Filed under: General Whining, Nutrition | Tags: ate way too much, not very proud of myself
Boy it’s always something – ya know?
Pulled my back muscle, feet swollen with arthritis, ankles tender, knees hurting… all from being a little too active over the weekend (well, and at the gym a few days ago).
I was glad to get back to work today where I could get some rest. Haha.
Weekends are crazy now that the warm weather is here – I’m always moving, doing, working, but not really planning my nutrition…
Then it hits me – BAM – and I am wiped out because I have no fuel in me. Suddenly I want to tear people’s heads off for simply telling me they are out of Diet Mountain Dew. So in panic I reach for whatever is there – and if you are in a place where there is Diet Mountain Dew, you are in a place where the nutritional choices are not good. That’s right – the C-store/gas station!
Well I found myself there twice in that condition as I mixed fuel for yard implements and filled up two cars going here and there on Saturday. No I didn’t have the web with me to count calories. No I don’t even remember all that I ate – and I’m almost certain that I don’t want to.
So no record, no gym this morning. Feels like I’m starting over again.
When I can focus – really focus on what I’m doing it goes really well. But I only seem to be able to do that for a few days at best and life happens again. Dangit!
Filed under: General Whining, Thoughts and Observations, Weighing In | Tags: depressed, hopeless, sad, this isn't working and it will take me forever to lose this stupid weight
I have to admit, I’ve judged my fellow human beings harshly.
I’ve seen many people have their inner plumbing altered in one way or another in order to lose weight. My thoughts have been harsh – “just man up and get some self-control and stop putting stuff in your mouth” I think. The weight comes off, everyone tells them how great they look. But in my mind they’ve cheated. Taken the easy way out.
Now I think I might understand.
Now I really really want to lose this. I’m so tired of feeling crappy.
I had a business trip to San Francisco last week. My time there, at this conference my company sponsors, is pretty intense. I have to stay in these expensive hotels where food is expensive, and it’s questionable whether my company will reimburse me. The conference provides food as part of the deal, but often it’s hard for me to get over to the convention center at the right times to get the food.
This all ends in me not eating very much. I’m on my feet constantly, hauling stuff around, interviewing people and recording people and the event with still images, and I’m focused. For about 4 days straight I am completely creatively focused on what I am doing.
The week before the conference I was very good at sticking to my two shake, one meal, one healthy snack regimen.
So when I came home and saw the scale was fixed at the gym, I was looking forward to a lower number, to seeing how much weight working out, sticking to my regimen, and spending a week on my feet with very little food (comparatively) would translate to weight loss.
My weight was the same. I hadn’t even lost one pound. Man that’s depressing to type, to admit to the world (or all three of you who read this).
So now we’re in April, three and a half months into the year where I’m going to lose 140 pounds. I’ve lost 8. At that rate it will take me 4.4 years to lose the weight.
But it’s not even that. I lost 8 pounds in one week – then life happened I guess. It hasn’t been a slow and steady progression, it’s been one stellar week and then nothing.
And I suppose that’s what the real challenge is here. If I could go to a ranch somewhere and just focus on getting my habits fixed, fixing my relationship with food, I think I could lose the weight. I have no faith that I would be able to keep it off once life started back up for reals again.
I have people in my life tell me that I should feel good, that 8 pounds is great. I have a hard time seeing it that way.
So now I start to understand the mentality of those that go in for surgery, who go in to have parts of them removed, or their plumbing re-plumbed so they can keep eating whatever they want and the body just doesn’t absorb it. I can see how after years of “trying” I could come to the conclusion that surgery is the only way out.
As I sit here now, I don’t really know what to do next. There’s canisters of shake mix in my pantry, but I have no motivation to replace meals with them. All those shakes I’ve gagged down (there are recipes that make it less nasty, but they rarely tasted good to me) and I haven’t lost much. My body just doesn’t seem to buy the fact that a drink is a meal – I still want to chew something. So I do.
Back to those habits.
So I have a hard time thinking that this approach is going to work for me.
I know I could sit down and devise a plan of what to eat in the whole food realm, working out every day, eating lots of raw and whole foods – I know what to do…
But then life will happen. I’ll get busy, I’ll try to squeeze in some interviews for my People Story Network after work, I’ll take a freelance gig to help someone out, I’ll get motivated by some creative vision at work and work late for a couple of nights – and there I’ll be out in the world with my body completely out of food, nothing around me but highly processed, highly sugared food…
And I’ll stay up so late working that getting up at 6:00 am to workout won’t happen…
And the wheels come off the track and there I’ll be… in front of my computer blogging about how hard it is.
