Monday, 10/11/10:

WEIGHT before eating today:  156.5

Daily Calorie Goal:  1200 or less 
Total calories eaten today:  Over 2000  (Long work night on Mondays.  Too much random snacking; UGH.)

Mondays are my longest day of the week.  I start work around 10:00 a.m. and I'm at the lab until 8:30 p.m.  My hubby takes baby home on Mondays, and I stay and work late so I can pick the teenager and her cousin up from St. Scholastica at 9:00 p.m., when they both finish their DSSO group practices.  I enjoy my Mondays most of the time.  It gives me some "brain time," time to mentally sort out my week, think about projects I'm in the middle of or projects I might like to start.  It's the only few hours all week when I am completely, utterly by myself.  I relish this time for the absolute silence and relaxation of it.

This is the teenager's 4th year playing in a DSSO youth group.

Mondays SHOULD be easy for me, as far as calorie-counting goes.  Right?  I should get a good start to my week, and be super-motivated and extra-disciplined on Mondays, and just suck it up and do what has to be done to get the week started off on the right foot.

I always try.  I usually do really well until Monday afternoon.  By 4:00, I've almost always kept my calorie intake to a minimum, somewhere around 600 by that point.  Mondays at the lab are so busy, this isn't normally tough to do.  As long as I can keep myself from unconscious eating, as in putting bites of things in my mouth randomly as I'm running around working, I do OK.  

It's the evenings that are the killer for me.  I always try to plan for this, especially on Mondays, when I know I'll be at work late and needing to eat some kind of supper there, and I try to plan every bite and every calorie so that I don't blow it after doing well all day long.

Sometimes I succeed.  Sometimes I crash and burn.
Tonight was the latter.

I felt like I was starving all day today.  My stomach was killing me.  It didn't even feel like hunger pangs alone; it was more like hungry-plus-nausea.  Not fun.  I tried to decode the feeling all day.  Hot tea helped, coffee made it worse.  This one is a no-brainer, actually.  Coffee always gives me a gut-ache, but I like coffee, so some days, I drink a cup - but no more than one.  Two cups of coffee has me doubled over, for real.

LOVE coffee, especially the smell of it.  HATE the inevitable gut-ache.

Today was a continuous-grazing day for me.  I polished off all of baby's leftovers, for one.  I also brought lots of portable foods, like fishie crackers and fruit and yogurt, etc.  The foods themselves weren't horrible or terribly unhealthy, but I had a hard time keeping my hand out of boxes and bags.  I felt like I NEEDED a bite of something, all day long.  Infuriating!

So I nibbled.  And by the end of the day, I am positive that I exceeded 2000 calories over-all, though I stopped counting sometime around 4:00 p.m.  <sigh>

Today is the 22nd day of my diet and my blog, and I'm floundering with it.  (The diet, not the blog.)  Yeah, sometimes it takes me a day or more to get my blog entries updated and current, but I'm having a lot of fun with it.  It really does motivate me to write it all down, and to "own up" to the hurdles and the food screw-ups when they happen.  It also helps me to be able to go back and read previous posts, and any comments.  After all, why am I blogging this crap, anyway?  Because I'm hoping, in whatever small way, that it will HELP me.  I'm like anyone else; I have a task in front of me - to lose the unwanted pounds I've been lugging around for almost 3 years - and I'm having problems finding the magic formula that will make it happen.  I know that I'm in the same fat-boat as countless other people on this planet.  The difference with me is, I'm miserable with this extra weight, and a lot of other people out there seem not to care if they're fat or not.  Maybe that's an incorrect assumption.  I have no idea.  Maybe every fat person on earth is miserable about their weight.  And I'll never know for sure, because there are so many millions of over-weight people on this planet, it would take me weeks to email them all and ask them.  

Well, she LOOKS happy...  But IS she, really???