Less of a Man

Well, as I mentioned in my last update, I may get a little less regular with the updates and comments…  hopefully no one was too worried when I didn’t post one last week. 

I have to admit, I really didn’t put much thought to eating well most of the last two weeks, ‘cept to say that I actively decided not to care.  Well, I’m not sure it was a decision… more of a realization, I guess, but whatever you want to call it there it was.  And it wasn’t the moment to moment “Oh, I really want this…” followed by the “Oh, wow, I feel guilty for eating that,” but I didn’t feel guilty at all.  Still don’t.  I don’t feel guilty when I go out and enjoy myself on vacation… and I don’t feel guilty for setting aside one worry of mine when I’m dealing with personal things such as I was.  I fully recognize that I probably need to figure out other ways to deal with those things, but as it was I didn’t have other tools available to me then and, well, yeah.  I ate a lot of things I wouldn’t have dreamed of.

One thing that did change, though…  I had been drinking more as we approached October 1st, but with seeing the doctor and trying out some new meds I have severely cut back on my drinking.  Mind you, I don’t think I was drinking THAT much, but my home brewed cider is about the same caloric intake as three regular beers so, yeah, it was adding up.  What blew my mind yesterday when I made it back to the meeting, though, was that I officially held even from two weeks before.  All those donuts, all that chocolate, absolutely no tracking and I held even.  Actually, I probably lost a small amount; two weeks ago, I went as “light” as I could, with no belt, no wallet, no cell phone, and only the house key and car key with me.  This week I had all of the above and was still holding even… so I at least lost the weight of those things. Considering how I was eating, and considering I’ve not been to the gym in about three weeks, I’m still a little surprised… but between having built up more muscle mass in the gym in the previous two months and cutting off the calories from the cider, I guess it was enough to hold even.

Oh, well, there was more too.  The first week on the new meds I took a half dose, per my doctor’s instructions.  Friday night I went to a full dose… and Sunday the side effects kicked in, waves of dizziness, nausea, and an odd feeling of my skin kind of crawling a little in my legs and arms.  I know that sometimes you have to adjust to the levels, so I continued taking the full dose for a week, but the side effects weren’t really getting any better… perhaps a little worse, in fact, so last night I went back down to a half dose and will call the doc tomorrow to see if I should just continue the half dose or go to something else.  Other than the side effects, my moods have improved somewhat… then again, we’re past the anniversary so perhaps that’s something right there.  I dunno.  But I suppose my eating was curtailed somewhat when I would have a wave of nausea, so that may be part of it all too I guess.

All in all, though, I’m kind of encouraged by the fact I held even in spite of my eating since my last weigh in.  I hadn’t realized just how heavy those ciders were, or what they were adding up to, I suppose…  if I cut out more of the comfort food (which I actually already have) and keep the rest the same I may go back to losing without a ton of extra effort.  We’ll see.  I did learn yesterday, though, that apparently Weight Watchers will be making some changes to their program coming up in November… I don’t know just WHAT they are, yet, but I’m interested to see what they are and perhaps they’ll help me to feel I’m starting fresh again.  Who knows?

At this point, there’ll be more updates…  I’m not quitting anything yet.  Just don’t hold your breath for them. 

Well, I did make it to the meeting this morning.  Officially by their scale, I was up 1.4lbs; not much for the pandemonium I was feeling the last three weeks.  Mind you, I left my phone, wallet, belt, and most of my keys at home, but an official weigh in is an official weigh in.    By their scale I’m at -35lbs which still isn’t bad.  I’m glad I went. 

The biggest news of the week, in my mind, falls back to the doctor’s visit on Friday however… and not just because I’m down 42lbs on my medical records.  I mentioned my issues with what seemed like an extended burn out, and the doc gave me some tests and confirmed that by that test I appear to be depressed.  It was kind of funny, actually;  he said men have a harder time of admitting when they’re depressed and wind up turning to road rage and alcohol instead of getting help;  I just commented that I have avoided the road rage but have been a little quicker to temper lately.  It was hard to argue the point on the alcohol, as that’s been a source of calorie issues for me lately too.  In any case, I’m starting Zoloft now and we’ll see if that helps.  It takes 4-6 weeks to really take effect I hear so time will tell how that goes, but I’ll keep people generally posted as to the process.

