Meatballs: Or How Other People Can Be the Death of CR

My first day on my plan went perfectly, or purrfectly, as we cat people would say.  I got up the next day, did my yoga and all was well.  I went about my plans and then my mom got some unexpected good news.  She texted me while I was at the grocery store to buy ground beef.  She wanted to make our favorite meatballs because we were celebrating.

So I did.  It was a big deal.  I had just now started back on my CR diet after being completely un-serious about it for a very long time, and Mom wanted to do something special.  So I bought the meat.  I proceeded to eat almost nothing all day to save calories for the meatballs.  I ate quite a few, but I figured it was a good infusion of B vitamins and iron, two things I tend to lack, and it was just one day.  Then back to the plan.

Then the next day while I was out, my mom texted me that she made me more meatballs.

I've lived with my mother for two years.  I came here to help her when she was having trouble recovering from a hip surgery and ended up getting a job I loved teaching in the public schools, so I stayed.  I was supposed to move back to Philly in January and did for a bit but then the pandemic hit, so I came back here.

To state the obvious, it is very difficult to live with someone who doesn't do CR when you want to do CR.  I never tried before.  First I was alone, then I was with MR.  I had pressure from friends when I was eating out, but during the early and most successful days of my CR, my daily calories were so low that I could eat out and not worry about it without losing track.  I often kept my calories to 1000 a day, but would go out for a meal with friends and probably pack in 2500 at once.  Seem impossible?  Read the calorie counts on menus and you'll see it's actually quite easy.  And I drank wine back then - those calories add up.

I am moving back to my own place in Philadelphia in literally two weeks.  In between I'm spending a week at my father and step-mother's house, where the dinners will be fabulous creations by my father (who calls himself my step-mother's personal chef) but during the day there are no structured meals so I can eat lightly.  Then I will be back in my own place, carefully controlled environment where everything is set up to suit me.

People see food as love, celebrations revolve around food, etc.  We know this.  I find it difficult to get around.  I don't want to make anyone sad by refusing their loving gift.  At the same time, I really need to get back on CR.  My blood pressure has been running higher than I like it to these days - partly due to stress (okay, almost entirely perhaps, as last time I had it taken was at the urgent care center when I was waiting to be seen for an acutely painful case of poison vines!) and I'm not messing around with stroke risk, not with my family's history. 

It's hard to communicate your food needs to people, especially when they've seen you go back and forth on the topic before.  I've been trying to get my diet straight for a long time since I've lived here, but too often ended up impaled upon a pile of toast that waits so appealingly in the toaster at night.  Late night eating often gets me, especially sugary things.  That's why I find it so much easier to just set a clear diet plan and stick to it.  Less decision energy... more about that later.

Anyhow, today I am right on plan.  Feeling better about myself and life in general.  It's a turbulent time... for everyone, to be sure, and my family was going through a lot without the pandemic.  But, as Lord Petyr Baelish says in Game of Thrones (which is now my religion):

"Chaos isn't a pit.  Chaos is a ladder."

What If?

It's a sad time around here.

Sunny is gone, my mom will soon have to move from this place, and the world is in a state of pandemic (I'm sure you noticed.)

I was laid off from my teaching job in one of the toughest public school districts in Pennsylvania on March 13, and I've been sad ever since.  I had been planning to go back and get my teaching certificate so I could teach in poor urban schools.  I loved those kids.  But I have a Masters in Public Health, it's a pandemic, the future of public education is entirely up in the air, and, as I tell interviewers, I feel it is a moral imperative for everyone with a public health background to rush to the frontlines.  For us in epidemiology, that doesn't mean direct patient care, but tracking down this disease.  I'll keep you posted.

I haven't paid enough attention to my eating, which only makes the sadness slip into a kind of depression.  I'll be moving back to my new place in Philly (where I've lived almost my entire life and where MR and I lived together for almost a decade), but for now I'm still at my mother's about an hour away. 

I used to call my mom's house the "Carb Castle."  I think I still will.  She loves bread, toast, baked oatmeal (it's a PA Dutch thing) and all sorts of carby treats that are very hard for me to resist when they're around.  I don't keep them in my own place, but I can't very well tell her what to keep in hers, so here they are, and here I am. 

I seem to go in phases between barely eating at all and then overeating.  Emotional, all of it.  Eating late at night is the worst.  It feels like carbs will be a sedative, calm my mind and help me sleep, but eating carbs late at night makes me wake up in a blood sugar crash and eat in the middle of the night.  Disaster for my sleep and obviously for my CR.

I look forward to a better day.  It's good to be here for my mom, it's beautiful, my cat has been happy looking out at a pond and listening to geese, but I am a city girl.  As I fix up my new apartment back in home sweet West Philly, I imagine getting back into the swing of "real" life, with my friends and a city that I know and love, where things actually happen.  Yet who knows, given the pandemic, what "things" will "happen" and what "happen" will mean.

CR is a natural antidepressant and I could use one.  I am also ever more aware of mortality.  And wanting to keep looking ten years younger than I am.

CR is self-experimentation.  You are your own lab rat.  One positive about the pandemic is that it has put many of us into more laboratory like conditions.  Without actually going somewhere to a job, we are trapped inside and making our own food.  No happy hours, dinners out, work luncheons, etc.  Real food can triumph over Atkins bars if you don't work a job where you have fifteen minutes to eat and no fridge in which to store a salad.  Let's take advantage of the opportunity.

1250 is an ambitious number but it's the BMR I'd have at my goal weight, and I have a tank of about 25 pounds to burn off to get there (132 - 108 give or take.) 

So here's the plan.  Stay on this for the next ten days, until I go to visit my North Carolina family for a week.  There, I will eat my regular breakfast and lunch but eat whatever amazing food my father cooks for dinner.  Still, staying away from ice cream, desserts and overeating. 

What ya think?

This could be improved upon greatly - less dairy, maybe some legumes, etc.  But for now, it's what I know I'll eat, where I am, with what I have going on.  MR used to say, "The best supplement is the supplement you will take," when he grudgingly compromised and said I could have gummy supplements (I have trouble swallowing pills and love all things gummy... a problem that at one point was legendary!)  The best diet is the one you can stay on.  Things will be different when I am at my own place.  For now, I need simple, straightforward and strict.

Oh, and I take Vitamin D and B complex supplements!  MR used to say, "Unless you walk around naked in Southern California all year, it's hard to get the vitamin D you need!"