No Wonder I Was Hungry

As you read, I was already near my calorie target for the day when I left work yesterday. I ate my little salad, only about 60 calories there, and drank my little glass of wine for 85.

And I was still hungry. Really hungry. Like, considering eating the neighbors hungry.

I had very little already prepared things in the house. One of my strategies, actually, is to keep very little prepared food in the house so that I am not tempted to snack.

But I did have one unusual set of items. The leftover ingredients from last Saturday night, when I made Michael Rae's delicious CR friendly pizzas for myself and my Very Skinny Mom.

So last night I ate: two low carb tortillas, 200 calories each, with part skim mozarella, just over 200 calories worth of that. Those were the only remaining ingredients. So my total intake for the day was: 1574 - 1600.

[Wow, fancy that, my calorie intake yesterday was right around the average SAT score of the guys I dated in college. Now that explains a lot.]

That's about what I eat on my going out to dinner days, so it's not that big a deal. But the fact that I ate it in an unplanned way, on a day when I was planning to eat at target, not above, and that I was sooooo hungry, was of interest.

I got on the scale this morning. 104. Yikes! I was 106 before the conference, and with that big meal late last night, I was if anything holding more water weight than usual. My carb content yesterday wasn't particularly low, though my fat content, especially saturated fat, was high. So I don't think it was the Atkins water weight effect, since I was way over 10% carbs, I had the wine at night, and the tortillas, while low carb, were still tortillas. We'll see tomorrow.

Sure enough, my anxiety returned in force this morning, and it took awhile for me to catch onto it. Argh! I am so sensitive now to calorie changes, and I don't think it's all in my head because I was having the classic anxiety symptoms for about an hour before it occured to me that my calories had dramatically increased late last night. It's like low calorie levels are an anti-anxiety drug for me, and I can't go off them without significant cost to my mental well-being. This is fine, over all, even good, because it makes me focus on CR. But it's a pain! And it's getting worse! My body is so much more sensitive to changes in calorie intake and food content than it used to be.

I think a lot of us ate less than normal at the conference. I had saved calories on Sunday night for resveratrol, and when that plan was stifled by the inability to locate a corkscrew, I didn't make up the cals. On top of the total deficit... not eating breakfast, eating fewer than 200 cals for lunch on two days, etc. Wow, now that I look back, I am realizing that I ate very little. I thought I was eating more because I had decent sized portions of fish at dinner, but that doesn't make up for eating just a plate of veggies, or a handful of almonds and an apple, all day.

Thank God this morning I had my eggwhites. They are quite delicious plain, though I did grind some fresh pepper onto them today. Eating a cup of eggwhites in the morning really makes my protein goal achievable, and I missed them so much! It was fun to meet other lovers of eggwhites at the conference. It was just fun to meet everyone at the conference, but you non-CR society folks are probably sick of hearing about it by now. Too bad. The next several entries are going to deal with some specific debates that were had at the conference. But first, I have some more research to do.