Of course, that leads right into a few other choices I’ve been debating as well.  I have decided that whether or not I quit Weight Watchers, I won’t make that decision right now if I am depressed.  When I was working the program it was working for me quite well, but I’ve just lost the motivation to really put in the effort of adding up the numbers and figuring things out.  Of course, I’ve lost a lot of other motivation as well…  if the Zoloft helps to bring back a little more zest than I might get right back into the swing of it.  If I’m still trying to just go on my own and not am not tracking in two months, I’ll probably quit Weight Watcher’s then but for now I’m going to stick with it.  I absolutely encourage anyone struggling with weight loss to try to Weight Watchers and really work it, because when you do work it then it really CAN work, but I’ve just had trouble caring about myself (or anything else) to work it lately.  If I do quit, it’s because of me and not because of the program.

I’ve also debated whether or not I really want to pursue this blog.  That TED discussion from a couple of posts ago is really resonating with me.  I have gotten a lot of fabulous feedback from the people here, both those that I’ve met through this site and others I’ve known longer who follow me here.  And it’s felt good, really good.  So good I think I have gotten a bit cocky and relaxed some on the kudos I’ve received instead of continuing to plunge forward and, frankly, even if I’ve lost over 40lbs I’m still at best between a quarter and a fifth of the way there.  So why do I often have the feeling that I’ve got this things mastered?  I know that I don’t, but I’ve lost touch with the tracking that helped me lose about ten pounds a month for the first three months I was on Weight Watchers.  I feel in some ways like some out of touch celebrity, perhaps knowing at some level that something else needs to happen but almost feeling like I’m above it, like it’ll happen without me making that effort.  That I can cheat today and be back inline tomorrow…  every day.

I won’t make any final decisions about what to do with this blog while I’m just starting a new medication and trying to figure out what that means for me.  I suspect that I’ll just throw odds and ends out here and there, however, and I don’t know that I’ll keep the same weekly update going on.  I’ll know more about the blog’s future when I know more about how my immediate future is working out…  and I guess we’ll figure that out together. 

In other quick updates; I walked a little over two miles Wednesday night, enjoying the full moon, but I did not make it to the gym.  I had my first middle of the night cramp that I’ve had in years in spite of a regular stream of bananas (and therefore potassium) and my legs have felt more more sore than they should lately…  very strange.  My clothes are still fitting as they have lately – those couple of pounds I’ve gained haven’t made much difference there.

It’s a new week next week…  and I begin titrating to new medication on it.  Wish me luck… I may need it.  :/

I mentioned last week that I was seeing the doctor today, and indeed I did.  Seems that he thinks my burn out is perhaps more than just burn out as well, and so we’re trying something for it and we’ll see how it goes.

The funny thing is the doctor said that since I was coming in for depression he wasn’t going to get on me about my weight.  I looked at him and told him I’d been losing… he looked at the chart and noticed I lost 11lbs since my last visit and 42lbs since that visit in March before I started Weight Watchers.  By that math, I HAVE lost over 10% even though the Weight Watcher scales aren’t agreeing with that.  Makes me feel a little better about the overall situation. 

Without much other comment I wanted to share this, which I found on Lanie’s blog tonight:

Makes me wonder…

A few weeks back I mentioned that the body follows the head and, so long as you keep your head in the game then things will flow, but if you’re head’s not in it then it’s going to be a struggle and not likely a pleasant one.  Well, last week the best way to put it is that my head and heart just weren’t in it.  I really didn’t track anything, and while I made some effort to have good food available to snack on as I usually do, and I did indeed snack on it, I also ate other stuff too in addition to that.

