Ouch! I gained two pounds! I was worried about that... my week in Pittsburgh without enough exercise and with too much eating...

Sunday morning I had to pack and get to the airport for my flight. Even though this was a domestic flight I knew I had to get to the airport with a lot of time to spare because the only direct flights from Providence to Pittsburgh are on U.S.Airways and they always seem to have long slow lines at their checkin counters. (To make the trip on other airlines would mean a two stage flight, Providence to Baltimore to Pittsburgh or Providence to Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, etc. No thanks.) I spent most of my time Sunday preparing for my Monday lectures. I tried to get a good night's sleep, going to bed around eleven but I kept waking up during the night. This is not unusual; I often have difficulty getting a solid night's sleep on trips. Monday night I prepared for Tuesday. Tuesday night I was exhausted. So... no workouts on those days... also very tired from the psychological effort of those two days plus the physical activity of being on my feet, pacing around in front of the classroom. Wednesday I had planned to go to the hotel fitness center and jog on a treadmill, etc. but sat down to read for a little while... ended up reading for almost two hours... by which time I was too hungry (and too tired) to exercise and had to get something to eat. Thursday got some good exercise in walking to Station Square from work and then from Station Square to hotel. Unfortunately, also had a big meal. On Friday morning I finally got to the hotel fitness center and ran two miles on a treadmill; flew home late afternoon... Jennifer and Sean were both working... my plane was almost half an hour late... but I must say that U.S.Airways was very efficient at Pittsburgh airport... no long line, check baggage before even entering the airport, go directly to gate and get boarding pass (now if only flight hadn't been delayed because the plane reached Pittsburgh late from its previous flight)... so Nancy and I went to the Main Street Fish Market in Wakefield (which sells retail but also has a restaurant) for a fish and chips dinner. It is a bring-your-own-bottle place, conveniently sharing a parking lot with a liquor store, so we just brought a nice cold six-pack of Bass Ale in with us.

Unfortunately that all meant that when I checked my weight this afternoon the scale read 201 pounds.

Yeah, I know, I'll take it off quickly this week...

I did learn something this week, however, about food. I realized that I have a strange fear of being hungry away from home at night with no food available. This goes back to college, to my freshman year living in a dormintory (the only year I lived on campus)... our mandatory meal plan, no choices of plans, was for twenty meals a week: breakfast, lunch and dinner Mondays through Saturdays, plus breakfast and lunch on Sundays. No evening meal on Sunday. And those Sunday meal hours were much shorter than weekdays... breakfast was like from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. and lunch was 11:30 to 12:30... and they were not exactly all-you-can-eat meals either... lunch might be a choice of a hamburger, vegetable, fries or grilled cheese sandwich, vegetable, fries... plus a small soda or milk... plus a choice of jello or a slice of pie or a piece of fruit. Of course that may not sound that bad but lets just say it was very greasy and (the supposed hot food) pre-cooked and now at room temperature. So... Saturday night out, get back to the dorm very late, no way of waking up in time for breakfast... the big question is can I wake up in time for lunch... If I do manage to make it to lunch... well, it was not exactly a nutricious or filling meal... but that was it until Monday morning breakfast... and if I missed it... that meant no food from Saturday dinner until Monday morning. No healthy eighteen year old male is going to seriously starve in that time frame... but it can be uncomfortable... and if you are on an extremely limited budget (as I was) you could ill afford to hitchhike into town for a burger... So why do I bring this up? Well, while in Pittsburgh I purchased a pack of PopTarts so I could have some food in my room so I wouldn't have to worry about being hungry in the middle of the night... and also, since I was getting up early in the mornings these could also be eaten with the pot of coffee I would brew in the room to be a simple breakfast. Please note: I never eat PopTarts at home... I don't even like them. And, towards the end of the week, after having eaten them all, I read the nutrition notes on the package and discovered that they had twice as many calories as I had thought. There are eight in a package, packed into four foil wrapped packs of two... I had thought that the 200 calories per serving meant one of those packs of two PopTarts -- wrong! -- It really meant one PopTart. Thus, eight PopTarts equal 1600 calories which (quick rule of thumb) equals one half pound. That package represented twenty-five percent of my two pound weight gain. And I realized that the impulse that had led me to buy them was this strange unreasonable fear of being hungry in a college dormitory nearly thirty-nine years ago! Weird! Yeah, so how do I explain the other pound and a half? Too much food, not enough exercise. Tomorrow I'll be sure to get in a nice long run... and I'll be back on track for the week, getting in my workouts and watching what I eat.

Why didn't I run today? I had an appointment to get a cavity filled at the dental office I go to. It seems lately as if every time I go their I see a different dentist. Today it was a Vietnamese woman -- I want to say "girl" because she looked barely fifteen years old. Yeah, I know, I'm old. So, with half my face numb, I went on to the library and then to the supermarket and then to a produce store... etc. then back home to fix some soup for a late lunch (for Jennifer and me, Nancy was at the beach with a couple of her sisters and Sean was working)... then read for a while (i.e., alternated reading and sleeping in a too comfortable chair -- I'm still trying to catch up on my missing sleep from this week)... and then it was time to go out in the garden to pick lettuce, etc. and then to make a salad to bring to Nancy's mother's house for dinner.

So now it's after eleven p.m. and I'm going to post this entry (before it becomes a Sunday entry) and get some sleep.

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