We had a nice visit to south Florida to see my sister who moved there with her husband last year. It’s funny visiting a place for the first time knowing you’ll be spending a lot of time there in your future. We got home late Thursday night and then I had to unpack and repack and drive up to Sacramento the next morning, early, for a series of singing gigs. Got home late Saturday, then spent Sunday grocery shopping, unpacking, doing laundry, cooking, and getting the house in order for our return to normal life. Exhaustion doesn’t begin to describe it. I’m going to need a reset day today.
More significantly, though, today I start a thing called the 5:2 diet. You eat 500 calories two days a week and your “TDEE” the other five days, which for me is 1800 (super doable, since I usually eat about 1500). My “fast” days will be Monday and Thursday. So today I have not eaten yet, and instead will have a tiny lunch and tiny dinner. I investigated the various intermittent fasting scenarios and decided this is the one for me, because it’s kind of like dieting part time. It’s not something you are required to do every single day for months at a time, which is not sustainable for me with my travel schedule. It’s also not practical for me to restrict my eating schedule to eight or less hours a day - again, with travel there’s no way I’d be able to do this all the time. This one, however, I feel like I can do, and make it a lifestyle, since it allows for living normally - eating at restaurants, pancakes with the kids on weekends, etc - the majority of the time. The only thing I have to worry about is just how hard it’s going to be on those fasting days - we’ll find out today!! - and what happens if this diet just plain doesn’t work (sadly, as with all diets, results for women are nowhere near as impressive as for men). I figure if I can tolerate it I can always up my fast days to three days a week, at least temporarily. But what I’m trying to do is find something I can live with permanently; eating 1100 calories a day, every day, is not sustainable for me, as we’ve seen. And just three weeks of eating normally and not exercising over this vacation and I’ve gained four pounds. If I keep going at this rate I’ll gain 5-10 pounds a year, and I’m already almost ten pounds overweight. You do the math. So I need to find something I can incorporate into my life permanently. I hope to god this is it.
This week I make a cash deposit to get me through February’s mortgage - $2500. And I’ll be going into the new fiscal year with probably a $13,000 - 15,000 credit card bill. So, not great. I hate starting the year at a deficit. But unlike last year, this year I’m going to guard my pennies zealously - no special projects except the one I have to do, which is make whatever accommodations the garage needs to install a car charger for when I go electric when my lease is up in November.
Ok, I’m going to go do my 2.3 mile daily walk on an empty stomach. Wish me luck.
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