What I need now is a good heart attack

11/22/09

It has been months since I last posted and about as long since I have taken my health seriously. But I'll start with the good. During my last doctor appointment, which was sometime this late summer/fall (August or September, I think), the doctor said that due to the amount of weight I had lost, and more importantly, my A1C result, I no longer needed to take my blood sugar at all and he would not need to see me for another year. I don't remember exactly what the reading was, but I think 5.4 or so and I think it has to be over 6.0 to be considered in the diabetic range.

Unfortunately, that positive news seemed to be all I needed to completely abandon any semblence of healthy eating and resume my previous habits of eating whatever I wanted without regard to how I felt or how it made me feel afterward. I resumed eating until I felt miserably full, snacking late into the night and consuming all the sweets I could. Even as I felt my pants getting tighter and tighter, I continued on this course, knowing that I was headed back to the same weight at which I had started, and probably surpassing even that to try and get back to the all time high something close to 260 pounds. I had reached a low, I think, of 218 pounds at some point and I felt it all coming back on. Yet, as bad as it made me feel, I seemed powerless to stop it. I seemed to be waiting, for what, I'm not sure. Some times I think I was waiting for the inevitable heart attack that must surely come and which would, finally, be the thing that would cause the miraculous turn around in my attitude that seemed to be necessary. Instead, I just felt worse every day. Full all the time, constipated, mad at myself, knowing that I had failed yet again. And I keep going. For a while after I stopped the blog, stopped weighing myself and stopped tracking what I ate, I at least pretended to still care. I didn't snack like I used to, at least all the time. I wasn't eating like a crazy man until I was stuffed. I put some limits on being out of control. But as the weeks past and I got through the doctor's appointment, bolded it seems by the good news, all control was gone. I THOUGHT about what I was doing, and then did it anyway, time and time again. In October, I traveled for business and so had to pull out some clothes that I don't typically wear, slacks instead of the usual jeans. These were pants I had bought in the late spring or early summer when things were at their best. But one pair was slightly loose even then and the others had a stetch waist. It wasn't a struggle to get them on, but as they day wore on, they felt tighter and tighter. By the end of the day, I could barely get in the hotel room before taking them off and it was like being freed from some menial torture. That was confirmation of what I already knew from the occasional weigh in over the past few months; it was all coming back. Then as November came on, the belt I had bought when the old one got too big started to feel tight, even on the last hole. But I knew I still had the old belt and I continued my same behaviors.

This morning, I weighed myself for the first time in weeks. Over 236 pounds. I started last January at 242 pounds and had gotten down to 218. 25 pounds lost and 18 of them are back, all within a year. Almost all the effort put in from January to May lost. I'm scared that I may never be able to truly change my lifestyle and live a healthy life.

I remember feeling better just a few short months ago. That I felt better phyisically I assume, but truthfully that seems fairly minor and I can't even really say it for sure. But mentally and emotionally? That I remember. I felt like I was doing something good, that I was more in control of my life and that I was good. Not lately. Lately I have felt like a failure and that last spring was just a fluke, a fad and I will never be able to sustain it. I will always be fat and out of shape, winded by a run up the stairs. I was proud of myself and I hadn't been that in a very long time, and now it is fading away just as quickly as it came.

So I've got a new plan and I fear that it is destined to fail again, but what else can I do? I'm trying to come up with something that is more sustainable, that will weather the upcoming holidays and their focus on eating lots of unhealthy food. I understand that diets don't work and that I somehow need to change ME, change what I want and the choices I make every day, every hour. But I'm not sure it is possible. The last few months I've been thinking that maybe I'll just always be fat, will never 'do what I need to do', but instead, indulge what I want to do as soon as I want to do it. Ignore the little voice that tells me what I'm doing is wrong, that it hurts me and barely feels good even while I'm doing it.

