FLD Resurrection. The Second Coming. Day 3
264 calories. That’s what I found in the barrel of my mind this morning, in amongst all of the other data. I read it on the packaging for the egg custard tarts I bought last night to surprise my daughter, because the pineapple tarts weren’t a hit with her. I also love egg custard tarts.
264 calories isn’t as bad as 400 calories though. I thought each tart would have about 400 calories. I’m justifying my half-formed decision to have a custard tart with coffee as my final meal, in ten or eleven hours. The first one will be in four or five hours.
I do feel a little hungry as I write this. My tolerance for hunger has increased since the weekend. It increased on day one. I don’t believe I escaped hunger on Monday because I’d eaten so much on Sunday. The more I eat, the lower my tolerance for hunger becomes, and the less I eat, the more I can tolerate hunger. There are bound to be limits to this.
Lunch is already decided. A grilled chicken sandwich, wrapped and in my bag. There’s a licorice and peppermint teabag in there as well, and my drink bottle. I wonder if staying hydrated takes my mind off of food. I suspect that drinking peppermint tea doesn’t, in the past it’s made me hungry. Does it stimulate appetite?
There’s half a grilled chicken breast in the fridge. I could have that tonight, instead of the custard tart. There won’t be any delicious leftover half eaten custard tarts. No one in my house is going to let that happen.
The meal replacement shakes I was so excited about are still sealed in their box. They will get used. I don’t know when. Maybe on the weekend. 2 days of meal replacement shakes! I wrote that with a mixture of excitement and dread. If Friday night involves eating in a restaurant, a weekend on the meal replacement shakes won’t seem like a chore.
Today is pay day. I get paid too little and I eat too much. When I grabbed my belly this morning, there was too much of that too. It’s one of the things I’d like to lose. If calories were money, I’d have a marvelously obese bank account.
I’m impatient. Last night I weighed myself and was annoyed that I haven’t lost any weight yet. I wanted to see results in less than 48 hours. My belt is looser, so I was hopeful, but either my waist can shrink without any reduction in body weight or the weight reduction is too small to register on my scales. They’re mechanical, not electric.
Not eating breakfast could become my norm. It saves me time and hasn’t bothered me at all. That surprises me. I thought I’d be starving by lunchtime.
I went to bed too late last night. There were no vivid dreams. I kept waking up. A colleague who reads these articles sent me something about sleeping on an empty stomach being better for the brain, and promoting more vivid dreams.
When is a diet not a diet? If I don’t eat breakfast for 3 years, it’s just what I do, it's not a diet anymore. Diet is a loaded term, it’s somewhat onerous. I recall a scene from The Simpsons. Homer is on the run and sees a billboard with the word DIE written on it. He screams. The wind blows away some foliage that obscures the billboard to reveal the word DIET. That makes Homer scream again, louder and longer than the first time.
In Life Without Diabetes Roy Walker advises staying on the Newcastle diet until you have reached your target weight before gradually introducing solid meals, one meal at a time. After a couple of months on milkshakes, you might go from three milkshakes per day to two milkshakes and one meal per day. But if you start getting fat again, it’s back the milkshakes.
I ate my sandwich at 1:30 pm. My sister agreed to lunch at 2 pm, so I ate whilst the blue circle spun around on my desktop, to indicate some ongoing process. My meal times are being dictated by time rather than hunger. Hunger’s not really on the scene. It shows up only fleetingly.
One sandwich and a custard tart. That’s probably what I’ll eat today.
I had my latte an hour earlier than usual because a colleague bought me one. A couple of hours after that an old friend visited the office. I sat and watched him and my sister eating muffins and enjoying hot drinks. This is becoming normal. I can watch people eating delicious food, with my last meal 12 hours or more behind me, and it doesn’t bother me. I wanted those muffins but I didn't care that I wasn’t going to have them. Even lunch was perfunctory.
It’s the evenings that have been going wrong. I’m on the train listening to a bragging mother talk about how much she feeds her son, who is on a rugby team that beats rugby teams from private schools, but he’s too skinny, so she has to keep buying him new clothes. She’s listing the prices of both the meals and the clothes, but she insists she’s not bothered. I’m bothered because this train is crowded and she’s animated and quite large. She keeps banging into me. Every collision makes the bag I’m carrying swing and shake. It’s a bag full of food. My sister cooked it for her daughter and forgot to take it home, so she called me and asked me to take it as she won’t be in the office tomorrow.
Now I have the food in the bag, and two chicken breasts in the fridge that that have to be used by tomorrow evening. I was going to cook one for my daughters (my wife is vegetarian). I can grill the other one and have some in a sandwich. The cat can have what’s left over. I don’t know if he’ll feel like eating it though.
I have to keep refusing food. My manager offered me some crisps, my sister gave me an orange, I had to say no. This place between not eating and not being hungry is fragile. I’ve been here before. I know how easily I can lose it. If I have just one bite of a snack, one unscheduled or unnecessary bit of food, it shatters. The food intake snowballs and I’ve blown it. I don’t know if things get out of control because of psychology or physiology, I just know that they do. It’s best not to eat. If I eat a little more, I feel a lot hungrier. I like this delicate equilibrium and I want to guard it.
It’s 11:40 pm. Did I predict my evening? I didn’t intend to. The food my sister had cooked for my niece all got eaten. Rice with chickpeas, and roast chicken. A drumstick and a thigh. I had a plate of rice and the drumstick. My eldest daughter, hungry after 90 minutes of athletics and conditioning had the thigh and a plate of rice. My youngest daughter left half of her rice, so I ate that too.
The cat got the leftover grilled chicken.
The fragile place I had happily occupied was destroyed. After all that food, I’d already lost, so I ate those delicious 264 calories as well. My egg custard pie. One fleeting happiness replaced another, better happiness.
