245 (still, but whatever)...

Well, the stall continues.  Honestly, I'm really not all that concerned.  I've been dealing with these same 4 lbs or so for the past month.  At least I'm not gaining.


Yeah, it is a bit frustrating, or disappointing, or what-have-you, but as I said above, I'm not gaining.  I suspect that I may be able to hit my October goal of 240 (I think that was the number) by Oct 31st, if only because I'm as broke as the economy for the next few weeks, so I won't be able to afford to over-do anything food-wise.

I do have an idea of what the "problem" is, and it's me.  Lack of real substantial exercise is the majority of it, combined with my continuing problem with eating at night.  Those two things are really only mitigated by one factor: ME.  I have the ability to go get my exercycle back from an ex, but by permission only.  I don't have any real way to transport it, and therein lies the problem.  I'd use a Zipcar, but I don't have the $30 it'd cost for the 2 hours it'd take to go get it.  It'll just have to wait.

Walking in the cold is a real issue for me.  My legs tighten (even with a warm-up), I get all wobbly and tremory, and then--at that point--I'm sorta a danger to myself.  I really want the bike here, so I can just work out regardless of the weather.  Admittedly, it makes me feel a bit trapped at times, but I manage.  I suspect that I'd manage even better while still losing weight, though.

The eating at night thing is a combo issue.  At night, I do get bored and a touch lonely when a partner's not here with me.  Combine that with my herbal medication that I need at night for my spasticity that gives me the classic "munchies" and I have a hard time not eating.  But there ARE things I can do to try and address or confront this issue.  I just sorta haven't lately.  I've been sliding back into that "whatever" place.  Not helpful, I know, but I'm trying to be honest about it.  I guess it's a bit of burn-out.  I've been at this since... May?  Frankly, for me to be burning out now is an accomplishment in and of itself.  Typically, I'd have given up/in much earlier.  Take the victories where you can, Fat Man.

Part of it is also that I'm trying to be gentle with myself, not unlike with zazen/meditation.  If I flipped out every time a thought meandered through my mind while meditating, I'd have lost it years ago.  There's no point in treating yourself, or meditation, that way.  So we are taught that the best thing to respond with is "Hey, cut yourself some slack here.  This is actually kinda hard to do, even when you're GOOD at it.  You'll get no where punishing yourself."  True with zazen.  True with weight-loss.  I see that pretty clearly.

I wanted to go to GVZM's "Mindful Eating" retreat, but I don't have the cash.  I'd like to, really, but I'm still trying to get my financial pins underneath me again after the major hit the wallet took from the Wisconsin visit.  I'll do the next available one, sometime in 2011.

All in all, I still feel good about where I am.  About 50lbs lost.  Staying off.  I still have piles of work to do, but that's as it always is with anything worth the results.

243.2 (And almost all quiet on the Gallbladder front...)

First off, that number will most likely tick up a bit, as it is an "on empty" reading.

Anyway, the gallbladder's finally quieted down.  To say that I've learned my lesson about 9pm mochas is not stating it emphatically enough, to say the least.

A quick word on the shiritaki noodles:

OMFGLOWCARBPWNIES!!!!!  These things made for the BEST pho!!!  Seriously, I was stunned.  Just like rice stick.  I was pleased beyond words, and at one point, I did--in fact--tell JB "Sssssh.  I'm slurping noodles, and I don't want to spoil the moment with words."  My friend TKW educated me on preparation, and the key is shocking them with boiling water to get the funk off them.  After that, you're golden.  Before that, you're pretty sure that spoiled, rancid tuna had been involved in the manufacturing or packaging process.  CCK ran out and got them the night after my TXT review and has used them as well.  The future's bright...

243.8 (on gallbladders and [a] Dharma exercise...)

Well, I'm gonna cop to some stupid stuff here.  Last week, my dear friend TKW was here for dinner.  She biked in, and we had Ahi tuna steaks on the grill.  I started telling her about the low-carb Uber-Mocha I've devised, and we decided that it would be a great idea for me to make one... or two.  So I wound up having a mocha with her... at 9pm.