So how do I do this?
Filed under: General Whining
So no real progress. I am getting better, but so slowly it’s very discouraging.
I’m looking forward to the time when my weight loss can move back to center stage as the focus of my life.
Filed under: General Whining
Massive head cold for a week now – fever, aches, pain, you know…
I still drink shakes just about everyday because they make me feel good, but only for a while. When I’m this sick I just eat when my body hurts, and that seems to be a lot.
So the scales at the doctors office tell me my weight starts with a 4 again, I haven’t been to the gym in a long time so I can’t tell you what the “real” scale says…
Just wanted to check in and let you know that I’m still completely motivated, just too sick to do much about it. I get up, work, go home, go to bed. Fun.
And don’t get me started on the medical system… Maybe I should start another blog. It’s craziness. Lots of really nice people doing the best they can in a system that is completely broken…
Filed under: General Whining
Something happened. I wish I could tell you what it is.
I just lost all motivation this week. I’m clinging onto the plan with my fingernails, but I think I’m gaining weight again…
First of all I feel terrible. Exhausted, achey, and all the time. My joints hurt, blah blah blah. “Suck it up, feel the pain and do it anyway” is what I think when I turn my alarm off and go back to sleep. And the fevers are killing me!
All night long freezing like I might not ever be warm again, then throwing the blankets off 10 minutes later. All night long. It produces spectacular dreams – that I forget very soon after awaking. Maybe I should do another blog about the dreams my fever induces?
I know, I know. Go to the doctor. I did. He fired me. He was very nice about it. He said he’d run every test that he could think of, they all have come back negative, and he wouldn’t be offended if I went to get a second opinion. See? Fired.
The real problem is eating helps. Today right before lunch I was seriously thinking of packing it in for the day and coming home and going back to bed. But a burrito at Barbacoa (so good!) and I was back in the saddle – an apple and an orange kept me feeling pretty good through the afternoon, but by the time I got home…
And of course there’s a can of peanuts sitting out – so I eat a handful and feel better for a while longer…
Now here’s the really hard part…
I love making video – I’ve done it ever so long. Animation, special effects, re-lighting scenes, love it! I don’t get to do nearly enough of that kind of work at my job, so I freelance. The place I freelance is Metropolis.
I had an office in Metropolis for 10 years. We had the feeling that if a client was coming in to pay $150 – $300/hr (depending on the room they were in) we should be very nice to them. Food = nice. So there were jars of candy bars, cupboards of snack, a cooler full of drinks… get the picture?
When I work I work very hard to tell the computer what I want it to do, then I “render”. This is a process where the computer goes through my work and creates video out of it, frame by frame. Sometimes a render is 5 minutes, sometimes it’s 12 hours. It’s those 15 minute ones that have killed me. Fifteen minutes is just long enough to be bored, just long enough to run and get a treat of some kind. So my conditioning, for ten years, is when I’m at Metropolis – I eat.
So I ended up at Metropolis last night, far away from my Isagenix shake for the evening. Of course they bring in pizza. I opt for healthy crackers (whole grain) and look for a bottle of water. Nope. Metropolis doesn’t buy bottled water any more. So to drink I have to walk to the end of the hallway, fill up a dixie cup with one swallow of water, drink, and repeat. No water! This is not going well.
Well, I ended up being there for 6 hours. Crackers and sips of water only last so long, and soon it turned into pizza and soda. I drank the real soda because it’s SO much better for you…
I felt terrible driving home. I feel terrible now telling you this. I was doing so well.
So feeling crappy makes me sad. Sad makes me want to eat. Eating helps me feel a little better physically. But feeling crappy has kept me out of the gym all week – and my conditioning and lack of preparedness really got me last night.
Sigh.
I guess I just keep going. Put the wheels back on and start again…
No sleep Saturday night due to late Excendrine consumption, and no sleep last night due to – well I’m not sure. It felt like that fever again. Might be time to see the doctor again…
But that lead to me sleeping through my alarm, missing the gym, and now feeling exhausted after work so the last thing I really want to do is go to the gym…
So I wonder whether to push it, feel the pain and do it anyway like the manly man that I am. Or to listen to my aching body and take it easy.