But fortunately, (or unfortunately-because I haven't hit that 'bottom' that I seem to think I need) there is some small part of me that doesn't quite believe it. Some part that thinks I do have what it takes to make the change, to live the life I've always wanted and to finally, let go of feeling bad and start to feel good again. Its work, every day and every meal and every hour and sometimes every minute. It's decisions every day that seem little or that I try to make seem little, but each one of them is really a big decision trying to hide out. Its a battle between the little voices; the one that says that 'it doesn't matter' and the one that says it does matter, it matters alot and those little battles add up for either the good side or the bad. For a while, the good side was winning more of those little battles than it was losing, and so direction of the war had changed for a time. But lately, there have been few if any victories for that little voice and the direction had very clearly changed back to the direction it had been going for many years. Now that little course change seems more like a little bump in the road.

I had been shooting for a goal, and was on a timeline and I think that both of those things can be useful tools in a weight loss and healthy lifestyle plan. And I knew, at some level that while I had those goals in mind, I would never really 'win'. I would always have to keep exercising, keep eating right or I would slide back to where I started and probably worse. But somehow, it still seems like I was thinking of the whole thing as something I had to do to get to a certain point, that though I knew it wasn't true, somehow I could still win. I don't know if that went in to my failure this summer or whether that is just my mind trying to find a reason, or whether maybe I never will be able to sustain the healthy lifestyle I crave. But somehow, I have got to understand that I am trying to make a permanent change. That stopping, even for a day is surrender to the bad voice. Taking a day off for a holiday is the same as taking the months off that I have since June. I need to understand that if I really make this my lifestyle, I won't WANT to take off even a day, because that means I'm doing something that I really don't want and I will never be able to sustain that. Maybe through will power and goals and whatever else, I could sustain it for even more than the four months I did this year, but I wouldn't be able to sustain it for ever. I'm either choosing to make this my new life, or I'm just playing at something I think I should do to please something outside of me.

Yet, the nature of my personality is that I need to have a plan. Even if the plan is flawed, I KNOW I have no hope without having a plan. And what I was doing WAS working as long as I did it. So here it is.

• Weigh in 1/week. The ups and downs of a daily weigh in were hurtful sometimes. It was depressing to be working hard and for it not to show some days, or for it to go down one day and up the next. By doing it only once/week, I should see at least some loss each time I weigh in, and I think it will be frequently enough that I will anticipate it and look forward to it to help maintain my drive.
• Track calories for everything I eat. I need to understand what I'm eating and how many calories at a detailed level. This helps me to stay on track, to have the occasional indulgence and make up for it in another meal.
• Exercise Daily, starting with walking/jogging and adding strenght training soon. It has to be every day, no skipping.
• Writing at least 3 times/week. I need to be really thinking about the change I want to make, talking to myself about how I feel, what I'm doing and the progress I make and challenges I'm having. Writing forces me to really think about it and not avoid the difficult thoughts.
• Have a goal. This is the one I'm most scared of right now. I feel somehow that there may be danger in this because it seems so short term and that once I reach the goal, I may think I can stop. Or that if I get close, I can relax. Yet everything I have been taught is that you can't get anywhere without setting a goal. Perhaps the goal should not be weight, but something else? Is it something like running a marathon, or having exercised every day for a year? I'm not sure. So for now, I will think about what the goal should be. The more I think about it, the more I beleive that the goal should not be a weight. That isn't what I really want, what I want is to live a healthier lifestyle, but how do you set a goal around that?

This is something I need to think about and work out in the next few days.

Land of the Lost

It’s 5/18 and as I pull up my weight and calorie trackers, it’s been 20 days since the last time they were opened.  It’s been 39 days since my low weight and I have added almost 4 ½ pounds back since then.  It no longer matters what was going on at the time, whether I was at mom and dad’s for Easter, traveling for business or what.  The only relevant fact is that I made a conscious decision to stop caring.  I made the decision not to exercise and I made the even worse decision to eat pretty much what I wanted whenever I wanted and to continue to eat after I was full and right before bed time.  I completely gave up on living a healthy lifestyle in favor of indulging whatever it is that gets pleasure out of that kind of behavior.  And the fact is I really don’t know what it is.  I don’t feel good after doing it.  I don’t like that feeling of being so full I’m uncomfortable.  What I guess I do like is that feeling when it is going in my mouth.  To taste that sweet, fatty, greasy food coming into my mouth, chewing it and that feeling right before it hits my stomach.  I guess I also like the anticipation of getting to eat all that food, as much as I want and all the flavors I want.

