Category — ditch medicine for suburbia

Well, either I bit my lip or something in the night (possible), or I have a real honest-to-Pete cold sore coming on.  ::stifles panic::  Now, I know that cold sores are normal — they're expressions of Herpes Simplex 1, which something like 80% of the population carries and is one of the viruses associated with the common cold — but I've only ever had one mild one in my life, and even then it scared the pants off me.  Not sure why, but those things give me the creeeeeeps.

I do have a cure for them, which I used last time and worked fantastically well (gods I love herbalism)…but do I have any slippery elm bark on me?  Um, no, I do not.  So I read about six web-pages full of possible cures, most of which sounded horrendous, and settled on "likely to work and available":  A dose of ibuprofen (swelling), a packet of Emergen-C (immune system boost) and a slice of fresh garlic, which I rubbed on the proto-sore and then ate, to clear my mouth of nasty virus-stuff.  (Garlic, for you uninitiated, is a phenomenal anti-viral, -fungal and -bacterial.  Be careful putting it on your skin though — prolonged exposure will give you chemical burns!  Garlic is such a strong medicine that if you rub some on your foot, you'll taste it shortly thereafter — I've used it to remove warts and skin-tags, all by itself! — so treat it with respect.)

It would make some sense for me to get a cold-sore now…I've been traveling, been around new people and sharing food and stuff with them, and due to being with family for the holidays, not eating or sleeping terribly well either (always a bad idea in the middle of winter!).  Sometimes I lean on my awesome immune system too much; a performance vehicle needs careful care!  I wouldn't be surprised if, due to the stress of the last few weeks, I got a sniffly cold-cold for the first time in almost 2 years (though I would be angry at myself, lol), and I shouldn't be surprised if I get this.  But hoooooooly cow do I hope I can stave it off!  ::shudders::

Hope everybody out there is healthy!!  More useful posting soon; after a long period of just being slammed with daily life (moving right before the holidays was such a great idea) I'm finally thinking and writing more again.  *WHEW*

Peace (even while at war with viruses!  ;)

*thank you to the University of Maryland Medical Center for their clear summaries of herbal remedies!  Nice to have that to link to.

UPDATE:  Everybody who looked at it (including Nurse Mom) said it was a cold sore, and if they're right then I stumbled on an awesome way to kick a cold sore's butt!  All I did besides the aforementioned single dose of vitamins and ibuprofen was to continue to apply and eat fresh garlic.  Whenever it became sore or bothered me, I'd cut the end off a clove of garlic (nice and portable; I took it on the train) and rub it right on there.  When I felt it sting I took the garlic off, and the stinging went away after a minute — and after that, it would stop bothering me.  It stayed the way it was for a day, then faded in a day; today it's pretty much gone and I haven't needed the garlic at all.  Also on the first day I ate a clove of garlic, and the next day I chewed up a few of the end-pieces I was cutting off.  But that seems to have done it — woo!

(Day 10.)  So besides the mad exercise, it's also week 2 of the Mad High-Protein Diet now.  That's going pretty well…I'm sure I'm overshooting the carbs a little, and I should be eating more vegetables (always), but so far so good.

Points:

• A small glass of chocolate milk is a surprisingly satisfying breakfast.  It's my recovery/after workout drink (I've talked about that already), but since I work out first thing in the a.m. and then go to work, I usually don't eat again until lunch, and surprisingly I'm experiencing less before-lunch hunger doing that than I was eating two pieces of toast (granted, earlier in the a.m., but without the exercise).  Odd, but nifty.
• I'm getting sick of tuna.  And I like tuna!
• I am, however, becoming a big fan of turkey jerky.  And I like Trader Joe's chocolate-flavored protein powder too, though combined with my third-grade-jealousy-worthy recovery/breakfast drinks, I'm starting to feel like I live on chocolate milk.  (And meat.)  I may switch to soy-or-something-else milk for one of them to reduce my dairy intake, but since my body is generally dairy-friendly and those two glasses of milk are all I get on this diet, that may be fine the way it is too.
• This is not a diet for vegetarians.  I mean, I'm sure it's possible, but it's hard enough for me and I've always been heavy on the carnivore side.  I think vegetarians couldn't eat anything but protein powder??  OK, but they'd do a better job getting more vegetables than I do, granted.
• I'm using the Dots for calorie-counting, but I figured out how to make them a little less conspicuous:  Bracelet Dots!  They generally stick around a day or two, so there's a sort of half-faded bracelet of them when they go all the way.  (1 dot = 100 kcal, by the way.  The pic was taken of the first set, when I got the idea, so you can't really see the bracelet effect, but it's working nicely.)  I'm aiming for 1800 cal/day to support the workouts; I usually hit between 1600 and 1800.  It feels like a lot, since my usual is 1400, but then again, it's a lot of exercise too.  ;)

