Day 4, and I boogie

I feel ten kinds of badass.

Last night, my Hub bought us dinner; I got a salad with grilled chicken and then threw in the remainder of the mandarin oranges from last week. (I find that when mandarin orange segments are in a salad, I need no stinkin' dressing.) Calculations with my spiffy little BFL Palm program indicate that I did okay by it. Rock on.

With dinner out of the way, I cooked. I had originally intended to make my Hub his own version of the breakfast Egg Cups, using whole eggs and the rest of his bacon and real cheese. Lo and behold, he had used up all the eggs and all the bacon on his breakfasts this week already. I pondered this, then said "fuck it" and made a new (and improved) batch of the same BFL-friendly ones I'd made for myself. Hub is fine with it, and upon trying them out this morning declared, "Hey, these things are pretty good." Yes indeed. Next week's batch will try having beans and corn for the carbs, rather than the whole-wheat tortillas, because although I love the faux-chilaquiles taste, I feel like I've been using bready products as a crutch the past few days while I got my land-legs for this program. I want to get the hang of using fruits, whole grains, and beans for the carb portion.

With breakfasts out of the way (we're so totally stocked), I turned to lunches. I have to admit that somewhere along the line we became dependent on Lean Cuisine for lunch. The past few days I've used the South Beach Diet wraps from Kraft (which would be perfect if not for the fact that they've got twice the fat I want in any given meal and three times the sodium), but we're out of those now. I did a lot of math and then created a ghetto fried rice (the way that only a white girl from the Midwest can) out of the remains of the Canadian bacon, skinless/boneless chicken breast, onion, mushrooms, asparagus, jicama, sweet red pepper, cucumber, brown rice, the scant remains of the EggBeaters, and (out of dumb desperation for a way to balance out the carbs from all that rice) a scoop of whey powder. Flavored it with soy sauce and Thai chili paste. Turned out pretty well, I think.

I also spent an absurd amount of time last night picking out which songs should live on my iPod Shuffle and which should not. They have to have a good beat and a tempo that kicks out around the level of the Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated", otherwise it throws me off when I'm running. My Hub made helpful suggestions and was insanely delighted when I wanted Judas Priest songs (never really listened to 'em before, but they work perfectly for this purpose). "My wife, rockin' out to the Priest!" Heh.

I got to sleep about an hour late. Not smart. Part of the problem with having more energy is a disturbing tendency to forget that just because I'm not dying of exhaustion, I do still have to go to sleep.

I've discovered an odd phenomeon since starting BFL: besides the garden-variety DOMS that I'm getting in spades, I'm also waking up in the middle of the night with whole new things hurting that never hurt during the day. It's like my body is trying to sneak in some extra aches at a time of day that I can't experience it mentally, so that I won't give up or something. It's very strange. It's like walking past someone and catching a snippet of a fascinatingly strange conversation they're having on their cell phone (my favorite of all time was hearing a guy tell his phone, "Hey, man, I supply ninety percent of your weed, you better have some damn Oreos for me to eat,")-- clearly I've walked in on something I wasn't meant to experience. My body is sneaking around on me. Weird.

Speaking of the DOMS, I would like to say OW, OW, OW. I mean, it's good. I've never had a sore chest before and was startled as hell to wake up with one on Monday morning; today my ass is sore in ways it has not experienced in... forever, really. Not to mention all the other sore spots. Wow. I'm impressed.

Morning dawned, I rolled out of bed, threw on my exercise gear, and climbed back into bed to wake up el Hubbo. El Hubbo was having none of it, and pleaded to get to sleep just a little longer. I figured what the hell, he'll only get half an hour extra 'cause today is HIIT day, so I rolled back out of bed, turned off the glowing alarm clock, strapped on my tiny iPod Shuffle and hit the treadmill. Had a hell of a good session.

Now, here is where things go slightly awry. I left the iPod on because, well, there are only a few things in life that please me as much as hearing the AbFab lady singing "Holding Out For A Hero" on the Shrek 2 soundtrack, and that was on, so I had to keep listening. While dancing around and singing along, I killed time by looking around for something to make my mid-morning meal interesting and ended up working out a recipe for a kind of curried tuna/apple salad with cottage cheese and cucumber and sweet red pepper and a bit of yogurt to finish balancing out the protein. (I'm getting pretty good at this, as I get the hang of the ingredients at hand.)

When I looked up, I'd been boogie-ing around the kitchen for an hour, and it was SERIOUSLY time to get my Hub out of bed; I had to run around like crazy for the nex half-hour to get showered, dressed, breakfasted and ready for work. Totally worth it, though, because a full half my meals today have been balanced, made ahead of time, and did not come in a box. Having them all be recipes of my own invention was the icing on the cake. (I'm so damn proud.)

The day is soon approaching when my Hub will have his three meals match up exactly with three of mine, and I'll be able to blow his mind by telling him about how many calories he's had that day and finally PROVING to him that things are not quite right, here. I'm almost positive he's eating less than he ought to be at regular meals, because a six-foot-tall man should not be eating the same as a five-foot-two woman. His body is stuck in feast-and-famine mode; either he's eating what I'm eating, or (like last night) he eats most of a deep-dish pizza. I'm almost positive that if we got him in a proper zone of caloric intake he would lose weight this summer, even if he got no exercise at all.

My Hub is puzzled by serving sizes. The huge amounts of stuff that constitutes a 200-calorie serving, when I use a ton of fresh ingredients, downright boggles him. I have to show him the nutrition information on everything before he believes me that I'm not somehow drastically overfeeding myself. This does not reflect well upon how I was feeding myself (and, even more so, him) when I was on WeightWatchers. It also does not reflect well upon my Hub's grasp of nutritional data. I'm going to have to start talking aloud when I scan those side panels, broadcasting my internal dialogue that goes something like "Okay, X amount of servings per container, that's [good/bad/outrageous], Y grams of fat, which is [insane/decent], Z amount of fiber [I'd like a little more/that's enough], and [insert pondering of the carbs and protein which still hasn't found a pattern yet]."

In other news, there's a fun run tonight that I should be at, and I have to call my mother, and I need to pick up my birth control prescription, and we very much need groceries and cleaning before a friend comes over tomorrow night for dinner. Wow. Hope I've got time.