Sunday Musings
Breakfast was a slice of french toast with sugar free syrup. I will talk more about this later in the blog. I held off until after 12 pm to have my yogurt. Lunch was a pepperoni pizza melt. Afternoon snack was cottage cheese and an apple. Dinner was roasted carrots and a spinach & artichoke stuffed chicken breast. After my shower I had a slice of apple bread with some butter. Evening snack was a chocolate cupcake with whipped cream.
After breakfast I spent some time finishing up challenges and playing my slot games. Yet again I was struck by how many of the ads are obvious scams. I can see where they take video clips of celebrities and manipulate them to look like they are endorsing the product. I'm sure plenty of people click on these ads and maybe even order the product. This is something I will never do. I'll order order from big retailers like Amazon or Walmart or online companies that have been around for a while, like Nailboo. I've been seeing their ads for a few years and most scammers don't last that long. Even Etsy is not immune to the scammers. I read recently that there's a ton of Chinese junk being sold there, which is sad because Etsy started out as a marketplace for small business. It's now full of mass produced trash, so even there you have to shop very, very carefully. The cell phone case I bought comes from a seller I've bought from several times, so I know they're reliable.
So earlier this week I mentioned the slice of french toast was small and I ended up having pancakes with it. Today's slice was small too and even before it hit the toaster, I told myself I'd just have a slice of the apple bread to compensate. I stopped myself right there. I hadn't even eaten and wasn't "starving", but I was already planning to eat more ! This is a red flag. Why do I feel like I need to eat more before I've even eaten ? Why am I afraid of being hungry ? I think a lot of it ties back to the lean years with Alex BUT - I was fat long before Alex came along. So my relationship with food has always been a problem. It got worse during those years. Eating pounds of candy in bed was my coping mechanism for a long time. Somehow I shook it off in late 2018 and managed to lose the weight, but then went right back to my old habits. I think a big part of that is because my life didn't change the way I might have wanted it to. I wanted men to like me and that didn't happen. There was a little bit of "why bother", so I think I used food to comfort myself (again!) and it slowly got out of control. Here I am now, 80 pounds later - struggling to get back there. I think I'm on the right path, but I have reel myself back in a little. I will not repeat last night's apple dessert. The caramel will be used for its intended purpose: a small add-in to coffee. The cinnamon sugar will be put aside for the time being. Whipped cream quantities will be reduced. I only buy 1 can a week now. Note that all 3 products are nothing but sugar ! Needing multiple quantities of things I use a lot is also part of the food insecurity associated with emotional eating. I have 10 bottles of the raspberry lemonade flavor that I put in my water. God forbid I run out ! I have 3 or 4 extra bottles of syrup and just as many (possibly more) of salad dressing. Same reasoning - what if the store doesn't have it ! I have 2-3 jars of each salad add in. I have 3 full containers of feta cheese. I have enough coffee to last months. You see where this is going. Some things I stock up on are understandable. During COVID the wet food my cats like was often unavailable and I had to scramble to find it online and order enough to keep ahead. I still do that now even though the shortages have eased. The beef baby food I feed Abby every day is also often not available. I think part of that is it's a popular product and Walmart doesn't keep up with stocking the shelf. I buy 10 jars at a time almost every shopping trip. The 30 pound bag of dry food I feed the strays is often gone from the store shelves too, so I make sure to buy a new bag when I open the one I have. I have 5 boxes of plastic forks and the same of plastic spoons, because I use them a lot. I also use a lot of paper plates and paper bowls, so I keep a good stock of those too. I really need to scale back on that because they're getting super expensive ! I have a dishwasher so there's no reason to buy all this disposable stuff.
Concurrent with my food struggles, I'm still struggling for consistency when it comes to working out. When I first started this journey I had to go to the office every day, so I only worked out once a day. That changed in the summer of 2019 when our office closed. I was able to work from home 3 days a week, so the lunch workout was born ! When COVID came along in March 2020 I began working from home full time. I think right now I am putting too much pressure on myself to exercise twice a day. I'm a couple years older now and I've gained some weight, so naturally exercise is no longer "easy". I dialed back my speed expectations but I'm still chasing the monthly challenges iFit puts out. I need to go back to the roots of my workouts and start I only have 2 workouts to go to finish the October challenges but one is 34 minutes and one is 37. Honestly, it's too much right this minute. I ended up running them on my phone just to get the completion. Starting tomorrow I'm going back to my "roots": the Atlas Mountains Cultural walk (just over 32m) with Tommy Rivs during lunch and a beach walk (15-20m) with John Peel after work. I'm going to do this through 10-31 and then assess where I am on 11-1. Consistency has always been a struggle when it comes to exercise, but I already prove I can make it work. Like everything else in life, you just have to put in the hard work !
I accomplished nothing this weekend, so it's a good thing I have this Friday off. The goal for next weekend is the deep cleaning the house needs. That means a good scrub in the bathroom and shampooing the carpet downstairs. The laundry room & kitchen will be easy as I already made a good effort there last weekend. The living room needs dusting in addition to the carpet cleaning. Same in the dining room. My office needs a little more decluttering, as does the dining room table. There is no reason I can't declutter and put stuff away during the week. I'm determined not to leave everything until the last minute, like I always do ! Also, it is tradition for me to put up my Christmas decor for this event, so I have that to do as well. It's a lot but it's 100% manageable. I have to make my sauce & meatballs on Saturday 11-4 and also cook the sausage, so I need to get as much as I can done before then.
Around 7 I took myself upstairs to take a shower. I took the old shower mat out and, as expected, the underside of it was gross ! I sprayed the floor of the tub and the plan was to scrub it another day. Then I decided that was stupid and there was no reason to wait. So I scrubbed it and then took my shower with the new mat. The new mat is not as "plush" as the old one but it's not slippery and it has an open pattern, so the underside won't be gross. The old one was like bubble wrap and many of the "bubbles" had popped so it never dried. It was super easy to rinse the bottom of the tub and I did hang the new mat over the side to dry. No more being lazy and leaving it in the tub. The old mat went straight to the garbage. I also did skincare after my shower. Yet again, I felt amazing afterwards and wonder why I don't do this every night.
As I mentioned earlier, looking around the house I can see I didn't accomplish much this weekend. However, I feel like I accomplished a lot mentally. Going to Wegman's and Walmart yesterday wasn't easy. I went with a sense of dread and a determination to overcome. I did overcome but I came to the decision that I won't be going to Walmart in Cicero anymore. As I said in yesterday's blog, there are too many sketchy people there. I need to start paying more attention to my surroundings when I am out. I also made a lot of progress with starting to understand my food problems. Food is never going to be the answer to a problem. My eating went a bit into overdrive when I spent 2 months thinking I was going to lose my job. Losing mom was also an excuse to eat. Being lonely was an excuse too. Thing is, eating might have given me a sense of well being, but it didn't last. I knew my weight was ballooning and the more I ate the unhappier I was, yet I kept doing it.
Comments
Post a Comment