Watch out. She's just a little irrational right now.

This morning has not been smooth sailing for me. In the grand scheme of things, there's nothing terribly wrong, but I'm cranky anyway.

I weigh in at very close to the same time every day. Every day I watch the clock, and I aim to hop on the scale every morning between 8 AM and 9 AM. This time is technically after my office hours begin, but it works OK for me because I work from home. I don't like to weigh in earlier because I like to be fully awake and rational before I jump on the scale. In all honesty, I can't handle seeing those numbers until after my first cup of coffee. Plus, if I go into our bathroom and weigh in any earlier, I wake up my husband whose work schedule runs later than mine.

Well, some jackass scheduled me for an 8 AM meeting this morning which lasted an hour. I had another meeting that started at 9 AM and lasted an hour. And now, I have some man here in the house working on a minor plumbing issue, so I don't want to take off all my clothes to jump on the scale.* This all means I haven't weighed myself today. Which means I don't know where I stand from a weight perspective, and I am hoping for a drop based on how I've done over the last few days, and now I won't know for sure until tomorrow because I don't trust the numbers if I don't weigh in at the same time, and IT IS MAKING ME CRANKY.

Sorry for yelling.

To top all of that off, there is a remarkable amount of jackassery at work at the moment. I have people who I emailed a month ago and who didn't reply until yesterday pressing me to quickly finish work that I could have done a month ago if they'd just replied to my damned email. Now their delay in responding is my problem, and I don't have the power to tell them to BITE IT like I'd really enjoy doing. Plus, other projects are also urgent, and still other projects are being poorly managed, which is out of my control but will come back and haunt me later.

I am feeling cranky this morning. My employers would not appreciate me blogging on company time, but I need a break or my head might explode.

The irony is that even though I'm feeling cranky and I'm writing about it on a weight loss blog, I don't think** I'm doing poorly when it comes to the whole weight loss thing. On Monday I ate well and went to the gym and had a great workout, yesterday I ate well and tried to recover from my great workout, and I have every intention of eating well and working out today. I'm trying to focus a little more on the good health guidelines, I've forgiven myself for the Christmas/New Years eating-everything-in-sight fiasco ... all in all, things are good in Weight Watchers-land. Well, except that I haven't weighed in (grrrrrrr....).

I am thankful that this cranky state of mind is not usually a trigger for me to overeat. Some emotional situations do challenge me ... OK, many emotional situations challenge me. This one could become a challenge if it continues too long, which is why I need to pull myself out of this pissy mood.

My hope is that if I eat on plan, prioritize my work with buy-in from higher ups (higher-ups in my department aren't irrational in most cases, thank goodness, it's other departments I have to worry about), get some exercise to work off some of this tension, and maybe go drink a shit-ton of beer ... oh no, wait, scratch that last one. I'm kidding about the beer.

But seriously, I'm hoping that if I can take some positive steps now I can prevent overeating problems later. I'm an emotional eater, and I've realized that recognizing and managing my emotions is the best way to handle this sort of thing. With emotional eating (at least for me), the problem isn't exactly the eating. The eating is a way of trying to deal with the emotions. When I overeat in emotional and/or stressful situations, it's because I haven't found, or at least haven't used, effective alternatives to cope with my emotions.

So, if you guys have any suggestions on how to stifle my desire to strangle some coworkers effectively cope with frustrating situations, I'm game for hearing them. I don't mean specifically with this specific job situation (this one I've got a handle on - prioritization and re-setting expectations should work fine once it's done, it's just an unpleasant process), but with frustrations and stresses throughout life in general.

How well do you cope with stress? What works for you?





* Yes, OK, this means I take off all my clothes during business hours. Daily. Sue me - I work from home. It takes less than two minutes, and no one sees this behavior (well, except my husband who is getting ready for work, but he just enjoys the view). It's not like I'm standing there buck naked*** in the middle of a bunch of cubicles.

** But I don't know, do I? Damned meeting schedulers and plumbers and grumble grumble grumble grumble ...

*** I'm pretty sure I'm officially a geek, since I felt the need to look up the term "buck naked" because I was interested in where the saying originated.