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.