satisfying. I feel alright now. Will have a peach later on, I think. And my next meal I think will be .... hell if I know. If I even get hungry again I'll figure it out.

I've basically just had this window open all day to type whatever popped in to my head, which has been a lot less than the last couple of days. That's not necessarily a good thing, though, because it's basically because I've been pretty depressed all day. Oh, just low-level depressed, not sobbing or anything. Just sort of feeling empty and nothing. It's actually sort of a break from my misery the last few weeks, but that doesn't mean it's healthy.

If I did more social stuff, I'd probably feel a little better. But it's hard to set anything up, because I feel like it's hard to even carry on a normal conversation. The last time I went out with a friend I hadn't seen in a while, I started telling her what had happened with the ex and I started crying in the middle of the restaurant. Embarrassing. Sometimes people will be in the middle of telling me something and I'll be struggling to understand, not because I wasn't paying attention, but because it felt like my brain had forgotten how to decode their words, usually because some thought about my ex or something had sort of halted my neurons.

I feel like doing what I did the last time I felt like this, the last time my life felt so empty and up in the air. I used to put my little schnauzer on her leash and walk for hours. We'd just wander our neighborhood in the dark, every night, until I finally dragged us home. It felt right to wander aimlessly. Sometimes I sang to myself. Sometimes I talked to my dog. Sometimes I cried. Other times I was just absolutely silent. I don't know if it really helped; it didn't keep my weight in check nor did it tire me out. But I find myself wanting to do it again. Unfortunately, that was about seven years ago, and it's not something I've felt comfortable doing since. The town I moved to after that had a state prison in it, and I didn't feel safe wandering the streets at night when felons were regularly released there. Then I moved back to my old town -- but the opposite end of it, and to get to a well-lit, safe area I had to walk about a mile up a road with no sidewalk and no streetlights. Where I live now, there's enough gang activity to make me uncomfortable roaming at night, even though none of it is really in my area. I wish I could move back to my little wood-floored house in the quiet, safe neighborhood where I used to wander.

Really, I hate the town I live in now. I like my house. It's quirky and has lots of room for me and my pets. It's fairly cheap, and I'm overall fond of it. But the town I live in smells because there's a cattle processing plant, it's weirdly organized and I can't find things, and then there's the gang activity in certain places. There's a reason housing is cheap, is what I'm getting at. If I had the money, I would move. Maybe I should have, back when I had a job and they were still giving us bigass bonus checks. But finding somewhere that I can have the three cats and two dogs I've accidentally acquired is a pretty big challenge. And at the time I had money, I was happy.

Actually, I had an offer a few days ago to move back to the prison-containing town and live for a year rent-free. There were a lot of reasons to do it; money, change, being there for a family member struggling with some emotional issues. But in the end I just couldn't do it. The space I'd be crammed in to would be much too small, and because of the way the house is arranged I'd have no privacy. Plus I'd have to find a job down there, and then after less than a year bail out on it and haul all my things back to this area (100 mile drive), because in a year all reasons to live there would have gone to college or moved away, leaving me alone and without a place to live, in a town I don't really want to live in. And honestly, I feel like I'm just too goddamn old at this point to be uprooting my life like that every year, at least when it comes to jobs. My work history is bizarre enough already (I tended to work a lot of unconnected jobs consecutively).

I suppose because I'm unemployed and applying for jobs all over the place, it's normal that I've been trying to evaluate what my goals really are. In terms of a job or a career, I've never been one of those people who knew What I Want To Be When I Grow Up. Oh, for a while I thought I'd be a novelist. And I do love baking. But I never even knew what to go to school for, because I was so ... unfocused, flighty, whatever you want to call it. And there are plenty of people like that, but those people usually have something else they want. For example, they want to get married and have kids. Yeah ... I don't. I mean, if I were with someone and they wanted to get married, I'd do it for them. But I'm never spawning. Ever.

So I don't want any particular career, I don't want a husband, I don't want kids. I don't want any of the "normal" things society tells me I should. What do I want? I want to be happy. But what would make me happy? Fuck if I know. :)

But hey look, it's late evening (er, according to my jacked up schedule) and I've eaten properly today!

I think I'm going to be doing a lot of this.

I'm only a few days in here, but I have the feeling that -- assuming time allows, which right now it does since I haven't found a goddamn job yet -- I'll be writing a lot. The reason for that is simple: eating properly is fucking difficult. It's hard with all the ads for pizza and assorted other crap being thrown at you. It's hard when your well-intentioned friends push chocolate at you. It's hard when you're tired or lazy and just don't want to cook chicken breast when McDonald's is down the street. We all know this. It sucks. And writing about it doesn't necessarily help.