I woke up with my gallbladder trying to punch its way out of my torso -via- my rib cage.  It's done this before with coffee late at night, but I thought that since it was a low-carb version, I wouldn't get that sugar dumping thing again.  Wrong.  Anyway, it seemed to quiet down a bit later that day, and I just thought I'd try and muscle through it.

Fail.

Last night, CCK and I were headed to a zen event I was in charge of running.  We needed something to eat on the run, so we swung into the Hawthorne Fish House.  Great food, and very lightly fried--not in batter--but brown rice flour.  It's about as low-carb as you can get and still be considered a fish fry. 

Fry.

I'd totally spaced on the "fried foods" thing and ate a goodly share.

Oi!  The pain really started to hit me about an hour afterwords.  By the time we got back from the event, all I could do was make pathetic noises and grunts.  The thought of moving hurt.  On a 1-10 scale, this was easily a 7.5, and I haven't been there in a long while.  I took some medicine, including naproxen sodium and settled into a very fitful and painful sleep.

I woke up feeling considerably better today, and had no trouble working the workshop that followed.  I actually made cheese omelets for the crew this morning.  Had mine, and a pork sausage patty.  Had fish tacos for lunch.  Then about 3pm, it hit again.  This time it's about a 6.o, and naproxen is back in me.  More medicine to come.  We'll see how it goes.

But the nice thing I had happen today is that I just visited the scale, and I'm down to 243.8!  Admittedly, teh angry gallbladder is a very effective diet, but I don't think that's really it.  I have been eating, but I think the ANA is starting to work again.  They called it: if you stall, just hang in there.  Well, that is being road-tested, to be sure.

Today at the event I was "runner" for, I had a staring contest with a multi-grain cracker.  I won.  Ditto with the hummus, and the apples, and the pears, and the cookies.  But of all of them, the cracker was my greatest challenge.  I even cut up an olive ciabatta.  Not a crumb went into me.

This new strength--this internal fortitude to say 'no'--is so new to me.  At times, I wonder where it's coming from.  Is this really me doing this?  Is this really me who's now lost (depending on where I start counting) over fifty pounds?  Ten of which came off while I was on vacation?  To Wisconsin?!  And if you go from my highest weight (340) nearly a hundred pounds!?  I won't count that number, because that was way back in 2001, but I'll damn sure take the fitty.  That is a real accomplishment, and for the first time in this entire practice--this entire proccess--I'll say this:

I'm proud of myself.

Tonight, JB is coming by.  I took a carcass from a roasted chicken and cooked it with a leek, an onion, a shallot and a few other things along with star anise, cinnamon, clove, coriander seeds and all that whatnot, and will be making phở gà--or Vietnamese chicken soup--my favoirtist soup EVAH.  I'll be road-testing the Shiritaki noodles in this.  Picture and report to follow.

245-6ish (stalled, but motivated still...)

Frankly, I'm not much concerned with this stall.  I'm not gaining, and at this point, that's still encouraging.

All said and done, I feel better than I have in years.  And years.  And... well, you get the idea.

But a word or two on the stall.  I am really beginning to suspect that this is due in large part to the diuretic.  I'm looking to find some alternatives to the triamterene that I'm on.  Atkins mentions L-Taurine and Co-Enzyme Q10.  I have a feeler out to a naturopath friend of mine for more info.


I got a decent bit of walking in yesterday.  Was in desperate need of a mocha yesterday, so I walked down to the bus stop and grabbed some beans from the store.  I hadn't had breakfast, so I knew a real walk wouldn't do me well with no gas in the tank.  But that was 10 blocks of walk (five on each side of the bus).  Later in the day, I did the full boat 1.6mi round trip.  Again, I didn't really feel like it, but did it anyway.  The walking's the thing, and if I don't do it, nothing really comes off.  So I strapped on the toggs and did it.  This was more of an aerobic walk than normal, because I didn't stop at the store.  I simply walked for the sake of walking, kept going and didn't rest, so it was a good, long, continuous burn.  All said and done, that was about 2 miles of walking yesterday.