I did not make it to the WW meeting again this weekend;  I actually slept in even later than I did the past week, and didn’t actually get out of bed until after the meeting had started.  Next week I’ll set the alarm for my own accountability if nothing else…    My scale of wild inaccuracies is trending up again, though, so I expect some bad news this weekend;  even if I were to run a 5k every night this week and strictly walk the line on the program, which I don’t see happening, there’s a lot of lost ground to make up.

I suspect this is going to be a rough stretch for me, to be honest.  That’s no excuse for jumping off the wagon and waving goodbye to it with a funnel cake in hand, I know, but the road gets really bumpy and it’s easy to bump out of it this time of year.   Why do I say that?  Take a moment and look back at my family tragedy history lesson from back in May for more of a background, but those anniversaries are starting to line up.   October 1st will mark the 8th anniversary of Sullivan’s passing…  November 7th would have been his 10th birthday… December 14th is the anniversary of his original near-miss SIDS incident…  and then there’s all the mixed feelings of the holidays after having spent one at the Ronald McDonald House and knowing there’ll never be a Christmas with all three of my kids together (the youngest having been born after the middle child passed).  Christmas is better than it used to be in many ways, but it’s still a bit of a marathon to get there from here.

I suspect there are some other things going on that I’m not even sure exactly what they are (although some I do and even talked about in last week’s update)…  but I find myself falling back into my emotional eating habits really easily.  I do still have control of some of the issues I used to have, but others, well, not so much.  I still have that appointment with my doc later this week, here’s hoping he’ll have some advice.

I started this blog originally to try and hold myself accountable.   I have to say, I far prefer to write the updates where I can say I lost a few pounds than ones like these, but if there’s anything that’s kept me from just saying “Screw it” and embracing the comfort food it’s been this blog.  I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets ugly before it gets prettier… but I’m not giving up yet.  Still hitting the gym, still making most of my eating choices good ones…  *sigh*

No one ever said this was going to be easy.  Except maybe me, saying that it WAS easy in stretches… and it has been in stretches.  Time to brace for a rougher one I suppose.

It has come to my attention, somewhat by accident, that I may be missing some of the comments that people are leaving here on the site.  As most people who have commented here know, I do have some spam filtering automatically take place and when it’s not sure (which is most of the time) it asks me to verify the comment before it appears.  If it thinks it’s probably legit but might be spam, it presents it to me in a “pending” folder that’s really easy for me to sort through.  If it thinks it’s probably spam, it set it into a “spam” folder with a bunch of other junk.  I used to skim through it really quickly before deleting the messages in there, and I would occasionally find one or two in there.

Since some recent updates, however, I now cannot look at what it thinks is spam.  I know there are about 200 messages in there that have built up over the last month or two, but I have no idea if any of them are legitimate.  And I’ve thought about switching comment formats, but I kind of like this one for other reasons and I suspect the problem will fix itself in the next update.  In the meantime, however, if you posted a comment but don’t see it having been approved in a day or two, please let me know.  And how would you let me know, you ask?  Well, I’m glad you asked!  I’ve created an email account for me to use with this site, and the address is “fattiny@lessofaman.com”, but you need to take the “fat” out for it to work.  (I get enough spam from machines just filling up my comments, I really don’t need any more in email…)  If anyone feels confused, remember that the first part is just “tiny” by itself. 

So, hopefully the comment eating spam filtering hasn’t gotten you, but if it has please do let me know. 

Let’s start off by saying, yeah, it wasn’t a good week.  I’m not sure if the delayed reaction effect I talked about last week had any role in it or not… but I frankly hope it doesn’t, if only because that means this upcoming week will be even worse than the last.

To be sure, I did not go to the Weight Watcher’s meeting yesterday so I don’t have an exact weight to report a gain or loss for.  (I started the day off oversleeping, which was good in all respects except making it harder to get to the meeting.  I could have still pushed and gone, but it would have been close and I wasn’t eager to go see just how much weight I gained.)  But my Happy Fun Scale of Wild Inaccuracies is at least consistently showing its wild guesses are a few pounds above last week’s wild guesses.  Considering that Labor day weekend was a rough one (diet wise at least, was good by other measures) and Friday went to hell in a hand basket, so only three out of sevens days were really on plan, and two of the days were spectacularly off plan.