 

Ok, so that is enough of beating on myself.  The only relevant question now is, what next?  I’m heading into another week of business travel.  I know the hotel I am staying at has a treadmill and nothing else.  I know I am going to be working late hours and it will be difficult to eat a healthy diet.  So what am I going to do about it?  Or do I even care?

 

Yes, I care.  Yes, I want to lose weight, but I’m also figuring out that I feel better on a daily, even hourly basis when I am eating right and exercising.  I’ll even admit that most of that is ego driven, just being able to think about what I’m doing, making the right decisions makes me feel better, completely outside of the physical benefits of a healthier lifestyle.  But there are also physical benefits.  Biggest of all is just not feeling full.  Not being miserably full so that all I want to do is lay down and take a nap.  And that’s the thing about beer too.  I can’t really have more than 1 without feeling full and being ready for a nap.  Especially during the day.  Not to mention the 150-200 calories each one adds to the meal. 

 

So, what can I do?  What will I do?  The good news is that since I’ll be there late, I can probably get away with coming in a little later.  That means I don’t have to get up real early and can work out a little later after getting up later.  I’ll have my Starbucks latte and oatmeal for breakfast, maybe I can even find a banana there, or better yet, go to the store.  I can still buy the frozen lunches and eat those for lunch and then the biggest problem is always dinner.  I like taking advantage of being on someone else’s budget and having a nice big, relaxing dinner after working all day.  The advantage to working so late is that those places have often stopped serving by the time I get back, so then what?  Is it frozen food again for dinner?  That limits the calories and also takes away the opportunity for beer or other mixed drinks, not with diet pop.  Is that the answer?  It’s the best one I can think of for now. 

IT’S SO EASY

It has been 18 days since I last counted my calories or worked out. That was 4/9, the day before we went to mom and dad’s for Easter. I knew it would be a tough weekend, but I turned it into something much worse than that. We left on a Friday, and though I had planned to get up and work out that day, I don’t think I did. I don’t remember for sure, but am about 95% sure I didn’t. I find that when I try to think about it, my memory gets hazy, like I’m trying to think through fog. Anyway, I went out that night and drank a lot of beer and ate bad food (cheese balls, hamburger and pizza at midnight). I tried to do better the next day but then we went to monicles for dinner and I ate way too much pizza. The next day was Eastern dinner and I took moderate portions to begin with (only 1 roll) but then kept going back and ended up eating 3 rolls, more ham and two deserts. The next day on the way home, we stopped and ate pork tenderloins and I had some really bad jalapeno poppers. Then more crap at home. The next day, it was off to La Crosse for three nights where I didn’t work out there either and ate pretty much whatever I wanted and drank a couple beers each night. Back home for daddy/daughter breakfast and from there I was on a mission to gain all the weight back. I started indulging those cravings for bad food, we ate out a lot and I came home and had snacks right before bed time. I still did good for breakfast and lunch, but from there, it was anything goes. Once, I even bought two candy bars and ate them on the way home from Benders to get milk. That confirmed that I was really in trouble, but I still didn’t do anything about it. And to make it easier on myself, I didn’t keep track of my calories the entire time.

I was starting to give up. I didn’t get near the scale and knew that it was going to say I had gained some back, how much I didn’t want to know. More important than that was how I was feeling about myself and the progress I had made. I was giving it all back, giving it away to the fat person who didn’t care, who only thought about those moments of putting food in my mouth and how yummy it was. I knew it was bad, knew it was the wrong thing to do, but I just didn’t stop it. Until now. It’s 7:04 and I did my bootcamp work out this morning after getting up 1 hour ago. It was hard and there were moments when I wanted to stop, but most of the time, I knew I was doing good again, that I was doing the right thing now. Next, it will be getting back on the wagon on food and eating the way I should again.

