Feb 4 – staying at my aunt’s this week means that there won’t be as many video clips and my normal patterns are a bit thrown off. I am using up almost all of my calories today and got pretty close yesterday.

Feb 5 – I spent the night giving my food to the toilet through the entry hole after getting a bad migraine. So that was less than fun. It took me until supper time to be able to eat. After dinner, I watched Adam Ruins Everything’s season three premiere episode and found a great stat that lines up with what I have been feeling: processed food is cheaper per calorie. They reference a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 79.1 (2004) that shows that you can get 1200 calories of chips and cookies for a dollar or 250 calories of whole foods like carrots. That’s almost a five times difference.

Feb 6 – I woke up this morning with a pretty bad headache again. Had a decent breakfast at home after dropping Annie off at school and got to work. It has been really hard to focus on work at my aunt’s place. While I can work anywhere, it is more efficient to work from home, especially when not feeling well. It has been harder to vlog/blog about my experiences this week. I do want to note that I am currently up half a pound over my last weigh in. I wonder how this Friday will shape up. I almost used up all of my calories today, but after yesterday, I am not too worried about what that means for my week. It was a good day, other than my continued headache.  

Feb 7 – I am a week into February and I’m eating about an average of 100 calories per day more than I did in January. I need to work on that for the rest of this month. I am almost at 10 days worth of banked calories at full daily usage. I really do feel that by the end of this Challenge, I will have around 150,000 – 250,000 calories remaining unused. I woke up this morning with a tinge of head pain. It feels like my brain is bruised. This is a normal side effect for me of a migraine. My stomach is still not back to one hundred percent, but that’s okay. I got a good night sleep and I am ready to get through my day, starting with a can of coke… Don’t judge me!

Feb 8 – I really wanted to get my calories down today, but we ended up having pizza for supper. I was able to do okay though and end the day with a little over 800 calories remaining for the day. Being away from home definitely has its drawbacks, even with going back during the day sometimes to work on work. I also don’t know why I’ve been so hungry lately. It is really frustrating.

Feb 9 – We went to get an optometrist appointment scheduled and then had lunch at East Side Mario’s. It has been a while since we ate there. I didn’t end up having a pasta dish but still walked away having eaten more than one thousand calories in a sitting. Dinner was leftover pizza, and I was so tempted to go over today. I really wanted to snack on some junk food in the evening. It was super hard tonight. I don’t know why, but going over feels like failing. I keep trying to tell myself it isn’t, but my brain isn’t always nice to me. It’s like if I fail once by going over then I’m a failure, and why do this? Logically, I know that’s silly, but emotionally, it is hard for me. I really want to end the year with hundreds of thousands of left-over calories so I can prove to myself that I don’t need to binge eat several thousand calories every few days or every week. I want to do better but when I’m having a bad brain day, I wonder why I’m doing this at all.