On Stress

I'm not stressed right now, really, surprisingly so. But I wanted to write a little bit about how much I hate to be stressed.

More so than anything else I do, stress make me gain weight, and not even necessarily from stress eating (although, on occasion, that does play a role). When I get stressed, like most people, the cortisol in my body goes into overdrive, except it really does result in the growth of my waistline. I shit you not. If I am calm, cool, and collected on a Tuesday, say, I can have clothes that fit. Seriously. My pants will fit. But if something happens and I wake up stressed out on Wednesday (even if I've eaten clean), my waistline will literally have expanded so much from the stress that what fit Tuesday cannot be buttoned on Wednesday.

This is what I'm battling with this weekend. The clothes I bought last week, that were loose! and comfortable! were tight yesterday. I think this is why I can maintain a healthy diet and maintain a rigorous workout schedule and still go from a 4 to an 8 during the course of the quarter. There's no reason why clothes should fit one day and not the next. And seriously, you can ask the J--this isn't in my head. And that totally explains why something that fits in the store magically becomes too small by mid week of work. I mean, I'm not consuming 10K calories a day (or even 5K)--there's no way that I could feasibly gain that much weight to cause that. So, I say the J is right. It's stress and cortisol.

The J has assured me though that since I've made some headway on a couple of things that were stressing me out that since those things are resolved that my belly should begin to decrease nicely over the course of the rest of the Whole30. So we'll see what happens over the next nine days.

I do have fewer things to be stressed out about this weekend though. We had a great day yesterday! I did awesome in my workout (deadlifted more than any other female there--2x or more as much weight as three of the other women there; only 40 # more than the other woman, but she was cleaning and jerking 20# more than me, and I was cleaning and jerking on par with 2 of the other women). I came home and had a great brunch after we went to the grocery. I got a little bit of reading in. Most of the rest of my clothes came in (man, they really really REALLY are preppy and middle aged white lady), I took a nap, and then we went to the tailgate at the U and then the football game. It was a lot of fun! I had four former students playing last night (at least), with actual field time. That sorta cool. I didn't have many players in my classes at Grad City U (thankfully--as a Big 10 school, I did not want to have to deal with them; there were more problems than not, but here, it's small enough that it's not bad). It was a lot of fun. It was a beautiful day. Our seats were right on the field. It was nice. Not a whole lot to be stressed about yesterday.

Today, while still behind on my reading, we are not going to the grandparents', so I do have all day to read. I can spend it in my pjs, too. I'm not even sure I'm going to shower actually. I want to just veg with my book and read. It's sad though because I was really looking forward to this stuff and this author, whom I've never read but was just so for sure that I was going to fall in love with her, but I can't get into it at all. It's taking me much longer than I anticipated, so things have gotten thrown off a little bit. But, I have the day to read. I do need to spend part of the afternoon doing the weekly food prep, especially since the J will be gone this week, I won't have him to take over a meal or two, so I've got to be on top of everything right now today. And it will certainly help with the stress and ensuring that my pants fit, right?

And I should be able to relax after dinner then, too. Crap, I forgot. I do have to shower. We are going to a friend's house to watch the Walking Dead tonight, but that's not until 7:30 or so, so I have time to lounge and stuff. Whew, I'm glad I remembered that!

That being said, I'm going to rearrange my fantasy football team and grab another cup of 1/4 caff coffee and start reading.