Friday 6 February 2009

The Call of the Wild

I suppose it’s not news, but my attitude toward my diet/health/etc changes from hour to hour. I could start a relentlessly positive post one day and by the next I wonder what pipe I was smoking (insert Michael Phelps joke of your choice here) and can’t finish it. Then a couple of days later I find the post fragment and even if the mood has returned, the moment has passed.

Lesson 1: Finish posts when you start them.

Lesson 2: Keeping weight off is hard. (Also not news, but what can I say? I’m a slow learner – and usually, a late adopter. Do you know how long it took me to first get a cell phone?)

* * *

Things I had in my refrigerator Wednesday: one jam and cream finger (translation: doughnut) and three Kit Kats.

The KitKats don’t call to me – I have one almost every day for a snack, although this is the first time I’ve braved keeping them in my flat. (I usually just buy one at snack time, but hey, they were on sale, three for £1, so I decided no time like the present to see how I deal with having them around.) The jam and cream finger – that’s another story. I bought a box of two at Tesco (I’d have bought one but it wasn’t an option) and had one as part of my lunch. Not as filling as my usual lunch, but now hopefully I won’t make that mistake again. (It probably didn’t help that I downed it in about three bites.) I put the second one in my refrigerator, and debated having it as my snack that day. Pros: It’s yummy and I’d get it out of my refrigerator. Cons: I was going to be extra-hungry at snacktime thanks to having wasted calories on it at lunch, and I’d already discovered it wasn’t very filling.

So I had a plain chicken breast at snacktime (no kidding – nothing like a hit of protein to kill hunger) and left the doughnut in the refrigerator.

It called to me all day Wednesday – so much so that it was difficult to write. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to eat it at the very moment I was thinking about it – progress, I guess – but that I wanted time to pass so it would be Thursday and I could eat it.

Crazy, I know. Life must be pretty dull if I’m counting down to the next time I can eat a mass-produced jam and cream finger, hmmm?

* * *

It’s been a tough couple of weeks. I knew freelancing would be difficult, and I am less than delighted that I was right.

Nor am I delighted to confront the fact that essentially, I am the world’s laziest person. Sure, put me in a gym and I’ll sweat up a storm for 45 minutes, but sit me in front of a computer without a deadline and I will read blogs and surf the web and email all day.

In two weeks of freelancing, I’ve pulled in a third of what I estimate I need for the month. As new businesses go, I guess that’s not bad. But I constantly fear not having enough work, which – instead of making me efficient – makes me want to bury my head in the sand. Or maybe a box of jam and cream fingers.

2 comments:

  1. I'm impressed that you can stay slim and have a Kit Kat nearly every day. Hold out against that pesky finger thingy. Just say to yourself that it's only a craving, and you're NOT going to give into it!! Simple eh??!

    I can identify with the surfing and wasting your days thing. I was unemployed for 10 months once and had such high hopes of how much I was going to achieve. I managed about a third of what I planned to!

    Good luck with the freelancing and chin up chuck!

    Lesley xx

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  2. Definitely think this is a case of displacement activity (the surfing, blog scanning etc) as this is exactly what I did at university whenever I had to do some piece of work that scared me or that I wasn't confident about. Come to think of it, I do it in my working life too! But what I couldn't do is resist that doughnut - not with all the common sense and logical thoughts I can come up with (my heart rules and my heart appears to be firmly rooted in my stomach!).

    love
    Peridot x

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