So I've been back at uni for four days now - term officially started today, and it felt like the longest goddamn day I've had in months. It completely wrecked me, if I'm honest. I felt like I was running on about ten quarts of adrenaline all day long - I don't know what it was, but I felt constantly anxious, and really jittery as if something bad was coming. I saw Tommy, which I thought would be weird, but it wasn't. It felt like New Years never really happened... which is probably a good thing. So that should have calmed me down but I wasn't really worried about that in the first place. It didn't help that the first lecture room we were in was so cold that the whole class couldn't stop shivering. I didn't stop shivering even when the class ended and we went into the warm common room area. (I go to university in the north, so it's normally around 5/10 degrees colder than London - oh joy). Even through lunch when everyone was chatting and relaxing and getting coffee, I felt flinchy and nervous. Like I couldn't even eat half a sandwich without feeling on edge again (too on edge to eat... am I onto something?) and the copious amounts of coffee/ritalin I swallowed over the course of my 9-til-5 didn't help me feel any better. Sure, I could concentrate, but my teeth were chattering. And I don't know if it was from the cold or the fact that I'd turned into a nervous wreck.
The minute I got back to the flat, I broke down on my flatmate's shoulder and sobbed for about an hour. Then I proceeded to stuff my face. Oh, by the way, I think things are going to be okay between me and Freddie (the flatmate I fell in love with last year who lives opposite me). We seem to be getting along very smoothly as friends and while I know there will always be some affection there, it doesn't seem to be making things difficult for me any more. I'm reminding myself of reasons why we're better off as friends, and they all make sense. I think last term I was just in a very vulnerable, emotional state and I clung onto anything that made me feel momentarily better. Now that I feel I have my priorities in line after the Christmas break, it doesn't make sense to feel so hysterical over someone who probably isn't at all right for me. Not to mention I can hardly fit a relationship into my schedule this term (which sounds like something a business woman would say but it's true). My priorities are work, losing weight and getting healthy again (emotionally and physically). Slowly trying to patch myself together again, and I feel I might be able to do it this time.
I've given up booze which seems to be saving me a LOT of money. Two weeks down :) I cut down on cigarettes too, but I'd like to cut down even more when I can handle it. The thing I need to focus on now is eating real meals. They don't need to be big, but they need to be sufficient enough to fuel me through the evening, stave off binges and randomly picking at food from the minute I get home. I have my breakfast sorted - cereal with soy milk seems to fill me up and isn't too heavy for workshops and things. Lunch is a bit of a question mark at the moment. Because I'm now spending 5 lunch times a week in my department (we occupy our own section of campus), I need to be able to decide on a budget lunch to eat regularly every day. A sandwich and cappuccino lunch costs £6.30 in my department. Which is ridiculous and factoring in cigarettes, bus fares, book allowance and other food needs, I'll be out of money by February. I think I'll go for black coffee (cheaper and lower cal) from now on and bring my own sandwiches. Dinner time, I'm thinking of buying a ton of quorn readymeals/ingredients to make vegetarian curry and just eating that all week. Then maybe on the weekends I can allow myself a treat like going into town for Starbucks. My flatmate (the one whose shoulder I broke down on and who worries about my health) told me I should buy some frozen pizzas. I guess the big vegetarian ones can be cooked and then half can be put in the fridge for the next day... but still, I don't really want to eat pizza :/ It feels weird eating pizza and expecting to lose weight (even though it really is a case of calories in versus calories out).
As far as my scales tell me, I haven't budged from 152.8. Which isn't great. I remember I got down to 140 lbs last term and I want that feeling back. I think my aim is to lose 10 lbs and get down to 143 by the end of January. If I give up snacking and stick to my meal plans it shouldn't be impossible. I also have a weird feeling I'll be burning a lot of calories working this term. You'd be surprised just how exhausting a full day of lectures and seminars can be :(
Acting workshops tomorrow. Eurgh. I wish I looked forward to them more, but I just find them fucking terrifying.