1. So I got a cold.  A stupid sneezy cold.  It's the first cold I've had after almost two years of complete sick-free-ness!  And when do I get it?  Four days into being monophasic.

   I'm just sayin'.  ;)
    

2. I've forgotten to mention the P90X "nutrition plan" — that's going very well, actually.  Not super-easy, and I don't have the kind of life that I can organize every tiny piece of what I eat to meet strict requirements, but I've made a major change and stuck as close to the suggested balance of nutrients as I can.  I feel pretty great, um, other than the cold.  Heh.

Also, my girl types at me in IM and we invent words together (she makes word salad and I pick out the good stuff).  Today we came up with fuerguw and trigoe and yurygurt and my favorite invented-Chinese name yet:  feg fu wei.  <3

I don't fsck with not getting exercise anymore.

I do at least the basics (pushups/situps/squats/triceps/or something), stretching, and some weightlifting, at least a few times a week, no matter what.  I also make sure to get a workout from walking — I walk fast, concentrate on my form, and always take the stairs.  And this is not difficult — know why?  Because there's been SO much positive reinforcement from doing it, that I'd sooner not eat food at this point, than not exercise. 

Exercise means I stay warm, feel alert, don't feel sore, am not anywhere near as stressed, and go through my days feeling strong and solid and reassuringly capable.  Many other people either limp along, due to age or weakness, or they're fine but only by luck; if they fell or suddenly had to catch something or move something or burst into action, they'd be at risk — but I get to feel all the time like I'm in nearly top condition for my size, age and build.  (Some lucky suckers get to feel like this anyway, but I never did; even when I was young, I was pretty weak from…oh right…lack of exercise.) 

Oh, and I get to look nice.  I'm not a model-type and I'm not a bodybuilder; I'm not "cut" and I don't really care — I don't do the kinds of working out that burn of all one's fat, really — but having well-exercised muscles means a) a pleasing overall shape and b) effortless control of excess body-fat.  You can pinch an inch on me (which, no matter what anyone says, plenty of people consider attractive anyway) — but I went and bought some pants that fit the other day, and after a massive trying-on-of-things, guess what I learned?  That since I started working out, I've gone from a solid size US 10, cresting into 12, down to a 6.  Without trying to lose weight at all.  That's the size I wore in high-school, by the way, and it isn't tight on me today.  I wouldn't wear a bikini — as if I ever have, or want to — but I feel good and I know I look pretty damn good. 

To that last phrase:  Knowing you look good is one of those things that I, at least, wish didn't matter; but we're social creatures, and it just does.  It doesn't require being the prettiest person anywhere to reap the benefits — knowing that you look good for you is enough.  Knowing that you're strong and healthy for you is good enough too.  The mental change is quite profound — it gives you the confidence to act like yourself around people that you otherwise might have backed down to for stupid reasons…because they're younger, or thinner, for example.  You see that all the time in a social work-environment, and it often leads to incompetent people getting a big raise or promotion simply because the more competent person didn't like holding themselves up for comparison against the young/skinny person, simply because they aren't confident about the shape they're in — not compared to others, but relative to how they themselves could be.  An older person or heavier person who exercises and is in good shape is a truly formidable opponent in the workplace; their decades of experience is a powerful asset, but only if they're not afraid to use it.  (Some people — especially autism-spectrum people, in my experience — can actually just ignore the whole physical side of those equations.  But most people can't, or don't.)

