Today's Breakfast/Lunch/Snack

Today's breakfast/lunch/snack.  Wasabi almonds, hardboiled egg (with salt), raspberries & blueberries, salad (lettuce, tomato, broccoli & cucumber), babybel cheese, strawberries, salad dressing & lifesaver in Planetbox. Strawberry vanilla refrigerator oatmeal in jar.  Freeze dried peaches in tin.

I may not eat it all, but for 2.5 meals, 725 calories isn't bad.  Still leaves more than half of my budget for dinner!

Eating the Moment, Activity 1 - Why did I just eat?

As part of my weight loss goals, i'm working on Mindful Eating and developing a more healthy relationship with food.  Part of this is finding resources that work for me.  One of those is a book called Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time by Pavel Somov.  I'll try to write more about it as we go.  


The first activity in Eating the Moment is, after you eat, write down why you ate, for a weekish. It was pretty simple, but having to actually think why something just landed in my mouth was interesting, particularly as i'm being more aware of what and how much i'm eating.

Today is technically 7 days, but since i don't have a functional computer at home, i thought i'd make yesterday the last day and move on to the next exercise today. Because Duncan and i are using Friday as our weigh in day, it also feels like a good time to move along.


Saturday
Breakfast - hunger
Snack - hunger
Dinner - hunger
Dessert - craving, needed calories, hunger(?)

Sunday
Breakfast - hunger
Snack - tired, thirsty, hunger(?)
Late Lunch - hunger, boredom
Dinner - hunger, needed calories

Monday 
Breakfast - calories, fuel/tired
Lunch - wanted a break from work, lunchtime trigger?
Snack - hunger
Dinner - social, hunger

Tuesday
Lunch - hunger, smelled food
Snack - hunger, bored(?)
Dinner - hunger
Dessert - calories, craving

Wednesday
Breakfast - fuel, hunger
Pre-dinner - cooking trigger (tasting), hunger
Dinner - hunger
Dessert - hunger, tired, calories, pain (wanted cold)

Thursday
Breakfast - hunger
Lunch - hunger, habit
Snack - hunger, food in front of me
Dinner - hunger, tired



There is a huge bias here. In reducing my calories i'm being forced to think before i eat, and not eat so mindlessly. If i wasn't being so careful boredom, tired, lonely and cravings would likely have shown up much more. 

When i looked at this, i first thought "gosh, i must be hungry all the time!", but i think the reality is i'm feeling hungry, so i eat, which is a normal cycle. And normal people eat every 4-6 hours. Normal people eat meals and snacks. This is OK.

Breakfasts are still a challenge. I've been doing a greek yogurt and sometimes fruit in the mornings, though often one becomes lunch or a snack. 


Today i start the next activity, which is asking before i eat "Why am i about to eat?". The upcoming week includes a wedding (social eating opportunity) and four unscheduled evenings (bored/emotional eating opportunities). I can change my mind or not once i answer that question, but it's about the honest check in beforehand. I wish loseit had a notes option to keep everything in one place, but so it goes. 

Related, C25K continues. The dental work is still sore and mucking with my sleep, so exercise is being pushed to after work. I hope to get back to 6AM next week. Still, i'm doing it. Yesterday was a walk day, but i chose to run 2 3 minute sections just to see if i could. God that's a long time at this point, but i know soon enough it'll be easy. Just keep swimmin'. Or runnin'. Or something.

Trust & Productivity

One of the things that is critical in GTD is trusting your system.  You have to really believe in your collection systems, or you won't use them.  When that breaks down, the system breaks down.  You have to know something will be in the right folder, or on your calendar, because if you lose faith, you will quit using it.

I'm having a faith issue with a different collection point - my freezer.  Once again, we are out power, so far for  about 36 hours and counting.  Although I live in a fairly urban/suburban area, I also live on a tree-lined street in southern New England, and the weather can be harsh.  In the past several years we've lost all of our cold food more than once, and it's heart breaking.  I haven't gotten too far into OAMC (once-a-month cooking) and this is precisely why.  I can't trust that we will have consistent power to keep too much in the freezer!

I'm not sure how to bridge this gap, short of buying a generator.  Although I can do my best to keep things full with ice and not open the freezer when the power is off, I don't really feel like potentially exposing myself or my family to contaminated food.

Ideas on how do learn to trust my freezer?  See this from a different perspective?