Grr, argh, grr.

I did manage to prove again this morning that I'll be able to motor myself (and hopefully my Hub) out of the apartment by 6:45 AM. Barely. Which has a lot less to do with my carefully crafted schedule than it does that I woke up in a mood.

Hello, PMS, right on schedule. And yes, I am so taking supplements for it this time through. Took the first this morning; more scheduled tonight. Hope to God it helps, because I am wretched to be around for the week before my period.

I rolled out of bed, grabbed my gear, and headed to the bathroom to pee and weigh in buck nekkid. Which is where the first monkey wrench got thrown into my day, because the numbers said 131, and I said "What in the HELL?" and actually got the old scale down off the shelf and tried that one, too, which seriously didn't help because it said 132. Then I tried the new scale again, which said 131 again.

This displeases me mightily, because I was 131 the day I started BFL. Dammit. Water weight, probably, but it always seems like kicking a gal when she's down to have water-weight gain and PMS happen at the same time; it's really not like I'm feeling logical at that point.

And then my nifty little PDA BFL program refused to recognize my scheduled exercise for the day, so it wouldn't time me and I had to keep track of everything in my head for HIIT. So, adding up the time spent arguing with the scale, the time spent arguing with my PDA, and the time spent on slouching around the apartment rather than striding purposefully as a model of efficiency ought to... well, it's really no wonder that I came in very close to the 6:45 AM deadline.

Definitely not the beginning to a good day.

I think I was set up for this, really. My Hub made split-pea soup last night, using Canadian bacon rather than ham hock, and I hadn't entered the recipe into my new nifty software (I forget what it's called; I'm currently on a test period with it and will probably register the thing tonight, since it's pretty cool) so I didn't have the nutritional breakdown by the time he served it. When I figured it out later, it was high in carbs, low in protein, and more calories than either of us dumbasses had figured. In retrospect, I really should have followed the ol' logic trail that would have told me that split peas fall into the same category as lentils and beans, but my Hub was on fire to have split pea soup as a side dish for the EFL turkey sloppy joes (a big hit, by the way; El Hubbo ate several of them and we're having them again for lunch), and so I just handwaved and said "whatever, sure."

I had a "d'oh!" moment when I found out, but got over it because hey, what can you do? Gotta move on. My Hub, on the other hand, was crushed. He'd been so certain that split-pea soup would be perfect-- and had I still been on WeightWatchers, he would have been right. Hell, had we just had the split pea soup and added more protein, he would have been right. (I'm going to poke at the recipe program tonight to see what to do about that. More Canadian bacon, probably, possibly supplemented with whey powder.) Oh, poor Hub. He kicked himself and kicked himself, and descended into a funk, and eventually he he came into the kitchen while I was cleaning up and grabbed Eating For Life and headed off to his cave (er, the computer room) to page through it, ruminate, and glower.

In retrospect, that's probably what set me up to have such a lousy reaction to this morning's adventures with the scale and the PDA. I finally summed it up, mentally, as "Oh, fuck, what if I don't get any results at all out of this? What if I'm tormenting my husband for no good reason? Ahhhh!"

I expressed that thought to my Hub on the walk across the Loop this morning, after an argument over who was going to carry the bag of breakfast paraphenalia (for the breakfast at work plan) had ended in me getting all teary-eyed for no good reason and he'd asked what on earth was wrong with me. He didn't even have to think his response over, bless him: he looked over with me with his most patient expression and said, "Look, I don't know if you realize this, but you've been a lot more energetic and cheerful since you started this plan, and a lot easier to live with. If the cost for that is having to learn a whole new food plan, fuck it, I'll pay gladly. It's worth it to see you feeling so much better."

Is there any wonder why I love this man so much? Man, that put it in perspective like a shot. In the end, even if I don't get into fighting trim on BFL, it's still keeping my energy up throughout the day. It's still keeping me happily full and satiated throughout the day, and giving me that "tummy touchstone" of automatically checking how hungry I am when I see a tempting snack-- and coming up, every time, with "eh, I'm still pretty full from my last meal." It's still the best thing I've found yet for dialing down the volume on the Inner Cartman, avoiding my traditional evening grazing, and damn near stopping the binge eating cold. It's still keeping me kicking my own ass at exercise, where I was sluffing off before.

(Also, and I could be imagining this, but lately I haven't been too cold in our office building. Usually when the air conditioners kick on for the summer, I freeze all day except for when I flee into the great outdoors. Am I crazy, or could it be that my overreaction to the temperature wasn't from losing all that insullating fat-- that it was from having a squashed-down metabolism? I've got to take my temperature when I get home and find out if I'm operating above my usual 98 degrees. Dude, that would be COOL.)