But what I think writing may help with is the high emotional content to my eating. I'm not nearly as bad as I used to be about it. I had some fucking epic binges, back in the day. Now at least my emotional eating tends to be having macaroni and cheese for dinner instead of chicken, rather than having macaroni and cheese and cookies and ice cream and chips and whatever random other crap I picked up at the store. So that's definitely good. But the emotional eating is still a problem, because I know that one episode of it can quite easily lead to a string of horrible days ending in giving up. I know this because of how my body reacts to sugars and high levels of starches. It's addictive.

There are things I can do to mitigate those emotional eating slips; for example, taking chromium definitely kicks up my insulin receptors and allows my body to deal with it better in a biochemical way. And drinking a lot of fluids helps keep the water retention factor down. My next meal being properly composed, that's another big one. But of course the best thing to do is, you know, not cause the problem in the first place. Which is where the blogging comes in, for the most part.

See, I love my friends. And I know they love me. But I also know that they're tired of hearing about me being heartbroken over my ex. They all think he's a douchebag and I should be over him. Most of them don't say that, but I can read between the lines. To be fair, for the first month or two I was upset, they thought he had been just a casual boyfriend. They didn't realize I was in L-O-V-E with him. I was embarrassed to admit it, and scared to admit it, and never did admit it to him. So my friends were in a frustrated mindset before I really told them why I was so upset. But still ... they're tired of hearing it. And I'm sort of tired of saying it, and I'm definitely tired of feeling it .... but it won't go away. I still feel heartbroken over him almost every moment of every day, and it makes me want to reach for the comfort food because I don't really have anything else to comfort me.

And of course, there's the stress of being jobless. And the fact that my grandmother is dying, I really haven't even begun to process that shit yet. And all the other little and not-so-little things that make up the ups and downs of life. Basically, I just need somewhere that I can announce "I FEEL MISERABLE AND HEARTBROKEN TODAY AND I HATE THE WORLD!" without feeling like I'm dragging down the people who care about it. Even if nobody reads this (or nobody but Amy, hi Amy), that's okay. It's there. It's written down. I have documented how I feel and have let it out in some form other than talking to my cats like a crazy woman.

Actually, I sort of feel badly for anybody who does try to slog through all of the crap I'm bound to throw out. It's gonna get awfully boring and repetitive. But that's the beauty of blogging - I can say whatever the hell I want, but you don't have to read it! And maybe some would say all the crap I'll spew doesn't belong on a weight-loss blog, but here's the thing: it influences how I eat, and how I feel about myself. If I'm not at least mildly mentally healthy, I'm not going to make any progress on the physical side of it.

(Made no progress on the story, btw. I read instead!)

Motivation and lack thereof.

I did alright today, despite the little voice in my head whispering about the delicious things I could order at work, and how one more day wouldn't hurt, and didn't I want to try that new pasta dish? It was a little difficult to push away temptation, because I don't really have a motivation to. That's the problem with the whole "I don't mind being fat but let's lose some weight anyway." There's no sense of urgency.

I ended up managing to order something appropriate by thinking about how horribly cranky I was the last couple of days, and reminding myself I'd just feel that way again if I went and ate a bowl of chocolate. And then I nearly ordered dessert anyway because one of my tables did and it smelled so good. That's the problem with working in a restaurant: constant exposure to my trigger foods. I have to keep reminding myself that it makes me feel physically unwell to eat that stuff more than once every couple of weeks. It's not worth feeling like I have a boulder in my stomach. Right?

Increasing my water intake, low-carb treats.

I really like water -- as long as it's cold! -- but I have a hard time drinking it at home because the water in my house tastes weird. More than that, it gives me a headache! My old roommate used to get headaches too. I've been buying 2 gallon jugs of water, but tonight I finally got a Pur filter for my sink. I also got a big plastic jug to keep in my fridge; so now I can have ice cubes and chilled water that doesn't taste funky.


I've been getting myself little low-carb treats the last couple of weeks. In previous attempts, this would've meant stuff full of sugar alcohols and aspartame, some imitation of a high-carb treat. Now, though, I'm treating me to good real food. Right now, I'm snacking on "deluxe" mixed nuts -- no peanuts! Yummy! And they're seasoned with sea salt rather than regular salt, so they have an interesting tang to them. And more potassium than sodium, which is always good. Last week, I got 1/4 pound of lightly smoked gouda and 1/4 pound of creamy havarti. It's too rich to eat more than a slice of at a time, but soooooo good. Simple things, but little things for a bit more variety and a little indulgence!