Never enough money

It's winter again. That means it's time to ask a local charity to pay my energy bill, which I haven't paid in months. I have to do this every winter; since I'm always cold, I run my heater a lot every winter.

Since I have to pay off the fifty bucks I borrowed to pay for the taxi I took to attend my Irlen exam, plus eight bucks interest, if I make the sixty-five-dollar payment I owe to the energy company (which is a sixth of the total I owe), I'll have just fifty-five dollars left to me for the month of December. With that I'll have to pay a fifteen-dollar phone bill. I also owe my ISP thirty-five dollars, but that can wait...although not paying anything towards it bothers me, won't look good since I haven't paid anything towards it for months.

I'm struggling to recover from one of the three workouts I cycle through each week. During the evenings of the days I do this routine, I feel abnormally fatigued, too tired to accomplish anything, and that really bothers me because I like to be accomplishing things (specifically, my language studies plus the yoga I've been trying and failing to add back into my evening schedule). I need some EAAs (that's essential amino acids, a sports supplement).

Once when my fatigue was really terrible, I started taking BCAAs (branched chain amino acids, which consists of 3 of the EAAs), and that helped me recover from workouts. That experience is why I'm expecting the EAAs to help. I figure that EAAs would be better for me than BCAAs because, as a vegan running a caloric deficit, my amino acid intake from food is probably subpar.

EAAs aren't terribly expensive (well, some brands are), but even the cheapest I've found so far would be a problem for someone who has only fifty-five bucks to spend. I'm hellbent on not spending another month with this post-workout fatigue, so I'll have to figure something out.

My Arabic studies are still proceeding way too slowly, but I'm getting used to the language, so I expect things to pick up within the next few weeks.

Next month will require another rearrangement of my diet. It's time to slightly decrease my calories again. Actually, I could probably wait until January, but why wait when I can get to my goal body composition a month sooner. And I'm not starving.

Maximizing protein intake and satiety while minimizing caloric intake is an interesting puzzle for me. Maybe it's part of the reason why I so look forward to grocery day. At some point, however (maybe now, in December), the diet is going to become significantly less enjoyable. TVP, one of my main sources of protein, is something I need to stop eating because it gives me stomach problems. In addition, the dietician who advised me concerning the low-FODMAP diet I'm now on suggested that TVP is probably high-FODMAP. The stuff has to go.

What will take it's place? More tofu? I try to avoid having tofu too many times a day because I get sick of it, but it's definitely the best food in terms of protein per calorie. I'm envisaging myself eating half a block of tofu three meals a day (I'm currently having four meals per day with one or two snacks). Or two protein powder desserts per day (I currently have one per day, for breakfast) plus two tofu meals per day. That wouldn't be terrible at all, especially if I had the occasional special meal to break up the monotony.

One of my current meals, chickpea pasta, also has to go because the pasta just doesn't offer enough protein given its caloric value. I've been adding TVP this past week to bolster the meal's protein content, but that's no longer an option. It's too bad because I add vegan queso to the pasta and make the tastiest vegan mac 'n cheese. That's a meal I'll really miss.

I've also had to stop eating broccoli, one of my favorite vegetables, because it gives me a foul body odor that I just cannot stand anymore.

One of my local grocery stores now sells pumpkin protein powder, and I'm looking forward to buying some of that. I read somewhere that hemp protein (one of the two main protein powders I use) isn't absorbed well, so maybe the pumpkin protein is better. It's just wonderful that I can buy protein powder with food stamps, just lovely. Previously, I was spending nearly thirty bucks a month on protein powder.