Obessing about food

The more I track my food, the more I think about it. I watch my caloric totals go up and up. Some days I'm within my goal (around 1700 in order to lose weight) and then some days it's 2500. Like today. Sometimes it seems like being stuck in studio until 2am can actually help me, because I'm not 10 steps away from a fully stocked fridge. The more I think about food, the more I think more about it.

On my own

Cooking for uno. I learned the hard way last summer that cooking for one not only sometimes entails leftovers, but also can result in produce gone bad. Now that I'm officially "on my own" but still in school full time and haven't quite landed a part time job, I'm living off the loans. (Actually, even when I do land the job, I'll still be living off those loans...sigh.) So for now, to my benefit, I've become increasingly aware of how much food costs. This results in me eating a little less, thankfully.

"Heavy"

After watching the first episode of the documentary series "Heavy", I became even more aware of my weight. I'm delusioned into thinking that I'm that overweight, but I'm still not in the healthy range. So immediately after my friend left when the episode finished, I went out for a run.
Mind you, I do not like running. To be more precise, running does not like me. About 5 minutes into running, my lungs kick in (or my vocal cord dysfunction, as my doctor seems to think I have instead...you decide which is easier to say) and I start sucking in for air that just doesn't come. So I do a pathetic walk/run combo. Today (at midnight, around my neighborhood) I ran/walked for approximately...10 minutes.
I'm not that out of shape, I can swim or bike or row for a lot longer than that, but my lungs just can't handle running.
No excuses, though. The point is: I am wildly out of shape. The most exercise I've done in the last 4 months is walk the dog around the park.
The worst part of it all is that after I exercise to get ride of all the calories I've already eaten that day, I immediately feel that I can reward myself with food. Somehow, in my twisted brain, exercising to lose weight = I get to eat all the calories back again. I need to find a non-food reward for myself. Currently after a workout I'm just focusing on drinking lots of water and hopefully that will crave my oral fixation and fill my stomach, for the moment.
Until later in the witching hour when my salt tooth strikes...dun dun dun.

Goals for Creativity and a Green-Filled Life

-Work more on my inspiration book (pasted clips of magazines in a sketchbook) and online list of links that inspire me
-Paint
-Paint in my journal (an altered book, I'm currently working in a copy of Gulliver's Travels)
-make seed bombs
-get indoor plants for my apartment at school
-do and write tutorials for DIY and repurposed crafts

Goals for Cooking

Some of my considerations for food in a fast-paced, high-stress life:
-Cost: I'm going straight from undergrad to graduate school, so I not only don't have any money saved up from working, but also haven't paid off any of my loans yet. Needless to say, I'm dead broke.
-Healthiness: I want to eat correctly, and not just eat ramen every night to save a buck (which I'm tempted to do nonetheless). Ideally, I won't need to take supplemental vitamins because I'll be eating all my nutrients.
-Low-calorie: My weight goal is about 25 pounds lighter than what I currently weigh. I would love to say I can go to the gym 2 hours every day, but that's just not realistic.
-Limited time: I enjoy cooking, but again, I can't spend 2 hours making my own home-brewed stews and sauces and bread and all that. I'm going to have about 20 minutes to cook dinner, max.

Essentially, I want food that is filling, healthy, cheap, quick, and low- or medium-calorie. (Is this even possible??)

Solutions, off the top of my head:
-Buy packaged food in bulk. I have no problem sucking up my ego and shopping at WalMart to save a few dollars. Costco is preferable.
-Learn to estimate what I will actually cook and eat myself, since I'm only cooking for 1. I've found in the past that it takes awhile for me to realize how much of a head of lettuce I'll eat before the lettuce goes bad. So, buy fresh food in smaller amounts.
-On the thread of losing weight and all that good stuff, I need to control my emotional and compulsive eating habits. I eat when I'm bored, hungry, full, thinking of a taste I crave, lonely, feeling fat (yes, I realize how silly that is), tired, reading, working, right after working out, late at night, secretly...so basically, I eat. Eating is how I try to solve problems and that clearly creates more problems for me. So, solution: get therapy in Atlanta to figure out the root of this cycle and how to stop it.
-Actually start working out. Since I'll have a few exercise machines in the basement of my apartment building, that should help, since I usually get the urge to work out late at night when it's too late to go to the gym. Though I won't have time to work out all the time, I think a goal of 4 times a week for about 45 minutes is a good goal. Also, I'm buying a bike in about a month, so that should help motivate me to bike places instead of drive.
-Cook in bulk. This will cut down on my cost and my time cooking during the week.