Tuesday

Still stiff and sore - possibly stiffer than yesterday, which is the general pattern when I do something like this. I took 3 Advil immediately on getting up, which just shows you. We did not go for a walk last night, which was a bad decision on my part; if we had, I think I would have eaten better, since Lee wanted to walk to a sports bar and back, eating in the middle. Instead, we drove for Chinese - and it was bad Chinese. Slightly sweet Hot & Sour soup, and the meat was caked with some sort of starch. Gave me indigestion at 1 am, which I was fully awake to appreciate (not).

156.4 this morning; some of yesterday was indeed water, but I continue to oscillate, and I want that to stop. Here's yesterday:

• tea with cream
  
• strawberries with clotted cream
  
• macadamia nuts
  
• cheese
  
• hot and sour soup
  
• 2 or 3 fried noodles with chinese mustard
  
• Mongolian beef, beef, starch, and onions
  
• a fortune cookie
  
• 1 tsp honey
  

I think I got more to eat after we'd been home for a while, and it was probably cheese, but I don't recall getting it or eating it; I was pretty easily distracted last night, and spent quality time dumping jelly down the dispose-all and relabeling and refilling spice jars. I can now vouch for green chile powder's ability to clear one's sinuses - I didn't even sniff, and spent 5 minutes sneezing violently while transferring it.

Sleep started out great, and I woke up bright-eyed and refreshed - at 10:46 pm. Also 11:46 pm, and 1:20ish. At that point, I stayed awake until after 3 - possibly closer to 4. The menopause stuff is certainly not making anything better, and it very possibly is making it worse. So I stopped all of it this morning - I really can't find a valid reason to mess with hormone levels as an amateur when I can get just as crappy sleep without. I don't really understand why I am so very resistant to all this stuff, but I've never once found anything that I can conclusively say helped me with this. Especially as my pattern of hot flashes is to have them for a couple of months and then have them stop for a while on their own. If I were a stay-at-home housewife, I could deal with this by sleeping in a bit and being kind to myself, but I'm not, and I can't; I have to get up and drive 40 miles to work, be professional and exercise good judgement for 8 or so hours, and drive 40 miles home. And. I. Hate. It. But there it is, and there's absolutely no point in wasting my feeble mental capacity on hating it; I need it for other things.

Looking at yesterday's eating, the starch, the noodles, and the fortune cookie were relatively minor amounts of carbs, and I think I'm getting maybe 5 strawberries at breakfast. I am trying to get back to a meat-fat-leaves sort of eating pattern, not very successfully (possibly the feeble mental capacity is impeding me here, too), and will just keep trying. I don't know what else to do right now. I ate as many of the onions in the Mongolian Beef as I could manage, knowing that they aren't the best of friends with my gut flora, but knowing that they're full of inulin. Probably the source of my indigestion. Today is steak and salad for dinner - either that or the steaks get wasted on the dogs, and some of them are Prime, which I'd dearly hate to waste. More strawberries and clotted cream for breakfast, and salami and macadamias for lunch (I was hungry yesterday afternoon).