Bass Ackwards

Today illustrates many of the mistakes I typically make. First, the facts from my FEW log:

8:15 a.m. - KIND bar
11:15 a.m. - 3 mint Oreos and a Reese's cup
12:00 p.m. - pasta with bison & mushroom sauce
6 p.m. - salad made with Boston lettuce, chicken breast, celery, carrots, olive oil/balsamic; some celery with peanut butter and raisins
10:15 p.m. - more pb/celery/raisins; 2 turkey & pinto bean tacos with sour cream; small amount of milk

The deal is, I don't want to be eating so late at night but my hunger got the better of me. And to explain why, I have to start with this morning. Instead of eating a real breakfast, I ate a couple of non-filling snacky things over the course of the morning. My pasta lunch at noon was good, but it was also the first actual meal of the day (making it more like breakfast in a sense).

I took it easy this afternoon. After attending to some appointments and things, I kicked back and watched several episodes of Downton Abbey. (Hooray!) The thing to note here is that when I really like a show, I can become engrossed enough to forget about food for a couple hours, even to the point of ignoring hunger. So I was good and hungry by the time 6:00 came around, and I enjoyed my salad dinner (in a sense, lunch, as it was the second real meal of the day) immensely.

The hours between dinner and bedtime have always been a problem for me in terms of cravings and hunger. I would have liked to stop eating for the day after that 6 p.m. meal, the salad I had for "dinner", but I was truly hungry around 10:00 p.m. And why shouldn't I be? I only had two real meals today, at noon and at 6, and it had been 4 hours since my last meal. My body was wanting that typical third meal of the day--an actual dinner--and that's what I was giving it when I obeyed my hunger at 10 p.m.

I think I do need a somewhat late dinner; I don't think I can consistently eat my last meal of the day at 5 or 6 p.m. and then fast until 11 or midnight. However, 10:00 is too late. If I eat my final meal at 7 or 8 p.m., it's a little easier to make it to bedtime but I usually have to tolerate some hunger pangs and feelings of irritation before bed. That's just how it is.

And that brings me back to TV. The best, most useful time for me to watch TV is after dinner when I need to distract myself from the inevitable post-dinner hunger and other urges to eat. That means that watching TV in the afternoon, just after a filling lunch as I did today, is a waste of TV's helpful application as hunger-distractor. I've found TV works better than anything else late at night; trying to clean or read or do anything demanding concentration and self-control doesn't work so well when it's late and I'm hungry and crabby. TV is a passive, entertaining thing and if I couple it with drinking water or hot tea, it's possible to get through the post-dinner hours without eating.

My screwy sleep schedule doesn't help with any of this at all--my body wants to fall asleep at 3 a.m. and wake up at noon and it will do so unless I take special measures to re-align myself. I wonder if making myself eat at more normal hours would help that whole mess.

Anyway,

1. real breakfast (and lunch, for that matter)
2. don't eat dinner too early and expect to fast the rest of the day
3. afternoon tv is a waste; save it for the evening
4. none of this is as important as continuing to not binge!!!