immagettinmyshittogether

[immagettinmyshittogether]

Haven’t posted in a while

But I’m still getting my shit together.

Since I don’t have a scale, I didn’t know what my weight was when it hit its peak. But considering how much I gained since the last time I was able to check, I would guess that I hit at least 320 pounds.

I just weighed myself for the first time in a long time, and I’m down to 267. I knew I was losing weight, but I didn’t realize just how much until now.

I haven’t written anything in a while, because I took a break from that to get over burnout, and to work on some music. I’m about to put out an album that I made mostly over the summer. I just have one more song to finish. I’m starting to look at some of my options for things to try and do if I decide to do NaNoWriMo this year.

I also finally found a doctor and set up an appointment this Friday for my first checkup in about 10 years. So maybe I’ll finally be able to find out if something can be done about my bad knees.

And just for the hell of it, I signed up for an upcoming civil service test, just in case I decide that I need a full time job instead of a part time job and whatever I can do to earn extra on the side from home.

I haven’t been as disciplined the last few months as I’d like, but I’m still getting shit done. And I’m not the only one. My wife was inspired to try and do Inktober this year.

[immagettinmyshittogether]

Trying new huel recipe

I have a minor heart condition that usually goes unnoticed... but occasionally causes mild arrhythmia when I’m not feeling great and I have high adrenaline, stress, or caffeine. And since I’ve been sick and stressed lately, it’s been acting up. Which means... I need to deal with my coffee addiction. Before I got really sick, I’d cut down my coffee consumption from about 3 cups a day to 1 because it was flaring up. When I was sick... well, I was too sick to notice caffeine headaches or other withdrawal symptoms. That cold/flu actually might have helped a bit in that regard.

Before, I would have a cup of coffee in the morning to help get going. Then I would put about two cups worth of cold brew coffee in my huel lunch shake when I went to work. This, obviously, was not ideal when it started causing heart palpitations. So at the time, I cut myself down to either having a morning coffee and none in my huel, or no morning coffee, and only one cup’s worth in my huel.

On weekends, when I didn’t put coffee in my huel, I had a recipe where I mixed blackberries, a small yogurt, and two scoops of huel in a food processor. Since huel is rather high in protein and I’m not actively trying to build muscle or anything, I figured I could do something similar during the week for my last couple of weeks of work.

But instead of doing fresh blackberries, I decided to just get a frozen berry mix from Target. I also just ran out of unsweetened huel mix. And whoooo boy... it is SWEET. The mix is just strawberries, raspberries, and pomegranates, I believe. I also put in half a banana, to help thicken it up a bit. And of course, that just makes it sweeter. Also, apparently pomegranate seeds, in spite of being bigger than blackberry seeds, are the right shape to slip through the grating on my shaker. Whoops. Next time, I think I’ll look for an unsweetened yogurt to help balance that out. I don’t think it has any more sugar than my usual weekend shake. It’s just lacking the mild tartness of blackberries to combat the sweetness of the fruit and the huel. Also, I usually do at least one of the two scoops of unsweetened huel. But until I get my next delivery (my fault for forgetting to order more. I still haven’t worked out exactly how often I need it, which is why I haven’t set it to auto-reorder.) I’ll have to settle for sweetened.

[immagettinmyshittogether]

Worthwhile distractions

So I’ve been having a little trouble keeping up with some shit lately. A couple weeks ago I got hit with a MASSIVE cold/flu/something. So my diet went out the window in favor of chicken noodle soup and spicy food to clear my sinuses and whatever the heck comfort food I needed to get through the day. Considering how sick I was, honestly, I suspect that my body was burning more calories than normal anyway just to fight it off. And I don’t seem to have gained or lost much weight in the last few weeks, so I think my hypothesis is probably pretty close to true. But I was so sick that I honestly couldn’t think straight for several days. Of course, the days that I was the most sick were Friday through Sunday. So I didn’t miss any work. I just spend the entire next week sniffling and taking dayquil.

Needless to say, for the second time, I missed a writing deadline. My writing income has dropped considerably (which thanks to the two month delay in Amazon sales, I won’t notice until the end of January). Partly because of missed deadlines, I’m sure, but also partly because I think the series I’ve been working on just doesn’t have as big an audience as I thought it would. I was trying to shift from straight up smut to smutty romantic smut. It appears that for short-term and short story/serial publishing, the lowest common denominator might be a better thing to aim for. My sales have been practically nil, and my Kindle Unlimited reads have been a little below average. I haven’t had the heart to check my book rankings, but I know they’re lower than they were the last few months.

Author’s note/edit after posting - I realized that I hadn’t updated anything about last month’s sales. Last month jumped up to over 150. It was on target to hit 200 until Thanksgiving came around and I missed my first deadline.... then it kind of hit a stasis that week, and I basically didn’t earn hardly anything for the entire last week of the month. Still, I’m afraid to look at my current projected monthly income based on what I’ve made so far this month. It ain’t gonna be pretty.)

Then the shit kind of hit the fan at work. I work on a college campus, so these last few weeks of the semester are just kind of a run-up to the end. Always busier than usual, often with higher stakes in order to make sure shit gets done in time. So the next week after being sick has been one of the busiest and most stressful weeks of the semester. I’ll explain the details under the ‘keep reading’ line if you’re curious.

