My Fitness Pal Blog - Day 6 - And Extremely Lazy

I so nearly had a useless day today. I fell asleep at 8am, finally feeling okay after a night of allergies and overactive libido (sorry, TMI) and figured I'd sleep until 12ish...and woke up at 6pm. I guess I needed the sleep. I don't set alarms when I'm recovering from an illness unless I have something pressing to do, and I'm free from now until New Years. 

Oh, not FREE free - I have to clean my room and the bathroom, buy six more presents, wrap all the presents, write another half dozen cards for family, write the rest of mom's cards or she'll forget, bake three or four things, make herbal bath stuff for my sisters, make cough medicine since I just know I'm going to get a cold any day, buy food, and try to arrange a trip to Somerset to see my Da and Stepmama. And I'm contracted for 3 12-hour shifts a week, with possible overtime during the holidays. But none of those things are tied to a particular day or time, and I can arrange my schedule as necessary.

Which is helpful on the days that my inner vampire takes over and I sleep until sundown.

It's funny, when I was a teenager I used to be obsessed with vampires. Particularly the L.J. Smith variety. There was a vamp-rush in teenage literature when I was in primary and secondary school, from about 1992 until 1998. Then nothing until they came back into popularity in the mid-to-late 2000s. I loved them when I was a teen because the brooding tortured soul thing seemed so romantic. Now all I can think is how CONVENIENT it would be to have vampires running all-night gyms and shopping malls. I don't know how things are in the US, but here in St Albans, England, we roll up the sidewalks at 10, aside from bars and clubs. Even restaurants close at 10 or 11. There are superstores you can go to for shopping 24 hours Mon thru Fri - if you have a car - but no libraries or gyms or swimming pools or leisure facilities. London is better, but not by much, and you certainly can't go and exercise at 3am, except for a couple places like Liverpool Street. Winter nocturnals like me find daily chores hard going. Summer is fine, but during the winter I mostly sleep days.

So what was the point of this? Oh, a useless day. Or nearly useless. I was going to clean my room, but the whole thing takes four hours - six if I do the closet - because my allergies won't allow me to do a half-assed job. I was craving crazy amounts of sugar too - I ate eight cookies (little cookies, maybe 30 calories each, but still) and a slice of Pandoro and coffee with sugar and cream. My sugar intake is something I need to seriously look into after Christmas; my daily diaries have been quite pleasing aside from the sugar. On most days I'm eating half of my daily fat and sat fat, and am well under my calories - and no yelling about that, please; after a lifetime of eating disorders I'm doing the best I can on that front, and I can't (financially) afford to eat more protein than I do - but I couldn't figure out why my sugars were so high, even on days when I don't eat cookies or candy, until I learned that a glass of orange juice (with no added sugar) has my RDA of sugar in it, and a carton of probiotic yoghurt puts me right over. I need to do more research on this and find out how much fruit sugars count, because I'm really not happy to give up orange juice unless I have no other choice.

In any case, I'm not changing too much until after Christmas. I want to see what I eat normally, and find out exactly how bad my diet is for a few weeks before I start changing it. And the scales at my gym have disappeared, and I can't afford to buy a pair for home until after Christmas.

Excuses? Perhaps, but still true ones. Losing weight is always easier under optimal conditions, but we make the best of what we have, and what I have is a minimum-wage job and a disabled mother and not enough money to go and spend ￡30 on a decent pair of scales for myself until I've bought presents for everyone else. :)

It's okay, though. I'm still exercising, still trying to get healthy - I'm just not going as hard as I'd like to be.

So yeah, a useless day. I did take a walk this evening for 40 mins. It's 7 Celsius outside - much more comfortable than the -5 that I was walking in on Tuesday - but the damp really gets to my bones, and makes me feel rotten. I don't function well in damp, either warm or cold.

I'm still pretty happy with the overall exercise this week, though. I signed up for the MOVE IT! Challenge - a pledge to do at least 180 minutes of exercise a week, preferably 360 or more - and I thought I wouldn't be able to commit to 360, but I've already managed 512 minutes this week with a day still to go. Running for the bus adds up, I guess.