Off to read a pretentious book on theatre and then to bed with a hot water bottle :P Will update later this week if I get a chance x
Monday, 13 January 2014
Thursday, 2 January 2014
Time for change
Sooo... I'm permanently stuck at 152.8 lbs. My scales love that number. And do you know what the disturbing thing is? I look at my body in the mirror and I don't think it looks that different from when I was 146 lbs. Which is stupid, because obviously 9 lbs (edit: 6.8 lbs, thank you Phoebe... my maths went out the window) makes a difference. And then I start freaking out about where the weight's gone, that maybe it's all gone to my face, and perhaps I haven't noticed the difference because I see my own face every day, but in reality it's a ginormous round blob with no structure whatsoever. That kind of stuff really gets to me and freaks me out. Then I think maybe it's all a trick, maybe I AM huge but my perception is so distorted that I'm kidding myself I look a lot thinner than I do. I don't know. It's all really disturbing and weird. I think the problem at hand here as that I've got far too comfy with being back in this weight range, and it hasn't quite hit me that I'm no longer the slim BMI-20 I reached while at uni. I keep thinking I am then wondering why I feel so goddamn heavy at the end of the day.
Seeing as one of my own private resolutions for this year is to be more honest about my failures, I'll admit that today turned into somewhat of a binge.
Breakfast
- Cereal with soya milk, 250 cals
- Coffee, 30 cals
Lunch
- Soya cappuccino, 150 cals
- 2/3 mushroom and emmental toastie, 300 cals
Dinner
- Most of a cottage pie made with quorn, 250 cals
- Diet coke, 0 cals
Binge
- Dairy-free chocolate buttons, 145 cals
- Jelly beans, 35 cals
- 2 pieces of brown bread with butter, 300 cals
- Bagel sandwich with cheese, 450 cals
- Crisps, 100 cals
Total: 2,010 cals.
I'm hopelessly ashamed of that number but the sick thing is, I don't even feel full. I feel heavy, sure, but I could probably eat another 500 cal and not blink.
Also, my lack of fresh fruit and veg concerns me.
It's time for a cheese and carbs cleanse. I think if I could give up things like crisps and bread for short periods of time it would really help me out. I don't think other starches like potato are as bad, but any sort of refined flour products are terrible for weight loss. Cheese, also, is terribly fattening, and unfortunately incredibly addictive. I've been toying around with the idea of resuming my vegan ways, but it's just not an easy thing to do during the winter. I might, however, compromise and just give up major dairy products for a while - cheese, cow's milk, and yogurt being the primary offenders. Things like quorn which are low-fat and high-protein feel 'safe' to eat in any quantity, even though they contain egg whites.
The new regime should probably start with a few pointers:
- More emphasis on fruit and veg: sugar in fruit is better to binge on than sugar in sweets, cereal and white bread
- No whole dairy products: cheese, yogurt and milk banned unless listed as minor ingredient.
- No flour.
- NO BOOZE! Yes I said it, I'm quitting drinking until I whittle my weight down to a sensible level and get on top of my work.
So I guess the plan is to lose 4 lbs before I go back to school, which is probably doable if I a) sleep at proper hours b) flush my system out with tons and tons of water and c) stay under 1000 calories a day. I'm going to use my timetabled acting workshops as motivation to do this. I have 3 per week scheduled for this term and the idea of performing in front of 20 other people at 153 lbs fucking terrifies me.
Anyways, I've rambled on enough, and it's time for me to go to sleep. I will write up tomorrow and see how it goes.
Seeing as one of my own private resolutions for this year is to be more honest about my failures, I'll admit that today turned into somewhat of a binge.
Breakfast
- Cereal with soya milk, 250 cals
- Coffee, 30 cals
Lunch
- Soya cappuccino, 150 cals
- 2/3 mushroom and emmental toastie, 300 cals
Dinner
- Most of a cottage pie made with quorn, 250 cals
- Diet coke, 0 cals
Binge
- Dairy-free chocolate buttons, 145 cals
- Jelly beans, 35 cals
- 2 pieces of brown bread with butter, 300 cals
- Bagel sandwich with cheese, 450 cals
- Crisps, 100 cals
Total: 2,010 cals.
I'm hopelessly ashamed of that number but the sick thing is, I don't even feel full. I feel heavy, sure, but I could probably eat another 500 cal and not blink.
Also, my lack of fresh fruit and veg concerns me.
It's time for a cheese and carbs cleanse. I think if I could give up things like crisps and bread for short periods of time it would really help me out. I don't think other starches like potato are as bad, but any sort of refined flour products are terrible for weight loss. Cheese, also, is terribly fattening, and unfortunately incredibly addictive. I've been toying around with the idea of resuming my vegan ways, but it's just not an easy thing to do during the winter. I might, however, compromise and just give up major dairy products for a while - cheese, cow's milk, and yogurt being the primary offenders. Things like quorn which are low-fat and high-protein feel 'safe' to eat in any quantity, even though they contain egg whites.
