Yesterday, I made a spreadsheet to track the quality of my diet. I’m following some fairly simple rules, as laid down in Racing Weight, to figure out if I’m eating properly or not. As it turned out, yesterday I ate dreadfully. I think I didn’t eat very different to any other day, which makes things worse: a one-off blowout is one thing, but every day stuffing the wrong things down your gullet is far worse. There were some immediate benefits: today, I ate much more carefully, mindful of how junk would be affecting the score of my daily diet. Usually, even knowing I don’t want to eat them, I’d be stuffing handfuls of Haribo Goldbaren in my gob by mid afternoon. Today, not a single one.
That did mean I came home ravenous, and then pigged out: a third of a carton of ice cream, the remains of a bag of tortilla chips, some toast, two burgers. What made it worse was I knew how bad I was being, and I didn’t stop. I really need to do something about delaying gratification.
Of course, I could have just been provoked. Provoked by an "undocumented feature" in Excel on Windows Phone 8, where if you create a pivot table in a file, you can’t subsequently edit it on your phone. Not that you can’t edit the pivot table; no, you can’t edit the file at all. You have to go and turn on your computer, delete the pivot table, save the file and then edit it on your phone again. This is annoying, both because Windows Phone was sold with the promise of good integration with other Microsoft products, and because if you search online, it’s not hard to find a list of compatible features in the mobile version of Excel, which includes pivot tables.
I don’t think I was eating for the Apocalypse just because of an aggravating spreadsheet. It’s hard adjusting from a high volume training regime to one where I don’t need all these excess calories. Though if I wasn’t putting all this terrible food into myself, I might be more capable of running more frequently. I could kid myself that I’ll eat healthily while oj holiday, but we have to accept that London and Canada means lots of beer and a more rotund me in a couple of weeks time.
Unless I exercise iron self-control, and on today’s evidence, that’s a little unlikely.
On the more positive side, I’ve learned some more Spanish vocabulary, and today it only took me around fifteen minutes of stumbling around before I woke up, even on a paltry six-and-a-half hours sleep. If I can get onto a routine where I’m better rested, I stand a better chance of my diet holding together. Without a firm foundation, I’ll be fragile.
Then again, two weeks of travel lie ahead of me. This is going to be interesting…