Self Talk

Triathlon notes of the day: T-minus 19 days. Goals for the next 19 days: get 8 hours of sleep a night. Ride bike outside with SPD shoes/pedals and aero bars at least three times on long rides. Practice swimming with and getting in and out of wetsuit at least three times. Choose an energy source or three for race day. Oh, and the triathlon newsletter verified a suspicion I had: "Northern California has experienced exceptional amounts of rain and unseasonably cool weather well into spring this year. If we get warmer weather and less rain in the remaining weeks leading up to raceday, we can reasonably hope that the lake will warm to the low- to mid-60s. This is still far below the normal low-70s that we have come to expect at Lake Berryessa this time of year." Brrr! End of triathlon notes.

Monday morning I woke up at the boyfriend's house, and too late to get to work in time for the free breakfast there. So without my kitchen handy I stopped at a coffee shop and ordered a (soy) cafe au lait, wheat bagel with hummus, and blueberry bran muffin. I knew this was a lot of food, but I wasn't being very conscious with my decision making. I kind of watched myself order all that food, driven by the "eat eat eat" impulse from a very emotional weekend, and explained away with: 1) I didn't want to bonk during my triathlon training class later that day, and 2) bran, wheat, hummus; these are healthy right?

As I was waiting for my bagel a beautiful thin very fit woman about my age walked in and ordered an americano and one of those hockey-puck sized vegan seed cake things. (You know the ones, they are super-dense and look like a birdfood millet cake. I don't doubt they are tasty, they just don't hold a candle to a muffin in the food-as-drug department.)

That was a really clear example to me that if I want to lose 10 (or 20) more pounds I'm going to have to do another round of re-wiring of the appetite. The amount of food I now eat once seemed like impossibly little; so too does the amount that I seem to be aiming for. I also need to reign in the emotional eating, and be more conscious every day and every meal with how much food I'm putting into my body.

The last time I re-wired my appetite I put very rigid rules (calories allowed, basically) in place for myself and followed them to the letter. I'm not really feeling up to that kind of focused effort right now; I'd rather focus on work and athletic training and friends and stuff. Maybe some kind of symbol or token that made me think about what I was doing every time I started to eat. A bracelet or ring maybe, things I don't usually wear. To remind me of this goal when all I can think about is how good that bran muffin feels on my tongue.