I may already be full

I'm not counting calories today; I'm not checking my numbers (beyond what I did this morning at the end of my fasting period). I'd rather not think about the havoc I'm wreaking on my health—and God knows things are already pretty egregious—but despite the day's not being over, I think I've arrived at some interesting moral insights.

First, when you're following a discipline for ten weeks, you develop a sort of ambivalence. This might not be true if you were to follow the discipline for years and learn to embrace it fully, like a monk, but ten weeks is enough time both to get used to the discipline and to remember what life was like before you began the discipline. So on the one hand, when you know the strictures are about to lift, you become impatient for your freedom. On the other hand, once you have your freedom, you're not quite sure what to do with it.

That was me this morning. I started off my cheat day with the candies I used to eat in my fatter days, and I have to say, while it was somewhat satisfying to go back to those sweets, it also became something of a chore to get through them. Next, with my coworker's wife not making food until next week, I made the snap decision, last night, to provide lunch for the troops myself. Having already made pesto (my second batch, made the classic way, proved much better than the first), I elected to make a chicken-shrimp cream-pesto pasta dish using the orecchiette ("little ears") pasta that had been sitting on a shelf for months. I had bought chicken thighs during my last Costco run, and I had maybe a quarter-bag of leftover frozen shrimp. At the office, I had a Ziploc bag full of leftover bread from when I'd made burgers and dogs for everyone, so in anticipation of using up that bread, I brought along the elements to make a humble garlic-and-herb butter. Oh, and I made a really ugly chocolate cake.

We all therefore had a lunch of chicken-shrimp pasta with cream-pesto sauce. Had I had the time and energy, I might have gussied up the dish with some baby spinach and minced chives or green onions (I'm not a fan of regular onions, but I do like green onions, chives, and even shallots... go figure). Later today, we'll dig into the chocolate cake. I might not want too much, given that I'll be eating pizza in only a few hours.

So now I'm stuffed, and I'm meeting my buddy JW for pizza tonight at 7 p.m. I'll be happy if I manage to get through two slices of Randolph Beer's "flower pepperoni" pizza. Not tragic: JW and I can bag up the rest to take home, and I can freeze any leftover pizza and eat it on my next cheat day, which will probably be in late October, when I'm back from my walk.

Aside from the aforementioned ambivalence, the second moral takeaway is that I may have to rethink the whole "two cheat days per month" thing. I might be able to get by with only a single cheat day. The problem, though, is a practical one: if I have two cheat days per month, then one is for the monthly office party, and the other can be spent however I want to spend it—with friends, adventuring alone, whatever. If I cut the two cheat days down to one, then it's just office parties for me, and I don't think I can abide that. Not that I hate the office parties, but I also want the freedom to choose how I spend my discretionary time. A compromise solution might be to limit myself, on certain months, to only one cheat day when I know I have no social engagements, with the option of having a second cheat day should the opportunity present itself. I can also combine the office party and a social occasion into one cheat day.

The very notion of a cheat day (which some optimists who hate the term "cheat day" call a "treat day"; it's all labels, so I don't care what you call it) comes with inherent dangers. Twenty steps forward on the diet, ten steps backward on a cheat day. Is it worth it to be constantly hitting the reset button every two weeks? This is a values question for sure: if I know I'm making a ton of progress when I'm on track, eating keto, and fasting, then I take a cheat day, maybe it's not ten steps backward: maybe it's only five. Ultimately, I don't think two cheat days per month is all that sinful, but I may have to look at my numbers to see what sort of damage I'm doing to myself. Just not today. Today, I think I've earned a break. I'll track numbers later. Besides, tomorrow is the start of the new discipline, the one I'll be doing for the rest of my life, and it begins with quasi-fasting (a keto shake in the morning and nothing else the rest of the day, plus stair work in the morning and a long walk in the evening). I think that, if my cheat days are on Fridays, then the ensuing Saturdays will do a lot to put me rapidly back on track. Friday sin, Saturday penance.

Anyway, lingering guilt aside, I'm enjoying being pleasantly full for the first time since my stroke. I can't be too guilty because I know tomorrow's going to see me going back to the grind, just a different grind from Newcastle. Eating 1800-2000 calories on my eating days will be a relief, and as long as I concentrate on healthy foods associated with satiety, I ought to be able to get through my fasting days without going insane. For now, I need to concentrate on surviving tonight's "flower pepperoni" pizza.

More later.