I fasted all day yesterday and only lost two pounds. For a brief moment, I thought my scale must be broken. This small loss only negates the weight I gained on Sunday; the eight pounds I somehow managed to gain via cookies and beer at Saturday’s party remain.

I seem to be gaining weight very easily and losing it relatively slowly. I guess it should be no surprise that every calorie really does count, and I have to stop falling back into bad habits like eating sugar and flour. One of the primary goals when this project began was to avoid those two things completely for the entire four months, so I’ve failed rather miserably in that regard.

The connection between rapid weight gain and the sugar and flour combination I made quite a while ago, so I’m not sure why I’m not more focused on avoiding one or both parts of that combination lately. Special occasions seem to provide me the excuse I need to slip up, but I can’t avoid events like a friend’s birthday party. I just have to be better at resisting things like cookies when they’re available. It obviously would have helped if I hadn’t bought them in the first place, but I wasn’t going to bring celery sticks to a party.

I’m still trying to figure out why I’m having such a hard time sleeping the night after a fasting day. I must have woken up three or four times last night, although I was able to get back to sleep each time. It’s like an alarm is going off in my brain, I guess. Although I tend to wake up at least once per night even after days during which I’ve eaten, it’s different on the nights after I haven’t eaten: I feel this nearly overwhelming urge to go downstairs and raid the refrigerator. I don’t actually do it (I don’t really have anything on hand that’s worth getting out of bed for), but still it’s  a strange phenomenon. I would have thought by now my sleeping brain would have acclimated to not eating by now.

I’m going to try having a vegetarian salad for dinner tonight. Honestly, I’m tired of grilled chicken, and beef would only increase the calorie count (and inflammation). I’ll add some nuts and cheese to the salad for protein, and I’ll probably even add some hummus despite the carbohydrates. Hopefully I’ll actually lose a bit of weight; the roller coaster is getting tiresome.