Work Stress, Lentil Soup, and Tracking-Induced Madness

Feb 23, 2017

Today was mostly about me being stressed at work. Just internal head-stuff mostly, trying to get a handle of keeping track of things that need tracking, knowing how to do things, etc. I'm so happy to be there but I really wish I could just fast forward to the part where I know how to do my job. It will be a happy day when my presence saves my boss work instead of creating more work for her. But such is the life of the newbie, I guess. Trying to be philosophical about it, keep things in perspective, etc but I do take this specific type of stress very hard. I'm working on taking it one task at a time and being more aggressive about time management. (Blah blah; sorry, this is boring!)

A lovely thing, though, was taking my parents out to celebrate my dad's birthday. We went to our favorite Italian restaurant and I did okay. Ate about half a small salad and demolished a cup of my very favorite lentil and Italian sausage soup. Then I had some mozzarella with marinara that I intended to mostly share with my parents and sister but, uh, kind of ate most of myself. (No regrets! It was delicious.) I eschewed dessert. I was actually feeling pretty sane so it didn't bother me that Mom and Dad and my sister each ordered dessert; I was happy for them to do so. I lived vicariously through them. Normally, over the past year or two, I might not have ordered my own dessert but I would have helped myself to many bites of theirs, or talked someone into splitting something with me. But no bites! No sharing! That's nice. I'd love to hope that's a permanent shift, but I know myself well enough to understand it probably isn't. I'll just have to remain vigilant.

Tonight is also a great example of why tracking my food, water, and exercise can make me a little crazy. (Or a lot crazy.) I've been doing great at tracking this week (well, since I started on Tuesday.) But the restaurant we went to tonight isn't a chain and as far as I know doesn't make nutritional information available. So I had to guess. I had to find things in MyFitnessPal that looked like they might be kind of close to what I ate, maybe, I hope. I do not care for this. If I'm going to track, I only feel okay if I can be reasonably sure what I'm entering is accurate. That's why one of the pitfalls for me when I'm tracking is that I default to things with scannable barcodes. It's an accuracy hangup, and it's really weird and unhelpful but honestly I don't know if this is going to change. Whenenver I eat at a restaurant or someone else's house or whatever (while I'm tracking) and have to enter best-guess stuff, I always make a note that I'm estimating and enter what I really ate—but it still disturbs me, like, way way more than it should. (It's not so bad if my husband and I are cooking at home and I can take the time to enter everything accurately as a "recipe" into MyFitnessPal, but once it's out of my hands...!) Anyway, I hate guessing and I am so bothered that my diary for today is technically inaccurate. ¯\_(?)_/¯ 

My estimates for what I ate for dinner put me over my calorie goal, so I had some extra motivation to hop on the treadmill when we got home. I'm glad I did that. Now I'm pleasantly sleepy and will put myself to bed. Tomorrow? No tracking, ha! I'll try to keep to "the rules" more or less, but I am taking the weekend off from MyFitnessNemesis. <3

2 Comments