I've had a productive couple weeks, attending to a long list of to-dos I'd been avoiding for ages. I applied for deferments, forbearances, and other sorts of formal pleading with my lenders to get my student loan debt dealt with, at least for the time-being. I wrote ad copy for my listing on the Psychology Today website. I went through a huge stack of paperwork, billing statements, and receipts that had been sitting around for months waiting to be processed, paid, recycled, or otherwise dealt with. In fact, I went through about four such stacks. I cleared out from my files any financial records more than seven years old.(Fascinating, the kinds of relics you find when you clear out old files. I happened upon the above bank statement from when I was a member of the Santa Cruz Community Credit Union a decade ago, announcing the local area code change from 408 to 831, devastating to me, a lifelong denizen of the 408 until then.)

Hmm, what else did I manage to do? Ooh, I thoroughly dusted Astrid's bedroom, since she's been sneezy lately, and cleared out a junk drawer to help make more room for her voluminous t-shirt collection. Next major project will be counting up my therapy hours for the BBS, a chore I will continue to dread periodically for the next two or four years.

I have no idea where this sudden spurt of organizational energy has come from. Maybe it's related to eating healthier? It feels really great to get all that shit taken care of though, putting things in order that have been chaotic for months, years. I like paring down the details, and therefore the amount of worrying I do about said details. Makes life a little more peaceful.

Food, Glorious Food!

It's been three months since my last update claiming I was going to commit to a new eating regimen, the regimen I've been thinking about for years. But I've actually been doing it for a week now, and it's starting to feel really good. I've cut way down on meat and the use of oils for cooking, I've totally eliminated dairy, refined sugar,* and alcohol, and seriously increased the amount of fiber and complex carbs in my diet. So I've basically been eating legumes, nuts, brown rice, fresh veggies, fresh fruit, multigrain breads and cereals. Tonight I had my first meat in about six days, some chicken breast that I poached instead of adding oil for pan-frying. I don't want to be this acetic all the time, but I'm trying to do two weeks of this sort of cleanse, and then introduce some cheese back in, and some weekend-only alcohol. I've been having digestive icks with some kinds of dairy, and I'm trying to be sparing with it. But it seems like cheese is way less the culprit than ice cream.

I've noticed a couple cool things over the last week: eating less, but healthier, food seems to be satisfying my appetite more than my usual food, without making me feel uncomfortably full. Specifically, I gather that the higher-fiber, less calorie-dense foods are filling me up and keeping me pretty happy about not eating as much as I normally do. This is the first time, maybe ever, that I've noticed this.

The other totally cool thing I realized today is that, even though it was an emotionally hard day for me (money stress and an intense supervision session that completely wrecked me for most of the afternoon) I retained the distinct feeling of not wanting to put unhealthy things in my body. Normally I would've dove into a burger on a day like today, or gotten Chinese food, heavy on the traife meats, but I stuck with my snack of almonds, walnuts, and raw cauliflower and I was fine. Don't know how long this'll last, but it's feeling good.

I will say, though, that whole wheat tortillas can suck it.

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*Had one lapse: my tea at a fancy tea place was sweetened with natch evaporated cane sugar. But it sure was yummy. Thanks Mag!