Welcome back to THE MORBS, my weekly update on my life re: diet and exercise which I keep trying and failing to make short and sweet because I love writing so much.
When last I left you, my weight was the lowest it had been this whole project, and I was ready to jet set off to Vancouver. I’d just made a batch of pemmican, hoping it would make me feel liberated and relaxed when it came to my financial and caloric budgets while I was away. Of course, you’ve probably all read that article — Pemmican Diaries — by now. Wow, you are all probably thinking. How does one woman become so funny? So talented? So profound? These are difficult questions to which the greatest minds of our generation still do not have the answers. And speaking of having the answers — was my pemmican solution a solution to my travel anxieties, after all? Did I come back from my travels lighter of mind and of body? Well…
In the last issue of THE MORBS I realized I’d completely forgotten how long I’d been doing this project. Embarrassed, I have since gone through my calendar and done a little tally — and it seems like the week measured from April 28th to May 4th would have been week 14.
I’m one week behind! To catch up, I’ll do week 14 today and be posting week 15 on Thursday.
The 14th week of this project was after I’d made the pemmican I wrote about in Pemmican Diaries. I took an overnight flight to Vancouver to speak at a symposium about divesting from cancel culture produced by my friends Jay and Clementine of the podcast Fucking Cancelled, hang out with my friends, look great, and have a good time. I slept in hostels the whole time.
My goal, as I said in Pemmican Diaries, was not to completely replace my diet with pemmican, but to use pemmican as a basis for most of the meals I made myself at the hostel — in order to save money, cut down on decision fatigue, and make sure the corner stone of my diet while I was travelling was food that did not make me feel awful.
To the first point, saving money — on this, it was a huge success. The vast majority of my meals were constructed from pemmican and the fewer than $30 dollars in berries, vegetables, and coffee fixings I bought on arrival. The other things I ate in Vancouver, as recorded in my food diary, were:
a medicinal poutine from the kebab shop across from my hostel, when I arrived at 2:30 AM Vancouver time (5:30 AM my time), after a red eye flight, to find the place overbooked, and had to wait over an hour while the front desk parlayed me a room
a Christmas cake found in a cupboard and shared with my friend DJ’s mother, while she and I bonded, the first day we met — food is the best way to get to know people, after all
a gluten-free doughnut and kombucha with DJ, on my birthday
sushi, also on my birthday — Jay and Clementine’s treat
a lunch of chicken breast with quinoa and kale prepared by my uncle at his place
and a lot of iced Americanos
I went over my calorie goals only twice, and both on the days I was actively travelling. One was a big whoops — 700 calories over, or so — and one was a medium whoops of 450. It was by far the easiest time I’ve had staying within my calorie goals while on a trip. I felt completely liberated, not begotten by anxiety about what I would eat or where I would find it or if I’d act weird because I was hungry or nutritionally deficient. I felt incredibly relieved — so relieved, in fact, that when I got home, I immediately ate a take-out order of Pad Sew, from Thai Express. When I weighed myself the next morning, I’d gained more than five pounds.
I knew this was a normal fluctuation due to carb-loading, or whatever the athletic types call it, as well as the sodium, but I was still peeved. I felt this weight fluctuation was very immature, and unserious. After being such an incredibly good girl? I demanded, outraged. After the pemmican? This feels racist, somehow.
It’s an increase of +2.2% of my initial starting weight. I did not take the rest of the serious measurements. Out of protest.