This is the second day in a row in which I’ve had zero snacks–not even healthy ones!
Plus I did a 10 km walk/run that burned over 700 calories, so in all, a pretty decent day.
I did gain 0.4 pounds when I stepped on the scale this morning. I chalk it up less to the pizza I had last night and more to the fact that the pizza made me so thirsty I drank enough water to fill a pumper truck.
(The beef was beef and broccoli stir-fry, one of my rare sojourns into red meat.)
Today I had breakfast, lunch and dinner and no snacks at all, not even healthy ones.
I did have pizza for dinner, which is both delicious and a caloriepocalypse, but I also did my 70 minute workout and walked around Deer Lake and Burnaby Park–over 21 km in total. So I should be good there.
Weight was unchanged today, we’ll see what the pizza does for tomorrow morning.
Good news: I was down in weight again, another 0.9 pounds, down to 173.4, my lowest weight since the start of the year. Woo.
Bad news: Mid-afternoon and the day felt like it was dragging on interminably. I gave in and had one serving of crackers, which I ate over a period of time instead of just shaking the box directly into my mouth.
I was very good otherwise, though, and was actually too low on my calorie goal for the day, so ate just enough to tip me past.
I felt guilty eating the crackers–as intended–and as I type this I am noshing on carrot sticks. I could learn to like these.
We’ll see if the crackers instantly convert to fat when I weight myself tomorrow morning.
I once again managed to skip snacking today. I would clap myself on the back but it hurts when I try.
The closest I came to Unauthorized Snacking was when I added a 50 gram serving of Havarti cheese to my dinner. I later found out this has 189 calories, which is a lot more than I’d expected. Oops. Fortunately I still came in under my calorie goal and cheese is a better snack than, say, a bag of chocolate frosted Skittles.
Also, my weight was different this morning–down 1.5 pounds. Now I am really expecting to be up tomorrow. We will see.
I have allowed myself to indulge in healthy snacks of the fruit and veggie variety. Today I had the following:
Other than that, it was another day of meals-only. I am noticing that I am feeling hungry at certain points through the day now, but this is good–it means my body is noticing the loss of food and over time will adapt to less snacks and more normal eating.
Curiously, my weight has remained unchanged for the last three days. I would not be surprised if it went up tomorrow.
Onward to Day 3.
An interesting thing happened while I spent today being snack-free. Actually, it happened many times throughout the day.
I thought about snacks. Specifically, I would be sitting (or standing) and suddenly think, “A snack would be nice.” This would happen regardless of whether or not I felt hungry or if I had just eaten. The first time it happened today I had just finished breakfast. I sat down after cleaning the dishes and instantly thought about getting a snack.
My amateur psych analysis of this is simple: snacking has become a substitute for something I need or crave. I don’t snack because I’m hungry, I snack because it provides comfort, it makes me feel better (unless I plow through half a box of crackers and feel gross and somewhat regretful after). The phrase “comfort food” looms large, like a giant box of chocolate glazed donuts. Mmm, donuts…
Anyway, I ended up not having to engage in any of the cheap tricks I listed yesterday to keep myself from snacking, because I also felt headachy and kind of listless for most of the day, so getting up and gathering snacks never registered as more than a distant thought. On top of the headaches today, allergies the past few weeks have been beating me up like never before. I can see myself becoming a nasal spray addict before the end of the year and having to join Nasal Sprayers Anonymous or something.
However, to bring things back to a positive note, I made it through the day and did not snack. Go me! If I’m up in weight tomorrow, I’ll just chuckle at how day-to-day fluctuations don’t matter, it’s the long term trends that show the real results. (I’ll still be mildly peeved, just because.)
It is time I faced a certain reality: I like shoving things into my face–specifically, snack-type things which go into my mouth, then to my stomach, then to the fat reserves around the mid-section of my body, which are now sufficient to sustain me through several winters.
Although my weight has been starting to trend back in the right direction recently, it is moving downward at a pace I would describe as extremely gradual. Given my current weight loss goal, my on-a-napkin calculation is I will reach that goal when I am 576 years old.
While I hope to live a long and fruitful life, I suspect I will not live top be 500+. But science has worked miracles before.
Barring scientific miracles, I need a new plan, and here it is:
Going cold turkey on all snacks. This starts tomorrow, as I’m considering the last two weeks of August to be a trial period of sorts. Here are the rules I have invented:
I figure for this to work I need to have two things ready to go:
We’ll see how long this bold new plan works. Today I stepped on the scale and was 175.8 pounds, 25.8 pounds away from my target of 150. We’ll see what the scale says in two weeks.
On July 14, the second official day of my summer vacation, I went for a walk around Burnaby Lake. The weather was nice, I felt good. It was a long walk, around 19 km in total. At around the 17 km mark my left heel began to hurt for reasons unclear to me. Some possibilities that I came up with later:
It is now August 12 as I write this, nearly a month later.
The left heel is still sore.
Is it better than before? I will say it is better than before, yes. And it may in part still be sore because I keep going for walks, almost every day, though the distance has shrunk from 19 km to 7-9 km. And I walk aggressively. The heel actually doesn’t feel too bad on these walks, as if I am limbering up the muscles and they feel better as a result.