I did manage to get the story out late. So I still managed to publish once my brain was functioning. Unfortunately, I’m finding that at the moment, my usual after-day-job home environment isn’t really conducive to my current writing. I don’t know if it’s just because I’m writing smut, and I have trouble focusing on that with my spouse in the room. Or, more likely, it’s because my spouse has ADD and needs constant background things going on, like youtube videos or something, in order to concentrate. Whereas I don’t, and those things are distractions for me.

I’m wondering if I should just wrap up the various series that I have going now and call this experiment in writing a minimum of a short a week what is was: an experiment. But with winter vacation coming up for me, I will have the chance to sit at home and write without distraction for a few weeks. So I’ll at least try to catch up on my work then and get a good backlog to keep posting.

The pen name I was using for this smut is not one I ever planning on using to make a living. I was just using it to force myself to write something out of my comfort zone, get some experience writing on a long-term repeated deadline, and get a feel for online publishing.

I have learned a bit about serial publishing. And I’m starting to understand why all the old classic serial publishers tried to make things as salacious as they did. In the fast-paced world of publishing, the most important thing is just to grab people’s attention. After that you can worry about quality.

I also had another pen name that focused more on the romance side of things rather than the smut side of things... but that’s an entirely different market, and it generally requires a longer time investment and longer stories. And when all I can do at the moment while I’ve got my day job is about 5k words per week, the smut seemed to be the better option to focus on.

So this winter break might be a turnaround. A chance to try something else. Or a chance to at least finish up my work on one pen name.

But back to the now. this week, since the series I was working on was doing so badly, I decided to put it on hiatus and go back to one that I’d wrapped up the first arc and put on hiatus. The one that had caused my numbers to kinda explode last month. I had an idea for a nice little intro story that was not only holiday-themed, but would be able to stand alone months from now, and would work as a good introduction to the second arc. So I started churning along. I had a lot of stuff to do around the house to start getting ready for the holidays, but my spouse was going to be out of the house for about five hours on Saturday, so I decided to pace myself. Get half of it written Friday, half Saturday. And I was on track. I was about 3.8k words in on the  ≈5k story. And I’d already found a suitable image to photomanip into a decent cover for publishing. (Something that often takes a while, sorting through image sites, finding something that fits what I need, but doesn’t run afoul of Amazon’s fear of butts on cover art. Just once, I want to find a picture of a sexy model who would look good on a smutty book cover who’s wearing regular underwear, and not a nigh-invisible thong. The problems of a smut writer.)

And then I got a message from a friend in need. I won’t go into too much detail, but it is someone who had just lost their job, suffers from severe anxiety and depression, and even if the big S word that so often goes along with situations like that hadn’t come up, I still would have done the same thing. I had pants on, brushed my teeth, and ran out the door in record time. (Even if said friend could afford a car, the anxiety issues are bad enough to make driving unhealthy and unsafe) And my spouse got home right around the same time we got back to our house. So we spent the night helping a friend in need. Needless to say, I really don’t feel too bad about missing the third deadline. Some shit is more important. My spouse and I may be super introverts who are terrible at most socialization related things... but even if we’re crap at helping a friend in need, we’re still going to try.

Right now, my spouse and I aren’t in the best place financially. I’m not in the best place health-wise. But I’m still working at it. I’m still getting my shit together. And as I was just reminded on Saturday, I’m not the only one. For everybody out there... if you have too much shit to handle, call a friend. Somebody. Anybody. As I mentioned, my spouse and I are NOT great at being sociable and helping people. We’re actually pretty terrible at keeping in touch. We hadn’t talked to this friend in a few months. But even we were able to help, just by being there and hanging out with someone who wasn’t safe to be alone.

Sometimes we can’t keep our shit together. And that’s nothing to be ashamed about. Sometimes all we can do is try to keep afloat and look for something to hold onto. And sometimes, we can be that something to hold onto for someone else.

... I still have a lot of shit to get done this week, though. After two weeks of neglect when I should have been preparing for holiday visitor (I was hoping for visitors plural, but c’est la guerre. Siblings are all on various coasts, and we can’t always find a way to get together. Especially since only two of the five of my generation can really AFFORD to travel), my house is a MESS. And I still have that story to finish.

Day job explanation time. My official job title on campus is ‘proctor’. Basically, it means two things: I administer makeup and online tests in my office/testing lab, and I keep copies of certain paper tests for a few departments on the smaller satellite campus where I work. There are two main departments that I mostly proctor tests for, one uses the computers in my lab, so all I have to do is check students in. But the other uses paper tests, and I proctor makeups for that department as well as provide the paper tests for the teachers to use in their class.

Unfortunately, the copier on my floor is showing signs of wear and tear. Once you get over about 50 pages in one sitting, it starts to overheat and jam. So this year, they decided to limit the number of pages per copy job to 50. And with good reason. Unfortunately for me, I need to copy rather large batches of tests. And I can’t go to the other copier several floors down, because 1) I can’t leave my lab for more than a few minutes at a time, in case a student comes by with a narrow time window before their next class to take a test, and 2) I’m only scheduled/paid/officially on duty during the lab hours, so I can’t stay late or come in early to do copies.

