November 10, 2006
Day 103

There’s nothing like extreme stress and deadlines to keep you moving and forgetting about food completely. Yesterday was a momentous day, and the week leading up to said day has been nonstop work. I finally defended my dissertation and am done with my Ph.D program! It has been constant edits and adding last minute tables and graphs for day now. I woke up this morning and though, “now what?” I have spent so much of the last year and a half spending any extra time I had on my dissertation, that now I don’t know what to do when my son is with his father. I gotta go out and meet more friends!

So the deed is done. With the frenetic pace of the week I would be up until 3am or 4am and snack a little off the diet. For example, you are expected to bring snacks of some sort to the “defense” in order to…I don’t even know what! Thank the board for showing up? Lulling them into a warm, happy sugar coma so they are more motivated to sign off on your paperwork? Not sure. Regardless, I brought cookies and petite fours (cuz the holiday turkey ones looked so darn cute). Naturally, in a fit of panic in the middle of the night before the defense I ate one or two. Hard to say now. I was in a haze. But in the days preceding the presentation, I would forget to eat. Either way, I am avoiding weighing myself until I am back on a regular schedule for a few days.

Give me a few days to get back on track and then I can post again with (hopefully) some better news about progress.