But I’m not a doctor, so who knows. It could be ALIENS.
If my left heel is still sore when my doctor is back from his vacation (hopefully he does not hurt his heels), I will arrange an appointment to discuss possibilities, like resting the heel or getting a bionic replacement.
This concludes my August 2020 heel update. There may be a Part 2.
July was like June in reverse. Instead of being up 2.6 pounds, I was down 2.6 pounds. My body fat also dropped by half a percent and actual fat itself by half a pound. I am up three pounds on the year, but that’s down from a peak of nearly six pounds.
I am still fat.
But all signs are trending in a positive direction now and I’ve made real progress on curbing ye olde snacking, so I am reasonably confident the weight loss will continue.
I’m not going to aim for anything crazy like dropping below 170 by the end of August, but at least such a goal is no longer implausible.
Stats:
July 1: 177.4 pounds
July 31: 174.8 pounds (down 2.6 pounds)
Year to date: From 171.8 to 174.8 pounds (up 3 pounds)
And the body fat:
July 1: 23.4% (41.5 pounds of fat)
July 31: 23.1% (40.5 pounds of fat) down 0.5 pounds)
It’s been four days since Tuesday’s heel tragedy. The good news is I can still walk and perhaps even walk and chew gum at the same time.
The bad news is my heel is still sore. Is it as sore? No. But it’s still sore, and it peeves me and continues to mystify me. But I went for a walk with Nic through Mundy Park today to take a bird picture (yes, we only saw a single bird. Well, actually, only one specifically in a tree. There was also a duck in the water.) and while my heel was starting to feel a little more sore toward the end, I got through the excursion without limping, curling up in a ball or demanding that Nic carry me out, and it is no worse for the trip out now, later in the evening and having been off it for awhile.
I was originally thinking I could run maybe as soon as this Monday (two days hence) but now it seem the end of next week is probably more realistic. Oh well.
Stay tuned as I suspect there are more heel updates to come. Woo.
When I went to bed last night I was sad because my left heel was still pretty sore from whatever mysterious thing happened to make it sore. I mean, I walked 19 km in just under three hours, but the right heel didn’t seem to mind, and I can’t recall the last time either heel objected to a walk so forcefully.
I regret to inform the six bots scraping this site that my left heel is still sore.
However, it is definitely improved over last night, so I am cautiously optimistic that I will not spend the bulk of my vacation hobbling around like an old war vet or a young protester after interaction with those supposedly there to protect and serve.
That said, I only walked to the store to get a few needed items, then another four blocks to meet my exercise goal for the day. The urge to walk more was approximately nil, which makes me sad, because I walk all over the place.
Tomorrow: Probably another update, hopefully the last.
As for vacation, the heel preoccupied my mind and body, so other than the store, I did a whole lot of nothing. I feel mildly guilty about this, so here’s a haiku about my vacation to make me feel like I did something:
Vacation Take it to relax But oh yeah the pandemic Afraid to go out
Hmm, that wasn’t especially cheerful, was it? Or not cheerful at all. Maybe tomorrow, with the heel back to somewhat normalish, I will be more inspired to think in positive terms.
When I went grocery shopping today I noticed the 2 meter lines placed on the floor to remind customers to keep apart were looking rather worn and faded, which makes sense considering they’ve been walked on for close to four months.
Which then made me think that we have been living with the immediate effects of lockdown/quarantine/pandemic for about four months now and no real end in sight.
How will we adjust as this continues on? While some places have opened up early (with predictably disastrous results), only to close again, and large events like concerts being pretty much off-limits (unless you’re a certain flavor of idiot country musician) until–or if–there is a vaccine, it feels like more people are adopting a “just let it happen and get it over with” attitude.
Why people would feel this way is easy to understand–they are tired of having their lives upended by all the changes the virus has forced on them. They don’t like physical distancing or wearing masks or having to do take-out instead of eating at their favorite restaurant (though they can do the latter now in many places–time will tell how prudent eating out is).
What remains to be seen is where we go from here. Some people are engaging in a weird sort of anti-coping by doomscrolling. Others are decrying their “freedom” being curtailed and doing whatever the hell they want, safety be damned. Most are just plodding along, tired, but still understanding the necessity of following guidelines and the measures in place. B.C. has had it much easier than some places and things still seem to be under control here, so complacency is also taking root among come crowds. How careful do we need to be when it really doesn’t seem that bad? Why would the government allow things to open back up if it wasn’t safe?
Who can say what the future might bring, though? Recently I’ve been reading about some of the less-reported effects people have endured after contracting COVID-19 and the list of ailments is scary as all get-out. There is evidence emerging that some may suffer permanent organ damage, such as to their lungs. The virus is less than a year old and we know very little about it. The fact that it is infectious enough to shut down the world is frightening all on its own. It’s not the flu. It may turn out to be so much worse.
While the pandemic has in some ways become so much background noise, I wonder just how many people have thought about how long it will be before we return to “normal”–or if we ever truly will.
2020 has been a year of change and upheaval. And it’s only half over.