Needless to say, my first thought was to see if I could just send my print jobs off to the print shop on campus and have them do them all and deliver them. Unfortunately, I need a digital copy to send to them for that. And in spite of the fact that I requested this at the beginning of the semester... all I’ve gotten from that department are the practice tests, not the actual tests. And of course, the practice tests are small enough that I can copy those just fine.

So I’ve been breaking the rules and doing batches of 60-75 pages whenever I can. But that’s still only 15 copies at a time, and I need something like 400 copies of each test. And the copier is occasionally down for a day or so when something breaks and they have to wait to get the part to fix it. And Murphy’s law seems to be in full force, because when I need to refill my inventory, it’s always fine on the days that I have a steady stream of students in my lab, and down the days that I have a trickle and therefore plenty of time with no students so I can close up the lab for five minutes.

The finals, of course, are 8-10 pages each, depending on the class. Which means that I can literally only do 5 copies at a time if I follow the rules. And there’s a hard deadline as to when I need to make sure that I have enough for every teacher. That deadline, of course, being after the last few weeks of classes, when students realize that they REALLY need to get in to take that makeup test and raise their grade before it’s too late.

Thankfully, the department actually got around to sending me a digital version of the finals. So I sent those off to the print shop, several weeks ahead of the due date, and I set the deliver due date as last Thursday at the latest, since I don’t work Friday, and I knew some teachers were letting students who couldn’t be there for the final take their test on Thursday or Friday before finals week. I gave them explicit instructions to deliver it to my lab, warned them that the lab is locked for test security reasons while I’m not there, told them where to get the key, and asked them to email me if, for any reason, they couldn’t deliver the tests.

I got to my lab in the morning to find... no delivery. I checked the support ticket. It said that they were finished 9 days ago... but neither one actually had a digital signature of who finished it. That day just so happened to also be the busiest test day of the semester. The department that uses computer tests in my lab had a final due date for the last chapter that day, so every semester that is always my busiest day. So as soon as I was relieved for my fifteen minute break, instead of taking my break, I ran downstairs to see if perhaps they simply didn’t read the delivery instructions and left the tests in the (thankfully locked) employee mailroom. (Which, coincidentally, is where the good copier is. This will be important later.)

So when I got back from break, the first thing I did was look up how to contact the print shop. Other than submitting a print request... there was nothing. I could look up the employees and email them, but there was no formal support ticket. Only a print request ticket. So I emailed the supervisor of the department.

An hour later, I finally had a moment with no students in the room, so I could make a phone call without worrying about disturbing people testing. So I called the print department. It rang four times... and went to voice mail.

I waited a minute, tried again, just to see if I got unlucky and just missed someone. Still voicemail. So, even though I hate using the phone because that means they’ll call me back instead of emailing, and I can’t really talk when there are students testing, I left a message.

By the end of my shift... still nothing. Nothing at all. And I knew that at least one teacher needed a few copies BY THE NEXT MORNING because he had students who couldn’t be there during finals week. And, just to add insult to injury, because of the holiday coming up, we had to submit our time sheet early this week. So I had no way to report extra time spent staying late to deal with this issue. But the teachers all depend on me, so I printed out  a copy of each of the tests, and I was in the middle of composing an email to let the teachers know that I would drop off an unstapled copy and a copy of the answer key in their mailboxes, so that if they desperately needed it, at least they could use the copier right next to their mailbox to make as many as they need for class.

While I was doing that... the phone rang. It was the print shop. Apparently they had finished my print job early, and set it aside and forgotten about it. It was just sitting in a corner of the room, on the main campus several miles away from the satellite campus. She apologized for forgetting about it, said that it was loaded in the delivery vehicle trunk, and as soon as the delivery person got there the next morning he would head over.

Since I didn’t know when he would actually get there, and when teachers would start needing the tests, that still didn’t change much for me. I thanked her for getting back to me, told her that if that should be fine, and just amended the email I was sending out to let them know that the tests SHOULD be there by the morning. But just in case, I was still going to drop off the unstapled copies. (Plus two stapled ones for the teacher who mentioned needing a couple by Friday morning) I’m still not sure how I can report the extra 37 minutes of overtime I had to spend doing that, since the time sheets are already in... and I can’t just add it to next week, because I won’t be working next week.

But I got to work today and... the tests were here. And things have been slow enough that I’ve been able to write this huge freaking post with only a few interruptions here and there. (Okay, now that I’m done helping someone, interruptions here, there, and the one while I was trying to hit post.)

[immagettinmyshittogether]

Almost lost my shit... but eventually got it back together

Last month’s writing progress was a little less than I’d hoped. In fact, last month I actually made less than I did the month before (I went from just over 110 to just over 100). But I kept slogging along. Kept publishing something once a week. Kept working.

My weight loss seemed to be going about the same. I was stuck between two notches in my belt for a while. It didn’t seem like I was actually losing any more weight. I was having a little trouble continuing to keep my calorie count steady.