We're all stuck being embodied, dammit. 

For the price of a few minutes every other day, it's possible to make that an asset, even if it's usually a detriment to you.  Even if you're in a wheelchair, working out the muscles you can will make you feel and look better.  Exercise is just a no-lose proposition, and I'm rather irked that I didn't know this, or know how to take advantage of it, until I was thirty.  But it's made being thirty far more awesome than it could have been!

*pant pant*

Okay, this week I almost wrote a Wednesday post.  I actually did write it — Wednesday night — and then it mysteriously got eaten alive, whole and chomping.  Gone.  And here it is Saturday, and I haven't been able to replace it.

See, here's the thing.  New job (YAY) is a mostly-from-home gig, which I'm quickly learning is harder than an at-the-office gig in a lot of ways (many of the same ways that doing college course-work online was surprisingly harder than going to school, actually).  It's only been a few months, and I have a weeeeird commuter schedule with a lot of new stuff to get used to, plus numerous big family-changes and stuff, so thank you all for being awesome and cutting me slack; I've needed it.

I think I'm going to switch to doing my weekly updates (as you know, there are Twitters and periodic small updates whenever, but the weekly ones are — or are supposed to be — the substantive ones) on the weekend, if that's okay.  I just spend too much time in front of the computer on a weekday as it is, and I just don't think I can work in any more.  Look at Ye Olde Schedule now:

• bet. 4-5a:  wake up, exercise, write fiction
• 6a, 2-3x a week:  kungfu class
• bet. 7-8a:  nap
• 8:30a:  start work
• about 1p:  nap
• theoretically 5p, but more often 7p:  done with work
• 5:30 or 7p, 2-3x a week:  more kungfu/taiji/stuff
• after work/class until 9p:  parent
• somewhere in the 7-8p range, if I can:  nap
• 11:30p:  bedtime if I didn't get an evening nap; I buy another 1-1.5 hours if I did.  I spend that time reading or watching TV and making chainmail, or exercising if I don't feel like I've had enough that day.

…So I'm on this rotating E3-E4.5 schedule where "it depends" on if I get all of my naps, or if work or the kiddo steals one, how much sleep I get at night.  Sometimes I even only get one nap, and then I sleep 6 hours.  Sometimes I overwork myself ridiculously at kungfu or working out (remember how I wasn't much of a straight-up-working-out freak?  That changed, heh) and need extra sleep to heal something.  (By the way, ice, some Ibuprofen and extra water before bed, and whatever herbal or topical healing-stuff you like, plus 3 hours extra sleep is the BEST cure for pulled muscles and stuff.  I've no idea if it works when you're monophasic, so don't ask.  ;) 

And one week every month, now, I travel, and spend that whole week working a LOT and sleeping in temporary places.  I've still only done it twice, so I haven't figured out how I can nap when I'm out of town, but I absolutely do plan to figure it out, if I can.  In fact, now that I'm mostly working from home, I absolutely plan to see if I can set up an Uberman-friendly schedule.  OH HELL YES.  If it's possible, I'm so on it.  But I'm still way in the early phases of figuring that out, unfortunately, so there's not much to write about yet.

And while I'm home, I'm spending 1-2 hours typing in the morning, and then 8+ hours during the day doing this rather astonishing combination of texting, talking on the phone, emailing, technie stuff, and chatting (IM is a big way my department communicates, so it's pretty much constant).  After that, I simply cannot look at any of the three computers I use every day (uh-huh) after 9pm; I can't.  So I've basically given up all video-games (except for my Wii, which I adore on the odd chance I get time to play it) and dropped largely off the face of the regularly-updating Internet Planet for a while. 

Like, 40 of you good readers got email replies from me this morning, some of which you'd been waiting on over a month.  Seriously. Oh, and I've pretty much been kicked out of my SF-critiquing group, for nonactivity.  D'oh!