The new regime should probably start with a few pointers:
- More emphasis on fruit and veg: sugar in fruit is better to binge on than sugar in sweets, cereal and white bread
- No whole dairy products: cheese, yogurt and milk banned unless listed as minor ingredient.
- No flour.
- NO BOOZE! Yes I said it, I'm quitting drinking until I whittle my weight down to a sensible level and get on top of my work.
So I guess the plan is to lose 4 lbs before I go back to school, which is probably doable if I a) sleep at proper hours b) flush my system out with tons and tons of water and c) stay under 1000 calories a day. I'm going to use my timetabled acting workshops as motivation to do this. I have 3 per week scheduled for this term and the idea of performing in front of 20 other people at 153 lbs fucking terrifies me.
Anyways, I've rambled on enough, and it's time for me to go to sleep. I will write up tomorrow and see how it goes.
Wednesday, 1 January 2014
Party hard
So last night was definitely interesting. Happy New Years, by the way! ^.^ I don't know about you but I definitely had a strange one.
To start off, my mother went away three days ago to spend NY's with her friends in the country. Which has been great because I've had the house to myself. Yesterday started out okay food wise. I ate a bowl of cornflakes with soya milk for breakfast, which was like the blandest thing ever, but I'm trying this new thing where I don't give myself too much variety. Strangely, it worked and I didn't feel hungry all day until about 5pm when I ate a block of cheese (damn you Christmas leftovers) before I went to meet Tina. Tina, for the record, is having a huge mental health crisis and may have to go into hospital for her depression. Which is a pretty serious deal, so I'm seeing a lot of her these days. So she came over to my house about a hour and a half before I was supposed to leave, which was quite stressful, considering I was only half-ready. The stress combination of seeing her in such a state and frantically trying to make myself look presentable caused me to eat 3 jam doughnuts, a bag of crisps and a big iced coffee. I don't know why I did it, but maybe I was pre-empting a binge. That almost always happens to me before leaving the house to go out.
Anyway, we shared a black cab to central London, because the party I was supposed to be turning up at was en route to her flat. Then I had to trek around this huge busy station to try and find Caro and Tommy, so that we could get to this house party. A bit of back story: Tommy is this guy off my course who I've been doing a lot of writing with recently. He's from New York and even more cynical and sarcastic than me, which generally means our conversations go a little like this:
GABBY: Your shirt is so ugly.
TOMMY: Your face is so ugly. Remind me why I hang out with you again?
GABBY: Because you're holding a candle for me, remember?
TOMMY: Oh yeah, I remember now. I'm hopelessly in love with you.
GABBY: Have you finished reading that scene I sent you yet?
TOMMY: No, Jesus, you're so demanding.
GABBY: Fuck you.
TOMMY: Fuck you.
GABBY: D'you want to grab a coffee?
TOMMY: Sure babe.
So I found them and then we went to this shindig, which basically turned out to be a bunch of people we'd never met before hot-boxing this poor girl's living room. Long story short: I smoked a joint to myself, drank rather a lot of vodka, and got monumentally pissed. The three of us ended up sharing another cab home (I'm sure it'll be the last one I can afford in a while), came back to mine, drank even more booze, and then Caro passed out in my bed. Me and Tommy ended up fucking at 5 in the morning and then we fell asleep as the sun came up. It was kind of... a very weird experience. We were almost dancing round the subject all night and then it just happened. I think I'm too used to having straight-forward, uncomplicated, boy-girl sex. This was just so weird. We were having conversations in the middle of it. About fucking Allen Ginsberg, and the beat poets, and just loads of other random stuff I'm pretty sure it's not normal to talk about during sex. I guess that's drugs for you, right? Anyway, and then we had to streak through my house naked because my mother decided to come back three hours early and not notify me.
I told you it was a strange New Years. The beginning of term is either going to be extremely fun or extremely awkward, but I guess we'll just have to see...
So today food wise has been weird because I kind of went to bed at 7am for half an hour, then again at 11am and woke up properly at 3pm. I forced myself awake with some coffee, a cream cheese and Jarlsberg bagel sandwich (possibly the most fattening concoction I've yet dreamed up), and a big fruit salad with low-fat yogurt. In all fairness, it did allow me to function for at least the following four hours. Then at 9pm I decided it was a good idea to make a huge salad with sweetcorn and tomatoes and cucumber and eat it with these spicy veggie patties and a fuck ton of mayo. I'm talking full fat, real Mayonnaise, which I NEVER do. Thank God for diet coke, because I think I've chugged enough to clean out my intestines for the next week. And I'm sorry, that was way too much information, but it does make me feel marginally better about the colossal amount of food I ate over the past two days.
