Tuesday

It's just irksome.

I do understand that calories-in/calories-out isn't valid.  I get that there are other forces acting on how my metabolism handles food and energy expenditure.  But it's bloody annoying to get up after a day of very low energy intake in which I had some purposeful activity, and find that I've gained half a pound somewhere.  150.2 this morning.  And here's what I ate:

• bacon (2 pieces)
• tea with cream
• the usual supplements
• cheese (1 piece)
• Lindt 85% chocolate (1 square)
• Big-Ass Salad with salami, feta, and a fabulous greek vinaigrette
• one other piece of cheese
• two almond-flour chocolate chip cookies

As for energy output, I walked up (and down, obviously) 5 flights of stairs in our office building, each of which is 26 steps.  Once I got home from an unexpected outing last night, I did 63 situps and 13 pushups on the bathroom counter (much more effective than the wall) - both to exhaustion, or as near as I could get without a drill instructor.

I'm not buying that I expended 1800 fewer calories than I ate yesterday, especially given that I almost certainly didn't eat 1800 calories (in other words, for c-i/c-o to work, I'd have had to spend the day in a sensory deprivation chamber, trying not to breathe).  I believe that I'm still retaining some water, and would very much like the hormonal issues to go away and bother someone else, so it would leave me.

Stress could be a factor, but, ... well, here's what happened.  We went out after dinner to buy some groceries, so I could make some beef vegetable soup for a neighbor who had a very bad surgery experience and just got home from the hospital this past weekend.  Got the stuff, put it in the car, and turned the key, to find that it wasn't interested in starting.  Called (in this order) AAA, Lee, my parents, AAA again, my parents again, and Lee a couple more times.  Suffice it to say that my parents will be returning an unused car battery to the auto parts store this morning, and that the AAA guy turned out to be not so great at hooking up his jump-start rig to a Mini Cooper - I ended up getting towed to the dealer, which was mercifully still open at 8:30 last night, and they were able to diagnose the dead battery correctly, replace it, and send me on my way home by 9 pm.  Yikes.  So that should have been stressful.  Instead, I went into my handle-emergency mental state, sent Elizabeth in to buy ice and a cooler for the groceries that needed it, and really wasn't much bugged by the situation.  So maybe I secreted cortisol, and maybe I didn't - when I drove home, I was kinda chuffed at how well I'd handled things.

I'm fasting this morning - started to have a piece of cheese in lieu of cooking but decided to push hard today and see if I can get something to break.  It may not - I accept that menopause is a nasty piece of work - but it may, and if it does, I'll see if I can take advantage of any momentum thus gained.