What worries me the most actually wasn’t the three days for the Labor day weekend.  Yes, calorie wise I probably had the bulk of my week’s weight gain there, but that was my conscious decision to allow myself to splurge at the ballpark on Saturday and on Labor day itself.  Friday’s blow out, however, was mostly because I really just didn’t care what I ate.

Back in one of my ‘history lessons’ I discussed some of my self destructive eating habits.  I am an emotional eater and while I’ve developed tools to deal with it and have gotten much better, there are days when I don’t give a <pick an explicative> about it.  And in a nutshell, that was Friday…  with some carry over into yesterday, although not as dramatically.  Today I’m starting out tracking again…  and here’s hoping it’ll last. 

To dig a little more into the big picture of things since this blog IS for my total fitness and not just weight loss, and to get a bit more personal than some of y’all may be comfortable with, as I may have mentioned before my wife had a seizure in late January and wasn’t legally allowed to drive in the state of Florida until July 25th.  For those six months, I was the Total Errand Boy for the house;  we’ve done a single car family before, but the single DRIVER family is a completely different ball of wax.  There was no errand for the house that I wasn’t involved in, no shopping trip too large or too small.  On top of all the other worries (what caused the seizure? will she have another one? why are we stuck with a high deductible insurance policy? how are we going to stretch out the medical expenses? etc.), it drained me more than I was realizing at the time.  After all, when you don’t have a choice but to do something you often don’t realize how much it’s taking out of you, as I learned when my son was sick.  In any case, I started Weight Watchers in the middle of it all, and it was on July 24th that I weighed in at 36 pounds down.

When my wife was able to drive again, I felt both a relief/release and I finally felt a more acute sense of burn out.  I had already started the process of backing off of obligations that I didn’t HAVE to take on when I wasn’t sure what was going on for my wife, but even when she was driving again and the doctor was happy with her maintenance plan I kept wanting to back out of things.  I just felt burned out and figured I needed a little time to recover.  It hit me on Friday that I’m still feeling like that, and perhaps even more so… and it may not be healthy for me that the feeling’s lasted for two months now.  As anyone who reads this blog can see, I’ve been happy to rationalize why I’ve chosen to not take the plan seriously for various odd reasons in the last two months, but since I have no net loss (and I’m sure a small net gain) to show for the last two months, well, something’s amiss.  I shouldn’t still be feeling burned out.

So, yeah.  I don’t have an appointment with the doc yet since this all hit me just on Friday, but I intend to set one up for sometime next week and we’ll see what his opinion is.  I thought this burn out would just go away after a little bit, but if I can get some help to get through it then why not.  I don’t know if anything he might give me would help with the weight loss itself or not, but I have to think that if I can care about it (and about taking care of myself) every day and not just most days that I’ll be better off.  We’ll see.  Wish me luck…  most then ever since I started this blog, I have a feeling I may need it.

It was an interesting week food wise…  The “program week” started with the company picnic after the last weigh in, too much pound cake on Monday, birthday cake for a co-worker on Thursday and going to Olive Garden with my family for my wife’s birthday.  It was an interesting week, but I lost about a pound and a half in spite of it all, and that was even once again getting weighed with the normal clothes and decently hydrated.  Go me!

I know I already talked about the first two temptations…  I really didn’t think I was going to be tempted with any birthday cake this week, as my wife said she wanted to skip that this year,  but, well, there I was at work being volunteered to take the biggest piece of my co-worker’s cake.  I decided to only eat about half of what I was given, however, and the rest found it’s way into the trash.    I suspect that the fact I started out working for this company always volunteering to take the big piece will keep them offering it to me, and I don’t want to just not have any cake and seem like I’m not taking part in the celebrations, but if they do give me something big there’s nothing saying I have to finish it.  I did refuse the ice cream I was offered though, so I feel pretty good about that. 