And around the house, I haven’t been able to keep up as much as I’d like. I barely managed to get the house prepped for winter this year. Last year we kind of had an advantage, since we bought the house on October and the previous owners had done a good deal of the hard work already. My big problem is the same problem I’ve had with getting a lot of physical work done lately: my knee starts acting up after doing any kind of heavy work for too long. I was honestly kind of despairing about everything not coming together. I just couldn’t get my shit together.

Then all of a sudden, I went down a notch. The last notch on my belt, so I’ll either have to start making new holes in my belt, or buy new belts. And sales for my short stories have picked up. This month I’m on track to maybe even break 200 for the month. Which isn’t half bad for only spending 16-20 hours a month on it. Which isn’t too bad for someone who doesn’t have a mailing list or much of a social media presence, and is only doing a tiny bit of writing and publishing in my one day a week of spare time. And for housework, when the first freeze came, I managed to get the pipes that needed to be cleared cleared, and when the first big snow came, I managed to get the things that needed to be covered covered. I was limping the next few days, and the dishes got built up a bit since I didn’t want to stand long enough to do them. But I got the big things done. Barely, but I did.

[immagettinmyshittogether]

Haven’t been updating much...

because I’ve just kind of been slogging along. I’ve been getting a short story published online every week, earning a few extra bucks there. Been keeping up with the diet pretty well. I’m at that annoying stage where my belt feels too loose, but the next notch feels too tight. No huge news. No huge successes. But no failures either. Just... going along. Which was kind of the whole point of me starting this blog, to force myself to check in on myself every now and then. To make sure that I keep going. To make me get my shit together.

[immagettinmyshittogether]

One month on controlled calories

I had been paying attention to calorie counts over most of the summer, to help combat the fact that I wasn’t as active as I wanted to be. But it wasn’t until September 12th that I officially started COUNTING, and replacing my lunches with Huel shakes.

Since I had no way of knowing my starting weight, all I can really count by are the notches in my belt. I just got a new one at the beginning of summer, so it’s easy to tell at a glance.

While paying attention to calories and working a job that had me on my feet all day, along with mowing the lawn and whatnot around the house over the summer, I went down two notches on my belt over about 3 months.

While not being able to get much exercise due to my knee injury, but actively counting calories, I went down a notch in about 3 weeks.

I seem to have passed at least one big hurdle. Around the three week mark, I started dealing with some major cravings, and it was hard to keep myself from saying, “Well, since I’m only at x number of calories per day, I can afford to splurge a little on y.” But either good habits or self control are seeping in, or my body is just getting used to a slightly lower calorie diet, because the cravings have started to either lessen, or at least be less intrusive.

Well, either that, or my excitement at going down one belt notch helped me resist those cravings...

[immagettinmyshittogether]

Looking at this, the natural reaction is to assume that they’re negative consequences. The last few weeks have reminded me that the same is true for positive actions and positive consequences.

[immagettinmyshittogether]

3 weeks on semi-strict calorie counting...

... and I just went down a notch on my belt.

Well damn.

I used to think that exercise was the only way I was going to counteract my appetite and actually lose weight. I still need to find some more reliable ways of exercising around my injured knee. At the moment, I’m barely getting any exercise in at all. It’s all been diet. And even with the occasional 2200+ calorie day over the last few weeks, the general shift seems to actually be working.

[immagettinmyshittogether]

Coming up on week 3

This is just a quick update. It’s been almost 3 weeks since I started this whole turnaround. I’ve only had one uninterrupted Friday as a writing day, and I kinda nailed it. Finished most of the actual writing I needed to get done in 3 hours, spent the next few hours working on the publishing and editing side of things. Got it done. Not a bad habit to get into, writing a 5k short serial in 3 hours.

As far as the diet goes, I’ve had a few days where I’ve wobbled up to the higher end of my calorie counts, but most of those are days when I went out to a restaurant with friends or my wife. I have to say, I was amazed when I looked at the calorie counts on the Chili’s menu. Although just substituting rice for fries as a side brought it down by quite a bit. And not getting the deal with the appetizer helped as well, since the only appetizer that looked appealing was their bowl of chili... which has the calorie count to be a meal in it’s own right.

I do have one advantage in this whole diet situation, and that’s that I never developed the habit of drinking soda or juice or any of the things that tend to add a whole lot of sugar calories to most people’s diet. 

When I first ordered Huel, I got one package of unflavored and one package of the vanilla flavor. Since the unflavored tends to end up bitter when mixed with coffee, and my usual lunchtime shake on work days is my coffee recipe, I’m finding that I’m going through more of that. I’m not low yet, but I’m low enough that I should probably order more when I get home, just to make sure that if there are any shipping delays it still gets to me in time. And I think this time I’ll just order two of the flavored packs, since I’ve still got at least half of the unflavored left.

One of the side effects that I’ve noticed from this diet is that it’s actually hard to enjoy food that’s too greasy. After a day of eating things that just aren’t very greasy, the sudden change in texture isn’t all that pleasant. I decided to try skinning some chicken quarters that I made a few nights ago, and they were actually much more enjoyable to me in that state than the last time I made them with the skin on. And I’m sure it cut down on a good percentage of the fat in there. Sources online are varying wildly, but I think it’s a safe assumption that it cuts down on at least a hundred calories for each quarter. Also, it means that any sauce I add soaks into the meat rather than just sitting on the skin. And while BBQ sauce is surprisingly high in calories, you don’t have to use a lot to add a lot of flavor.

