The perils of a desk job
Tuesday, March 13th, 2012 08:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chanaleh
You guys, I have so, SO much I could be writing about, and I've just been too slammed to take the time. Which means I have half-finished entries gathering dust from a month ago, and by the time I get around to posting them, they have to be half rewritten. (Not that that's bad, from a literary perspective.)
So here's one piece of the current landscape.
**
Remember those size 8 pants I bought at the end of October? (I'm pretty sure I had posted about them either here or on FB, but I can't find the citation now, so you're going to have to take my word for it. ANyway...)
Yeah, they don't fit anymore. I suspect I've put close to 10 pounds back on since starting my new job Nov. 1. :-P
Admittedly, it's hard to tell because the cheap scale I bought last year seems to be wildly inaccurate -- it measures small amounts correctly, but it tends to show different amounts every time I get on and off it in quick succession, even when I've just zeroed it properly. Happily, when I had a physical last week, they weighed me in at 184, which for me is about the upper limit of "reasonable range of recent years", and not as terrifying as the ~190 the scale at home has started showing at times (and of course I know to only weigh in the morning, etc.). But conversely, I'm not sure what was my actual low point in October either. All I know is... witness the new pants.
Apparently living in a 4th-floor walk-up, and car-free, is no match for:
* a mostly-sedentary desk job
* working 10-hour days the majority of the time
* baseline work level operating at panic-mode, undoubtedly keeping my cortisol elevated
* averaging only about 6.5 hours of sleep a night (ditto)
* a nearly-door-to-door bus commute
* a workplace that includes daily breakfast and lunch in the school cafeteria. Where breakfast = cereal (I invariably have raisin bran, since nothing else they offer contains any fiber whatsoever) and muffins (these I've actually wised up and cut out), and lunch = starch-heavy entrees portioned for growing middle-schoolers. They do actually include an impressive array of daily fresh vegetable and salad selections -- on the whole it's quite good for a school cafeteria -- but it's hard to actually *take* enough salad to satisfy myself.
Even more to the point, I think there's something about sitting at a desk and having food served at just one time in the day that invokes my scarcity mentality: "I'd better load up on what's here, because this is my ONLY CHANCE!" Mind you, I have snacks in my desk, of course -- usually nuts (yes, I know these are calorie-dense; what's a better protein source?) or sunflower/pumpkin seeds, besides Luna bars for actual breakfast/dinner emergencies, and sugarless gum and Tic Tacs for the after-lunch sweet. (They almost never serve dessert with lunch, which is all to the good since they basically serve dessert for breakfast!) And it's not like I'm going to starve at any point EVER. But it's a lot different from being at home where I can comfortably work for a couple hours, have a small meal, work some more, eat some more, and feel like it's under control.
Writing this, it occurs to me that I would normally have said the opposite, that being at home with an endless food supply would have caused me to eat *more*. But I really don't think that was the case, and the scale bears that out. Unless I was just that much more active when I wasn't on an enforced butt-in-chair schedule.
Anyway, so, I'd already begun trying to round out the starch with extra protein -- the daily salad bar always features hard-boiled eggs, chickpeas, and dry (as well as mayonnaised) tuna, which is an excellent addition to a half-portion of mac & cheese. Since starting to write out this entry several days ago, I have tried to be a little more mindful about what I let them give me at lunch (take the protein and vegetable, pass on the starch sides insofar as possible).
And skip the chocolate-chip muffins.
So here's one piece of the current landscape.
**
Remember those size 8 pants I bought at the end of October? (I'm pretty sure I had posted about them either here or on FB, but I can't find the citation now, so you're going to have to take my word for it. ANyway...)
Yeah, they don't fit anymore. I suspect I've put close to 10 pounds back on since starting my new job Nov. 1. :-P
Admittedly, it's hard to tell because the cheap scale I bought last year seems to be wildly inaccurate -- it measures small amounts correctly, but it tends to show different amounts every time I get on and off it in quick succession, even when I've just zeroed it properly. Happily, when I had a physical last week, they weighed me in at 184, which for me is about the upper limit of "reasonable range of recent years", and not as terrifying as the ~190 the scale at home has started showing at times (and of course I know to only weigh in the morning, etc.). But conversely, I'm not sure what was my actual low point in October either. All I know is... witness the new pants.
Apparently living in a 4th-floor walk-up, and car-free, is no match for:
* a mostly-sedentary desk job
* working 10-hour days the majority of the time
* baseline work level operating at panic-mode, undoubtedly keeping my cortisol elevated
* averaging only about 6.5 hours of sleep a night (ditto)
* a nearly-door-to-door bus commute
* a workplace that includes daily breakfast and lunch in the school cafeteria. Where breakfast = cereal (I invariably have raisin bran, since nothing else they offer contains any fiber whatsoever) and muffins (these I've actually wised up and cut out), and lunch = starch-heavy entrees portioned for growing middle-schoolers. They do actually include an impressive array of daily fresh vegetable and salad selections -- on the whole it's quite good for a school cafeteria -- but it's hard to actually *take* enough salad to satisfy myself.
Even more to the point, I think there's something about sitting at a desk and having food served at just one time in the day that invokes my scarcity mentality: "I'd better load up on what's here, because this is my ONLY CHANCE!" Mind you, I have snacks in my desk, of course -- usually nuts (yes, I know these are calorie-dense; what's a better protein source?) or sunflower/pumpkin seeds, besides Luna bars for actual breakfast/dinner emergencies, and sugarless gum and Tic Tacs for the after-lunch sweet. (They almost never serve dessert with lunch, which is all to the good since they basically serve dessert for breakfast!) And it's not like I'm going to starve at any point EVER. But it's a lot different from being at home where I can comfortably work for a couple hours, have a small meal, work some more, eat some more, and feel like it's under control.
Writing this, it occurs to me that I would normally have said the opposite, that being at home with an endless food supply would have caused me to eat *more*. But I really don't think that was the case, and the scale bears that out. Unless I was just that much more active when I wasn't on an enforced butt-in-chair schedule.
Anyway, so, I'd already begun trying to round out the starch with extra protein -- the daily salad bar always features hard-boiled eggs, chickpeas, and dry (as well as mayonnaised) tuna, which is an excellent addition to a half-portion of mac & cheese. Since starting to write out this entry several days ago, I have tried to be a little more mindful about what I let them give me at lunch (take the protein and vegetable, pass on the starch sides insofar as possible).
And skip the chocolate-chip muffins.