Net loss, or gain in this situation, is 1.63 pounds. Not bad considering all I’ve done to wreck my progress in the last 18 days. I’m lucky that I was able to stop it after only that much back sliding and I’ve learned a lesson. You can’t take a day off. You can’t stop counting the calories no matter what. You can’t stop weighing no matter what. You can’t stop exercising no matter what. It is SO EASY for one day to turn into 2 and 2 days into a week and a week into two weeks, or 18 days. It would be SO EASY to fall back into the same routine as before, eating not just whatever I want, but continuing to eat, even when I don’t want to anymore. Trying to make myself feel better with food when what I know it is doing is making me feel worse. Not just worse over the long haul, but worse right that moment, as soon as I swollow whatever sweet things was in my mouth. And for that bad feeling to hang on until the next day, where I try again to feel better by eating something else that I know I shouldn’t. It is almost like a sickness, a mental breakdown that keeps doing the same bad thing expecting it to be good, but knowing even as I’m doing it that it won’t and that it makes things worse, a little worse each time.

Back on Track

Back on Track
It’s been nearly a whole month since I last wrote for the blog. Much has transpired in that time; not all of it good. For the last 7 days, I have exercised every day; all of us it using ‘The Biggest Loser’ videos. I’m doing the Bob’s ‘Boot Camp’ level 1 except 1 day I added ‘Weight Loss Yoga’ in to get started. That run of exercise was after about two weeks of not doing ANY exercise. During that time I also got into the bad habit of not tracking my calories as timely; sometimes having to do an entire day the next day. While I tried to account for everything I ate, I figure it is inevitable that I forgot at least a few things. Inasmuch as I didn’t forget food, my calories stayed pretty good. The first week of March I averaged 1759/day and the next two weeks it was between 1900-2000. I was still motivated to lose weight and I did a pretty good job of eating right, but I’d lost the motivation to exercise.

It happened a week after first doing ‘biggest loser’ videos and stopping what I had been doing on the treadmill and with free weights. I’d resisted using the videos before because I was afraid to change what had already been working and which I had a pretty good routine with. I feared that changing would lead me to losing the will to keep at it. And either because it was a good instinct, or a self fulfilling prophesy, that is exactly what happened.

But I felt guilty about it every day. And eventually I started getting the head aches again, which had slowly gone away when I had started exercising in January. I thought back when I started that exercise would make them go away, but I assumed it would be immediate. That the head aches were stress induced and so a workout would remove that stress. When that didn’t happen, I was a little discouraged, but kept at it. Gradually I got them less and only when I started getting them again a week or 2 ago did I realize that it had been some weeks since I’d last had one.

The first week I didn’t do any exercise, I still managed to lose 1.8 pounds. Considering that the previous week (with exercise) I had only lost 0.4 pounds, that was a victory. Then last week, after two weeks of not exercising, reality set in and I actually gained back a pound I’d lost. That was the wake up call. The progress I’d made in the previous 50 days could all be lost very quickly. So, last Sunday, I got back on the wagon and started up again. And what do you know, the head aches went away within a couple days of starting and I didn’t feel guilty every day any more.

The other decision I made last week was to change my daily average calorie goal from 2000 to 1800. 2000 was actually pretty easy to do and I wanted to challenge myself a little after the previous two weeks of back-tracking and I figured it would also maintain, if not accelerate my weight loss. I did really well with it and came in this week with an average of 1738/day. And I am confident that I counted everything I ate too, because I got back to tracking what I ate during the day and not going to bed without ensuring that entire day was logged. The result? I lost 4 pounds this past week and finally surpassed the 20 pound mark (21.4 to be exact). That felt really good. This was also the first week since I started that I had done all 7 days with exercise.

I decided to post an updated picture, I think I can see a little difference in my face; not so puffy as before. Can’t really tell if my stomach is any smaller in this picture, but I think it probably is.

