Cuffed

ADDENDUM: I just ordered a one-touch digital blood pressure wrist cuff from Amazon. After my dad's stroke, my parent's got an old school blood pressure cuff, with the inflation, the deflation, the needle going round. They took each other's pressure regularly and took mine. I wish I paid more attention to what they were doing and talking about, I wish I could talk to them about it now.

BREAKFAST: 7:15am, hot oatmeal and half a diet sprite, hunger 3/5. Hadn't made oatmeal since the winter, it's usually a cold weather food for me, but I was craving something heavy, and another bagel is a little boring. So I prepared it as I always do, with water, a dash of sugar and a dash of salt....hmmm. Just finished the Quaker tube, gonna look for an organic brand. And use the evaporated cane sugar, the sea salt, and maybe whole milk and the good butter to make it a real treat. The diet sprite AGAIN tasted a bit....fakey and thin. Not different, just realizing that after cutting off the diet coke, I don't particularly LIKE diet soda!! Weird. It was such a staple for me for so many years. Ilsa warned me this might happen, discovering stuff that I was in the habit of eating might be found distasteful upon cutting back on them and reflection.

AM SNACK: 10:15am, 25 oz of still water from the sippy cup. Hot day, road the good bike to work, going to leave early and shoot out to Coney & back. I just learned it's 4 miles door to door to work. Thats 40 miles on a bike a week, just for going to work! That's so cool!

LUNCH: 12:15, shrimp curry & basmanti, dal, one pakora, 2 small pieces of nan, water, hunger 4/5. Relaxed afternoon lunch with Erikka. Cheap n' tasty.

PM SNACK: 1:15pm, 3.5 oz dark chocolate bar, hunger 3/5. After lunch went to the Hershey's tourist trap store to buy a 'Cacao Reserve' bar - Consumer Reports named it #1 in dark chocolate, which surprised my chocolate-snob self. On one hand, it's friggin' Hershey and it contains both milk fat and milk, which means technically it's milk chocolate and not proper chocolate (properly snobby chocolate only uses cocoa butter as it's fat), but after eating it, I must say it was damn good, a nice balance of bitter and sweet, smoothness. As I'm slowly eating it, hoping not to like it, I thought of the 'mindful eating' document Ilsa gave me. Without purposefully doing it, I was paying close attention to what I was eating, how it was interacting with my mouth and taste buds, how it felt from touching my lips to going down the hatch - it really does increase the pleasure. Regardless, the chocolate was really good, but in more of a generalized 'dark chocolate' way - Jaques Torres chocolate is still more interesting and tastier. So there.

DINNER: 7:30pm, sauted brocolli and mushroom with seitan over brown basmanti, small green salad, chocotlate hagen daaz bar. Hunge 3/5. Was good, but not as good as the first time, too bad as Betsy was eating with me. Maybe overcooked teh broc a little. Seitan wasn't as yummy as I remember it, from when I was vegan. After the meal, I was unsatisfied. I craved.....meat?

PM SNACK: 9pm, small amount of onion rings, hunger 4/5. Remainder from the freezer, not as high in sodium as I thought, but still not a health food. At least it had whole onions, unlike that weird industrial onion ring stuff I ate the other day.

PM SNACK: 12 midnight, bagel and humus. hunger 4/5. -sigh-

PM SNACK: 12:45am. Popcorn fried in olive oil, a little sea salt. hunger 4/5. Just hungry. Should of had meat. Thought of eating something sweet, but not desiring sweet, oddly enough. A different kind of hunger.