Muke's growing journey

Right, so I managed to miss last week’s update. My weekend left me all discombobulated and I don’t think I ever really got back in order for the rest of the week. (Even now I’m still a day off kilter; remind me not to leave my house anymore.)

I suppose one of the side effects of missing last week is that it looks like my gaining streak is still going, if it was 206.4 two weeks ago and 206.7 this week—a small change, but still for the better, right? Not actually; last week I was actually up to 208. I won’t blame the loss on last weekend, though; this is more of DP pitching my calorie budget way too low, because I was already on the high end of the weight range I told it I was shooting for.

As far as food goes: I made those sandwiches I mentioned last week, and they turned out pretty great. Awesomely so.

At some point during the week, though, I managed to acquire a slight sense of paranoia about cholesterol. I don’t actually know how much I ought to worry about it; being a vegetarian surely helps, to a degree, but when your diet is full of eggs and dairy, and you’re eating to gainerly proportions, it surely doesn’t help.

So I’ll probably be keeping an eye on that for a while. Soon as I get through this little carton of eggs, I’ll probably switch to one of the lovely cholesterol-free substitutes—at least, till I get on one of those urges to avoid those heavily processed foods.

Life’s fun like that.

…So last week officially makes my longest gaining streak all year. And it might keep going, considering how well I’ve been holding up; so far this week I’m still ahead, so here’s hoping.

Found an old breakfast receipt I was using as a bookmark and started talking to the folk in #bearden about missing the food at college.

Before I started college, my parents (who’d gone to the same school) basically told me they had the best food ever. This is in fact true. Even after I graduated I kept eating on campus, and all the better since it was on my own dollar and I didn’t have to deal with the guilt of racking up the bills back home.

At any rate: awesome foodstuffs. They had the most excellent breakfast burritos, which I’ve since learned to make myself; admittedly, I recall theirs being slender, gracile creations, while mine are a little more squat and chunky in their presentation. With the burritos I’d generally have an SLT (a vegetarian BLT sandwich) and a Lomino (a sort of fried egg sandwich), a bit of vege-sausage, biscuit and gravy, and the best tater tots in the world.

Shame for me that I had those huge breakfasts at a time when I was considerably more active—working manual labor and doing a lot of walking, burning off calories like nobody’s business. I didn’t manage to gain ten pounds till after I’d left the state altogether.

But if I ever go back, I’m sure I’ll eat like mad.

And I’ll definitely have to make lominos next week.

Every little bit helps, you think. If only it could be so easy; in reality, the little bit you gain is so often going to be offset by what you lose.

They say that when numbers fluctuate based on a combination of luck and skill, the outcomes tend to regress towards a mean value. If you do well one week, you’ll have a tendency to do poorly again the next, and vice versa. You can’t rest on your laurels and say “I did better”; you’re only doing better if you’re actually showing upward progress, because over time an isolated victory doesn’t add up to much.

On the bright side, the same goes for isolated defeats.

It’s easy to dwell on where we go wrong, because we’re a kind of creature that lives to solve problems. Contentment isn’t interesting, so we ignore the parts of our life that are working out positively, to focus on the issue du jour. And while our problems give us an opportunity to be unhappy, there’s no reason they have to bring us down.

I’m sorry, I’m sleepy and appear to be channeling a life coach.

My weight’s up this week for the fourth week in a row. On the down side it’s not by much. But I hope to keep pushing it upward. After all, I’ve got sopaipillas.