Last night my kid was here for the afternoon-evening.  I hadn't really had much to eat all day except for pork rinds and sour cream.  She was hungry and fighting a headache, so I made "white roughy" with mustard/mayo on the grill.  I probably won't be making it again due to the controversy surrounding it.  Apparently it's basa, which is not a roughy at all.  It most certainly didn't taste like roughy, but the texture was similar.  Still tasty, though.  Also made a few chicken drummies over the coals as well.

Today is kinda a big day.  It's the celebration of my hitting my 250lb goal.  CCK and I are spending the day together in a special way.  Should be fun.  And low carb.  Very low carb ;)

248-ish something (Of shoes and saving throws)...

If there was reason to suspect that the 240's aren't here to stay, three days of not seeing 250-anything about stick a fork in it.  Having said that...

I have still not really recovered from my Wisconsin trip, but it's not for lack of trying.  It is, however, from lack of sleep.

JB an I have been seeing more of each-other, which is really nice.  We just get on so well is so many places, low-carb not withstanding.  We've really been feeding off each-other lately, and I saw her Friday afternoon, when we went to pick up her boy, my little buddy QB.  We then went back to my place and made dinner and some other things.  Sunday she came over during the day, and I made chicken thighs and experimented with a country sausage gravy that--while waaaaay too salty--was really tasty over mashed cauliflower.  We then went out to karaoke (with me fulfilling a promise) and had fun.  We stayed up way the hell too late last night, and didn't get to sleep until nearly 6am.  I woke up at about 11:30am today and made us breakfast: omelets with pancetta ham, mushrooms, diced onions and cheddar cheese with bacon along side.  She was thrilled and impressed.  I was wasted tired.


She left about 2pm, and I dorked about on my laptop, trying in vain to get caught up on nothing in particular.  I was dead tired, but knew I needed to go do something.  So I ate a CarbWell bar, strapped on the Keans, and walked.  I know that the exercise is key, so I forced myself, tired as I was.  I didn't even really give myself time to think about it.  I just started by putting on the footwear.  OK, strapped in.  Might as well walk.  I was so on auto-pilot and so tired that I didn't even grab my phone, which is unheard of.


Walking down the hill from my flat, I tripped rather significantly.  I stumbled two or three steps in a row, and thought for sure I was going to wipe out in spectacular fashion, splaying myself out in a heap on someone's lawn.


But I didn't.


And this is interesting.  Yeah, credit the dice with a good saving-throw, but I immediately knew that if this had happened to me before weight-loss (hereafter refered to as simply "BWL") I most assuredly would have been pulling grass out of my mouth.  My knees would have buckled, my hips would have given out, and I'd have gone down like The Hindenblob.


I gathered myself and continued on, grateful but still tired.  I stumbled a few more times.  This was beginning to feel odd.  Yeah, I was tired, and yeah, my right foot drags due to my unsteady gate and disability, but what the hell?  I stopped at a crosswalk and looked at my feet.  I suddenly realized that my feet were too small for this particular pair of shoes now.  Well, I should say that they were too small for the way I'd been wearing them.  I never had to tighten the drawstrings on them before.  My Fred Flintstones were always kinda snug in them.  I walked a bit further, sat on a bus-stop bench, and sinched them in tight.  The walk from that point on was easier.  And safer.  And less spectacular.  Good.


I was still damn tired, and knew that I probably wouldn't do well tackling my regular 1.6mi walk, so I decided to make it a simple (and safer) 1 mile.  On my way back, I got a bit of an idea, and popped briefly into a local pet store.  I found the largest bag of dog food I could find--a 36.5lb bag--and lifted it.  I then reminded myself that I've lost 5.5 pounds more than that bag weighed.  That was how much weight I was schlepping around on my 5'8" frame.  Part of me suddenly felt a slight shame welling up inside of me.  The other part--the larger part now--didn't feel that.  It felt relief and a bit of pride.


