solo mama entendre

Your refrigerator makes for a poor roommate when you are stuck at home 24/7. When the whole quarantine thing started, I relished getting out to the grocery store once a week; it was my one act of normalcy. Now I just don’t want to be bothered with it. I can’t use order online and pick it up for two reasons: I can never navigate the apps well enough to even find what I need so it ends up taking me about 2 hours to put together my order, and I really hate when I pick up and they say “We didn’t have regular Oreos in stock so we substituted them with mint Oreos.” Really??? Mint should not be an Oreo flavor, please don’t think it’s a good substitute for regular.

I decided it might be a great idea to do Whole30 again and my sister-in-law and I started it together. I did it last August like a champ. Definite benefits – lost weight, gained energy, never felt bloated, and discovered which foods typically upset my body when I re-introduced them at the end of the 30 days. I liked it so much, I kept my food intake at about 70% compliant, 30% after I was done. I thought doing it during quarantine would give me a little control over something in a healthy way since we don’t have control over much these days. Definitely a little more cheating than before (weekends), but still staying away from the foods that bother me. So not really “Whole30” per se, more guided by it.

Here are 3 things I’ve learned about eating when being locked in most of the time:

1. Track my water. I never drink enough water. Now I keep a post-it note and hash mark it with each glass. It has helped, not drinking enough in mile-high Denver will definitely take a toll and make quarantine worse.
2. Track my food intake, again on a post-it note. I don’t do calorie counting but I don’t remember what I ate even 5 minutes ago anymore so keeping a tally helps me put my day in perspective and helps me know if I should eat more or less, and what kind of food I still need for the day.
3. Have an idea of healthy snacks ahead of time (even writing them down in the morning) so that when I need a snack, I already know what I’m going to eat (snacks are also not really part of Whole30 but I can’t eat just 3 meals a day). My biggest issue: I’m eating all day, but that means I eat during meetings. Your face looks even more horrible on a Zoom call when you are eating and it freezes up and it’s probably not good meeting etiquette anyway.

It’s hard not to eat like a maniac when you have access to food all day (for me, my fridge is about 10 steps away from where I’m working). I do know that if I am not paying attention, gaining weight and being stuck at home will make me even more anxious and depressed than I already feel at times. Most people I know would love to have some other ideas to help with this, so please feel free to share them through messaging (and I will share them in a future post) or responding to this post.