My Little Gloji

Today was first day back at work after a week of annual leave and an interesting lesson – maybe don’t fill up the first day back from work with a gazillion appointments, such that there isn’t time to move, get a cup of tea, or go to the bathroom. Loving being back at work but I could’ve planned better. Tomorrow is calmer though…

Tomorrow will see the arrival, through the post, of the step aerobics DVD I ordered 😀
I love me a bit of step aerobics. Wilma was asking where I’m going to fit it in and can I set myself a goal with it. I said I’ll experiment with where I can fit it in and that my goal is to do it at least once, at all, this week. Promise low, deliver high, yep?

I forgot to take a photo of my evening meal… and now I’ve eaten it!
For anyone following the photos of what I’ve eaten, this evening’s meal was almost exactly the same as I had on Day 7. You are welcome to head back to that post and look at the photo… please use your imagination to add broccoli.

Good evening! Not been much with the blogging today as it’s the last day before I start back at work but I’ve had a lovely, long walk, and eaten nice things. PJ made me breakfast – I don’t usually have a cooked breakfast but, when he makes one he always asks would I like to be included, then heroically foregoes proper dairy in the scrambled eggs so they’ll be safe for me too.

I’ve got another Wilma catch up tomorrow at 3. She sent me some useful feedback to my food diary and I read it but I’ll give it another read before I speak to her.

Sound a fanfare… the food delivery arrived! All sorts of making, baking, and creating can now happen, and then all sorts of rescuing the kitchen from looking like a bomb hit it afterwards. It’s the weekend, so it’s a good time for it. Hopefully I can get enough made, today and tomorrow, that I’ll have stuff ready to eat on my first day back at work. I seem to have crammed a ton of work appointments into Monday; the rest of the week it calms down a bit.

I had a walk for an hour this afternoon. Several of the large trees fell yesterday, it’s sad. My usual stroll around the outside edge of the park turned into circumnavigating past masses of branches and trunk.

My back aches somewhat from standing in the kitchen for ages making olive cake then mushroom and chickpea burgers. Burgers were gorgeous though, and PJ, my human test subject liked them too. I mostly followed the recipe except I didn’t have any parsley so I used rocket, and I used shiitake mushrooms instead of regular ones as they needed using up.

So here’s why the burgers took ages to make – the recipe called for flax seeds and my only flax seeds were part of a mix alongside pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, and hemp. I spent the best part of an hour separating everything else out: pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds are large so can be removed easily, then hemp seeds are round so they roll if subjected to being on a slope, but flax seeds are flat so they don’t. That’s commitment right there – or it’s ridiculous, given the food shop arrived today and there were many other things I could’ve turned into dinner.
Never again – I’m going to order some just flax seeds from the internet right now.

Late night edit: I just looked back at the recipe and realised I was supposed to put bread crumbs in the mushroom burger recipe. Oops.

There is no more fresh fruit in the house but advice from the Met Office is to stay indoors to avoid getting blown off the street by Storm Eunice. Thought I had an apple left over from a pack of 6 but I don’t, I already ate it, so it’s raisins this morning in the yogurt and amaranth – I sprinkled on some seed mix but it hasn’t helped. I shouldn’t complain – we have enough packet food in the kitchen to survive a small siege, and I’m perfectly capable of exercising indoors.

Evening update: I think I’d like my next challenge to be a 3-day movement diary. Gloji might be about to suggest that but I think if I do one now, it’ll show me some opportunities for improvement, like the food diary did.
I think I definitely get cues from my body when it hasn’t had enough exercise. If hunger feels like an emptiness, not having moved enough feels like a stickiness, a restless itch – I felt it loads at the start of the pandemic going from walking to and from work every day to working from home. I was definitely feeling it today. And like I feel better after eating, I feel better after moving.
I’m going to do a bit of internet research, by which I mean asking my friends on Facebook – what exercise do people like doing and how much time and prep does it take?

It’s 10pm now… if I get hungry and eat anything else before I go to bed, I’ll let you know.

(I stayed up till 2:45am, powered by a handful of pumpkin seeds and flaked almonds, both of these roasted by me several days ago and then put in a container… that is now empty!)

Well, thank you very much to the internet for explaining to me why I got up about ten times last night to go pee, despite my most recent HbA1c result being fine. Don’t eat fruit right before bed. I have not had much sleep and am proceeding accordingly, with the possible addition of a tiny bit of caffeine. I usually don’t because it can make me anxious, but there’s an emergency jar of instant coffee in the kitchen.

