Losing a part of me

Today is the first day of a very long and grueling week, all of which I am very excited about. I love teaching, and I especially love that as a contractor who ‘eats what he kills,’ my dance card is filling up nicely for the next little while. Knowing that my daytime class today starts shortly, and that my evening class follows immediately after the culmination of the early class and continues to 9:30pm, I was in bed at a reasonable hour last night, my alarm set for 7:00am, ready to face the very long day well-rested. What happens then when you cannot sleep? I fell asleep just fine, but my eyes popped open around 3:45am, and for love or money I could not fall back into slumber. When I finally gave up on sleep (for the short term), I decided to go through my phone’s picture library from the past three years. I am very good at taking lots of pictures, and because I was notified recently by Apple that my cloud storage was full, I even went through them a few weeks ago and deleted hundreds (if not thousands) of pictures that were just not needed. In the middle of the night, my mission was to add a few mew pictures to my Favourites folder. It turns out that meant nearly two hundred pictures of Leslie, several of HRF Princess Sophie, and maybe 5-10 of friends and others. By the time I finally got back off to sleep (around 5:15am) that folder had ballooned from 18 pictures to 230. I broke my general rule and took another melatonin gummy, and finally closed my eyes again… and even though I did not sleep through to my alarm, that extra 90 minutes of sleep was important. I feel that I can now face the day.

Yesterday evening I told Leslie that after two days at the same weight, I was really looking forward to seeing the numbers on the bathroom scale drop this morning. She told me that if my weight stayed the same, I am still winning. While we had a minor misunderstanding over the homonym lose, I agreed with her that staying where I was would not be a loss. I am glad we had that conversation, because guess what I weighed when I stepped onto the bathroom scale this morning? If you guessed exactly what I weighed yesterday and the day before, then you win the prize! I did not drop below 285 (see my psychology rant from yesterday… I originally wrote 385), but I did not gain. I will stay on track again today, and hopefully tomorrow I will break the plateau. If not, Leslie is right… as frustrating as it might be, it is nowhere near as bad as that plateau just above the 300-pounds mark. I will also mention that today was the third straight morning that I was unsuccessful moving my bowels… that is not uncommon while on my full-fast program, but I do hope to end that streak tomorrow.

My plans for today are to stay on track, and with my schedule I doubt I will have any opportunity not to. While I have three 15-minute breaks throughout the day, I am supposed to have a 1-hour lunch break, but I have an important appointment that will take up most of that time. As such, the order of the day is coffee with meal replacements… and nothing more.

My diet buddy came over for a cuppa yesterday, and we had a great talk. It really is great that both of us have stayed (mostly) on track. I had my modified program, and she had her surgery, but a year later and we are both doing great. I really hope our friendship continues to grow even after we have both achieved our goals. We discussed yesterday how difficult it is to know that we will always have to be mindful of what we eat and will never be able to eat like we once did again. It is sad, but an alcoholic cannot have just one drink… for us it will be more difficult because we will still have to eat, just differently. I told her all about the Chinese meal that I planned out beforehand and enjoyed in Dallas, and that gave us both a little hope that while we cannot eat like we once did, at least we can eat and enjoy it. I think one of the big tricks will be for us to switch from eating to enjoy the experience to eating in order to fuel our much healthier bodies. That will not be an easy change for either of us to make… we both love food so much! She was telling me about a brunch she enjoyed that included eggs benedict on avocado toast, and while it sounded delicious, it also sounded dangerous. She enjoyed it but got right back on track. Maybe she is further ahead with the psychology than I am.

One more thing that we discussed was getting rid of our bigger clothes, which led to a much more important discussion. She told me that she had a colleague who was larger, and she was going to give all of her larger clothes to. I asked her how close she was to that colleague, and she told me not at all. I then advised her not to do it. I reminded her how personal our weight loss is, and that giving her the clothes can be seen in several ways, but almost all of those ways would include having to share her journey with yet one more person… and each extra person you share with takes a toll. That is before we even hear from them their experiences and struggles, and why what we are doing is wrong, but their way is better. She agreed with me and will be donating all of those clothes to charity. The colleague’s loss will be the charity’s gain.

I want to clarify one thing about my occasional sleep issues. A year ago, I had trouble sleeping because I could not get comfortable with the massive bulk of my body. That is not the case now… but sometimes I simply cannot sleep. I know that the meds I take for ADHD can affect that, which is why I take that pill first thing in the morning, which my doctor assured me is the best way to make sure that it does not affect it too much. There have been several nights over the past few months when I had trouble sleeping, but that was usually due to stress and anxiety caused by factors that were (at the time) beyond my control, but which were still very real. Last night? There is no reason, other than sometimes people have trouble sleeping!

Have a great day folks!