Day 13

166.0. Ugh when will this end.

My sleep got thoroughly screwed up this weekend so I'm blaming the weight gain on that. My body just seems to get extremely confused whenever I eat past midnight, so that's going to be a new rule from now on - no more eating into the early hours.

Today's intake:

-Starbucks soy vanilla spice latte (230 cal) <-- a ridiculous amount of calories for a coffee, immediately regretted it
-Caesar salad (300 cal)
-Potato salad (90 cal)
-Diet coke (1 cal)
-Binge at 11pm (somewhere in the range of 800 calories)

In general, I'm torn about my diet. Part of me wants to subsist off a shoestring-budget diet of pasta, lentils and dirt-cheap oatmeal; the other half deems that an unacceptable amount of carbs, and wants to live on fat-free coffee from Starbucks and expensive Caesar salads. Pasta and pesto was always a go-to meal, but after discovering how many calories it contained, I've always equated it with food slobbery and complacency - the kind of food you eat in your pyjamas when you've got no fresh produce and a trip to the supermarket is just too much. Pasta is a lazy meal, but it's the cheapest option by a long shot, and I can't keep spending the amount that I do without running into serious trouble.

Here is the reality: I have exactly three weeks to lose a minimum of 11 pounds. I refuse to go back home a pound over 155. It's just not an option. But my sleeping patterns and activity levels undulate so aggressively that it's seemingly impossible to stick to a schedule. The ideal, really, would be to rise at 7 every morning, and be tired enough to pass out by 10pm at night - but when has that ever been the case? In me, it's always ended in mania - hitting a point of tiredness and then pushing through until 5am the next day. Why is it that I feel more alert after twenty-four hours awake than I do upon waking up? My body, or more specifically my body clock, confuses the hell out of me.

Once I'm out of the 160s for good things should (technically) become easier for me, psychologically at the very least. If the past two weeks hadn't been such a failure of an experiment I would be adamant about returning to 600 calories tomorrow, but I feel like it's not working. Maybe my attention span is just too damn short; maybe it's making me eat erratically, some days 1000 or more, some days 400 - and, indefinitely, that can be worse than bingeing.

I fantasise about being able to eat "intuitively" - whatever that means. For me, at least, I know how to tell the difference between real hunger and psychological hunger. Perhaps waiting for the moment intense hunger strikes - pangs and all - as cue to eat seems risqué, but on some level it feels more logical than eating neurotic 100-calorie meals every three hours and never truly feeling satiated. Logic is telling me that I wouldn't overeat if I listened to my hunger cues. If I listen to emotional hunger cues, sure - but isn't it easier to resist a binge if you know (on the whole) that you're giving your body what it needs, when it actually needs it?

Maybe it's a long-shot, but I refuse to struggle through a further two weeks of restricting (and after all, that's what I've been doing - consistently eating a stupidly low amount of calories - given my height and weight - for the best part of a fortnight) only to remain an uncomfortably-chubby-but-not-quite-fat 166.

An adequately-sized bowl of oatmeal (made with water but occasionally soy milk and honey) has always kept me full way past lunch time. So I'm going back to that. And then I'm going to make a tupperware of pasta - or, alternatively, a sandwich - for when I get hungry out. Because that's when I run into trouble; getting hungry at the library, and making impulse purchases on only semi-decent baguettes and coffee from the cafe. Coffee, as a rule, will only be taken black from now on. I can't believe how many calories are in Starbucks lattes. It's kind of insane how we all wolf down these glorified milkshakes every day and wonder why we're getting cellulite.

The no-eating-past-midnight rule still sticks, by the way. The fact that I binged at midnight and not 6pm made it all ten times worse. We'll see what happens with my weight. But surely this yo-yo restricting and bingeing is what got me into this range to begin with. I think if I tell myself I'm not depriving my body of anything useful then it'll be far more inclined to agree with me and cooperate. I think, I pray, I hope.