Week 8: Up is down. Black is white. Hungry is.... good?

[captainsblog]

Thanks to some general work craziness of the past week, and some more of it plus loading-out our daughter to RIT next week, I've been on a cardio-only regimen since Monday, and haven't even had the time to schedule, much less go to, any in-between-classes classes with Sally. (Tomorrow morning, and Thursday of next week, are the only days I'm sure will be free, so if you're reading this before I message you, just comment on those options.)

The flip side of being so busy with work and college planning, though, is that there's less time to sit around stuffing one's face full of Ho-Ho's, or whatever one's dessert of demise might be. And just now, after getting back from a late-afternoon elliptical trip and while waiting for Eleanor to get home from work, I came to what I think is an important realization:

"Hungry" is just a message. A biological version of AOL's old siren song of "You've got mail!"  Could be a loving letter from an old friend; could be spam. You never know until you respond to the prompt and open it.

Waiting at the backyard table tonight, "hungry" suddenly seemed a good thing. A validation of what I haven't been eating, and the at-least-something I've physically been doing. Instead of the response to "hungry" being OM NOM NOM, my reaction tonight was, "I must be doing something right." At least two different people noticed this week that I look better these days than I had before starting all this; granted, they'd seen me at what was clearly my worst-ever, so it wasn't a hard task to get this far, but it provides mondo encouragement as these weeks turn into months and hopefully into a redefined lifetime.

There's still plenty far to go, and the coming week will provide plenty of challenges, between five of the next seven days being heavily overcommitted to stressful pursuits and with eating-out opportunities being the easiest if not the only alternatives. Still, between the encouragement and the realizations of how to react to it all, I think I'll make it through until I get back on a regular schedule of real-workout workouts after Labor Day.

ETA:Added the week count (w+1), and just checked the weight count (n is down another 2, or 2-and-a-half, I keep forgetting and it doesn't really matter in and of itself).