Anyway, this is your formal assurance that there are Plans.  To start with, regular updates will be returning, albeit on weekends.  Progress on the 2nd Edition of Ubersleep, which I left at about 2/3 done, will resume.  Somehow.  And I'll keep everyone posted on the details of my situation that are relevant to casing out a possible future Uberman opportunity, which, if I did it, I would do it right, including videos and daily notes and the whole shebang.  I'm busy as shit, but I remain hopeful — which, really, ought to be my motto.  I need a T-Shirt…

PD

Very first thing I want to say:  Wow, were there some great comments on my recent "An Argument for Right Now" post!  That argument is one of the cores of my personal philosophy and one of the main reasons I chose, in the last few years, to align myself with Chan Buddhism and Taoism.  I've made that argument to friends and family and philosophers many times before, mostly provoking the "omg you really are a whackjob, aren't you?" face in return.  To have thrown it at the Internet, and to have so many people offer wonderful and intelligent responses, was a total gift.  Thank you, everyone!  I'm planning a follow-up post soon where I can address some of those excellent points directly, and pull some textual and historical references to support my claim.  Exciting stuff!

The other thing worth bringing up today is the magic of baking soda and salt.  Years ago, on an herbalist's recommendation, I put equal parts sea-salt and baking soda in a grinder and whirred it to a fine powder.  I had no idea at the time how massively useful this stuff would be, but after using it again this morning, I thought, "This is something the Internet needs to know about!"

The principle is ridiculously simple:  Salt is a powerful killer of most germs and microbes, and it also, while stinging quite a lot in open injuries, is a great pain-killer.  Baking soda is a strong base, so it neutralizes acid; plus it has a nice toning and softening effect on skin and hair tissue (which is why you can use it for shampoo and to scrub your face, as well as to soak in a bath with).  The combination of the two is fantastic for basically anything related to your mouth or sinuses, like so:

• If you have, or think you may be getting, any illness that involves your sinuses, put a pinch (just a pinch) of this mixture in your neti-pot, mixed into warm water.  It will kill germs like crazy and also soothe irritated nasal passages.  If I can make myself do this twice a day, there isn't a sinus infection / cold / etc I can't kill in three days, seriously.
   
• Similarly, if there's anything going on with your mouth or throat that involves inflammation, irritation, or infection, swish or gargle with a (slightly stronger) solution of the stuff for powerful painkilling and germicide.  Works wonderfully on swollen tonsils, cuts or injuries in the mouth (not open bleeding ones, because ow ow salt ow — though if you do have an open cut, this won't do any damage; it'll just sting), post-dental-work pain and swelling, etc.
   
• If your teeth are not in the best shape, this stuff is your best friend.  It doesn't replace toothpaste (if you have cavities or whatnot already, you need the fluoride), but it does something that, if you already have tooth-decay, is equally important:  It kills germs, better than alcohol, and brushing with it (while, as you can imagine, totally delicious) is much better at working it into the holes than swishing with mouthwash is.  A tooth with a cavity isn't the end of the world, even if it eventually breaks and falls out; but abscesses and infections are awful, and can even be life-threatening.

…And that's about all I've got today, EXCEPT for this wonderful poem I just ran across — I'll post it beneath the cut.  If you like it, you'll be really fascinated to learn who the author, Peter Erlang, really is…

[Read more →]

Indian-spiced Easy-as-heck Lentil Soup

1 or 2 onions, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp. grated fresh ginger (substituting the powdered kind doesn't hurt)
1 cup red lentils
1/2 cup or so chopped carrots (also celery if you like; I don't)

1 can garbanzo beans, drained
1 can other beans (I use kidney, but trust me, it doesn't matter)
1 can diced or other tomatoes (I use whole so I can pick them out)

1 tsp. garam masala
1.5 tsp ground cardamom
0.5 tsp cayenne pepper (more for extra hotness)
0.5 tsp cumin (more for extra indian-spiciness)

Directions:  Heat big pot w/ a little olive oil in the bottom.  Add onions & garlic and cook until not raw.  Add six cups of water and everything else.  Bring to a boil for a few minutes, then reduce the heat and simmer until you don't feel like simmering anymore, and the lentils are soft.

Dump half the soup into a food-processor or blender and decimate it.  (If there's an ingredient you don't like to eat in chunks, like carrots or tomatoes, just leave them big for the cooking part, and then put them all in the food processor during this part.  I put all the whole tomatoes in the blender.)  Mix the halves back together and away you go.

