Reflection and recovery
Today I am countenancing something wonderful: the end of the Lenten fast; the end of mandatory one-meal, two-collation eating.
This has been one of two factors constraining my eating since I started the blog over a month ago; the other is of course my $40/week budget. I didn’t institute that as a Lenten measure so much as a real financial one. Unfortunately I don’t get money back just because it’s Easter.
BUT I do need to make some changes. Here on Easter vacation I weighed myself for the first time in months. I, as a 6’2” man, have weighed 185 lbs, give or take maybe five pounds, for the better part of seven years. I knew I had lost a little since January this year when school began and since March when Lent started, but I didn’t expect to weigh only 164 lbs. I haven’t weighed that little since my first round of college a decade ago when a homeless man on the subway asked if I had cancer (I also had a shaved head for some reason which didn’t help).
I can’t just keep fading away, so the challenge is now to feed myself enough to not just maintain my weight but hopefully to make it back to 180 territory, while not growing broke in the meantime. I’m thinking of pivoting to $200/mo instead of $40/wk. Its not only a very, very valuable absolute increase but phasing it that way makes bulk (read: cheap) purchases far more practical. And it’s still battened down enough to force plenty of learning and creativity. The danger of course is the temptation to eat like a king for the first half of the month and like a starving orphan the second half. But I flatter myself that I have learned enough, this Lent, about self-control to make it work.
This morning I began with more baguette and another questionably-fast-friendly-protein shake before heading off to happily starve through a beautiful four-hour liturgy ending a bit past noon. The fast being over then, a delicious and generous church luncheon followed. It’s always hard to re-learn pacing when dessert returns after a forty day absence. When you’ve been low-key hungry for weeks on end, it’s very easy for your eyes to outpace your stomach. I tried to be reasonable, though I’m not sure I got the balance quite right.
I was feeling under the weather anyway, as I predictably do after several nights of 3.5 hours of sleep, several days of long hours of singing, and several weeks of caloric deficit. A friend’s wife supplied me with some tangy home remedies for my sore throat (and some free Easter bread from the massive loaf they were gifted), and my (different) friend and I were checking out a butcher near his house on the way home, and I impulse-bought a $2 container of frozen beef brother which was HEAVENLY and restorative when I heated, seasoned, and drank it. I added the things in my host’s cabinet (with permission) that appealed to me: minced garlic, garlic powder, onion powder, paprika, black pepper, salt, and apple cider vinegar. I dramatically oversalted it, and compensated with some extra water, which fixed it just fine, very little lost. I can’t tell you how much better it made me feel. I’m lying in bed now and wondering what will become of this inconvenient illness. I should be fine. I brought it on myself, anyway. No regrets.
Happy Easter, readers! I can’t wait to get started on more, and slightly-adjusted, learning adventures going forward!