All these things that I have done

So much for OBLOAFA* plan! Quite apart from my weekend activities (of which more anon), I was going to get on with things this week. I have failed to do so. There was a plan, and it related to lunches. You see we get free lunches in the canteen. This is good, because free food! But bad because free fattening food! I'm eating 5-600 calories a day in lunches. So the plan was as follows:

1) Buy lower fat lunch alternatives that I can prepare in our minimally equipped kitchen (toaster, kettle)
2) Eat breakfast at work, thus still getting some free food! benefit
3) Eat said alternatives for lunch

Step 1 went fairly well and I got a selection of pasta pot type items to warm me up over the autumn and winter lunchbreaks (any other suggestions welcome, btw). Step 2 I failed at this morning, because I was very low in my "on the case" levels so I ended up starving 20 mins ago and went for biscuits. And step 3 is looking doubtful because I have forgotten to bring the cunningly purchased items from step 1 to work with me!

On the other hand, I did come in in the car today (naughty, but compensation to self for not so great night) so I could drive over to Sainsbury's and get something healthy. It feels like hassle but I probably should make the effort.

* Operation Become Less Of A Fat Ass

I had what may be a blinding flash of the obvious last night - I think I figured out one of my dieting problems/eating triggers. A lot of diet books talk about this sort of thing and mostly they focus on eating when you're bored and when you're upset, neither of which quite rang true for me but when talking to Alex last night I suddenly realised: I eat when I'm tired.

This takes a few forms:
1) When I'm tired I am way less likely to be motivated to cook. This means that more often than not, we end up eating take out.
2) When I'm tired I'm much more likely to reach for a snack to keep me going because I feel the need for the energy boost. This tends to take the form of something carby.
3) When I'm tired, I'm much more impatient, so I'm much more suceptible to thinking "gah this diet isn't getting anywhere/is too slow/whatever so I might as well just give it up".
4) When I'm tired I am much less likely to be prepared to do exercise when it can be avoided (e.g. I'll drive to work instead of walking/cycling).

I've been tired a lot this week. This has been due to the fact that we had a couple of late nights at the start of the week and partly due to poor sleeping conditions. I sleep in fairly short cycles and I'm very sensitive to noise unless I'm quite deeply asleep. We've had problems with Charlie this week where if we let her in she'll decide to sharpen her claws on the mattress at 5am and if we shut her out she scrabbles at the door either at 5am or while we're trying to go to sleep. Really, we need to train her to not do one (or both) of these things but effective training is hard to pull off at 5am when you're already tired.

My thoughts about this currently are currently focusing on two main things - how can I avoid feeling tired and how can I avoid overeating when I do?

As far as avoiding tiredness goes, the ideas I've come up with so far are as follows:

1) Go to bed earlier (well duh!). The main problem here is the aforementioned short sleep cycles and light sleeping for large parts of them. If I go to bed earlier and then Alex comes up an hour or so later, it's almost impossible for him to avoid disturbing me. How do I find out what my optimum hours of sleep are anyway?
2) Get up earlier. This sounds crazy but hear me out. I've noticed a frequent pattern recently where I'll wake up around 6:30 or 7 quite suddenly. There generally won't be anything apparently to cause this and I'll feel quite alert but I look at the clock and think "too early" and settle back for more sleep. I suspect this may be putting me at the wrong point in my sleep cycle when I wake up at 7:30 with the alarm.
3) Deal with cat noise at night. Possibly shut them downstairs? This seems mean to Cassie because she is nice and well behaved in the spare bedroom but might work.

I suspect that the best plan for these is going to be to obsessivly diarise for a few weeks to figure out what works well and what doesn't but any suggestions/comments are welcome.

Then there's avoiding overeating when I do feel tired.

1) Force myself to exercise. This is a reasonable idea in principle but I am cautious about it mostly because I have a very strong antipathy to most exercise anyway. If I force myself into it when I feel less than good, is that going to risk putting me off it altogether? If I only did light exercise on those days would that make any difference or does it have to be at a certain level for the hormones to kick in?
2) Plan some low/no cook meals for days when I don't feel I can cope with cooking. The limiting factors here are going to be finding things that really do taste good so I brighten my mood and the size of my freezer, which is very small and mitigates against a lot of cooking in advance (although you could have some stuff like that). I have got some ready meals in there but I bought them because they're low fat ones and while they're not bad, I don't find them satisfying. It occurs to me that finding some ready meals or pasta sauces or whatever that I do find satisfying is likely to be less calories than take-out even if it's more calories than other ready meals. Any suggestions?
3) Corollary to (2). Stop feeling guilty about occasionally asking Alex to prepare said low/no cook meals. As long as it's not all the time (and experience suggests it wouldn't be) then it's perfectly fair and he's said before he'd be happy to so accept that it's a shared thing, damnit! I'm so used to being the one that feeds us that it's hard to get that head off.
4) Find some low calorie energy boosters which can be used as a temporary measure. No particular ideas for any - any suggestions?
5) Do something upstairs rather than watching TV downstairs on evenings when I'm tired - to physically make it more effort to get any snacky stuff.