As a nice little bonus, I did all the math once September ended and I discovered that even though I didn’t publish anything for the first two weeks of the month before I started getting my shit together, I still managed to break over a hundred dollars in sales this month. Not too shabby for only working a few hours a week on my writing and publishing. And if I can keep my schedule going, I just might do better next month. I’m shooting for breaking 200 a month, to replace the part time job that I just quit. I don’t know if I’ll make that next month or not, but it’s certainly worth shooting for.

[immagettinmyshittogether]

Two weeks

As of today, I’ve had Huel for lunch for the last two weeks, and I’ve done a fairly consistent job with counting calories. I’ve literally lost count of the number of google searches I’ve done checking on calories for various meats, fruits, vegetables, and menu items in the last two weeks, and how much calorie math I’ve done every day. I still don’t have a scale, but I’m fairly certain that my belt is easier to put in this particular notch. Wednesdays are my longest work days, so this is the one day when I’m most at risk for getting hunger cravings while I’m still at work. And despite bringing a few snacks along today, I am definitely getting some.

I haven’t gotten any writing done today, it’s been just busy enough at work that I haven’t been able to do any while I’m here (other than this post), but that’s fine. I’m at work. I can’t expect to be able to do my own work while I’m at my day job. It’s just a nice benefit when I can.

And my wife just texted me saying that they had pizza at her work, and she’s bringing some home. I should have asked what kind, so I can look up the calorie counts per slice...

[immagettinmyshittogether]

Nearly two weeks

Been doing Huel for lunch for nearly two weeks, and honestly, it’s working out pretty well. My biggest day was about 2200-2300 calories, my lowest was under 1600, and I’ve been doing a pretty good job of dealing with cravings when I get them.

I’ve also been working on treating Friday when I don’t have my regular day job as just another work day to get things done for my writing. I’ve only had one Friday with which to do that. Of course, I had something I needed to get done that day. Go figure. But I managed to get more writing done by 1 in the afternoon than I had the entire two weeks prior, so I’m not too dissatisfied with that.

I’m probably going to end this month earning about as much from my writing as I did last month, but given than I had a nearly two week hiatus in writing, that’s not nearly as bad as it sounds.

Money is going to be a little tight now that I quit my second job. So I’ve just got to keep slogging along. One of the other side benefits of doing Huel for lunch is that I’m spending less money than I would otherwise for my lunches.

[immagettinmyshittogether]

Perfecting Huel recipes

So today marks my first week of doing Huel shakes for lunch and an occasional pick-me-up or snack. The basic shake recipe is 3 scoops of water, 14-18 oz. of water, and a couple ice cubes.

My biggest issue is the texture, but anything that can help the flavor isn’t a bad thing either. So this is what I’ve been doing so far. I’ve got three recipes I’ve come up with for different days.

My key ingredient for these is a bit of banana to make it creamier rather than grainy. This does add sugar, but since huel has such a low GI, I don’t mind having something with a little extra sugar right off the bat. Frozen bananas have a slightly different texture, and I’ve found that they do make it slightly creamier than regular banana. So I peel and halve bananas and freeze them for the week. Plastic baggies are just the right size for four half bananas. I also froze a few berries for my lighter mixes.

Workday Lunch - Primary ingredient: vanilla huel. Added ingredients: Banana, cold press coffee, almond extract. Can make the night before (which will probably help the grainy texture soak out a bit), but I usually make them first thing in the morning, along with my breakfast. This one ends up still being vegan.

It’s made to be a simple, straightforward, tasty, filling meal with a coffee pick-me-up mixed in. However, trying it with unflavored huel makes any bitterness in the coffee REALLY come through, and A) I’m normally a coffee lover (I never put sugar in coffee, just milk) and B) I use cold press coffee, which is less bitter than normal coffee. So I definitely recommend using the vanilla huel for this one.

When I make it, first I put 10 oz of cold press coffee and two scoops of huel into the shaker, and shake. In a blender or food processor, I break the banana half into halves again and put them in with six ounces of water and a scoop of huel. I blend until all the banana chunks are gone. Then I take the top off the shaker and DO NOT remove the little screen, and pour the banana mixture into the shaker. Then I take the screen out, wash any banana gunk stuck on it off (that’s why I left the screen on. No matter how much you blend, something will get through and get stuck in the screen when you’re trying to drink it later), and pour a dash of almond extract in to add a bit of an amaretto-ish flavor before putting the screen back in, putting the top back on, and shaking the two mixtures together. Then I let it sit in the fridge until it’s time to leave for work. Before I leave for work, I add ice cubes to top it off, then put it in a thermal lunch bag with a few ice packs (and some carrots and/or celery to snack on, but that’s just me.)

This ends up being around 500 calories.

Light weekend lunch / afternoon snack - Primary ingredient: vanilla or unflavored huel. Added ingredients: banana, berries, vanilla extract. I generally prefer blackberries, but of course, then you end up with the pips mixed in. So if you prefer no (or just smaller) pips, then I’d recommend grapes or strawberries. This one ends up being still vegan as well.

