Derailed.

My diet totally derailed today. It's been building up all week. I'm not prepared, I'm not on top of it. I didn't ever print it out this week, that was my first mistake, but I'm out of cyan ink and I could have printed it out as a b&w draft but I just never printed it out. So I couldn't really ever look at it all at once. Plan ahead. So, Lesson #1. Print it out, hole punch it, put it in the binder.

Lesson #2. Do the CONVENIENCE plan on busy weeks, rather than the recipe plan. I needed to not have to put in that extra bit of effort in the cooking this week. Actually I might could have done okay if I'd spent a little less time online, but by the time I was ready for a meal, or needed to cook several meals for the day, there was more preparation involved than I had time for. In accordance with Lesson #1, it was also problematic that the meat was never defrosted when it needed to be.

Of course, I had a few odd work circumstances too, and I had a hard time with that. Today was the worst - I didn't know when to be awake, when to eat... I had been up until 6 a.m., and needed to be at work at 1, supposedly, so I set my alarm at, oh 11:15 maybe? - to prep food for the day. But at 11:15 I didn't want to get up, snooze buttoned until too late, actually made breakfast properly anyway, dashed out the door, drove to work, only to find that the person I was there to meet wasn't there! It was 1:45, and I said I'd come back later. So, not having enough time to go to the theatre and do anything worthwhile there, I went back home, showered so I'd be clean and dry for the Symphony that night, and tried to get the rest of my sleep. So much bright sunshine glaring on my face, I wavered between deep rich sleep and disturbed into slight wakeness. I had dreams - dreams about being very late back to the work site, dreams about hallucinating, all tied into one dream interrupted by disturbance into slight wakeness. The alarm went off, I hit snooze... That was my daytime - fitful, broken sleep.

Then I rose, went to the job site. And then I didn't have lunch prepared, so I did go to the Charlotte cafe and ordered grilled trout, rice and gravy, spinach, and cornbread with unsweet tea. Man, what a disappointment on all sides. Ok, the unsweet tea wasn't terrible, but I've had better. But the trout seemed way fattier than the tilapia I cook at home. Also they served 2 trout filets, so I remembered to be good and only ate one. (I saved the second for later, but it was eventually served to a stray cat, isn't that awesome!) The rice and gravy were also pasty and lardy (respectively), the spinach was out of a can and lacking flavor as well as proper texture, but the flavor! How can spinach lack that robust spinach flavor? Spinach fail. And the cornbread - worst I've ever had. I guess it's made from a mix? Pasty, no texture, blech.

So I tried to be adherent to the diet principles, but I don't think I did too well. Then I got 3 mini Peppermint patties on the way out. Huh? One, maybe even two, but three is excessive, especially for a dieter.

I went back to the job site to finish up, then rushed to the Symphony. I was very nearly late for it. After which I was stuck downtown waiting for the parking deck to let its gates up so I wouldn't have to pay. That kept me downtown another hour. I got a coffee with some nonfat milk... and a chocolate chip cookie. Huh? Stop it, not really? Yeah, I figured it would taste good with the coffee, and though it didn't taste all that great, it did create a very nice sensation in concert with the coffee. However, this was getting to be all too much of the old habits.

I got out of the downtown area and went to work, where I am now behind thanks to having taken on this other job this weekend that's kept me from working on this one for too many days now. And I didn't have any food with me, so at 3:30 I went to Cookout, the only place nearby that I knew would be open. Ugh - I didn't do too well here either. And then I had M&Ms, with the old familiar "the-day's-already-ruined-and-M&M's-would-be-so-great-right-now" thought process.

And what about tomorrow? I don't see it coming together tomorrow, either... but maybe. Maybe after work (again) I can come home, get some sleep, wake up, and prepare a bunch of meals before going to work. That's going to be hard on me, though, because tonight's the deadline, so I won't want to spend a whole bunch of time on meal preparation that will keep me from getting all the work I need to do done.

The other thing to chastise myself about is getting so slack about kitchen cleanup. There is no excuse for leaving a mess for my roommate to deal with.

And the other is that I've practically cordoned myself off from things like restaurant dining and social dining and drinking for so long, that I find myself wanting to break free a little. I should just re-instate a clear Cheat Day to alleviate these issues. The problem with Cheat Day has been that lately my Cheat Days have been externally imposed, fraught with obligation to outside demands...

I guess my focus is scattered, or maybe more like pointed toward distractions I wasn't having in the spring and summer.

Anyway, the mirror tells me I want to lose more weight, so I hope I can take my lessons and make it all easier on myself next week. Now that I'm not going to New York, I should have plenty of focus time to lose more weight before going to Asheville to work in October.