A milestone and a changing relationship with food

Today starts the 6th week of the new me. A little scary to say that since it assumes that I won’t just stop doing this at some point and gain back all the weight I’ve lost and more. But there is a confidence this time, or maybe a calmness that I’ve not had before when I’ve made other attempts to lose weight, eat better and exercise more. Especially in the last week, when I chose not to exercise as many days as I did choose to exercise. Yes, I was concerned, but I wasn’t in a panic that I was blowing it again. I am a little worried about being too relaxed about it and actually stopping, but I haven’t had that self loathing that usually accompanies a lapse in either eating well or exercising. And I’ve certainly had lapses in the eating department. At least once a week, for one meal, I’m just ignoring the diet completely and eating whatever I want; almost always because we have gone out to eat. But as I told Mindy today, as long as I can focus on the weekly average of calories, I think I should still be OK.

I hit what feels like a big milestone this week, even with exercising less. I’ve now lost over 16 pounds as of my last weigh in yesterday. Getting down under 230 was going to be a nice thing to see and I was concerned since I had not exercised as much if I would lose anything, much less get down to below 230. The previous week had been a tough one when I lost only 0.6 pounds, but this week I lost 5.6 pounds! Pretty amazing, but there was something else that was different this week; for the first time I came in under 2000 calories per day on average. 1609.13 to be exact and I feel pretty good that I tracked all my calories and it isn’t just an artifact of ‘lost’ calories that were consumed but not counted. So anyway, having lost 15 pounds feels pretty good and I’m looking forward to the next big number, which in my mind will be 20. At 2 pounds/week, that would take until April 4, but if I my current per week weight loss rate was sustained, I would hit it some time next week. I’ll take anything in between at this point and though I can’t quite figure out the logic of how/when my weight is coming off, I feel pretty confident that it will continue coming off fairly quickly for a while yet as long as I stay under 2K calories/day on average and exercise at least 5 time/week. I’d like to keep it at 6 just to be safe.

One thing that I though about early on is my changing relationship to food. What has come as a bit of a surprise to me is that I’m enjoying eating now more than I did before. There are multiple reasons. The most obvious and, in my mind anyway, most banal is that I’m more hungry now when I sit down to eat than I was most times before. I’d known before from the occasional missed meal or extreme physical workout how good food could be when I was really hungry, but I’m experiencing that almost every day now. To be sure, sometimes I get tired of grilled chicken and steamed vegetables, but even that is much more enjoyable than it would have been before. More philosophically, I’m feeling better about WHAT I’m eating and don’t have this guilt every time I sit down to a meal. I didn’t really realize it before, but I guess I knew somewhere inside me that I was doing my body harm just about every time I sat down to a meal and it was eating away (sorry) at me more than I realized. Finally, I’m ENJOYING and appreciating the food I eat so much more now. It brings home that something that you have too much of loses its value and ceases to be something about which you care about any longer. When I was eating all the time, and knew that I would be eating a bunch more after dinner, I didn’t really give my dinner, as I was eating it, too much thought. It was just what I ‘had’ to eat in order to feel justified in eating the chips, cookies, donuts, crackers and whatever else as soon as Camryn went to bed. And that made me feel guilty as well. I was waiting for her to go to bed so I could indulge myself in all the junk that I either went out to the local grocery store to buy after putting her to bed, or what happened to be left over from the previous night when I’d gotten two or three things to choose from.

The biggest difference though is in sweets. I have always had a weakness for sweets and it was a given that I would have some every day. Now, it is only a couple times/week and when I do have them, I really enjoy them. I actually sit down with a cookie and a glass of milk or cup of tea and enjoy it. I actually think about how it tastes and how good it is. Its so much different than sitting down in front of the TV with 3-4 cookies which I eat in a few bites without hardly noticing. It helps me to appreciate and enjoy it so much more than before.

