Beer Loss

Good evening, and welcome to one of the strangest phenomena of really fat people that you probably didn't know.

This evening, I took a small shit, only one since last weigh in, and hopped on the scale:

356.5 lbs

Now, for those of you keeping track at home, that's a little over 10 lbs in about 36 hours. This is part of a magical phenomenon I like to call "Beer loss". You see, as you all know, when you drink beer, you bloat up, at least a little. Now, "bloat" on a 180 lbs guy and "bloat" on a 340-370 lbs guy are two very different things.

My weight has changed, up then back down to the same thing, as much as 20 lbs over a 5 day period, before, just from drinking Friday and Saturday night. That's fucking nuts, when you think about it. I mean, even on me, that's a belt loop, right there.

On a completely unrelated note, yesterday, we received a gift basket in the mail celebrating the new house. It was a lovely monstrosity from Zingerman's (C) http://www.zingermans.com/Product.aspx?ProductID=G-ULT . Now, I love me some Zingerman's, but the timing on this was kind of awful.

After this week, this sort of thing will just be ignored, except as portions of it can fit into my Nutrisystem food schedule (which I will expound upon at a later date). These can be a horrific derailment, which would be easier to deal with if I were still working, because I'd just bring it in, rather than feel awful about wasting it. Fortunately, there's at least one member of the household who's not restricted from these things, and is working, so that person can deal with it.

Now, we decided to cut the various things down into less ridiculous sizes, and just have small samples of each thing. This seemed to work out all right for us, and was deemed acceptable, as I have not started eating my diet foods, yet.

Moving to today (Tuesday), I basically didn't eat, since I'm trying to readjust my stomach in a negative capacity kind of way. I had some of the delicious cheese and salami with a few crackers around 2pm, but that was it.

Tomorrow, I go on to my simple rule of Nutrisystem: I may eat exactly what the diet lists, but I do not have to eat everything the diet lists.

This means: I can eat Breakfast between 6am and 9am, I may eat the prescribed midmorning snack at 10:30am, Lunch between 12pm and 1:30pm, Afternoon snack between 3:30pm and 4pm, and dinner between 5pm and 7pm (includes Dessert). If I miss any of these meals, I don't eat. I'm not allowed to swap items for timeslots (i.e., "oh, I'll just have this fruit with lunch, instead, and I'll eat my carb from dinner with breakfast") and I'm not allowed to shift my times if I don't get up on time.

This is more than a matter of weight loss. When you're unemployed, there are certain temptations that are far too easy to give into. A big one is a loss of scheduled sleep. If I'm left to my own devices, my sleep schedule will slowly creep to the point where I'm getting up at Noon or later and reading or interneting until 5am. Fortunately, today, I was awoken at 9am, so I'm not in too bad a shape.

Readjusting to a normal, working adult sleep schedule is an important step towards getting myself back behind a 75lbs computer cringing at fluorescent lighting all day. It means I'm awake and ready during times when I might receive calls from recruiters and, more importantly, puts me in a work frame of mind.

Now, mind you, it's almost 1am here in the EST zone, but I will either force myself out of bed on time tomorrow, or I will be forced to go to bed at a decent hour tomorrow. Training the stomach will train the mind.

Tomorrow (today) is for victory, and the Second Circle is for Lovers!