I do not know why I went past what I should have eaten yesterday evening. I do know that I paid for it on the bathroom scale this morning. What I was hoping would be the day that I hit that milestone – dropping below the terrible mark – I instead gained a pound.
Welcome to Day 1000 folks… to anyone who does not believe that weight loss has to be a life-long struggle, I bring you the fourth digit of my journey.
I was hoping that my weight would finally dip back below that dreaded number today… no such luck. Tomorrow the odometer changes from three- to four-digits. Hopefully I will be able to celebrate that very small but important re-milestone then.
My weight dropped another pound this morning, bringing me back to exactly the evil mark that I swore I would never hit again. I did not expect to drop below it today, but it would be nice if I could do so tomorrow or Wednesday.
I am still having trouble falling asleep, but once I do fall asleep I am sleeping pretty well. I might consider taking a sleeping pill this evening… but that is a pretty drastic measure for me, and one that I would not do lightly.
Today is Canadian Thanksgiving, and I have a lot to be thankful for. I miss my wife, but I will see her in less than a week. I am going to spend the afternoon at a buddy’s house in Grimsby smoking cigars… an unofficial Lodge herf.
Have a great day folks!
I am still not sleeping nearly as well as I would like, but sometimes I wonder how accurate the scores on my fitness watch are. I trust it completely for my walking and heart rate, but whether my sleep score is correct? I’m not sure. Yes, I think I could have slept a little better last night, but a sleep score of 69? Hmph. I did have trouble falling asleep last night… I was in bed by 9:00pm, but could not fall asleep until I decided, at midnight, to get up and take a shower. I know I saw 12:30am on my clock, but I do not think I saw 1:00am. According to my fitness watch app: ‘You slept long enough, but not well enough to bring your stress levels down overnight. You might feel higher stress or fatigue today.’ I do not know that I feel stress or fatigue, but I will try to get a good night’s sleep tonight.
After a disastrous week of gaining weight (about 8 lbs.) I am glad that my weight dropped significantly once again this morning. I am down over 5.5 lbs. in two days… after gaining nearly 7 lbs. in under a week. I should attribute the last two days of my weight dropping to Yom Kippur; let’s see how it looks tomorrow.
Speaking of tomorrow, it is Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. To honour that, when I went shopping yesterday, I bought a smoked turkey leg. This is always a dangerous buy because of the extremely high sodium content in smoked turkey, but I decided to take the chance. Hopefully it will not hurt me too badly, and if it does then it will be from water retention and should be gone within a couple of days.
No, I do not have any Thanksgiving plans this year. My friends who traditionally invite me every year decided to spend the weekend camping, and most of my other friends are either away, or else serving ham. I am neither upset nor lonely for this… growing up in my family, Thanksgiving was never a big deal for my family so while I am always happy to spend it with friends, tomorrow will really just be another day for me. I think back to where I was a year ago – Thanksgiving fell on October 9th, which means that it was just two days after the October 7 attacks in Israel. I put on the happy face to spend that Sunday with my godson and goddaughter (and their parents and grandparents), but there was nothing happy in my world. I was waiting in earnest for a call that would never come recalling me to active duty. It is had to believe it has been a year already, and what a horrible year it has been on so many fronts. My weight is 60 lbs. heavier than it was a year ago; the roller coaster of my personal relationships (owing chiefly to the massacre) felt like a free-fall abyss for much too long, and while I am relieved that they survived… the last year has been fraught with far too much pain. I have wept for every one of our hostages in Gaza as well as for those Israeli soldiers who have fallen in the war. I have spent the year in a red-hot rage over the worldwide hatred and vitriol spread against my people, proving once again that the only socially acceptable form of racism is against Jews. With every false accusation spread and every protester shouting for Israel to accept an unconditional cease fire (at best) to the death and destruction of our nation and all Jews (at worst) I want to scream and lash out… but I cannot because if I do the useful idiots (Hamas’ term, not mine) will accuse me of aggression and violence. How is it that people who have never set foot in my country can hate us so much? How is it that they do not understand that they would be welcomed in Israel, but they would be executed in the streets of Gaza just for being who they are… and yet they call us genocidal oppressors.
