Let me show you what Thanksgiving week looked like for me. I was scheduled to work Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Monday we were overstaffed so they called me off. I was grateful. I was tired and had homework to do. Tuesday I ran around like a chicken with my head forcibly removed all day. No nap. No rest. No feet up. Zero. Zip. Nada. At 1715 (or 5:15 pm) I went to work. We were busy. And by busy I mean busy. I think I took lunch at 0230. Maybe. My longest period of sitting was maybe 20 minutes. Home I came. Kids were at the in laws thankfully. The dep and I visited and I think ate breakfast. I went to bed at 0730. Tired. So tired. I opted out of a sleep aid (namely Ambien) and decided that since I had too much to do I would only sleep until my body woke up, whatever time that was and then get up to cook. Master plan: lay down in the afternoon before going back to work. 1000 and awake I am. 2.5 hours of sleep. I cooked all day and generally exhausted myself, never sitting. No time for nap and by 1600 I was dragging ass. Oh well, back to work. Wednesday night was a fun repeat of Tuesday and as an added bonus I had a benefit 5K to run at 0800 on Thursday. By 0700 Thanksgiving morn, my legs resembled some kind of shapeless, swollen blob. I ran and then came home and did the day. Aided mostly by champagne and white wine. By 0200 the NEXT morning I had had 2.5 hours of sleep in 68 hours and I had gained 3 pounds of water weight. At least.
Ok to be fair that's not a typical week. Typically I stay up all day my first day of work (like tomorrow). Maybe I'll sleep an hour or two in the afternoon if I can manage. The second day looks a lot like the first. I'll skip the gym usually, because I'm just too damn tired and swollen. I'll sleep part of that day. Maybe 3-4 hours or a very good day and then just lay around, too tired to do anything productive and not able to sleep, despite the aforementioned exhaustion. The third day looks remarkably like the second except I'll run or go tot he gym because I feel so incredibly shitty that I figure it can't get much worse. Maybe I'm SO tired I can sleep 4 hours. Maybe, but probably not. Work again that night and then come home the next morning, go to the gym and go through the day. Usually no sleep or a shortish nap of an hour or two because anything more than that and I feel guilty for sleeping the whole day away. Anyway on a typical week by the time my third day of work has elapsed I have slept 6-8 hours in three days. Ew that even looks bad.
People will say to me "how do you DO THAT?" The truth is this... I do not know. I just do not know. I feel like shit. That's fact. I look pretty bad. Also fact. My brain is certainly not 100%. Not a comforting fact. But I don't know. I know this though. Anyone who is sleeping on that kind of schedule can't be feeling too hot or healthy. Which brings me to my long awaited point. How can you expect to lose weight and be healthy when you consistently deprive yourself of the thing your body craves most, aside from water and food? The answer: You cannot. Diet on the night shift. Here and HA I might add. There is that eat to stay awake phenomenon. There's just no way to put in kindly. It stinks. It sucks. It sucks ass.
The dep says I should blog about sunflowers and happy thoughts. He doesn't have a blog. Clearly.
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