I’m going to eat something, then do a bit of laundry, do a bit of housework, do a bit of being useful around the flat. I might make blueberry muffins – they’re one of your 5 a day, but only if you eat the whole tray in one go.

6pm update: This afternoon involved a knife fight with a globe artichoke. I think I won… just. Looking at my food diary now I’m halfway through it and I notice all my meals are skewed later in the day: I eat my first meal of the day when most people are eating their second etc. This isn’t by design, it’s when I’m physically hungry, and I expect there are opinions other people might have over whether this is an issue or not, and over what I should do to address it, if anything.

I accidentally weighed myself this morning thinking it was Thursday and wrote the number of kilos down on the back of an envelope in case I forget to do the weighing thing tomorrow. And now I’m off for an evening stroll to buy salad because we’re getting through it so fast we’ll be all out before the supermarket delivery.

Later evening update: I just realised it’s been a few days since I’ve eaten bread. I’m not anti-bread, I just think I’ve been eating it instead of a variety of food, when bread is probably meant to be eaten as well as a variety of food. Now that I am eating more of a variety of food, I’m less interested in bread. There are still carbohydrates though – just not bread ones.

Lunchtime update: Today I’m starting the 3-day food diary that Gloji recommends. Also been outdoors (in the rain) for over an hour – this included some time at the market buying veg, and a can of beans that suspiciously announces itself just as ‘white beans’. I intend to make something happen in the kitchen with these in a minute.

Early evening update: So it turns out that if I eat just when I’m hungry, I get to find out what it feels like to be hungry. Good grief! How do people who go on fasts manage this? I feel very annoyed, with someone, probably… no idea who, perhaps with anyone who thinks fasting is a good idea.

I made kale chips earlier, from a Gloji recipe. PJ just came home, carrying a bag of giant Wotsits, and announced that I had made the kitchen smell like a fart. I guess it’s the sort of thing you have to leave the room then come back into the room to notice.

Now eating while typing (look I can multitask!) – I made chicken pasta salad, with a home-made pesto that tastes amazing, which is handy because, on its own, it looks like I imagine nuclear waste looks. We divided it into 3 so PJ can take some to work for lunch tomorrow*. I don’t yet know what I’m having for lunch tomorrow but it will have to be more substantial than today’s lunch (and occur earlier) so that I don’t go out on a crime spree.
* (I offered – because I’m off work this week – and I have some veg from the market I want to make into things)

… and then I had mandarins and a pot of jelly. I did take a photo, you can see it if you really, really want to, but I think it’s visually boring.

I just discovered the camera on my phone has a ‘food mode’ – somehow it worked out that it was pointing at food and asked me if I’d like to use ‘food mode’. Food mode appears to create a little circle within which the plate can be framed, and everything outside of that circle is blurred – but not much. OK then… here’s what I ate at 4pm today, this being the first thing I ate today (and I’m imagining Wilma frowning now). Hold on, the food is a bit blurred too. Now I’m frowning at ‘food mode’.

Now let’s talk about this lovely Gloji recipe book I’ve been given (as a PDF). The recipe book starts off with a load of majorly sensible advice about eating healthily, about hunger, about not doing restrictive dieting, about types of hunger and the hunger scale…all fantastic stuff! And then it has recipes. I’ll likely be using the guidelines it gives and trying some of the recipes but I’d rather invent my own recipes and use the Gloji guidelines to make them more healthy.
I just read I’m meant to be keeping a food diary for 3 days and I’ve got to say what I ate, when I ate it, and how I felt before and afterwards. Oops not started that yet – I’ll do it some time this week.

I think I’d work better with this Gloji book if I had a hard copy so I’m going to try to arrange myself one – via the local printer if I have to.

Also there are some things I identified I’d like to have as resources to help me eat healthily and to move more, so I’m going to try to build those.

Lunchtime update: I’m very grateful to ‘yesterday me’ because ‘yesterday me’ stayed on in the kitchen after dinner and made me a somewhat protein-y salad. I’d take a photo of it but I’m currently eating it. You want details? Chick peas, red pepper humous, cherry tomatoes, red cabbage, celery. Do I know if it’s nutritionally-balanced? Not yet. But I do know that it’s healthier than the 2 slices of bread and spread that formed the Nothing sandwich I had yesterday.
Missed my early morning walk due to staying up late listening to audio with the lovely other half but I’m going to head out now and get some steps in before back to work at 2pm.

Evening update: Why am I not hungry? I’ll eat anyway – using my (late) Dad’s wisdom “You’ll want your dinner when you smell it”…

Meanwhile, I’ve changed the battery in the scales. It involved a screwdriver. But I should be able to get an accurate weight now. I’ll do that in the morning!