I'm in love with....carrots

I’m in love with ….. carrots.

Tuesday 10:00 pm

I am tired.  Quite a long day and I just put the last dish into the dishwasher and cranked that puppy up.  I realize that feeling tired at the end of a workday is normal for most of us, but I am particularly wiped tonight.  One thing that I have noticed in the last three days is that planning and preparing meals, especially with an eye toward a modicum of nutrition and on a strict budget, requires a lot of mental energy.  This is a little bit of a stretch, so bear with me.   I am experiencing it a little like learning to speak a new language.   I remember being in Italy as a college student and spending days speaking only Italian and how totally drained I would feel at the end of a day.  Something that was normally effortless (communicating) suddenly became an effortful process.  For me so far the experience of obtaining and preparing meals during this SANPfast has been very effortful.   I am used to pulling into to the nearest fast food joint or convenience store at the first pang of hunger and filling myself mindlessly with whatever was handy.  No thought involved in that at all.   In the last three days I have been thinking about meals in advance, trying to figure out how to ensure I get some nutrients, making sure I am pacing my consumption of my supplies, and then finally considering whether I might actually like what I am eating.   This is exhausting!

Another note about consumption of my supplies:   I did experience a touch of anxiety today about whether I might run out of food before the week was over.  Would I gut it out if I did, or just chalk it up as a failure and allow myself an out?   I know that the consequences to me of “failing” here are academic, because I can just always run down the street and fill my grocery cart, but what about people for whom the stakes are real and for whom this is not an exercise? 

On a lighter note, I told my wonderfully supportive boyfriend Robert tonight that I had discovered something unexpected this week….that I actually like carrots!  Where have they been all my life???