So, I seem to be at a little bit of a plateau. It’s not a real plateau, I just think I am eating enough to keep my weight steady. Its about 2200 calories per day, apparently—which is far more than a woman my size should be able to eat and maintain her weight. If I was on weight watchers, they would have me somewhere between 1200 and 1500, which, if you ask me is nuts.
Yesterday, I had the worst craving for a snickers bar. It was very specifically a snickers bar. It was so powerful that I actually text messaged my husband and said, “help! I’m craving a snickers bar!”
I even went to our vending machine in my office’s break room to see if they even had snickers bars. They did. My husband texted me back that I didn’t really want that Tin-nee HFCS taste, and that he was very proud of me.
I did actually manage to make it through the day without caving in to my snickers bar craving. For the record, I used to LOVE snickers bars. I didn’t eat them so much before – but when I was in highschool, I used to get an Ice cream snickers bar a few times a week.
Instead of giving into my cravings, I used the emergency stash of nuts and sunflower seeds in my desk. I have pistachios, peanuts and sunflower seeds hidden in my desk drawer for just this reason. For a snack, they are the perfect food. They are energy dense, but also nutrient dense. They are also inherently satisfying and one serving will generally do it for you. I say generally, because yesterday specifically, this wasn’t true. I think I had quite a few more than one serving—maybe 2 or 3.
These past few weeks are the first time in a long time that I have had actual cravings for foods that I no longer eat. The question becomes, what’s triggering them? I can only think that it might be the coffee that I’ve recently started drinking. Atkins recommended that you abstain from coffee as it causes cravings for sweets. I think he actually might have been right about that one. I’m going to wean myself off it, which shouldn’t be too hard, since I am really only drinking about 2 cups per day at the most.
But still, I think that may be 2 cups too many.
Of course, I’ll have to start tomorrow. I didn’t sleep very well last night – Maybe because of the coffee, and when I got to work this morning, I was flagging. I don’t really feel the effects of caffeine in a jitters or buzz kind of way. But it does have the effect of waking me up at least enough for me to get through my day and be somewhat productive.
I have to be honest, right now, I’m not really doing much at work. I was hired as a business analyst for my current contract, but weeks into it, they decided to assign me as a project manager instead. This made sense from many different perspectives, as I am trained primarily as a project manager. But they only gave me one project. One project that is currently in the design phase with a very hands off systems designer who doesn’t need a lot of handholding. Previous contracts I’ve held have assigned me to multiple projects with tight deadlines driven by market, FDA, or other fiscal concerns. In this case – I’m working for a non-profit. The deadlines are self inflicted, so if the project takes longer to get a perfect product, the stakeholders are willing to wait. This laid back atmosphere is a new experience for me, but it wears on my sanity a little bit.
It won’t be like this for the whole project. As soon as the design document is completed there will be a lot for me to do, and I’m sure if I do a good job, they are going to assign me to more projects to fill the gaps in my time. I’m sure that soon I will miss the quiet days with nothing to do. But I feel a little bit like a slacker—just sitting here basically doing nothing.
In the first couple of weeks, they assigned me busy work to help fill in the time. I wrote some test scripts, summarized pre-reqs, went through the current documentation, but that work has run out and now, I’m just sitting here twiddling my thumbs. Or writing blogs.
The highlight of my day is my lunch break, half of which I spend cross stitching. After taking a couple of small projects to prepare myself I have started my first Thomas Kinkade Vignette – It is a 5 by 7 rendering of Snow white overlooking something in the background, with a few cute animals at her back.
I’ve been using the parking method, which I learned thanks to youtube. It’s useful because you only do one row of 10 stitches at a time, making it unlikely for you to make a mistake. Of course, I made a mistake as soon as I started it by not checking the orientation of my stitches, and ended up having to unpick my first two rows and start all over again, this time in the correct direction. Since then though, I have mostly been ok. This is my first time doing quarter stitches and 3 quarter stitches—and it turns out my boss, a man who apparently was in the marines or something, is a huge cross stitch lover. He lent me a book that had brief tutorials in ¼ stitching, ¾ stitches, back stitching and French knots, all of which are in this project. I chose this one mostly because it didn’t have decorative thread, which I am still a little bit scared of. Hopefully completing this project will ease my anxiety, slightly.
I did some quick calculations. There are 8 (10x10) boxes across and 11 (10x10) boxes down – 88 of those in total. So If I can diligently stitch at least one of those boxes every night, I should be able to finish the project in a little under 3 months. Honestly, that’s a lot of entertainment for about 10 dollars. And who knows, maybe I could sell it in my Etsy store.
I know this blog is only partly about my weight loss, or as of right now, lack thereof. I will have to pay particular attention to what I eat over the next few days and try to limit my calories back down to 1800. Calorie cycling does seem to work particularly well for me, but I do need to just make sure that my calories are where they should be. I think that will help me restart my weight loss and make my month-1 goal for my 6 month transformer bet.