And hey, it's not like I've been an angel on this program. This past weekend had a lot of no-good involved. Also, I have to remember that I'm eating about 300 calories a day more than I was averaging three weeks ago; it's very likely that my metabolism was depressed by a year and a half of WeightWatchers-style calorie restriction and that even though I seriously needed the extra calories, it's still going to take some time for my bod to adjust. As of now, I'm going to shoot for angelic perfection on my food intake, for remaining calm over any lapses and being able to re-group and re-focus in time for the next meal, and as long as I'm being a good girl on plan I will remain satisfied with merely maintaining my current weight.

My body will adjust. I'll put on muscle. I'll lose fat. It might take longer than it would if I wasn't dealing with a (probably) depressed metabolism and the occasional brush with binge eating on my Free Day, but the human body is built to adapt and if I keep these circumstances constant, my body will adapt to these circumstances. In the meantime, I get to continue feeling a lot peppier than before and enjoy being in charge of my eating instead of the other way around. It will be okay.



...Um, speaking of my Free Day, I'm thinking that there's a problem with it in that without my normal schedule I seem to run crazed, and that is no good. I'm considering re-drafting that into a weekend dinner thing-- that I eat like a good girl for the first four meals of the day on Saturday and Sunday, then get whatever I want for dinner on both days. Part of what keeps me binge-free on a normal day is the schedule, part of it is walking into each meal while still mostly comfortable and un-hungry, and part of it is that sense of having rules & regulations. Theoretically, two dinner's worth of unrestricted food (with my Fortified Fudgecicle scheduled for 9 PM so that it doesn't become an evening o' binging) should do the job just as well. I think.

(Friggin' eating disorder. I swear to God, I want to kick this thing to the curb in the worst way. Grrr.)

Speaking of Ed the Eating Disorder, this morning's discombulation had me in the mood where I kept thinking about making a mid-morning run to the store to buy treats to eat in my office. All at once. And no one could stop me! The good news is that a) the constant Tummy Touchstone fullness has kept me pretty "eh" about the idea of extra food, b) that talk with my Hub and typing this all out on the blog has vented all that frustration pretty well, and c) for once, I wasn't thinking about the Walgreens' big bag o' candy section when the vision of the store came up. I was, instead, thinking about a discovery I made last week when I was exploring solo (on the day my Hub was sick)-- a neat little gourmet foods market, tucked away on the basement level of a nearby office building. I'd been in there before, but never really had the chance to explore at my leisure, and it has all sorts of random cool stuff in there. Hell, they have the diet versions of some local sodas (which are damn hard to find, I tell ya) and some small-company nationwide sodas. They have all kinds of strange little low-carb snacks. They have exotic products which I like to poke at and consider buying.

It's somehow comforting to know that if I do break at some point and go careening out of the office to comfort myself with food, that the food I bring back will probably end up being diet Sprecher's root beer, Wasa crackerbread, and Laughing Cow light cheese. It seems that my instinct of "if you must binge, binge on good things that you usually limit" last time may mean that I've turned some kind of corner. Not a 90 degree corner, maybe more like the corner of a dodecahedron, but even if it takes much much more than two corner-turns to head this thing in the opposite direction, it's still worth it.


Hubby-wise, we had a very entertaining conversation yesterday about his eating. The main dish that we brought along for his lunch turned out to be kind of off, or at least it smelled that way, and given that he's just recovered from a nasty cold we don't want to risk getting him sick again, so that food got dumped. He was eating his Jell-O, green beans and apple and waving off my protestations that he really needed something more substantial when I got frustrated and blindsided him. I told him that I knew that if he said "Don't worry about it, I'll get some more food if I need it" that he'd end up not eating, because that's always what he does, and that I would rather he eat junk than not eat.

That gave him some pause, because he has a clear concept of my stance on junk food. "But... I thought you wanted me to eat better?"

"I do, but right now I want to get you to stop yo-yoing between feast and famine. You're either eating half the calories you need for the day, or twice the calories you need for the day; you keep avoiding food for most of the work day and then getting the evening munchies. It's not a good pattern, it's not a healthy pattern, and I'm actually pretty sure that if we get you halfway healthy food on a regular schedule that your unfettered cravings for processed oversalted lard will calm down."

He agreed, after that, to go get a baked potato and a smoothie, but I don't know how much of that sunk in. We do have oatmeal and natural peanut butter (and, as soon as I can haul it over there, a big ol' 5-lb. thang of chocolate whey powder) in his office, though, so there's always the possibility that I could convince him to eat breakfast. We still get hung up on that "but I'm not HUNGRY in the mornings!" thing, which I personally think is a matter of his body adapting to his schedule instead of the other way around. Still. Might get this thing working. My goal this summer is to convince him to try two days of eating every three hours so he can see how it feels. What the hell: it's always good to have goals.