Olive Garden really wasn’t that tough of a challenge either in the end.  I knew we were going there, so I looked up the nutritional information from their web site before we went and decided on their Parmesan Crusted Bistecca.  At 16 points, it wasn’t light fare, but I could certainly budget my points for it.  (At three points per breadstick, though, I had to watch myself on that…  and I probably had more salad then I should have since it comes already with the dressing on it, but, mmmm, I do love their house salad….)  They tempted me into a glass of wine with their free sample, but I was the only one in the family who did not order a dessert.  It was a good, on-plan meal.

I made it to the gym twice;  between the Olive Garden after work one day, an open house at my son’s school I ran to after work another day, and, uh, I forget what came up the third day, I only wound up having two days after work to work out.  But work out I did, and pushed a little longer than I typically would since I knew I’d have reduced days this week.  Not a great accomplishment to get there twice, but still better than what I had been doing before.

All in all, the biggest difference is I feel like I’m getting my head back into the swing of things again and while I’m still having some days or events out there a bit more (aka the pound cake), I’m being more careful on the regular days vs. living in ‘summer mode’ and I’m seeing the benefits.  Looking back at my weight tracking, on July 3rd I had weighed in at -32.6lbs.  Yesterday, September 4th I weighed in at -36.4lbs, or less than four pounds less than where I was two months earlier.  Compared to the almost 10lbs a month I was losing the first three months, it definitely feels like things have slowed down on the one hand.  On the other hand, man, knowing the things I did over the last two months it’s a miracle I’m not 15lbs heavier, so perhaps the program has saved me 20lbs.  I know that temptations aren’t going to go away (like all the popcorn I had at the baseball game last night), but I also know if I get my mind back to it that it can come off much more quickly than it has.  What’s phenomenal to me is that I HAVE lost four pounds over the last two months and NOT felt like I’m missing out on life at all.  This program make take me five years, but nothing’s going to stop me from getting where I’m going because I’m enjoying myself on this program and won’t mind spending five or more years on it.

Oh, and while I had weighed in at -36 once before in July before a small backslide, the -36.4 is the lowest I’ve been since starting the plan.  I’m 2.1lbs away from 10% off.  This labor day weekend will have more temptations for me that I might give into as a last summer hurrah, but even if so then it is the last summer hurrah.  I don’t foresee any major “temptation holidays” coming up for a while after this and I’m getting my groove back on in the dailies so I fully expect to get back to the 10lbs/month I was at before, especially since I wasn’t really exercising before.  I’m feeling good about this!

Is it just me, or does weight gain or loss tend to follow a little behind the activities that produce it?  Last year when I was working with that nutritionist, I noticed a definite pattern that I’d notice a weight gain when I ate a whole bunch a few days AFTER the event, not usually right away.  Similarly, when cutting down on my eating it’s sometimes a few days later that I notice the differences.

The reason this comes to mind is because I weighed myself tonight after my workout and shower on the Wild and Unruly Scale of Random Fun that I have here at home.  I’ve mentioned before, I think, that I can get on this scale, have it give me a weight, get off the scale and back on it and be a few pounds different…  it’s not reliable and I simply cannot trust it to track my weight, so normally the only weights I report here are the ones I take weekly at the weight watcher’s meetings.  I do NOT really recommend anyone pay close attention to any scale on a daily basis… there are too many odd fluctuations in body rhythms to stress a daily up and down.  It’s gonna happen, just accept it and move on.  (Actually, there are really good arguments to just weigh monthly, particularly for women, so they can hit the same points in their monthly cycles and avoid those fluctuations as well.)

Tonight, the Wild and Unruly Scale of Random Fun pegged my weight at 340.7.   The lowest I had seen before this measurement was 343.? (oh, like you would remember all the decimal points for all your weigh ins!) — I know the scale swings up and down, but when I see a low swing point lower than I have in such a long time I feel fairly sure that I have lost even more.  I mean, let’s say the scale drops as much as five pounds at a weigh in — nothing I can track by regularly, but if the lowest before was 348 something that had swung down to 343, now it’s 345 swinging down to 340.

