I saw Dr Hope again yesterday. We re-hashed a lot of the past few weeks. She believes the UTI etc are my body reacting to stress. I talked a lot about the job opportunity and it’s true it has been bothering me more than I wanted to admit. My first real clue came when I mentioned it a few days back in a blog post here… I was pretty surprised to have so much pour out of me so fast.

In any event, the Dr Hope advice is to find time to take care of myself - a few minutes of stretching or yoga or meditation or breathing. Ideally a few times a day, but we’ll start with once.

We also talked a lot about the past week or so - my eating has been getting worse and worse - although nothing terrible, certainly not the “eat with intention to lose weight” approach, and the scale must be creeping upwards again, my pants are tighter. So I’m to keep a proper food diary, and bring it to her at my next appointment. Yeah, accountability!

I’ve actually decided to share my food diary here on my blog for the next few days - comments welcome!

For Tuesday 5th February

Breakfast (7:45am) :

  • Ate : Muesli, coffee with milk
  • Hunger : high
  • Environment : home, relaxed
  • Appreciation : muesli was good after a week of other stuff. It’s better when I make it with rice milk, however… Coffee I drank too fast as I was running late.
  • Leave something leftover : nope.

Lunch (2pm):

  • Ate : Spaghetti bolognese
  • Hunger : very high
  • Environment : restaurant with colleague, pressed for time
  • Appreciation : sauce was very good, noodles were greasy and a bit dried out. I ate too fast, and menu choices were limited to a few things they could do fast.
  • Leave something leftover : I left a few bites of my spaghetti and I didn’t touch the bread.

Snack (6pm)

  • Ate : 3 clementines and then a small “faiselle” (sort of like yogurt)
  • Hunger : medium
  • Environment : in front of the computer checking email for work. As I left my co-worker she had just bought a chocolate bar thinking she’d share half with me… I don’t think I was hungry before she offered me that.
  • Appreciation : high for the clementines, lower for the faiselle - I don’t regularly buy this and probably won’t again… yogurt is bettter
  • Leave something leftover : no

Dinner (10:30pm)

  • Ate : small bowl of Grape Nuts with milk (the end of my box from the American imports store…)
  • Hunger : low but present (and I didn’t want to try to sleep hungry)
  • Environment : web surfing to see about the elections after working all evening
  • Appreciation : pretty high. I love the texture and plain-ness of Grape Nuts
  • Leave something leftover : a spoonful left just because I decided I would blog about this and thought I better have something decent to say…