May 14th, 2012: I wish I could report that I’d lost another pound in the last 24 hours, but I have not lost. I fucking gained 3 pounds. I was 265 yesterday, and now I’m 268 and feel like I’m edging back up to the 270’s. I’ve told myself that if I cross back into that disco-decade, I’ll drop 200 more calories daily from my diet. There really isn’t mechanically much else I can do right now. The program is not only about physiology, it’s about psychology, and dropping too many calories at once might introduce excessive thoughts of deprivation. Too much of that leads me to feel sorry for myself, and feeling sorry for myself is absolutely unacceptable – and that goes for every part of my life for the rest of my life.
I stayed with the program and I’m training hard. You know what, though, I have looked at my long term weight chart and compared the weeks and months (I have every data point in an Excel program – don’t forget, I have nerdlike tendencies). Maybe my just body has to “grow down” to its new size. I put on a pair of Levi’s that were tight as hell last Wednesday. Today, same pair, and they almost could be considered loose. Without a doubt I’m compacting.
Sometimes you just have to literally sit down and picture yourself putting on a pair of blinders. Then you say to yourself “Just keeping running, no matter what, just keep running.”
May 14th, 2020: Monotony with respect to my diet is something I had to learn to tolerate, which has actually led to an enhanced appreciation of chow times. Sometimes I can’t tell if I’m surprised, or if I’m horrified to find the mundane so rewarding.
I never was this kind of 1950’s or 1980’s fuckin guy who got home from work and bellered “What’s for dinner hun?” anyway, so that required no adjustment. However, after I quit drinking, my afternoon thoughts at work mostly did revolve around what I’d make myself for dinner, or where we might go out to eat and what I would order there. Juliana is a hell of a chef, so occasionally I’d ask if she was concocting anything that night, but it was never expected.
Some of my favorites from back in the day:
- Grilled cheese sandwiches with at least two different kinds of cheese. At least 2 of these with tomato soup with heavy cream mixed in it.
- Papa Tom’s pizza
- Ribeye steak with curly fries
- Ah never mind…
Some people like variety in diet (my wife). I do not. I just have to know what I’m eating every day, and learn to look forward to it like I look forward to going to bed. I mean, it’s not like I have some new and/or different bed or bedsheets or bedtime routine or something every night. It’s the same bed in the same room, etc. May as well make it that way for eating.
I beat the mundane with simple variation. Sometimes I take a different way to work. Sometimes I try different coffee. Sometimes I do weights before cardio. Sometimes my playlist for cardio is different.
Routine and monotony are anxiety antidotes. Anxiety opens the door for the demons – all kinds of demons that may or may not deal in binge-eating. There’s plenty of variation that happens to me during the day, so I need to keep my boring and repetitive motions in place to maintain structural integrity with respect to my sanity.
