Trying to keep up with my crazy body + sort the goals out

I weighed in this morning out of curiosity—since I knew I didn’t gain 5lbs in a week, plus I’ve been feeling better and more energetic, and hungrier—like I’m adapting to the big eating increase? And yikes—I’m right back to where I was before the gain. Huh??! I didn’t gain at ALL? Come on, at a week of 500-1000+ I should be up at least a pound, right? Grr.
Why does my body fight me so hard on this? Surely it wouldn’t mind having some more meat on it, even if still thin, right?

However, while I intend to continue working on getting my eating habits and intake to the level I need to both gain and support my training at it’s best, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the system I’ve got going on here for my August nutrition goals. In my quest to really take this to the extreme bigtime I got so fixated on the details and lost tough with the actual goal behind the criteria: building peak physical potential and health.
Instead, I’ve been more or less creating myself a new unhealthy lifestyle. I was actually doing quite well staying healthy and improving performance, and while much stands to be improved yet, dedicating my life to eating 4000 calories [not that that still isn’t what I need or will make a way to get in] isn’t giving me the improvements I want. Instead, its leading to decrease in my physical state and lifequality—not to mention starting and unhealthy lifestyle of binging all night. My runs have suffered, my anxiety has increased, and I’ve lost focus on my real goals [the whole point of making nutrition criteria] in this obsession with my 4000 calories.

That said, I do need a system or I won’t get anywhere. I might be okay, but if I really want to improve my lifestyle, habits, and have the kind of diet to back up my elite athlete dreams, I’m going to have to train it. Just eating what I feel like or am currently motivated for won’t consistently give me what I need to really put on the weight and have a consitently increasing intake: even the higher intake days balance with being more full, and my weight just sticks where it’s at. I am a classic example of the “setpoint weight” theory as well as one of “old habits die hard.”

I have a few ideas how I might set up my plan—but it can’t all revolve around some one exact #. Even if I do use counting calories to get it in, I’m going back to the weekly average so I can work it around other things going on in my life. I think I am also gong to have to set daily minimums again, because otherwise I end up about the same 2000ish calories by my 9pm dinner, and I want to build my calories from that primetime point [before 9pm!]—which is where it’s hardest for me to do. I might set up some contingencies/reinforcement to help me with the time management aspect as well as serve as motivation—like I can’t have internet time or more coffee until I’m over a minimum! This way if I have to run to work before I’m done with lunch, so be it—that’s life. But I can’t just get lazy and dink my days away because I’m “full for now.”
In other words, I can flex for my real life, but not just stick to old habits because that’s what I’m used to—I want better!

If I want to go that route [training by calorie counts] I hope to have such a “retraining system” in action by next week. First though, I want to start a different “training” step. I’m going to give a sort of exchange system another try. I’ve tried it before, and ended up getting way to frustrated with the limits of trying to figure out exact protein, carb, fat, etc. values. I felt it was too much thinking and obsessing. The thing is, if I want to retrain balance and diet makeup in addition to totals anyways [see goals in previous entry] this might be a better way to do it.
My system would be more flexible than your typical exchange system. I’d have a total exchanges, with ranges of carbs, proteins [milk counts as a protein], and fat to fill the total exchanges with. Fruit and veggies are unlimited [Even someone not trying to gain shouldn’t have a quota on those or something screwy is going on!], but I would track my totals just to get an overall idea of how much I’m eating and keep my goals of getting the nutrients I need in, in addition to my core-calorie groups.
With this sort of exchange system I don’t have to work my life around getting an exact type of food in every day—just as long as I get all the exchanges in with a breakdown in the target ranges I would keep my total intake at a level where it needs to be [but not necessarily one exact number] plus have a more appropriate makeup. I feel like I can do the latter with basic overall goals {I know how much protein I need and what a good balanced meal looks like], but until I really train and practice that it won’t happen.
This is just the first step—once trained and practiced I can go to more freedom with a look at the big picture, being used to the kind of balance that provides me with the best results.

A note about timing:
My day off work really made me realize that a lot of my struggles with getting calories [at least the EXTRA calories—I can have an above average meal, just struggling to get the 4000-level breakdown early on] truly does come down to the time constraints of my life. Allowed to just wolf down my post-run cereal to my hearts content, continue with protein and whatever else until full, and then grab something else to eat whenever I wanted [vs. the restrictions on the job] I had no problem working with my appetite to eat a lot more sooner.