Housekeeping

I’m new to the blogging world, although I’ve created web sites more or less from scratch before. That was back a few years before anyone had ever heard of a blog and the web site software, while pretty easy was still a long way from today. I just don’t have time to keep up with the latest software and I wasn’t much of a designer anyway.
At first I wasn’t that wild about blogger.com and my spouse mentioned that she like wordpress. I decided to try it out since I couldn’t figure out how to make blogger allow me to post spreadsheets or other files on the blog. So I abandon my blog on blogger.com and kept it on wordpress for a couple weeks. While wordpress does seem to be a little more flexible, I didn’t like the interface very well and I wasn’t that wild about the themes either. So I’m back to blogger.com. I made the decision to come back when I discovered Google Apps and figured out I could publish my spreadsheets with Google Apps and then link to them via blogger.com. So, I pasted the posts that originally were on wordpress back here and have made the wordpress version inaccessible. Yes, I’m a recovering geek. My wife might say not so recovered

Progress (Started 2/8/09 and finished on 2/11/09)

End of Week 2, 235.6 pounds, 6.4 pounds lost
I weighed yesterday morning; looking forward to what the scale would say. I’d been diligent in tracking what I ate, avoiding late night snacking and eating healthy, or at least low cal snacks when I did snack during the day. I felt pretty confident that I would have lost at least a couple pounds. When the scale said 235.6, I was pretty disappointed. I thought that I had weighed in one day during the week and was down to 235.0, though I didn’t write it down so can’t be sure. Consequently, I thought that week over week I had actually gained a few ounces. I couldn’t believe it. I weighed again to be sure. Same result exactly. As it turns out, I’d weighed 236.4 the previous week so I lost 7/8ths of a pound. Not what I was looking for after losing over 5 pounds the first week, but I knew that wasn’t sustainable. And I’ve still lost over 3 pounds a week for the first two weeks so that’s really good. But I am concerned that it slowed down so quickly. I wonder if I need to curb my calories even more. So, I put all the daily calorie counts in a spreadsheet so I can start tracking calories on a weekly and average daily basis to make sure I’m staying on track. Week 1 was 14075 total calories for an average of 2010 calories and 15092 in week 2 for an average 2156. So an extra 150 calories per day on average. Was that the difference between losing 5 pounds and 1? I don’t know.

Exercise has been going pretty well; I’ve done 6 of 7 days each week so I feel pretty good about that part. A few days ago, I changed from two three pound dumb bells to my free weights and am now using two 9 pound bars/weights. There are some exercises with that weight that are pretty easy at 10 reps and some that become difficult toward the end, so I’m probably going to need to bring up some of the other weights and start using the long bar and additional weight for those exercises that aren’t hard to do.


So, now it is three days later and what a difference a few days can make. I think it was the next day or something crazy that I weighed myself again and I was down to 230. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve since weighed myself about every day, though I’m not writing it down and it’s been any where from 232 to 234; but the good news is that I’m still losing weight.

Since tracking my daily caloric intake on the spreadsheet, I’ve been more diligent about trying to keep my intake under 2000/day. This week is at 1904 so far so I’m feeling pretty good about that. I know I was eating less the first two weeks than when I started, but I’m really trying hard to keep it under 2000 now. I had one day at over 2400 and another over 2100 and then somehow had a day at 1295, but as I do this more, I think I’ll get better at staying closer to the goal.

I’ve been pretty hit or miss on getting up to do my exercising first thing in the morning; most days in the last week have probably been in the evening either right before or right after putting the girls to bed. It’s not ideal, but I am having a hard time getting to bed at 10 which I need to if I’m going to feel rested at 6am the next day to exercise. I also notice I’m much more motivated when I’m awake in the evenings and tend to walk at a faster speed on the treadmill. The important thing is that I do it and I have still missed just two days in the 19 days since I started. I’m looking forward to this weekend’s weigh in and think it is time for another picture. I really want to be able to see the progression when I get down to my goal weight. One more cool thing this week, I found that I had to move to my last belt loop hole. In another month or so, I’m going to need to get a new belt, I hope.