It’s made to be a snack of variable size with a bit of a sugar rush at first and a nice fruit flavor. No caffeine in this one. Either kind of huel works, but of course the vanilla will taste a little nicer.

I don’t even know if I need to put this as a recipe, it’s pretty simple and close to the one in the booklet that comes with your first order. I do six ounces of water and either a half a banana or a handful of fruit per scoop of huel and blend, then put in the shaker, mix together if you had to do separate batches for each scoop, and add ice to let it sit for a bit to soften the grainy texture. Add a bit of vanilla extract to taste if you want. This also works well with the unflavored huel, since the fruit adds sugar. If you just want a little snack, then do a quarter of a banana and only three or four berries with one scoop. Keep in mind that if you’re counting calories (like me!) a banana has just over a hundred, and berries have quite a bit of sugar as well. So I did this as a light lunch, one scoop blended with half a banana, one scoop blended with six or seven blackberries. It ended up being very purple in color, and I found over the few times that I tried it that if you A) Freeze the blackberries and B) don’t over-blend them, the pips are usually still suspended in a little blob of berry, so instead of getting hard pips in your teeth, you get delicious little squishy packets of fruit instead.

It was a lot lighter than the three scoop meal, but ended up being a right around 450 calories due to the extra fructose.

Weekend lunch - Primary ingredient: vanilla or unflavored huel. Added ingredients: banana, berries, fruit yogurt. Obviously, with the addition of yogurt, it is still vegetarian, but not vegan.

This is just a slightly fuller-bodied variant of the light weekend lunch mix, and it also has no caffeine.

Much like the light weekend lunch, blend half a frozen banana and six or seven berries with two scoops of huel and twelve ounces of water. If you’re using a small food processor like mine, you’ll have to do it in two batches. Then pour into shaker, spoon the yogurt in (I used Activia black cherry because that’s what I had on hand), shake it up, then add ice and let it sit until you’re ready for it. You can still add a flavor extract if you’d like to, but I found that it didn’t really need it.

With the yogurt added, this will end up being a little over 450 calories (if you use a larger amount of yogurt or more fruit, it might get up to 550, and a lot of that will be fructose).

Not bad for only a week’s worth of experimentation. I wish I’d been able to weigh myself before the week started, my belt seemed to go to the notch I’ve been using a little easier today. Obviously nothing huge, but anything noticeable is a good sign.

*edited to fix calorie amounts. I misremembered how much was in each scoop, it’s actually 150 per scoop, not 166. For some reason I got the 500 calories from my normal lunch stuck in my head as the normal amount for a 3 scoop shake.

[immagettinmyshittogether]

It occurs to me...

that perhaps watching the Great British Baking Show while on a diet may not be the best idea...

... but I’m really enjoying the show. And I’m learning a lot.

[immagettinmyshittogether]

General report 9/18

Tomorrow will mark 1 week on my new diet. Last night I got my first serious cravings late at night. I think I might want to stock up on some simple little <100 calorie snacks to keep around, just in case one of those hits again. The craving actually came AFTER I’d already had a little extra dessert that night, (still under 2200 or so calories for the day, even with that dessert) so I suspect it was kind of a sugar rush backlash of some kind.

This week will also be my first week not working retail in 10 years. Come Friday, when I would normally be working retail, I have a short story to finish and publish, another one to at least get far enough along into to get an excerpt from it to put as a teaser blurb in the one previous one before I publish it, and I need to write a finale to a series that I just published the last serial for so that I can bundle it together in a single novel-length story with a nice little ending.

I haven’t done as much around the house as I’d like, but depending on how my injured knee feels on Friday, I may try to use any stretch breaks or writing breaks I need to take to get up and clean a bit.

Now that I’ve been thinking more about food, I’m trying to do a bit more meal planning. Actually getting ahead of things. My wife likes to be able to bring leftovers to work with her. With my current diet and eating schedule, I like to have nice big dinners. These two things are counter-productive.

However, my wife is also a very picky eater. So there are a lot of things that I like that she doesn’t. So on the few nights when we’re actually home and I can cook, I’ve been making two meals. One for me and one for her. Which isn’t as crazy as it sounds, since at the moment, we only really have two nights a week that we’re guaranteed to be home. So I’m only planning four meals a week. And cooking them two at a time. In a small kitchen. And trying to make them finish at the same time so we can eat together. Nothing too crazy.

The nice thing (so far at least) about my current diet is that limiting my breakfast calories by portion size and limiting my lunch calories via Huel shake leaves me with a LOT of room to eat what I want for dinner. A 400 calorie chicken quarter? Sure, gimme two of those. A sweet potato? I’ve still got some calories to spare, lemme add some butter to that. I had a huge greasy delicious dinner and still finished the day at about 1900 calories. Maybe a little more, not sure exactly how much sugar from the barbecue sauce stayed on the chicken itself. Then again, I trimmed most of the fatty parts of the skin off, so that might have balanced out. I’ve always had dinner as my big meal of the day. But this diet is making it so that I actually have ROOM for a big meal at the end of the day without getting too many calories. And it’s making it so that the few nights that I actually go out to a restaurant, I don’t have to get something expensive and healthy, I can go for a cheap greasy option if I want to. So it’s working pretty well for my lifestyle so far. My end goal is to get my wallet fatter and me thinner. And so far this strategy seems good.

