Tag Archives: stress eating

No Sausage Rolls Welcome Here

In the here & now, ,

In the last hour of yesterday, when I was kicking back and relaxing in my armchair, glued to the final part of a TV drama I’ve been looking forward to since last week’s episode, I didn’t eat anything, so I’ve officially declared it as a victory. It’s the first time in four days where I ended the day without incident.

It wasn’t a bad dieting day all things considered…I ate a sensible breakfast, a questionable mid-morning snack from the sandwich van, followed by a sensible lunch, a dodgy afternoon snack from the ice-cream van and very sensible light supper followed by an hour’s swim after I got back from the hospital. I tried, you know? And more importantly, I counted.

I didn’t want to. I mean, I wanted to want to, almost as much as I wanted not to have to but in the end I just bloody behaved myself and sulked about it like a petulant child. But you know what, as I was drafting some words for this blog post, for the first time since the weekend I felt like I could look myself in the eye and report that on the dieting front at least, my day had been okay. Even though it’d been a shit day in every other respect.

Mum’s poorly. I got quite choked at the hospital yesterday…I was telling her who was coming for a visit today, and she didn’t recognise the name of my best friend in the whole world, even though for the last thirty odd years she’s affectionately referred to her as daughter number two. That was a first. The doctors can’t tell me if this sudden mental decline is due to the infection, or whether the last pieces of mum are slipping away from me. I cried like a baby on the way home.

In between all that she still made me laugh. For some reason, she’d pulled the cannula out of the back of her hand, twice, and when I asked her why, she put on her very best innocent face and pointed at the old lady in the opposite bed… it wasn’t me, it was her, she did it. We both got a fit of the giggles when I caught her eye and she knew she’d been rumbled. It was the one bright spot in what was otherwise a difficult visit.

So let’s see what today brings. Between you and me, I’m hoping it doesn’t bring anything resembling a sausage roll. I’m working from home today and there’s only wholesome food in the house, plus neither the sandwich van or the ice-cream van will be calling to tempt me, so I’m in with a fighting chance.

I’m not expecting miracles…I just want to keep the wheels on, that’s all.

Like it..? Tell your friends!
 

Running Out Of Noughts

In the here & now, ,

Well, I first of all have to say thank you to everyone who took the time to write to me after Friday’s post. As the day went on, my shoulders got squarer, and I definitely felt less guilty about the three bowls of pasta consumed by that lady which, according to y’all, were not my fault. You might remember a blog post back in the early days called The Sorry See-Saw. I was weighing down the heavy end again and watching all the sorry roll towards me when it really wasn’t my fault, but you lot are definitely my voice of reason.

I hope she doesn’t check out my Shitbird page this week, that’s all I can say. She’ll be apoplectic and probably chucking stuff at the screen if she does, because last week wasn’t pretty and of course it’s reflected in the number. I’d about got myself back in the zone by the end of the week but it’s all gone to shit again over the weekend.

I got a call in the early hours of Saturday morning to say mum was on her way to hospital, and I mean it was the full blue-flashing-lights job. She’s had a nasty chest infection over the last week which has seen her feeling a bit grim, but she took another tumble on Friday evening which shook her up and she was struggling to breathe. I shot out of bed as soon as I got the call, pulled my pants on – backwards as it turns out – and almost beat the ambulance to the ER.

We were there all night. She got admitted, and has been hooked up to oxygen and I.V. antibiotics ever since. She’s responding quite well, and thankfully the CAT scan ruled out anything sinister as a reason for yet another fall but they diagnosed pneumonia, and we all know how that can turn out when it grabs a hold of a frail octogenarian whose tank is already running on empty. She’s had a really crap few months.

When I finally headed home on Saturday after mum was settled and sleeping, the need to eat a mountain of crap was overwhelming. I drove home via the supermarket and all I could think about was going home to bed with a box of double caramel Magnums. The Asshole voice was screaming at me that things were too serious for just one box so I bought two and I ate the whole fucking lot in one sitting.

I headed back to the hospital later on, sat and held mum’s hand for a while then went and cleared my head with a swim before ordering Chinese food and eating till I almost popped.

Yesterday was supposed to be better, only it wasn’t. We spent time at the hospital with mum, and she seemed a little bit better, but she’s so tiny and frail in the midst of this big nosy ward. She’s very hard of hearing, and it’s a strange environment with no familiar faces so she’s scared and a bit confused and it’s heartbreaking leaving her there, but we’re not allowed to stay. Turning straight to my drug of choice seemed like the only way to get through the rest of the day and I pretty much ran out of noughts on the calculator when I tried to tot up the number of calories I’d consumed by the time I stopped eating. Shit.

Sundays are nearly always good days because they’re my ground zero, you know? The start of a new week and an opportunity to start a clean untainted sheet. Well, this week’s sheet already looks like the dog threw up on it, and it’s only minutes into Monday.

I’m going to try and reset again…it’s all I can do. My focus has to be on my mum, with a little bit left over for me. I’m going to try and find an hour somewhere in this day to take solace in the pool instead of the food cupboard. I just keep reminding myself that this too shall pass.

 

Like it..? Tell your friends!