Benefits:  Spicy, cheap, filling, vegetarian, high in fiber and protein, gets tastier the longer it sits in the fridge/freezer.

Spicy food helps clear the sinuses and keep away colds, too.  This soup is how I survive the cold months. 

May it bring you some warmth as well!

(Unless it's already warm where you are, in which case c'mere, I've got a snowball for you.)

It may not surprise you that I like coffee — I am a computer-centric organism, after all.  But obviously I’m also health-conscious (though I believe in moderation for that too — moderation in all things, including moderation!*).  So anyway, you may remember that several months ago, I decided to make a concerted push to learn to enjoy my coffee without milk or cream.

I used to take sugar in it, too, but when it started negatively impacting my teeth, I forced myself to get used to it without sugar.  That wasn’t so hard.  Looking around a decade later, I figured that I probably consumed about $5 a week and 200 calories a day worth of dairy creamer in my coffee, and I decided it’d be nice to get rid of it, just because.  Also, if I drank black coffee, it’d be easier to accept a cup at other people’s homes and in circumstances where there might not be cream (I hate the powdered stuff, so if there’s no cold milk or cream, I’m outta luck for my coffee). 

My goal was just to simplify this little thing, my daily coffee, and I figured that it wouldn’t be half as hard as some of the other changes I’ve made.  I mean, really; where on the continuum that includes learning Taiji and adapting to Uberman is "drinking black coffee"??

So, every day for a week, I put less cream in my coffee, until it was nearly black.  Well, dark brown, anyway.  But you know what?  I couldn’t get farther than that.  I still liked the mellower taste, and I couldn’t bring myself to stop using cream altogether.  (I tried getting rid of my half-and-half, but since the household always has milk on hand for the kid’s use anyway, that didn’t really help.)

Then, a few weeks ago, opportunity knocked.

"Opportunity" was actually two really icky necessities:  One, I got a chest-cold and coughed my butt off for a while.  Two, a restaurant served me coffee in a dirty carafe, and I ended up with a big blob of something slimy in my mouth (before I spit it out and got the management!), and I spent the next few days seriously squicked out from that.  But both of those things turned me off to cream — it tasted disturbingly slimy, and it was aggravating my cough, as dairy products do.  Plus, very little else tasted right thanks to the mucus overload from my cold, so basically all I could drink for a whole week was water and hot black coffee.

I could have gone back to using cream last week, now that my cough and the squick have both subsided; but you know what?  I didn’t.  Now that I’m used to it, I find black coffee tastes just fine, and I’m enjoying how it doesn’t curdle or go gross in the crevasses of my travel-mug, not to mention the other benefits.  The opportunity posed by the unavoidable events I experienced helped get me "over the hump" of getting used to drinking black coffee regularly.

Even though I had help "quitting cream", I still get some of the credit.  Why?  Because it was me that realized that those icky and unpleasant coincidences could be an opportunity to do something I wanted to do, and it was me who chose not to go back to the comfy old status quo when I could have.

So there’s a lesson here:  Sometimes you just can’t make a change on your own, and that’s okay.  Don’t beat yourself up.  But DO continue to keep your eyes open, because very often the Universe will give you the extra push you need to make it happen.

Cheers!  ::raises coffee::

*a little-known Greek named Petronius said that.  But my favorite moderation-related quote is by Thomas Paine (one of my favorite writers), who said that "moderation in temperance is a virtue, but moderation in principle is always a vice".  Isn’t that awesome?

Dear Valued Customer.  If you like amusing slander of credit-card companies, you might enjoy reading that.  Also if you have a thing for strikethroughs, I suppose.

It’s day three and for some reason I’m posting neat original content on LJ and chatty updates-on-life to pd.com.  Eh, I’ll just roll with it; it seemed like this food thing I’m doing might merit more details.

I’m really amazed and amused by how very like an Uberman adaptation this experience is.  There’s that shift in everything, how time passes and things stand out and you realize all kinds of things you’ve been thinking habitually forever that suddenly don’t make sense anymore.

