Muke's growing journey

I know my body is working against me these days. Just a couple of months ago I was gaining steadily on under four thousand calories daily; last week is the first progress I’ve had in a while and it took about five thousand a day. I am displeased.

More and more I’ve been despising buying groceries.  I don’t have the instinct to buy high calories—I keep craving expensive, expensive vegetables… and every week is like doing it for the first time.  Instead of just posting meal plans ahead of time (which may be hit or miss in their results) I think I might just start posting what I ate on the weeks I did make progress, so I can look back on them when I don’t know what to buy and have options, instead of having to come up with something new every week.

Plan for week of 3/22–3/26, result +1.0 lbs:
Sunday (~4000 calories)

• Breakfast: Toaster strudels, 2.
• Lunch: Mozzarella sticks (half of a 32-oz package) with spaghetti sauce. Soda.
• Snack: Apples, 2 with peanut butter.
• Dinner: Frozen pizza. Soda.

Monday–Thursday (~5200 calories)

• Breakfast: Vegetarian sausage (one patty, two links). Toaster strudels, 2.
• Lunch: Hamburger helper (made with vegemeat and half and half, 1/4 batch). Corn, 1/3 cup. Rolls, 2–3. Soda. Cheese crackers (3 oz.).
• Snack: Apples, 2 with peanut butter.
• Dinner: Tacos, 6 (made with beans instead of vegemeat for lower cost and higher calories). Soda.

In practice I fell short on the plan above; on a couple of the days my appetite ran out before I could get through all six tacos, and I still have some cheese crackers left over, which I shouldn’t. Nevertheless, this mission was a success!

Here’s a video of me eating tacos on Monday:

I do despise the entire lack of progress I’ve been having the past couple of months. You might call it a plateau, but really it feels more like a wall. I just can’t eat as much as I ought to be doing. I need to learn from my mistakes and not put so much reliance on breakfast calories I can’t handle; after the stuff I miss out, it turns out I’m only getting an average number of calories, and of course not enough to gain off of.

On the bright side, I’ve been getting used to buying calories cheap. I can have a couple thousand calories worth of tacos a night for most of this week on less than ten dollars.

Anyway. I’ve run out of things to say, and you guys wanted, among other things, pictures, so here’s some from today.

The continued lack of progress to report is discouraging. Chiefly it’s been a problem of appetite; I just haven’t felt like eating, and in the gaining business of course that’s not very helpful. Week before last, I had plenty of food, but couldn’t eat it all; last week I didn’t even feel like buying much.

This week I’m hoping to turn that around. I’m trying for 4000 calories a day, and I’ve got the material so long as I can pull together the drive.

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All right, so last week’s 5000-calorie plan was perfect, and didn’t seem that extreme, but it was pretty much a mistake to have breakfast be my biggest-calorie meal of the day; I wasn’t able to eat much of it at all, and eating about 2/3 of what I’d planned wasn’t very effective. And that’s why I’m at the same weight as last week, I’m afraid; that, and eating poorly in general on Thursday, my usual weigh-in day, probably didn’t help all that much either.

Ah well, enough with excuses. I wasn’t all that successful with the meal planning yesterday, so I don’t hold out very high hopes for this week either; I definitely need more practice at this.

That, and anyone who wants to contribute a menu is still welcome to do so.

Yeah, I’m down a pound this week again. I blame being sick—just a slight cold, really—and not feeling like overstuffing myself; I only got maybe a couple thousand calories a day.

Luckily I’m better now, but I’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Backsliding the past couple of weeks means I’m leaving February at the same weight I came into it with, and that’s no good. The goal for March is ending up pretty high (a few pounds a week) but I think as long as I don’t get sick again I can pull it off. The only hard part is meeting the calorie budget.

Next week, for example, DP is putting nearly five thousand calories a day on my plate. In itself that’s difficult for me; while some people make food choices that have them eating like that naturally, I’m not one of them.

The harder part is that my grocery budget is $50 a week. (While I can spare more comfortably at the moment, I’ll want to get into the habit of not doing so, since I’m moving into a home with a higher house payment soon.) For a six-day gaining week—I generally take Saturdays off—that means I need to be spending an average of about .16¢–.17¢ a calorie. For comparison, a candy bar (say 200 calories) from a vending machine (say 65¢) is almost double that, at .325¢ per calorie. Yeah. I actually managed to put together a menu that pulls it off, though, and probably won’t kill me.

So here’s my meal plan for the week.

Breakfasts will be a couple of breakfast burritos (~600 calories each) and a toaster pastry (~200 calories).

For lunch, potato casserole (~700 calories; the recipe is not far off from this one), cheese crackers (~400 calories), and yogurt (~200 calories).

I’ll be trying tofu or noodles with peanut sauce (~900 calories) for dinner, with ice cream (~450 calories) for dessert.

For snacks at work it’s Lifesavers candy (~100 calories) and to drink in general will be lemonade from mix and orange soda (about ~700 calories over the course of the day).

Somehow I managed to buy materials for all that for under fifty bucks—actually, with enough left over to buy cookies for Friday’s furmeet. On the downside it took all of a Saturday afternoon to engineer it. Putting stuff like this together is going to be harder too after I move; the new place is outside of the grocery delivery area so I’ll have to go out to buy groceries again, and that means either checking the prices at home before shopping (and thus spending far more time) or checking the prices at the store after the planning of calories (and thus raising the chance of ruining my budget).

The goal for the month of March, by the way, is a pretty unrealistic 220 pounds, but I’m not giving up yet.