July 26, 2007 stress as a food trigger

July 26, 2007
week 3 day 2
From the time I woke up to around midnight I had an awesome day! I actually went to the gym today and did 30 minutes of cardio thanks to my new gym buddy friend Janie who called and said “what are you doing? Wanna go to the gym?” I was like “uuuhhhhh, well, I have a whole 2 hours until I need to be at my interview and it’s not like I’m seriously working on the paper, fine!”

I had breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner-all healthy and all included protein. I really wanted lunch to be my biggest meal so I served myself small portions of a variety of things and got pretty full actually. Dinner was just turkey bacon and almonds. I went to work at my paper at CC’s coffee house and I let myself have half of a mochassippi (only 110 calories). The day was relatively low stress. I took a one and a half hour nap sometime between lunch and dinner.

I realized a general connection between why I have good days and bad days in terms of diet and exercise, stress, and how productive I am and that is that on my good days I don’t have to go to work and on my bad days I have to work, I think my job is really bringing me down. I’ve had lots of jobs before, I worked all throughout college and during most of my summers. I was a telemarketer, I did scientific research in a lab, worked in front of computers, teaching, tutoring, etc. This job is my first retail job and I thought it would be fun plus I get a good discount at a high-end store, but I’ve never come to dread going to work as much as I do this job. Although I only work 4 to 6 hour shifts when I go to work I feel like I was at work all day long because getting ready to go to work is a process, full makeup and accessories, trendy outfit, and since I spend my entire shift on my feet in high heels and sometimes it literally feels like I’m jogging when I get home I’m tired, really tired, too tired to do something productive like start studying for my optometry exam (called OAT).

The pay is commission based but lately I’ve been making only close to the base pay because I lost a lot of the enthusiasm and drive that I had when I started, I don’t really care for going out of my way to find things for people or push people to take advantage of our latest promotions like the $98 sexy trench coat or the $69 hobo satin bag (it’s ugly). I really feel unappreciated especially by this one manager who seems to be the one I have to work with the most. She’s a control freak and I don’t jive well with personalities like that, I feel like control freaks have insecurity issues so they try to control people around them to compensate. She points out my weaknesses in sales and she’ll repeat things to me slowly like I’m stupid or something. Also, the dumbest things will bother her. I consider quitting all the time but I don’t have another job lined up and I do need some sort of income no matter how small so I can at least make my credit card payments (my parents help out but I can’t always depend on them to).

At the beginning I said to around midnight I had an awesome day, so what happened after midnight? Well, stress set in! I was doing research for my paper and realized that I only have a couple of days to get it done and I just started getting all panicky. I’m remembering now that Shiela the nutritionist that stress is a food trigger for me. Anyway, I stared out just letting myself have a piece of cheese, then I though it was too dry and let myself half a piece of whole wheat bread. Then I put a little bit of rice and soup in the microwave. When I finished that I thought, what the hell the damage is already done so I let myself have more rice and soup, and all after midnight. This definitely wasn’t a binge or anything but its really too late to be eating, not to mention all that white rice I had It’s around 1 AM and I’m actually feeling sick, I can’t even think of any motivational or uplifting statements to tell myself at the moment as to why I’m not going to do this again.

My final number for the day are 931 calories, 27 grams of fat, and 107 grams of carbs (the rice and the mochassippi was over half of that)