Any more ideas?

So, back on the weight loss trail again now that I am feeling well enough to cook and Glastonbury is out of the way. I'm trying to decide how systematic to be about it this time around. I've had sucess and failures both ways before so I could go either way.

In principle I like having a counter or target to use. I like online food planners and trackers but I also find them frustrating. Because I cook for myself so much I have to enter all the ingredients and some of the sites I've tried are not so good on generics either - looking for chicken breast can get you a lot of Breaded Chicken Breast meals but not always the straight forward ingredient. If the site has a recipies feature then that's pretty good because I do have a core of tried and trusteds that cut down on this problem but it's still not nearly as easy as it would be if I just ate ready meals.

Also, close though it may be, I'm not actually on the computer all the time. Ideally I'd like to be able to update the tracker thing through my mobile phone but surprisingly few places I've looked at offer this. I did trial one but it had the problem with not having many generics in it's food list (although it did have a lookup by barcode for products, which I thought was pretty neat). At the very least, it would be nice if the website was light weight enough to use on the go - that was where Weightwatchers online fell down for me - it was a pretty poorly designed site, which was unfortunate because otherwise it was offering a good service. The other problem with most of the tracker sites I've tried is that they tend to have quite inflexible targets. Again, the weightwatchers one was good here but most of the others I tried wouldn't even let you carry over between days.

Then there's the clubs. Now this is fine in principle. I can quite agree that weightloss is easier if you've got someone to do it with - you can support each other, share good ideas, even police each other if that's what works for you. In practice however, I have never managed to meet anyone even remotely like me at a slimming club. I used to go to a lunchtime weight watchers meeting and it was full of old women and young mums with young babies. All nice enough but facing completely different weight loss challenges to me. As a support group it just didn't really work for me, although I did get some good ideas from the hand outs. Still, I am drawn to the idea of a support group. Anyone know any good ones? Want to form one perhaps even?

Overall, having written this, I think I like the idea of having a structure, but I don't know where to get one that'll work long term for me. Any recommendations? I only actually tried out a couple of online systems before getting discouraged and moving on so there's probably loads out there I haven't seen.

Well, all in all, a pretty productive weekend. I've managed to write the first draft of my essay today. I've still got a question or two for my tutor about referencing, and I have to cut out about 200 words from it but I'm pretty pleased with it so far and I dug up some figures to include myself rather than just relying on what's in the course book (yay for BBC school league tables). Also, I weight myself this morning and I'm under 15 stone again! This despite a week where I went round to Ian & Ruths for games (much fun, btw) and ate cheese and then snacked on cheese again last night to avoid snacking on pitta breads. I'm starting to think there might be something in this carbohydrate thing. Fingers crossed, eh.

Well, that was an interesting afternoon in front of the keyboard. I decided to do a bit of googling on the subject of carbohydrate cravings to see if I could find out if it indicated anything that might be missing from my diet and I found lots of interesting stuff.

The first link I found, which was fairly typical was this: http://www.diagnose-me.com/cond/C240808.html which talks about carbohydrate addiction. This seems to be lead to/reinforce insulin resistance and is also linked to low serotonin, although I'm not clear on what the link is between those two. More hunting around suggests links with SAD and possibly atypical depression (which also has possible links to thryoid issues apparently), both things I have show signs of at different times.

It looks like the most sensible course to reduce insulin resistance in the long term would be to try a low GI diet for a while. A lot of the foods I choose seem to be high GI as well (cornflakes, for example, which is one of my favourite snack items and jacket potatoes, my regular lunch), which is an interesting indicator. Low serotonin levels can be combatted with lightbox/daylight lamp treatments (can you get low energy daylight bulbs?) or supplements so I guess a shopping trip is in order.

Its interesting because it's another way in which a lot of my issues link together. Serotonin is involved in body tempurature regulation, mood and sexuality which are all issues for me. Looking at this and the thyroid stuff earlier in the year make me think about what a complicated interrelated machine the body is - all these things link together and interrelate in such complicated ways and it's so hard to tell exactly what part of the system is not working as expected.

See, I was going to be a good girl today but someone left a bag of Iced Gems in the kitchen. How am I supposed to resist that, I ask you?! My only comfort is that knowing my collegues, they won't last long :) I thought I'd managed to break my scales last week - they were flashing weird things when I stood on them but eventually I got my brain in gear and realised they were flashing BATT and just need a fresh battery!

It was good to get out last night. I had a long chat to Mum on the way in and then a really nice time relaxing with the girlies. Lots of getting it of ones chest over stuff, which was very cheering. We're planning another girly on the 20th, by the way, probably in the Holywell or the KA if anyone wants to join us.

