Monday

Solid weekend. I got so much done both days, and it's always a pleasure to look back on that sort of weekend; I rather hate the ones spent reading or doing nothing much of use.  On Saturday, I finally got the leaves and dead stuff out of our large round garden bed in the front yard; haven't weeded it much yet, and it needs it, but it looks so much better.  Seven bags and a trash can full of rubbish from the effort, and I no longer feel guilty about our neighbors' yard, where our leaves had trespassed a bit. Sunday, with all the aches and pains from Saturday, we got the guinea pigs moved to Elizabeth's place, including the furniture they sit on, and went to the gym. I walked 2 miles in under 28 minutes total, using a new playlist, which I came home and modified immediately - it had a couple of songs defined as a high BPM which would only work that way if you walked double-time. I'm okay with the pace, but having to pay that much attention to the song was just too much work.

In any event, I hit goal on the FuelBand both days, without contrivances. Our plan is to hit the gym multiple times per week between now and the Bolder Boulder, so I will be in decent shape to do it this year.

Eating also went well; now that I see clearly what I've been doing (eating too much), it's pretty easy to calm things down and stop doing it. As a result, I saw 155.6 yesterday and was 156.0 this morning - the overall trend is in the right direction.  Here's yesterday:

• tea with cream
  
• fish oil (for stiffness - seems to be working)
  
• 3-egg omelet with ham, cheese, and tomatoes
  
• the innards of 2 Fuzzy's ground beef tacos (beef, cheese, lettuce, tomato, sauce)
  
• 1 piece of cheddar cheese
  
• 3 squares of Lindt 85% chocolate (eaten 1 after lunch and 2 after dinner)
  
• 1 package of baked cheese crunchy snack thingies (more below)
  
• 1/4 pound grassfed beef patty
  
• a zucchini as zoodles with sour cream, butter, and parmesan
  
• 1 tsp honey
  

I'm pretty sure that was it. Note that the snacking was subdued a great deal, in quantity of snacks per incident and in overall number of incidents. I was strict about avoiding starch, as well (not entirely sure what a zucchini is relative to starch, though).

We discovered the baked cheese snacks at the grocery store on Friday. They consist of nothing but cheddar or Monterey Jack cheese, and are not bad at all. A packet consists of about 10 of them, and the really nice feature (to me, at least) is the crunchiness. Apparently, they are being test-marketed here. They're a product of General Mills; they come in a box, but with just the one ingredient, as things stand today, I think they are something we can have regularly.

I had strawberries and leftover whipped cream for breakfast this morning, although I think I will be adding cottage cheese shortly, because I have it in my lunch and I am hungry now. I also have a leftover burger patty with tomatoes and cheese to melt on it while nuking, for my actual lunch. Something about BBQ pulled beef for dinner - something Lee found in a box somewhere, so probably sub-wonderful nutrition. I hope it's okay. I will have a very large salad with it, to help out.

A note on sleep - last weekend, I changed out the duvet for a lighter-weight one. It seems to have helped; I am waking a lot less frequently, and last night, I think I only woke up at 4:56 am for the first time. Not bad. I think I have a lot of sleep debt to work off, but as long as I'm not adding to it, things are improving.