This is working.  Finally.  It's working...

I did it! 249.8!!

(Sorry about the picture quality.)  That is a real number.

While I was on vacay in Wisconsin, I fell off the "don't weigh yourself on someone elses' scale" promise wagon, and stepped on my mom's.  It read 245!  I knew that that was not real.  Couldn't be.  But at the same time, I felt an encouragement.  I weighed less than my first goal weight on someone's scale.  For whatever reason.  Maybe it was the latitude.  Gravity may be pulling harder on me in Portland?  Who cares?  I felt energized.

I was so good while in Wisconsin.  At my mom's party, there were buns, mac and potato salad and all the carby rest of it.  There also was cake, and a ginormous birthday cookie.  I had none of it.  Didn't even really feel tempted.  My eldest sister went out of her way to make a pot of veggie something-or-other for me.  She haddn't gotten the memo about my dietary switch-back.  I was so touched, yet I couldn't eat it at all.  It was bean-potato something, so it was like a double poison.  I actually felt really badly about it.  I found out that she has done low-carb as well.  She was a nurse her whole life, and knows her medicine.  She was really encouraging, and it made me feel better about my decision, and about the food she'd made me that I couldn't enjoy.

My other sister (the middle one) had gotten the memo, and went out of her way for me in the other direction.  She'd already made a big pile of chicken with bar-b-que sauce, and when she saw a post of mine on low-carbing it, she went out, got yet more chicken, and made a slightly smaller pile of it for me specifically with no sauce.  Awesomeness.  I had three pieces of chicken, three brats, and a couple of dill pickles, some mustard, and a tiny bit of ketchup.  I felt totally satisfied.  I got to take the rest of the chicken with me, so I had some back-up food at the motel.

I stayed that night in a motel my eldest brother had rented.  They had a fridge in it.  I'd inadvertently left the no-sauce chicken with my mom, and my brother had a pile of the sauced kind in the motel-room fridge.  "Just peel the skin off" he said.  Nope.  I wasn't even inclined to open the fridge.  The following morning, after he hit the road to drive back to Arkansas, I was gathering my stuff in order to swap rooms away from the high-volume-TV-at-4am neighbor, opened the fridge and spotted--along with the sugar-coated-chicken--a huge 2lb bag of "White Mountain Trail Mix" that was full of white chocolate, dried fruit, and about ten different kinds of baked crunchy carbs.  As I was walking down to the front desk, I had to squeeze past a house-cleaning cart with a garbage bag hanging off it.  I tossed the trail mix in like a desperate junkie dumping his last bag of heroin into a toilet.  On one hand, it was kinda sad: Yes, it had come to that.  I was looking at carbohydrates like they were a drug, a poison.  But it was also very empowering, freeing and encouraging.  I was not only able to say "no" to the drug, but I was able to say "yes" to control.

In heroin recovery circles, we have a bit of a combined saying; "Third time's the charm" combined with "Never trust a junkie who's quit smack once."  This essentially speaks to the following: it's actually easier to quit a drug or addictive substance when you've bottomed out and are lying face-down in the gutter.  You're miserable, you're in pain, and you're desperate.  You'll try anything to get clean.  So you quit the junk to avoid pain.  The trouble happens when things start looking up.  You're back in control somewhat.  You feel a bit empowered as far as avoiding temptations.  Then, a little voice in your head says Ya know, we're better than we used to be at this.  Maybe we can do it again and stay in control?  Yeah, I bet we can.  So you fail.  You feel like hell.  You know you made a mistake, so you climb back on the wagon.  Then the watershed moment.  You're back in control, and then something in life goes really wrong, totally pear-shaped.  You use again out of the fear of pain and suffering, to feel that instant rush of familiar--yet false--comfort and relief.  Then you are faced with a choice: the faux relief of the anesthetized state, or the tough--yet real and honest--world of sobriety.  You choose sobriety for its own sake.  You choose it in the tough times, not merely in the good times.  You choose it for no other reason than its base honesty.  You have finally comprehended that the honesty, the truth, is what has been missing from your life this whole time.  It, and it alone, is what has been exacerbating your pain.  The avoidance of the experiencing of pain has caused you to suffer more, not less.  So you say "I want to be real.  I want to feel what's real".

