Fatigue

I am a morning person.  I am usually asleep by 10:15 every night and up by 5:45 in the morning.  I absolutely need at least 8 hours of sleep to function.   The other night I decided to stay up until midnight and watch the Olympic Ice Dancing finals. The next morning I dragged myself out of bed and struggled all day.  During the morning and afternoon (while I was at work) I stayed on my eating plan and was quite happy with myself.  All that changed once I got home.  I came home and ate a cup and a half of cheez-its followed by a handful of cookies.  As binges go I suppose it wasn't the worst, I ate the cheeze-its slowly and savored them.  But it wasn't what I wanted to do which made me start thinking about what caused me to throw all my hard work and planning out the window.  The more I thought about it the more I came to realize that fatigue played a huge role in the meltdown. 

No doubt about it; I was tired the next day.  Not only did I get several hours less sleep than normal, I had a day where I was doing demanding, detail oriented work.  Add to that a half hour commute home and you have a recipe for dieting disaster. 

When I get tired I don't make good decisions.  I lose my temper, I eat too much, I drive carelessly, I make mistakes, I don't pay attention to people.  This time, I threw caution to the wind and binged on cheez-its and cookies.  It doesn't matter the size of the binge -- what matters is that I choose to make decisions that are not in my best interests.  Almost always, those choices leads to episodes that cause anger, remorse, and guilt. So how do I change this?  What do I learn from it? 

I guess I have to realize that I need to be more proactive in taking care of myself.  I need to plan for the times when I know I'm going to be tired and liable to slip up.  If I had left a yogurt and fresh fruit parfait in the refridgerator for when I came home I wouldn't have wanted the crackers and cookies.  Note to myself:   leave a snack made up in the refrigertator, and my workout clothes sitting out.    Most of all I need to be able to cut myself some slack - I am losing weight slowly, and sticking (mostly) to my plan.  Each day I'm learning something new so, all in all, despite everything I am making progress.