And Now We Wait and See

In reference to the post from earlier today where I discussed my silly food experiment, I have finished my lunch. I had a little bit of chicken, a protein cookie, a little sugar free chocolate, and a handful of Ritz crackers. No peanuts for me.

Now we wait and see how I feel this afternoon including if my stomach requires me to eat on the drive home, and how I feel when it’s time for dinner, probably around 6:45-7:00pm. Will there be gassy pain in my stomach like there often is when I work in the office and have peanuts with my lunch? Or will I be pain and discomfort (and brutal, violent farts) free (please excuse the TMI, but I included it for the benefit of scientific research, you understand)?

In other health-ish news, I used my CPAP machine again last night. It went well. No issues. More importantly, the SleepWatch app on my Apple Watch tells me that the ratio of restful sleep vs light sleep increased. Yesterday it was 67% restful, which wasn’t bad, I don’t think, but today it was 79% which is pretty wonderful. I like seeing that number in the 70’s, but when it pushes 80 it’s extra special. It had my sleeping heart rate dip at 21% too. Anything above 20% is excellent. Unfortunately, I failed to get six hours of sleep in total (only by a few minutes though) and the older I get the less functional I am when the total is less than six hours. Oh well.

So as far as medical experiments go, we need to see how my stomach feels by the time dinner rolls around, 4-5 hours from now, and how tonight’s sleep goes. There is just so much data to collect. The statistics nerd typing this post is giddy with antici…

…pation.

Hello Stress

As mentioned in the previous post, as well as a couple from last week, we are trying Hello Fresh again. Are you familiar with it? Every week they send us recipes and all of the ingredients for a couple of meals. All we have to do is follow the instructions and boom, fancy dinner for two. It’s kind of like culinary paint by numbers.

Except it tends to be really stressful. We’ve tried it in the past, as well as their main competitor Blue Apron, and generally trying to get all of the prep for each step done in time would raise our blood pressure by about 10000%. This time we’re taking it easier. If step one is prep, step two is cook, and step three is “while that’s cooking, prep again” we just do the two prep steps first. It takes longer to finish, but it’s easier on the heart.

Mostly.

There is also the little issue with the smoke alarms. I think in the last six meals we’ve done, we’ve set off the smoke alarms in the house four times. Four. Times. It’s gotten to the point where I turn on the exhaust fan and open all of the windows before I do anything else. It didn’t help tonight though. Frying up the chicken cutlets in the pan on the stove sure enough set those bastard alarms off once again. At least we know they work, right?

Speaking of the frying pan, the oil the chicken fried in splashed all over the kitchen. I’ve mopped the floor three times in the last two hours. Hopefully we don’t slip and fall. I would feel like a right asshole if that happened.

Still, despite all of that… the dinners we’ve made have been really good. Jen was a little down on one, but the rest have gone over really well.

Here’s hoping the trend continues. I think Jen is happy to not be eating chicken breasts and quinoa every night. Whatever makes my love happy.