I want to feel what's real.

249.8 is real.  And it feels good.

The rest of the trip was really great.  Great on so many levels.  But there was some sadness, and it was weight related.  My eldest brother, who's lost over a hundred pounds at least ten times according to him, is back up to nearly or over 300lbs again.  He has degenerative disc disease, and has virtually no discs in his entire spine that are whole anymore.  He has such a hard time moving.  He is in so much pain.  When he awoke and rolled over, he let out a groan/yelp that sounded like someone snuck into the room and was stabbing him in the face with dull forks.  It was heart-breaking.

Next, I went and had a very quality hang-out with one of my oldest and closest friends, KK.  K had always been rather thin and healthy when we were teens and young men.  But the middle-aged Wisconsin life and diet of beer and stuff-on-carbs with a side of carbs had taken its toll, and by about 2003 or so, he was up to my realm of weight.  When I saw him at my father's memorial, I barely recognized him.  This past week, we were at about the same place weight-wise.  I tried to gently encourage him to think about trying the ANA.  We made a very carb-friendly dinner: roasted chicken on the grill and mashed cauliflower with cream cheese.  It was fantastic.

The rest of the trip was full of people wanting to support me with this approach.  My old college philosophy professor, MCEP, made a great stir-fry of free-range chicken and "Chinese-uh-Vegetable" (inside joke), and did make it more challenging by making Basmati rice for he and his wife.  It was more challenging less about rice being present than because he actually knows how to properly prepare rice.  I just had extra chicken and veg, and was totally pleased.  He and his vastly-better-half had done ANA, and were beyond supportive.

My greatest weapon during the trip were my Atkins bars.  I always had them with me, so I was able to maintain energy even at kind of challenging times (most notably, the airports).  When I felt depleted, I'd have a bar, and that would sate me.  On my way home, waiting at MKE, I knew I hadn't had anything real to eat that day, so I ducked into a Chili's in my concourse just a few yards from my gate and had a Mesquite Chicken Breast salad with bacon, cheese and ranch dressing.  They serve it with BBQ sauce, which I simply didn't use, and had them skip the roasted corn relish.  I felt totally satisfied.

I got a good walk in yesterday, running to the store for a few things.  Last night, JB and I got to hang out and have dinner together with her son QB.  We had a tiny bit of a low-carb freak-out feast.  I made grilled chicken and pork loin cutlets over oak coals.  JB totally dazzled me with tuna-cakes (think "crab cakes") and this absolutely fantastic cheesecake pudding that we topped with this sugar-free chocolate fudge sauce I picked up while we were all out shopping.  We also took KK's mashed cauliflower to a new high by making it with cream- and fontina cheese and some garlic powder, whizzed up in the food processor until smooth.  It tasted all the world like mashed potatoes!!!!  We both commented to each-other how helpful, and just plain ol' nice it is to have a friend in our lives who is doing low-carb as well that you can cook with, hang out with, and both support and be supported by.

Last night, I weighed 250.6.  This morning, 249.8.

What a journey this has been...

250.6!!! WHILE ON VACATION!!!!

How do you like THAT?  Ten pounds in a week!  I will keep this brief and elaborate a bit in another post, but:

1. It was a lot easier than I thought it would be.
2. I had very little temptation, and was in total control the whole time.
3. I had plenty of energy the whole week.
4. I did get plenty of walking in.  The airports made sore of that.
5. I feel better than ever before.
6. People are really noticing now, not the least of whom is me.