No vegetables

Friday:

Those tablets seem to be still working, which is awesome, so now I am back to my baseline of obese woman who doesn't take good care of her body and doesn't like hot weather. Actually no one is getting much sleep around here with the horrible humidity. Looking forward to those cooler rainy days forecast for next week!

I had a bit of a "funny turn" earlier. I used to have bad reactions to either low blood pressure or low blood sugar, not sure which, but not serious or often since my diet improved. But today I got home from shopping rather late for lunch and really hot, was warming up leftover Indian food in the microwave while unpacking groceries, suddenly felt really shaky and strange and had to sit down. Ate some quick carbs then lunch, kept trembling for an hour afterwards. It's another reminder I'm not looking after myself in the truest sense. I need to give my body nourishment not just sufficient calories. When I'm not "on a diet" I eat more junky food but more importantly I eat a lot less healthy food. My fruit and vegetable intake goes down to almost zero.

Yesterday for example I think I ate grilled cheese on toast for breakfast; roast beef and potato for lunch; a Paddlepop (ice cream) in the afternoon; crumbed squid, beef vindaloo (meat in spicy sauce) and rice for dinner. A couple of chocolate biscuits. Three cups of tea. I don't think any of those things are particularly bad in themselves, but the menu is definitely missing a lot of things I should be eating. Like vegetables in a variety of colours not just white bread, white potato, white rice as my only plant foods. I'm not doing myself any favours. But I'm having a lot of trouble turning this around.

I did have some salad with dinner tonight! Will do better tomorrow.

Dizzy

Thursday:

This morning I went for my first training run on the new C25K (couch to 5K) program. It involved eight 60-second sprints with 90 walking rests in between (plus warm up and cool down). I ran the first three intervals then skipped every second one after that (walking them). I miscalculated and thought this would mean I did the last sprint, but of course I actually skipped 4, 6 & 8. I was a little disappointed that I couldn't run them all, but I will work on it. I was certainly working hard, sweaty and exhausted. My last sprint (interval 7) wasn't the full 60 seconds, I think I only made about 40.

My book contact actually turned up at the meeting today, which was great. In particular I now have a sumptous "making of HBO's Game of Thrones" hardcover which I am enjoying very much.

In the afternoon I forgot to bring my gym card when I took the kids to their gymnastics lesson so I just went for a walk. I was walking very fast and strongly for the first half hour but then slowed right down and by the time I got back I was feeling quite odd -- shaky. I felt like I needed food, even though I'd had a low-GI snack just before walking. I wasn't near any shops by that point and hadn't brought any more food but I remembered seeing a half a dried apple ring left in Aiden's lunchbox when I picked him up from school so I went to the car and checked that it didn't look like it had been dropped in the dirt or anything (I sniffed it too, not sure what I expected to learn from that but you never know with a six-year-old's left-overs) then ate it. Then I rummaged in Jasmine's lunchbox and she had two dried apple rings!

I went inside, feeling increasingly trembly and weird. There was a snack machine in the foyer with a choice of chocolate or soft drink. It only took coins so I asked at the reception desk if she could change my note. I was even considering saying I was diabetic and really needed the sugar, but I don't think I would have -- I'm not very comfortable with lying even if I did really feel like I needed the sugar. Anyway, I didn't need to; she gave me some coins quite willingly and I bought a bar of chocolate. I was not in the mood to share it with the kids so I ate it fast, shovelling in the last couple of pieces when I saw Aiden coming. It's like I was almost in some kind of panic mode.

We still had half an hour to wait for Jasmine so we went up to the mezzanine level where there are benches. I still felt really shaky and found the stairs a challenge. I wanted to go home but didn't want to drive in that state. I also considered using the rest of the coins to buy another chocolate bar, but talked myself out of that. I knew it would take a while for the first one to hit.

Whether it was to do with my blood sugar levels or not, I felt a lot better after half an hour and fully better after getting home and having dinner. But it was very odd. I've had what I think were episodes of low blood sugar in the past -- or possibly low blood pressure? -- but it's felt a bit different. Whatever, I do too much self-diagnosing. Could have been anything -- cold germ residue, PMS, alien experimentation, government agent intervention, reaction to the drop in barametric pressure due to the approaching storm ... who knows?

Ate too much this evening. Probably self-medicating.

picture by ciokkolata