QOTD - May 24
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What is your baseline? On days where life hands you lemons (and there is no sugar, sugar free substitute, tea, water, or anything else with which you would put lemon handy) what are your bare minimum requirements for having a "successful" day? Do you ease up on your plan? Pat yourself on the back for a ten minute walk and a glass of water? Rely on the healthy habits that you do naturally without a second thought? Share your favorite coping strategies here!
I am a panic eater/stress eater. When I have a stressful day, I eat constantly. To count as "successful", I still try to get all my steps - now 15.000 a day, formerly 10,000. My life allows me to walk. I'm not tied to a desk, phone, computer, etc - so while I might not want to do it, it's not the huge hurdle that it might be for someone else.
Last week I had one of the biggest panic days I've had since I started all "this" in July. I was putting together the yearbook (which I talked about earlier) and the company changed its website to reflect that production days were business days, not actual days. I had had a specific conversation with a representative in April and she had told me that it was calendar days, not business days. So when I saw the new verbiage, I panicked. Prior to seeing the changes, I thought I only needed 10 days from when I turned the book in until delivery, so I planned to have the book done on May 20th, to arrive May 30th. When I saw business days, the books wouldn't arrive until after school was out. In order to get the yearbook to our students on time using business days and not calendar days, I would have had to pay $1,000 more for express overnight shipping. The PTA couldn't afford that and I was preparing myself to tell my husband that I made a $1,000 mistake and that we needed to donate $1,000 to the PTA to cover it. I called the company and had conversations with different levels of representatives and (probably because they record all their calls and listened to my initial call where the rep told me it was calendar days, not business days) finally, the next day, they told me that they would get the books to me on time and they would waive the expedited shipping costs. Whew. This was after I put the $1,000 on my credit card in order to protect the kids. I just couldn't face not having it done in time for the last day of school. Thankfully, it was refunded the next day.
As all of this was rolling out, I went into an eating frenzy on May 19th. The good news was, as I check my diary (I did log it all), I ate an entire bag of baby carrots, three apples, a pint of strawberries and four cheese sticks - in addition to my meals. So I pigged out - on "acceptable" foods. I went over my calorie goals, but it could have been much, much worse. So, success? I guess . . .
Do I need to figure out how to NOT stress eat? Yes! I already pace when I'm stressed. I easily got my steps that day - lol. I'd love any tips on how to put the carrots down when I panic!