I’ve been surprised by all the changes, but I shouldn’t have been — I drastically changed my whole diet.  It’s somewhat telling that it didn’t occur to me before that this would have a big impact, isn’t it?

So, I get fuller much easier now, which isn’t surprising as I haven’t had a meal over 200 calories in three whole days now.  Those meals fill me up nicely, and when I get hungry between them I have some kind of raw vegetable (though I’ve been thinking, adding cooked ones would increase the variety; I dunno), and that fills me up too.

The food I eat, I taste. It’s really odd how strongly everything tastes.  But it’s nice; nothing tastes bad or anything.

Oddly, my problem isn’t overeating — that’s what I want to do of course, but so far I haven’t — what I have done is eat too little.  During the day, I don’t want to eat one of my “meals” in a rush, or just grab something; I have to think about it.  So I put it off, and end up eating nothing for half a day like I did today.

I’m not sure if that’s a big deal or not.  This diet isn’t really predicated upon eating at certain times, is it?  I chose not to make up the calories that I missed out on earlier (because from what my sources say, it’s actually good when starting a calorie-restriction gig to cut waaay back the first few days, as it kick-starts the necessary processes).  Although, when I had to ask myself if I should have that artichoke in addition to the already-170-calories I’d had for dinner, even though it would probably push it over a bit, the fact that I was already down 400 for the day made it easier to say “hell yes, artichoke!”.  Which is as it should be, right?

So anyway, yes, this is proving interesting.

Crap.  I just realized that I should probably buy a scale, eh?  Well…maybe.  But I’m NOT putting one of those goofy slider-bar .gifs on my blogs.  That’s a little masturbatory even for me.

Okay, peace ya’ll, time for some real writing before bed.  I’ve got another story almost done and another one starting.  Woot!

P.S.  Also, something special coming up soon…Content from Beyond!

So, I’m on my very first ever actual calorie-restriction diet.  This is Day Two.

I’ve had more fun.

However, I probably also never have actually eaten this healthily, if health can be measured in quantities of raw vegetables.

Anybody could know why I did it, I imagine…three years of regular, increasingly athletic exercise, and I’m in the best shape of my life… and I still haven’t shed a pound of the thirty that I put on since momhood.  I try to make healthy choices whenever I can, but it’s no joke that I have a mean oral fixation (ever seen my fingernails?) and a pretty reliable sweet tooth.  I was raised on the Middle American Sugar Diet, and it shows.  Even when I was “just tracking” my calories with the dots-per-day thing, I was aiming for 1400 and probably missing it by 200-300 most days.

So, eventually the obvious quits f*cking around and actually becomes obvious (dammit, brain!):  The weight isn’t going anywhere, except possibly underneath a fresh layer of more, until the food issue gets solved.

I really, really prefer to do things all-out and cold turkey, when I can.  It’s SO much easier to just get it over with without a big drawn-out battle, isn’t it?

I’m waxing my legs today, as a commemorative.  I figure it’ll help if I engage in a long, painful ritual involving repeated visceral reminders that shit hurts a lot more if you do it slow, if you stall it or drag it out; the only way to go is one-two-three and exhale on three (if you can, add a kiai!) and rip that sucker off.

So it will go with food, if I’m lucky.  I did it with smoking, and my first Uberman adaptation, so it’s not impossible that I might.  It also runs in the family: my grandfather (may he have a breath of respite now and again in his Hell) quit drinking and smoking cold-turkey at once, with no drugs or doctors to help, and kept a new bottle of whiskey in his cupboard and a new pack of cigarettes in his pocket for I don’t know how many years.  My dad, oddly enough, though he inherited my grandfather’s intellect (and blessedly not much else), doesn’t seem to have this ability.

My grandfather was a bad person.  (One of them; the other is a hero of mine.)  I won’t tell you what he did but trust me, you’d agree that he was just bad, bad in the incurable way that people still think capital punishment exists for.  I wonder sometimes if he was always screwy somehow, or if he was normal, maybe before the War.  He was Big in the War.  Boxful of medals; Normandy I think; and it definitely messed with his head.  All those old men at his funeral who flew in from places.  I wanted to talk to them, but I didn’t because I couldn’t ask them what I really wanted to know:  Was he a good guy then, really, or was he always creepy, always “off”?  Did the War do it to him?  Then again, I wonder if any of them even knew, or believed, the stories of what he did.