... I probably should actually get a scale, though. Right now I can only track things by how I feel, and whether I go up a notch on my belt.

[immagettinmyshittogether]

Huel day 2

As an addendum to yesterday, I had been warned that switching over to a shake for a meal can make your digestive tract a little... confused. Some people reported odd noises. Gas. Other digestive related issues. Which is why the info from the people at Huel suggest only replacing one meal a day for the first week or so, to give your body a chance to adjust to the change in diet. Since I’m only planning on replacing one meal a day with it anyway, that’s kind of a moot point for me. But I did experience a few oddities. Most namely that I was actually producing LESS gas than I have been lately... which probably doesn’t speak well of my diet before. Also, what little gas I produced smelled... funky. Not worse than normal. Just weird. Thankfully that passed (ba dum tish) and I suspect that was a delayed reaction just from the coffee and huel that I tried on the day it arrived.

In addition, I found that my stomach and body weren’t quite in agreement yesterday. My stomach was full, but my body had been expecting immediate carbs, and was still reporting that it was hungry. Then as it went through, everything switched. My stomach was reporting that it was empty, and my body was reporting that I was good. But for a little while, I had the weird feeling of being simultaneously full, and yet needing something with a carb kick to get me going. I never quite got the low blood sugar shakes that I sometimes get, but I could feel that I was close to it.

Now on to today’s report. I mixed in a banana this time to try and help the texture. It helped a little. I didn’t have time to fully brew a new pot of cold brew coffee, so the coffee flavor is a little light today, but I made up for that by adding a dash of almond extract. So technically there is alcohol in the lunch I brought with me to work. Less than a quarter of a teaspoon, but hey, look at me being all subversive here. The flavor and texture actually didn’t change much, but a lot of people online are recommending freezing bananas before blending them in to make the texture less grainy and more creamy. So I put a couple of bananas in the freezer for tomorrow.

With the little bit of sugar in there from the banana, after drinking a little more than half the shake, I’m finding that I’m not getting the odd mix of hungry and full that I had yesterday (so far), but I am feeling a little low on the blood sugar end of the spectrum. We’ll see how things play out.

Honestly, it is filling my stomach up enough that I may consider doing only two scoops instead of three in the future. Which would bring my lunch down from 500 calories (or 600 with a banana) to 333 (or 433 with a banana). But we’ll see.

[immagettinmyshittogether]

Writing as a Business

For the most part, those who want to hone their writing skills and treat it as a business will turn to writing copy or writing articles of some kind. I could do that, but I’d honestly rather not. I’d rather continue to focus on writing fiction.

However, I’m perfectly okay not writing the sort of things that I’d publish under my own name. Hell, I’m perfectly okay writing just about any kind of fiction. It’s good practice. It’s good to force myself to produce regularly. And treating it like a business, e.g., finding markets and writing towards them, is not only going to earn me a second income, but it will also help prepare me for being able to market and sell my own personal work as well as the tabletop gaming stuff my wife and I make.

At the beginning of summer I started looking into various fiction markets, trying to figure out what could possible work for me. I’ve chosen to focus on one major market that’s blooming for online self-publishers, and just enough outside my normal comfort zone to challenge me as a writer. Romance/erotica. It’s not normally something I read. It’s not normally something I write. But there’s a market out there that’s willing to give new writers a chance, and I need to expand my own writing skills.

So during the summer, I started doing a bit of writing. I ended up coming up with two separate pen names for different markets. And over the course of the summer, I started churning out things faster than I ever have before. One pen name focuses mostly on shorts and serial fiction that can be combined into novel-length stories of a more porny nature, the other focuses more on the romance side of things. It’s easier to earn money with minimal marketing with the more porny side of things, but there’s a lower income ceiling on that one. However, marketing is expensive, and since I was only working one part time job over the summer, I didn’t want to spend money. So I wrote a few things for the more romance-oriented pen name, but have kept them on the back burner. For the most part, I was churning out (for lack of a better word) smut. And I did get a response right away. Not a huge one, but a response. The first month, I earned just over 50 dollars. The second, 90. I’m hoping that as my back catalog builds, my income will as well. If I can earn enough with that pen name, then I can start to invest in marketing for my other more serious one that will (hopefully) be able to earn more in the long run. I don’t know what kind of growth curve I’ll see, a lot of what I’m doing is throwing things against the wall to see what sticks. There’s only so much market research one can do without actually going into the market.

In the meantime, having churned out somewhere around 150 thousand words over the course of two months has really shown me that I don’t need something like NaNoWriMo to force me to write. I just need to find a market to aim myself at, put myself on a schedule, and go.

Will smut help me get my shit together? Maybe. Just maybe.

As for my pen names... nah. Not gonna share those yet. One of them I’m not all that proud of, the other I might share eventually.

Might.