The oddest thing about this is it follows my pound cake binge yesterday.  I did get right back on the wagon today and right now, after dinner (at a point I do NOT feel hungry in the least) I still have 12 more points I’m supposed to get in to get up to my daily points level.  That may factor into tonight’s weight as well, but man it feels good to see the scale go down.  I suspect the pound cake will coming back to haunt me by week’s end with the delayed reaction weight gain I mentioned earlier, but who knows?

In a totally unrelated moment today, I got an unsolicited comment from a woman I work with today about how I must still be losing weight because I’m looking better.  Man that felt good!  It’s one thing when you say, “Yeah, I’ve lost 35 pounds” and someone comes back with “yeah, and you look good” — that just feels like you were fishing for a compliment or they wouldn’t have thought of it.  But when someone says something out of the blue…  yeah, you know they really mean it, and it really must be showing.  Felt good.  (To be sure, I usually fall in the “not noticing” category… I’ll have to make more of an effort to change that.)

So, my mission at this point…  keep today’s momentum and have a great rest of the week…  and I suspect it’ll relate to the WW scale on Saturday morning as well.  I don’t foresee any major temptations between now and then (although I do see one coming up Saturday night, heh) so we should be in good shape.  (In more ways than one in fact!)  

Yesterday was… well, not a good day for the program.

First, a little background.  For those who don’t know, I’m a professional IT geek and maintain the servers/network/PCs for a fair sized company.  Frequently people ask me about problems with their personal computers as well (since computers are what I work with), and if I can’t help them out just by giving them odd advice or such I may invite them to bring their computer in for me to work on.  This is always done by simply working on this in down time;  when dealing with viruses, for example, most of the time is spent on running scanners against the computer and it I can start the scan in a minute or two and let it run while I’m working on things for the company.  I do not guarantee any time frame as work business always comes before personal business, but it’s a quick and easy way to help out my co-workers and so far none of them have really abused it by bringing in their computers too frequently or anything, which is good.  One of my co-workers started this unofficial policy before I even started working there, and he and I both do this to help as we can.

The people who we help are, of course, often grateful that we’ve helped them and offer to pay us.  However, since the company has paid us to be there in the first place we flatly refuse any monetary payment — it just wouldn’t be right to “double dip” on the clock.  Traditionally, however, if they offer to buy us lunch we don’t argue that too much.  I mean, we have to eat anyway, right?  As far as fitness goes, these lunches do sometimes present our own challenges but generally the people buying us lunch ask us where we want to go so I can control things well enough that way.

Yesterday, however, turned out to be a little different.  The co-worker we were helping decided to make a pound cake for us.  Well, that’s not entirely correct;  it was more like a ‘several pounds’ cake;  it had been made in a big angel food cake mold and it was, well, BIG.  And, worst, it was quite possibly the best pound cake I had ever had.

Realizing the dilemma I was looking at, I offered to it the rest of our team at our Monday morning meeting.  No one there took a piece or even tried any.  I took it back to my office and made sure my co-worker tried some too…  he agreed that it was amazingly good.  We spent a while catching anyone who walked past the office and insisted that they try some of it;  we had several people claim that it was the best pound cake they’d ever had as well.  In fact, we managed to share most of the pound cake… but not before I had had four pieces and my co-worker had had three.  (Well, he might have also had four…  not entirely sure about that.)

Looking up the points for pound cake (which I can only guess are a similar recipe to what was used), weight watchers says it’s 8 points per 5″x3″x1″ slice.  Going back and thinking at my slices… ok, I might have had five slices worth if you measure by that.  So I had probably 30-40 points just in pound cake yesterday.  (There IS a reason they call it POUND cake after all, right?)

So, it’s a good thing I didn’t use many of my weekly points after the company picnic….  I had 26 weekly points left which are now gone.  I need to work in a few more activity points, but I have to say I’m ready to get right back on track today.  It’s good knowing that most of the damage was covered with the weekly points – I DID go over, yes, but it’s not like the whole program is ruined.  It’s a new day, a new chance, and I’m going to see if I can’t still take some weight off this week.  It will be a challenge to recover… but I’m up to a good challenge, how about you?