One week of weight loss is fun, I’d love to continue those high numbers – hard to do that without the gym.
Oh the dilemma…
18 months ago my ears started making a sound…
Well, ok, my ears don’t make a sound that YOU can hear, but I can. It started like that sound that you hear when the pressure builds up when you’re driving up a mountain, or flying… but it just got louder. I went to get my hearing checked, hearing is great, I can hear the entire range of tones.
But everything in my world now has this white noise in the background. My ability to hear conversations in crowds, or places with lots of ambient noise has really been affected.
So last night I’m on the aspartame web site link that Christine had sent me (http://www.sweetpoison.com/aspartame-side-effects.html) and it says that everything that I’m experiencing with my hearing has been linked to artificial sweeteners. Are. you. kidding me?
So I’m mad. I’m mad that so much of this is being consumed in our society. It’s bad enough that I’m fat and having issues around all that, but then I believe the marketing that drinking a drink with no calories will be a good way to satisfy my sweet tooth and help me lose weight (where did I get that impression? it’s not really the marketing message now, but it’s what was in my head) and it causes numbness in my feet and makes me lose my hearing? I’m angry. I cry foul.
I’ve been away from Diet Coke for about 2 weeks now – I keep the last can I drank in my cup holder in my car. I’m revolted by it. I can feel that chemical taste and the burn of the carbonic acid in my mouth when I look at it. I want to burn that disgust deep into my psyche so I never go back there again. That can has kind of become one of my spoils of this war…
I hope my body can cleanse the effect of this away. I guess we’ll see in time.
If it ends up I’m just going deaf from old age and loud music, I’ll apologize to Diet Coke. But we’re still broken up for good.
I was pretty sure that my body was going to have some issues with what I was doing with my nutrition. I was not disappointed…
Headaches:
Coming off of Diet Coke was brutal. Probably 8 days straight with a splitting headache. I tried drinking a couple of swallows of DC to alleviate it, but it tasted so terrible to me I didn’t want to do it. I found Excedrine helped on the very worst days. Mostly I just toughed it out. I knew I was paying a consequence for my actions, and I was smarter than my dumb body.
Also in this category I need to tell you about my migraines. I would get them pretty frequently, and every Sunday I could count on one. Eye fluttering, sensitivity to light, nauseous, you know, the fun kinds. Since I have been on the program – no migraines! I get headaches, but they are a different kind, and so much easier to live life with.
The other thing I *think* I’m noticing is that when I eat processed sugar, I’m getting these headaches in my forehead. I’ll keep track of this in the coming days and see if that’s really what’s happening.
Fevers
At first whenever I drank anything from Isagenix, I would get really hot. Well, my face and head would get really hot. I would have my wife check and I was hot to the touch, but not running a fever according to the thermometer.
Then for a while when ever I ate anything it would happen.
As I type now I can feel it, I just had chicken parmesan, green beans, white rice, and a salad about an hour ago – oh, and a cupcake with no frosting. I wonder if it’s the sugar that’s doing it…
It’s not too uncomfortable, I chalk it up to my body releasing toxins through this process and/or trying to talk me into going back to my old ways by throwing a fit like some two year old. Not buying it.
One night it turned into a raging fever with sweats and chills all night long – crazy cool dreams though. I’m not concerned enough to go see the doctor, I’ll keep you apprised as I keep going.
Arthritis
In the past when I’ve worked out for extended periods (30 minutes is extended when you’re fat) the next day has been unbearable. My ankles and knees and feet being so sore I could barely walk. I was willing to go through that this time to get to healthy, but much to my surprise…
It’s not happening. I just went downstairs and back up here in my house, and I could do it without holding the handrail. This is huge. I was in so much pain before when I tried to exercise, and now it’s not there at all. I have focused more on the bike this time, but there’s something else different. I couldn’t be happier that this part is better than I expected.
Digestion
All systems are go. Without being too graphic let me just say that my digestion has not worked this well for, well for 15 years that I can think of.
Sleep
Sleep like a baby for the most part, wake up before the alarm ready to go.
The exception to this is when I take Excedrin late at night. In the old days with my DC consumption way up, I could take Excedrin anytime I wanted – no big deal. Now, it’s a bid deal. Spent a sleepless night last night due to mis-timed consumption of these pills.
I named this “Body Revolts” but really, the upsides are so much better than the downsides. Hey this blogging thing is teaching me stuff!
Doug Losing Weight 