[immagettinmyshittogether]

Huel day 1 and 1/2

I will preface this by saying that I don’t know what my current weight is. The only scale I have access too doesn’t go that high. Which, of course, is not the best sign. I’m fairly certain I’m over 300, since the two scales I’ve stepped on recently both only go up to 270 or 280, and I was obviously at least a bit over that. I’m only 5′10, but I actually AM ‘big boned’, e.g., I have broad shoulders and thick joints. Which actually makes me look LESS fat than I am, since my weight is spread over a broader frame. If I was my current weight and I was not ‘big boned’, I would definitely look obese. As it is, I just look fat. No pictures unfortunately, I’m writing this at work. But even when I was so skinny that you could count my ribs, my hands, wrists, neck, shoulders, hips, and various joints were just as huge as they are now. I suspect that I’m going to have a LOT of trouble finding button-up shirts that will fit me if I do succeed in losing weight. Even the big and tall shirts are often too tight around my shoulders, collar, and wrists most of the time. Finding ones made for me in a skinny shape will be damn near impossible. But I digress.

I didn’t get my first order of Huel until I got home from work to find it waiting for me at my door. I got home at around 4 in the afternoon, and I figured I could at least give it a try. My wife and I run a D&D game on Tuesdays (something we’re beta testing in the hopes of eventually publishing the module and various other sourcebooks, so also relevant to some of the home business and writing related shit I’m trying to get together), and I was falling asleep. So I figured I could try the huel as a combination snack and pick-me-up. I just got a cold press coffee maker a few weeks ago, and I had some cold press coffee in the fridge.

So I figured I’d just do a snack sized portion. One scoop of powder instead of three. About 165 calories. And I mixed it with coffee instead of water. The shaker that came with my first order still smelled strongly of new plastic, so I decided to wash it and just mix up the huel and cold press coffee with a fork in a coffee mug.

... that may have been a mistake. It just didn’t mix well. It was grainy. It was hard to get down. I couldn’t taste the supposed vanilla flavor at all. I took so long to finish drinking it that it was almost room temperature by the time I was done, which made the taste and texture far worse. My first experience was... bad.

But since I was just freestyling, and I didn’t exactly follow the instructions on the box, I figured I’d give it a pass for now.

Still, I was able to have a lighter dinner than usual and not be hungry. And the caffeine kicked in just in time for me to be able to run game. And, as an odd side effects of adding something new to my diet and having a smaller dinner, I realized this morning that I’d forgotten to take my heartburn pills... and I didn’t have any problem with heartburn last night.

So that was day 1/2. Not good.

This morning I decided to do things a little closer to the instructions. Wednesdays are my longer days, the one day I work more than 5 hours. So the day that I most need coffee during the day. So I still wanted to add a bit of coffee to the mix. So I did 10 oz. of coffee, 5 of water, mixed it up, and then before I left the house added several ice cubes to keep it cold longer and add enough water to make it half and half by the time they melted. Then I put it in an insulated lunch bag with three ice packs and some apple slices and celery sticks in case I did need some solid food to snack on during the day.

So I’m on break right now. I started drinking the shake a little after 12:15. Finished about 3/4 of it by 1. Sipped on the rest over the next little while. It’s gone now. And I’m... feeling weirdly simultaneously full and not full. My stomach is definitely full. But the slower release carbs are confusing my body. I’m still kind of craving food. But I’m definitely full. To the point where I actually am feeling a tiny bit of hearburn right now, and I think it’s just because there’s so much in my stomach. It’s weird, but now I know that this diet change isn’t a magic anti-heartburn diet for me. I’ll want to remember my pill tonight.

It was SO much better cold, and it tasted much better when it wasn’t making a coffee sludge. Also, I suspect the fact that I made it in the morning and didn’t drink it until three or more hours later probably helped the texture become a little less grainy. Cold press coffee can be a bit stronger than normal coffee, and I let mine steep as long as possible to be as strong as possible. So watering that down and letting the vanilla flavor of the huel through probably helped a bit.

It wasn’t hugely enjoyable, I mean, it wasn’t exactly a shake in the traditional fun sense of the word. But it was much easier to down than the mess I made yesterday. And I’m not getting low blood sugar shakes at the moment, although honestly I do feel a little low on sugar. It might be worth it to add a little something to give my blood sugar a spike while it’s going down, maybe add some caramel syrup to accent the coffee flavor or something. Still, if I really need sugar, I’ve got the apple slices I brought with me. Or if I need something for my stomach acid to work on other than my esophagus, I’ve got the celery.

I actually bought one pack of vanilla flavored huel, and one pack of plain, unsweetened. So I’m going to experiment with different additives. A lot of people online have suggested freezing bananas and blending them in, which apparently helps with the texture a lot. However, bananas have a lot of sugar in them, of course, so I’ll need to take that into account.

I do feel a grain or two sort of stuck in the back of my throat, so I may want to consider mixing it the night before to help with that, or trying the frozen banana thing. Or maybe I’ll just run to the water fountain before my break is over and see if I can just wash it down.

Also, if it turns out that my body DOES need a bit more sugar rather than slower carbs, I may investigate switching to soylent. But I’ve got two huge packs of Huel to get through first.

That’s all for now. We’ll see how things keep working for me, and whether this dietary change will help me get my shit together.