Holy moly, 90 pounds

Stepped on my scale this morning and got a nice surprise: a new low weight, 189.4. I even stepped off and back on, to confirm the number. Down 2 pounds from yesterday. This means I’ve lost 90.1 pounds and have 59.4 to go.

I don’t think I could life 90 pounds without help. How was I walking around with all that weight? The answer: not very well. I was taking the maximum dose of a couple of diabetes medications and they were barely keeping my blood sugar in good ranges. Now I’ve been able to cut out both of them. I still take blood pressure medications, but I’m going to look into eliminating those at my next doctor’s visit. We live halfway up a hill, and I have to park at the bottom and make that walk every day. At my top weight, it used to take me the longest time, and I’d have to stop a couple of times to catch my breath. At one point, a neighbor even stopped his car and asked me if I was OK. Now, I don’t run up the hill, but I can make it in pretty good time, without stopping.

I’m lucky in that the tightness of my band is exactly right. I’m in the green zone. I can eat what I need and not be ravenously hungry, as I’ve felt in the past. I’m making sure that I’m following the rules: no liquids with meals, and waiting a half-hour after eating before resuming drinking. Sometimes I’m counting the seconds until me next cup of coffee, but that’s my new reality.

I want to remember this feeling for when I’m tempted to overdo foods that get me in trouble, like chocolate. Oh, I’ll have my sugar-free mochas, but I’m deliberately walking the other way from the giant bag of Ghirardelli chocolates someone has placed atop the filing cabinets. It’s hard for me to eat just one, so I won’t eat any, at least today.

And tomorrow, if I eat one or more, the world won’t end. I’ll just have to work harder to get past it. That’s what I love about weight-loss surgery: I’m not sweating out the weekly weigh-ins that can determine how the rest of my week will be.

I hope the rest of your week is good. See you tomorrow.

Making the best of it

My daughter had her heart set on eating at The Old Spaghetti Factory last night. We used to eat there literally every Friday. You get a full meal, with salad, entrée, drink, and dessert. I was a little worried because pasta isn’t my ideal meal—may my Italian ancestors forgive me!—because of all the carbs.

Well, we started with salad, which I usually can’t handle too well. I get stuck on lettuce, of all things. I ate a bit of a salad with the creamy pesto dressing—it’s to die for. I made sure to put dressing only on parts I was going to immediately eat, and saved the rest of the salad for my guinea pigs. For my entrée, I ordered crab-stuffed ravioli in pesto-alfredo sauce. I got about 8 huge pillows of pasta and ate a couple of them. Actually, at about 1 too many and had to make a dash to the restroom. The rest will be dinner tonight. Both of us were so stuffed that we declined dessert of spumoni, and OSF has great spumoni.

The upshot is that I dropped a little weight last night. Yesterday I had a shake for breakfast—a 28g protein shake, smaller than my usual—and a half-can of chili for lunch. Greek yogurt for midafternoon snack and skinny Starbucks mocha for the drive home. Then pasta for dinner. A few mixed nuts after I got home. Now that’s a “diet” I could stay on.

I was pleased to see this morning that my fasting blood sugar was even lower, 94, than earlier this week. That tells me I’m going the right direction.

See you tomorrow.

Change is good, but it's scary

I’ve been shrinking in the oddest places.

The other day, my wedding band fell off. Just plain slipped off my finger as I let my hand dangle. I tried it on another finger, but it wouldn’t fit very well. So I’ve had to put it in a jewelry box drawer until I can find a nice chain and wear it around my neck. I plan to get it and my engagement ring resized, but I still have about 60 pounds to lose and no telling how skinny my fingers will be. I found my high school class of 1973 ring the other day and it barely fit on my little finger.

I do feel sort of naked without my wedding band. Not that I get hit on in real life. On Facebook, all the time. By guys who can’t read the word “Married” in my profile.

So why can’t my ass catch up with my fingers? I suppose if I were working out I’d have better luck down there. I type most of the day, so my fingers are probably the fittest part of my body.

I have been able to stop the last of my diabetes medications. I was taking Actos every evening. My last A1C reading a few months ago was still high, but much lower than before surgery. I’ve been waking up shaky in the morning. I stopped taking it a week ago and have been checking my blood sugar readings in the morning. I’m right around 100, which is acceptable. I do feel better in the morning, although I never wake up full of sunshine. However, after a few cups of coffee, I’m my cheerful self.

I hope you all can find your cheerful selves so easily. See you tomorrow.

Are you still thankful?

By now you’ve probably answered the dreaded “How was your Thanksgiving?” question a million times back at work. Well, how was it?

Mine was fine. I spent half the day cooking. Since we weren’t expecting guests, I didn’t start until the afternoon. It was fun, because I love to cook and I don’t get to do it too often. We had ham, so that only involved warming in the oven for 40 minutes. My daughter made cornbread muffins from a mix. I also made mashed potatoes, baked one sweet potato, steamed asparagus, made Hollandaise sauce from a mix, warmed up canned gravy, microwaved Trader Joe’s stuffing, and made sugar-free cranberry sauce from scratch.

The spread was gorgeous, but I was too hungry to take pictures. Of course, I made enough food for probably 8 people, and there were only the two of us. I had a little bit of everything and we have a ton of food left over.

After dinner, we built a bedframe with bookcase for my daughter that we bought a few weeks ago but I was too lazy to start. We got that sucker built, and except for a crucial missing part that prevented completion of one drawer, we finished.

The next morning, I had lost 2 pounds. I guess moving wood around the floor really burns the calories.

We celebrated the bed completion by buying a new dining room table at IKEA. It’s still in a couple of boxes in the hallway. We decided a round table would fit our dining area better and leave more room to move around. The table also has a built-in leaf that expands the table to an oval for more seating. Our current dining room chairs—purchased with our current table at IKEA in 1999—will still work. Maybe I’ll tackle it tonight. It’ll be my third building project in 10 days. Have Allen wrench will travel.

See you tomorrow.