Brrrwaugh! Wow, apparently that needed to come out.  Whew.  Anyway, back to something resembling the point.

*raises flags and marches Pointwards*

I can’t live in a world with no chaos, so I’m on a daily allotment of 1,000 – 1,250 calories, by my best estimation and package data.  I try to get this allotment in five 200-calorie chunks, so that I can eat often, which I sense will make things easier.  I’m allowed to reduce one meal to compensate for extra calories in another, but I’m not allowed to skip meals entirely, so I can’t “go over” by too much.  Moreover, in addition to this amount I’m allowed to have raw veggies whenever I want.  Also, only one of my 200-calorie “meals” is allowed to consist of junk food.  (I tend to save that one for last, having a long-bred habit of craving “dessert”.)

I have been hungry, though oddly it’s been from pushing back or even skipping some of my meals.  Where I would have just “grabbed something” before if I was busy, I don’t want to now; I want to enjoy it.  But when I am hungry and starting to really feel it, I grab some of my fridgeful of new veggies:  green peppers, celery, cabbage; all good raw-eatin’ stuff.  I also have brussels sprouts and an artichoke to cook for a meal sometime (I cook ‘em with looooots of butter. ;)

One thing:  The components of this diet are, so far, very cheap.  Did you know a head of lettuce is less than a dollar?  And I’ll be eating that thing all week!  Tearing off a cabbage-leaf is a great “geez I just need to eat something” antidote. It doesn’t really need sauce or salt, and it’s fast, and if you just have a few bites and put the rest in the compost, you don’t feel bad.  I hereby approve of cabbage leaves.

I’ve also eaten vegetarian for the last two days.  I didn’t really mean to, but well, with 200ish calories, you get a lot more food if it’s not meat.  And I don’t really crave meat in my diet anyway, so it’s been pretty easy to ignore it.  I’m not committing to that part, at least not yet, but it is interesting.  If it keeps up I’ll need iron supplements, eek.

I devised this diet the way I did for three reasons:

1.  I want to lose weight, and the only surefire way of doing that is to restrict your caloric intake.  I’ve seen it work in several cases to help people I know lose over 100 lbs.  So I aimed for 1K, figuring I’d screw up some and end up at 1200, which would be fine.  I knew that if I had to fuss over every single number, I’d quit.  I hate mental math!
2.  I like to eat often and I don’t like to eat too much; my appetite has always been small (or maybe I just grow bored of eating) and I eat a more varied diet when I spread it out.  So I took my caloric requirement and divided it up a way that seemed to make sense for me.
3.  I know that in order to keep weight off, there has to be a lifestyle change, not just a temporary change in diet pattern.  Like the lifestyle changes involved in quitting smoking and sleeping at night, I guess.  So I wanted to create a “diet” that would be both healthy and livable over the long-term.

OMG I just realized this means I’m eating polyphasically. Holy crap, that’s funny.

Less funny is the fact that I have to actually change my polyphasic sleeping schedule soon. The more work ramps up, the more impossible it gets to get my naps, and things have been getting dangerously messy lately.  I think things will get busier before they get stable, but I’m still trying to get a handle on what the bigger changes might look like so that I can plan a new schedule.  Man, I’d better be able to at least do something like a siesta schedule, or I’ll be pissed.

I’m also getting fuller, sooner, today than I’m used to.  Maybe my stomach is already accustomed to these small meals?  For dinner I’m having home-baked tortilla chips (ikr?!) and awesome fresh salsa, and I gave myself a few more chips than a serving as a treat or something, but now I don’t want them; I’m full.  And the last thing I had was celery, like, almost three hours ago.

Next stop:  Sustaining life with only sunlight and water and bloody-mindedness!

(This image is actually slightly appropriate, but only if you’re a huge nerd. The rest of you will just have to settle for enjoying the random pic of a sparkly anime guy. *yay sparkly anime guys!*)