So, the scuttlebutt seems to be that Peter Jackson has optioned naominovik's Temeraire series. I'm not sure what to make of that - visually I'm sure it'll be fab but both King Kong and LotR have left me somewhat dubious about his ability to actually tell a story - King Kong, way way too bloated, LotR, missing what I considered to be the point of some of the characters. Still, it should be gorgeous, and I think Temeraire will be a lot easier to film without annoying me than LotR because there'll be less temptation to change the original story. And, of course, who knows whether it'll really happen - it's a long long way from option to screen.

For reasons unknown I seem to be in a bad mood today. I think it's because I need a new plan and I don't have one now, nor do I really have the energy to make one. Also, I have just twigged that I have gone straight from stress eating to bordom eating. This is not a good thing, oh no. I need interesting things to do - anyone want me to make a style for them maybe? I can do LJ or Scrapbook. Or any other suggestions? I find reading at work only works for short periods - I think my body is just too adapted to lounging around while reading to be comfortable doing it at a desk.

It was so nice to have the temperature go down enough of Saturday to actually do chores! I got quite a long way with Thursdays list (which I had completely failed at on Thursday). The house looks presentable again and no longer smells of festival, which is good. I'm also close to clearing out the review queue for Scrapbook, which will give me a warm glow.

On the bad side, our shower broke last week - Alex was using it when he noticed that there was smoke rather than steam and a nasty plastic smell. As he said, it was quite good going for his subconcious really given how awake he normally is in the morning! When we took the cover off the wires were blackened :( Unfortunatly, the earliest we can get it replaced is Thursday this week apparently, so I'm showering at work and Alex is bathing in the mornings, which is awkward.

Having failed in my plan to try the Slimfast diet due to them having stopped making the foods I like and could eat in the office for it I've decided to try cereal instead so now I have a big box of cornflakes lurking in the office kitchen. I've also picked a random selection of pasta lunch things to make up when I want hot lunchtime food, although I gave in and went for a jacket potato today. Perhaps I should bring in low fat fillings or something - tuna mayo is not bad but it's not great either. I also plan to dance and revolve (or possibly revolt) this week - hopefully that'll be a fun way of getting a bit more exercise.

Went to see the in-laws on Sunday* which turned out to be a rather pleasant day - huge amounts of food (I didn't finish mine) from the BBQ, nice laid back relaxing chat and a look at Bob's latest crop of holiday photos. I have to say, if you are going to look through someone elses holiday photos, Bobs are the ones to look at. He's got very into digital photography and he has a great eye. There were some particularly amazing ones in this batch, including one of an artic tern swooping on him from above which is now my desktop background. I'll have to upload a protected copy to Scrapbook so you can see it - it really is a fab photo.

* I always feel a bit odd calling them my in-laws as, strictly speaking, they're not but it seems to trip off the tongue in a way "Alex's parents" doesn't and implies more of a relationship between them and me, which I think is appropriate these days. I always thought outlaws a bit self conciously silly for actual use and I don't think I've heard any other descriptors for it.

My body has been behaving really oddly the past couple of weeks. Firstly, about a week ago, it suddenly switched on the "dieting" switch again and I'm now not having a problem sticking to my diet again. I'd really really like to know where that switch is please! Bizarre. Then this weekend, perhaps to avoid lulling me into a false sense of security it decided to ambush me. I was fine all Saturday, all Sunday afternoon, went to the garden centre, got home, sat down, wrote cards, then bam! Suddenly I feel crap and flu-ey. It literally came full on in about 30 minutes. I ended up taking Monday off to lie in bed feeling achey and then went back to the office yesterday. I can only assume I got it from one of my Brownies... As long as it's completely gone by Christmas, I don't mind.

I'm going have a week of trying really hard to apply the Weightwatchers programme this week - I need to remind myself that when I do it properly I can actually lose weight. One of the things I've been having problems with in the last couple of weeks particuarly but also generally is comfort eating. Or not exactly comfort eating but I've been finding that I get home and have dinner and a glass of wine and then what seems to happen is that I feel tired and perhaps a little bored and just want to sit in front of the TV with another glass of wine and perhaps a toasted pitta or bakewell tart. And then repeat for the next 3 hours or so.

So my question is have you got any suggestions for things I could try instead. I need something with fairly low barrier to entry (as it were) as it's difficult to get myself started but once I'm going I can get re-energised fairly quickly. Ideally it should also be something that I don't do just sitting down in the living room, at least for the moment as I currently associate that with relaxing with wine, pittas, etc. Any ideas?

Also, as support is so important ( :) ) I thought I'd organise a pub meet tonight. Far from the Madding Crowd? (Or Copa, but they have more tempting food) from around 5:45? Comment now and I'll txt white_hart after lunch with the conclusions.