Project 7000: March 17th 2022

Shopping	505,914kj (+36,800kj)
Extra meals	0kj
Cheat meals (@5000kj)	65,000kj (+5,000kj)
Days elapsed (@7000kj)	525,000kj (+28,000kj)
Remaining	45,914kj

Days until next shop: 6 (📅 March 23rd 2022) with 3,914kj carry-over.

Photos and reflections (including a two-week-late photo of a reflection) after the fold.

I only did a small shop today, because I was shopping while waiting for takeaway.

I got takeaway because I had a mild cold today and wasn’t feeling up to shopping and preparing food earlier in the day. Caffeinated paracetamol helped, but not enough to make me want to spend time at the supermarket.

I had plans for tonight which included a different take-away meal, but due to the cold I cancelled those this morning.

I got through the last shop pretty-much exactly: This morning I had a bowl of cereal and some milk, and I’d had about 4MJ remaining. So technically that takeaway meal pushed me into tomorrow, but I figured if I was going to have to wait anyway, I’d rather do the shopping now.

So I’m going to try and achieve that again. It’s an interesting contrast where earlier in the year I had lots of food left over, and then since mid-February, stuff happened and now I’m cutting it quite fine.

So it turns out my mental health and mood are pretty big factors here. That shouldn’t surprise me, since some of the most-effective weight loss I’ve had has been when I’ve been at extremes of mood; 2012-2013 once I was settling into living in Vietnam, and mid 2016 when stuff was coming down around my ears. I know that the converse is true, since when I gain weight (or lose it more slowly than I hope) my mood suffers.

I’m still not sure how best to make use of this information though. Anyway…

The milk I’ve been getting was out-of-stock, and the replacement is explicitly unsweetened, and 30% of the kilojoules, so I suspect that’ll give me a small amount of extra leeway, reducing the sugar in my cereal by about a teaspoon per bowl.

To give a sense of my meal planning: On the next shopping day, I can have one pack of (two) pies. So then I spread four bowls of cereal, six microwave meals, two pies, and the veggies across the remaining five days, since I didn’t eat anything from this shopping trip today (as the takeaway meal took care of that). So I’ll probably have the pies and the brussels sprouts tomorrow, then I get cereal and microwave meals for the rest of the days.

And of course, free-zies whenever I feel like it. It literally says “free” on the packet!

That’s a pretty good position to be in, it’s quite doable, as long as I don’t have any days where I get up super-early and end up eating an extra meal as a distraction. I have a little bit of leeway there, but it’s very easy to eat that leeway, and then need it later.

Only a couple more weeks until the end-of-March weigh-in. I realised, uploading the photo for this post, that I didn’t actually post an Ass-update from the end of February. So here it is.

I don’t remember what my weight was, and the background is the same, except a door has been unhung. This is also the only big mirror I have in my home, so I’m not sure what I can do about that. Maybe time to clean up the laundry sink?