I'm now super busy until I go back to university. School starts on the 13th and by then I've got to have completed these two essays, read a ton of books that haven't even arrived yet, and miraculously have got my head together. January's gonna be wicked fun.
To start off, my mother went away three days ago to spend NY's with her friends in the country. Which has been great because I've had the house to myself. Yesterday started out okay food wise. I ate a bowl of cornflakes with soya milk for breakfast, which was like the blandest thing ever, but I'm trying this new thing where I don't give myself too much variety. Strangely, it worked and I didn't feel hungry all day until about 5pm when I ate a block of cheese (damn you Christmas leftovers) before I went to meet Tina. Tina, for the record, is having a huge mental health crisis and may have to go into hospital for her depression. Which is a pretty serious deal, so I'm seeing a lot of her these days. So she came over to my house about a hour and a half before I was supposed to leave, which was quite stressful, considering I was only half-ready. The stress combination of seeing her in such a state and frantically trying to make myself look presentable caused me to eat 3 jam doughnuts, a bag of crisps and a big iced coffee. I don't know why I did it, but maybe I was pre-empting a binge. That almost always happens to me before leaving the house to go out.
Anyway, we shared a black cab to central London, because the party I was supposed to be turning up at was en route to her flat. Then I had to trek around this huge busy station to try and find Caro and Tommy, so that we could get to this house party. A bit of back story: Tommy is this guy off my course who I've been doing a lot of writing with recently. He's from New York and even more cynical and sarcastic than me, which generally means our conversations go a little like this:
GABBY: Your shirt is so ugly.
TOMMY: Your face is so ugly. Remind me why I hang out with you again?
GABBY: Because you're holding a candle for me, remember?
TOMMY: Oh yeah, I remember now. I'm hopelessly in love with you.
GABBY: Have you finished reading that scene I sent you yet?
TOMMY: No, Jesus, you're so demanding.
GABBY: Fuck you.
TOMMY: Fuck you.
GABBY: D'you want to grab a coffee?
TOMMY: Sure babe.
So I found them and then we went to this shindig, which basically turned out to be a bunch of people we'd never met before hot-boxing this poor girl's living room. Long story short: I smoked a joint to myself, drank rather a lot of vodka, and got monumentally pissed. The three of us ended up sharing another cab home (I'm sure it'll be the last one I can afford in a while), came back to mine, drank even more booze, and then Caro passed out in my bed. Me and Tommy ended up fucking at 5 in the morning and then we fell asleep as the sun came up. It was kind of... a very weird experience. We were almost dancing round the subject all night and then it just happened. I think I'm too used to having straight-forward, uncomplicated, boy-girl sex. This was just so weird. We were having conversations in the middle of it. About fucking Allen Ginsberg, and the beat poets, and just loads of other random stuff I'm pretty sure it's not normal to talk about during sex. I guess that's drugs for you, right? Anyway, and then we had to streak through my house naked because my mother decided to come back three hours early and not notify me.
I told you it was a strange New Years. The beginning of term is either going to be extremely fun or extremely awkward, but I guess we'll just have to see...
So today food wise has been weird because I kind of went to bed at 7am for half an hour, then again at 11am and woke up properly at 3pm. I forced myself awake with some coffee, a cream cheese and Jarlsberg bagel sandwich (possibly the most fattening concoction I've yet dreamed up), and a big fruit salad with low-fat yogurt. In all fairness, it did allow me to function for at least the following four hours. Then at 9pm I decided it was a good idea to make a huge salad with sweetcorn and tomatoes and cucumber and eat it with these spicy veggie patties and a fuck ton of mayo. I'm talking full fat, real Mayonnaise, which I NEVER do. Thank God for diet coke, because I think I've chugged enough to clean out my intestines for the next week. And I'm sorry, that was way too much information, but it does make me feel marginally better about the colossal amount of food I ate over the past two days.
I'm now super busy until I go back to university. School starts on the 13th and by then I've got to have completed these two essays, read a ton of books that haven't even arrived yet, and miraculously have got my head together. January's gonna be wicked fun.
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