I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes...

Well, it seems like days since I last updated this blog, despite my last post actually only being the day before yesterday. I've just been all over the place with sleeping/not sleeping these past couple of days and I've sort of lost my bearings. After my last post I was up all night without sleeping. The night after that I wanted to try and retrain my body to get back to a normal sleeping time - so that I could go to bed at the same time as my boyf - so I took a sleeping tablet hoping it would help me get straight to sleep and snooze nicely through until the following morning. Unfortunately, I must have taken a few too many Diazepam too or something, because I went to sleep on Tuesday night at about 11pm.....and woke up on Wednesday evening at 8pm! I had been in a complete coma the whole time, slept through two alarms, my other half trying to shake me awake and both our cats clambering all over me, mewing to get fed. I woke up foggy and icky and not feeling great - not to mention being starving hungry and fixated with the idea of tuna cheese melts! - but due to having just pulled a super-sleep-shift, I wasn't going to be tired enough to go to bed to sleep at all last night, so again sat up all night, watching a documentary on Women in the Georgian 1660's in Great Britain and a bit of Jerry Springer (“An Hour Of Your Life You'll Never Get Back!”)

Today was going to be a bit of a bad day because it was the day me and the other half got money and went to do our big weekly shop. And as is the tradition, we started this day with a bite to eat in KFC, followed by coffee in one of the little local coffee houses and then a wander along to the supermarket. This was all planned well in advance and I'd figured out how to bring in my total intake/expenditure for the day to just under 900 calories, so I wasn't too worried.

But it was the insanely raging hunger I woke up with yesterday, after that 21 hour marathon sleep, that crept up on me and really took me by surprise. It wasn't just a normal hunger, this was an all consuming insane craving that consumed my stomach with agonising pains and fed the imagined scent of a tuna melt into my head to make me think that somewhere in the apartment, lurked a ready toasted plate of the gooey cheese and toasted tuna booty. I knew that I could ride out the pangs with lots of water if I really wanted/was determined to, but I decided instead to have dinner with Mia. I lightly toasted a baguette, spread tuna with mayonnaise on it and topped it all off with grated cheese before slipping under the grill to melt together. Then, I added a handful of sliced Santini tomatoes to the top, a liberal smear of cottage cheese and a generous sprinkling of black pepper. Et voila!

And I won't lie, the damn thing was fucking uh-mazing!

But with Mia as my dinner guest, no good feast goes un-purged, so as soon as I'd finished I chugged back another pint of water and silently made good on my promise to rid myself of every morsel I had eaten. I felt so much better afterwards. Cleaner, emptier, back in control of everything. The cravings had been sated and the hunger had abated, so I consoled myself with a good litre or so of water and a couple of Diazepam to quell any shakey-quakey after-effects. All was good on the Western Front.

As I said earlier, I was up all night again through the wee small hours until morning, watching crap TV. I even ended up finding myself watching an episode of TAPS, which I'd seen before, but kinda felt like revisiting because of the whole time of year, leading up to Halloween and whatnot. I love Halloween and Autumn and it's at this time of year that I allow myself to let the skepticism take a back seat and just enjoy a good spooky tale. I actually quite like the way they conduct the investigations on this show though, because they go in to each site with the premise of of trying to debunk whatever phenomena has been reported by the owners/occupiers, rather than try and ramp up the ratings with sensationalised, exaggerated bullshit to make you think that they find something everywhere they go. It was a bit of fun and a good introduction to this year's season of spookiness, reminding me to get started on one of the myriad horror/paranormal/ghost story books, I have lined up on my Kindle, waiting to be read.

Which reminds me....I really must go check that my Kindle is fully charged and ready to go, because I have 'Last Days' and 'The Ritual' by Adam Neville at the top of my list as well as the second novel by Syd Moore 'The Drowning Pool', which seems to follow on in the same vein as 'Witch Hunt', which I really liked. It merged the horrific trials and executions of alleged witches in the 17th Century, with a modern tale of a journalist trying to write a historical piece, all the while discovering her own familial connections to these women who were persecuted over 200 years ago. I read it around this time last year on my Spooky Season book kick and I guess reading the next one right now would make perfect sense.

Getting back to food though. Today was a free pass day to do what I wanted. When me and my other half went to KFC I had a Zinger Burger and a Small Popcorn Chicken. I think it came it at just over 800 calories. But no sooner had I devoured it, than I felt incredible twisting stomach pains and a pressure I just wasn't familiar with. I was ridiculously full, but hadn't really realised because I'm not used to being satisfied by such a small order. I would normally wade through twice that amount of chicken in KFC, but this time I was so full, I could hardly move and all I wanted to do was throw up. But I had to restrain myself as I was out and about in public and I really don't like the idea of getting my face anywhere near to a toilet where the thousands of arses of the general public have sat and shat, so I kept it down for the afternoon, the whole time lumbering in pain as we moved away from the fast-food-fat-fest to another calorie-laden lair of temptation: the coffee shop. Urgh. I felt like I was waddling as we ambled our way down to this cute little place about five minutes away. It's not one of a chain like Costa, but a privately owned small business who just happen to make stunningly good coffee and insanely good cakes which you can smell cooking in the ovens as you cross over the threshold. Aaarrrrggghh!

I wasn't hungry or thirsty or in any way in need of any sustenance, but hey, when you're off the wagon, you get to roll in the dirt as much as you want don't you? So I ordered a small hot chocolate and just about managed to get it down without throwing up, but the minute I'd swallowed it back, I just felt it shudder and slosh around in my abdomen, making it almost impossible to not vomit. Somehow though, will the greatest will and determination known to mankind, I managed to fight back to the beads of sweat forming on my forehead and the watery mouth that always comes before the inevitable involuntary puke, to hold off on the technicolour yawning whilst we sat in a too-warm lounge, listening to 80's music on the radio and reading the local papers.

After that was our trip to the supermarket. Something I really wouldn't recommend to anyone feeling overly nauseated – not unless you don't plan on buying anything you can cook up into a meal for your other half. Shopping for me was easy. I didn't want anything that I saw around me. All I could think about was getting home and collapsing onto the sofa, falling asleep and then waking up the next day to a renewed, fresh approach to consumption. Restriction and control. Feeling clean again. As we wandered up and down the aisles, I had to keep reminding my other half to pick out stuff he wanted for himself, but not to worry about me as I have absolutely no intention of eating any of his big meals, day in, day out.

My own personal shopping consisted of: Yoghurt, rice cakes, Ryvitas, Go Ahead Bars, tinned grapefruit, bars of chocolate (sometimes I just get through a day on a small bar of Dairy Milk and a cup of coffee!) Sugar Free Relentless, Ribena: No Added Sugar, Pickled Beetroot, Mr Freeze Ice Pops, Cup A Soups and cottage cheese. Oh and a packet of cigarettes. That's basically what I'll be existing on, during the days when I'm not having a binge or a cheat day. The way I feel today after all the gluttony and the subsequent agonising stomach aches, makes me wish I hadn't consumed all the crap I did today. My insides feel like they've been put through the mill and I ache for that calm, familiar sense of emptiness and clean control again. To get through the day on a couple of rice cakes and a yoghurt, feeling strong and resilient and calm.

Roll on tomorrow. Bring on the return to restriction. Bring me back to that safe, sensible, place where I don't have to bear the brunt of my idiotic pig-outs. And please don't make me suffer further with the aftermath of today's over-consumption. Yuk. It's about 2am here now. I really do have to go and get some sleep. Hopefully, when I awake, I will be back feeling like I did before I gave myself a free pass to gastric agony.

Wish me luck

x