Saint Francis Of Assisi Could Never Be This Good

Quote from the Sting song "Saint Augustine In Hell," found on one of the mix tapes I made when going through a period of mild obsession with Saint Augustine in my late teens. In the midst of some late night thinking about religion, I somehow managed to leave that part out. Let's just take a moment to think of how the entire history of the Western world could have been different if Saint Augustine had known about CR.

To end my cheap attempts to somehow tie a Sting song in with CR, I'll explain the hadline this way: after falling asleep from about 7 pm to 10 pm last night, waking up and running back to the office to check my email, an event which ended in writing for about three hours, then going back to bed at 3 am, I still managed to get up and come to the office early enough to blog a bit before starting work. And I am pleased to report that my CR inspired clarity of skin and eyes seems to be saving me from *looking* like I was up all night writing.

You may be wondering what the hell I am writing, as my posts have not seemed any longer or more intense than usual. I'm working on some posts about the conversations I had at the conference, and Michael and Brian are working on them with me, so I'm doing a lot of writing and editing on stuff that is not yet ready to be published.

Writing myself into exhaustion seems to work as a cure for insomnia, though I suppose you could just say that I would have been tired again by 3 am even if I had done nothing but pet the cat.

I did have a bizarre dream in the early hours of the morning, right before I woke up at 5:30 am. I dreamed that a rabid right winger in the CR society (not someone who exists, a figment of the dream imagination) hated my blog and tried to organize all the other CR society members to disassociate themselves with it. He said he hated a) the politics b) what I eat c) the fact that I listen to my walkman all the time. How's that for a blog anxiety dream?

I think the Black Moth is right about not eating at night leading to better sleep... I also suspect that just eating less, for me, leads to better sleep. Yesterday was a higher calorie day for me than the day before, since I was hungrier and got home still needing to get some of my ON. Let's see... when last I wrote, I had eaten my 140 of eggwhites for breakfast, and was busy speculating on whether or not they actually like the Texas Pete.

When I got to the office, a co-worker suggested that we have a meeting we were planning over lunch, so I knew I would get a good salad since we decided to go to a place that has a decent salad bar. I didn't want to rely on the salad bar alone, though, since it has almost nothing in the way of protein sources and I didn't want to be so hungry that I would be tempted to eat one of the pasta salad thingys. So I went ahead and ate my cottage cheese pack, 280 calories, 70% of the RDA of calcium, 42 g protein. No fat. With tabasco. That was yummy. I also ate one rye cracker, 35 calories, with the cottage cheese.

At lunch I ate a salad of romaine, grape tomatoes, a few beet slices, ten black olives, artichoke hearts, balsamic vinegar and a teaspoon of olive oil, with a small plate of fruit (melon, pineapple, strawberry) for dessert. The olives and the olive oil helped out with the fat for the day, but the fruit upped the cals and the carbs. Did some guessing in terms of total amounts on my DWIDP, but I always guess on the higher end.

Got home earlyish from work, around five (things have been rather quiet since the Conference, after the crazy sprint of the two months before) and was hungry, plus wanted to fill in some holes in my ON for the day, so I ate my brewers yeast soup and about half the almonds I usually eat, for around 100 calories. Got in bed to read with my glass of wine and my cat, but fell asleep almost immediately. P:F:C ratio for the day: 35:25:40. Great ON -- over 100% on everything except zinc (49%) and iron (89%). It wouldn't have been great ON without the brewers yeast soup, and the PFC ratios would have been way off without the almonds... I had entered everything from earlier in the day before I went home, so I knew what I wanted to fill in. That works wonders for my ON... entering things before I eat them so I can figure out just what the right combination is. It makes it possible for me to eat a pretty large variety of foods without totally screwing up all the time. High calorie yesterday: 1264.3. If you average that with the day before, at 980, you get 1122.15. Not bad, and if I stay in this pattern, I'll end up averaging to around 1100 if I don't have the wacky 1500 or more calorie big eating days every five or six days. I have plans to go out for dinner with some definitely not CR'd friends on Friday night, so I'm worrying about that. It might make sense to adapt to the different pattern without dropping my calories (my weight is remaining very stable around 104 - 106 depending on how much salt I ate the day before and how late at night I ate my last meal), and then try to drop the calories a little bit.

One thing I've noticed about weight loss... I seem to stay stable for a long time, then drop a couple of pounds almost all at once, like I did after the conference, then hover right around there, going up a tiny bit if there's a "refeeding" period after a particularly low time (like the week after the conference), but rather quickly dropping back down permanently to the new low. It's hard to believe sometimes that I've lost so much weight since March 26. 137 - 104. Weird. It will be terrifying to see my family at Thanksgiving, since they haven't seen me since last year. I hope they don't freak out. I don't look all that thin (people who saw me at the conference can confirm that this is true, and considered positive in CR world where we all know that the ob/ob mice on CR live longer... ha!... not some anorexic raving that she's not skinny enough.)

Still no taller... but I acutally really like being a short person. Easier to be comfortable on planes, etc. You can always get someone to reach items from high shelves. Even after the Biotech Rapture, I will still probably want to be 5 feet, 1.75 inches tall.

Am thinking a lot about hunger lately and about the various uses for it. Meal spacing is so critical to avoiding hunger. Careful planning to make sure that the right foods and only the right foods are available when I am hungry seems to be the key to ON, now that I have found foods that I really like that are CRON friendly. When I read back over old issues of the blog, I see how much time and trial and error went into finding those foods. That entertaining adventure with Grape Nuts... I just can't eat high carb like that without going nuts. Talk about food cravings, and blood sugar games!

Wondering if I could channel physical hunger into useful pursuits, like writing. Seems like a small rewiring of my brain could accomplish this. Will think more about this later... it's time to organize the nurses now.