The weather has turned. These last couple of days I have been wearing my jacket out, whether to take Her Floofness for her walks or to sit on the balcony with my cigar. Autumn has arrived in Canada and while Leslie is jealous, she is so from the heat of Texas; I know that Canadian autumn leads all too quickly to Canadian winters! With that said, I am flying down to see her a week from today, and I will spend two weeks in her warmth of her embrace, and in the warmth of the Texas October. If you cannot tell from the previous paragraph, I think I need Leslie’s warm embrace now more than ever. Going through this alone very often leads me to despair… and I cannot let it influence my eating this week.
Have a great day folks!
Yom Kippur. The Day of Atonement. May we all have an easy fast and be inscribed into the Book of Life.
Since the fast did not begin until after dinner last night there is no weight loss from it just yet… but the fact that my weight was up a ridiculous amount since Sunday meant that there was a lot of low-hanging fruit to shed; the numbers on the bathroom scale are still disgustingly high this morning, but there was a significant drop from yesterday. It is still well above that disgusting and depressing mark that I hate to mention, but at least it is closer to that mark than it was.
Speaking of fruit, I was bad yesterday which turned out to be good. I will explain: I drove to Hamilton to spend a couple of hours with my buddy Lyle yesterday, and en route I stopped and picked up some dried apricots. Dried fruits are extremely high in sugar, and therefore a bad idea for anyone on any diet, especially a keto diet. On the other hand, apricots are, to quote one website I found, ‘may promote gut health, and are high in fibre.’ This is the polite way of saying ‘they are going to make you poop… a lot.’ Last night I had a very good bowel movement, and I had another this morning. Whether it was because of the apricots or not I do not know, but between the two I am not surprised that my weight dropped so significantly this morning.
Other than the dried fruit, I ate pretty normally yesterday. I had my omelette and a roll for breakfast, chicken with egg rolls for lunch, and chicken with salad for dinner… with a challah roll. I actually bought two challah rolls and will break the fast this evening with the second one. I am also going to have to run to the store because I do not have anything to prepare for dinner… but that’s not the worst thing in the world.
It is 10:15am and I am already hungry. I will try to not eat until sundown, but I did brush my teeth, I did take my meds, and I will smoke a couple of cigars on the balcony. These are all violations of the strict rules of the fast, but I am going to do my best to not eat or drink (except for the water required for my meds). I took the Floof out for her walk this morning, but it is my intention to not exert any more energy than necessary until after sunset when I can eat. I hope that I can stick to it… I will do my best.
Yom Kippur is meant to be a day of reflection, so I am going to add something else here. On Wednesday I will write my Day 1000 entry into this journal, and what a wild ride it has been. While I am much slimmer than I was 1000 days ago, I have slipped terribly this last year. I would like to drop back below ‘that disgusting and horrible mark’ by Wednesday, and I would like to continue to lose weight to get back to where I was a year ago. I have had a few false starts so far, where I have made some progress… and then lost it all. I hope that this one can be the one. While hope is not a strategy, I will put in the effort to succeed.
Have a great day folks!
My weight did not drop from yesterday to this morning… nor did it go up. It is disgustingly up from before my trip, but at least it did not go higher today. This evening, we begin the fast of Yom Kippur… the Day of Atonement. I hope that a day without eating will help.
I was right… and I don’t want to talk about it. I was absolutely disgusted by the numbers on the bathroom scale this morning.
I know that when I step onto the bathroom scale tomorrow morning it is going to be bad. I am dreading what the number says, but all I can do is plan to eat better and smarter once I am home. In the meantime I have one more day on the road to face, and I will do my best to eat better.
I already wrote that I ate bagels and cream cheese for breakfast yesterday. For lunch I ate a small hamburger with some nachos and guacamole. Throughout the afternoon I snacked on an assortment of nuts and dried fruits from a melange that my client and her daughter were having, but I do not think I did too badly with those.
Dinner. Sigh. I ate better than I had the previous evening, but that is not difficult. My host wanted to eat at Olive Garden. I ordered the soup and salad and breadsticks. I ate an entire bowl of the salad (huge bowl, but not awful), two bowls of minestrone soup, and two breadsticks. I suppose I did not actually do too bad, but I made the mistake of not asking for them to go light on the dressing.
This morning my host went out to get bagels again. had they not got them with lox (smoked salmon) and cream cheese then I could have resisted. As it stands I am pleased with myself for not eating more than one of them… and for eating slightly less cheese for having shared it with the dog.
This morning I have a couple of hours of work to do before heading to the airport. The airport in Portland is not huge, but as with every other North American airport will have myriad ways for me to falter in my eating. I just have to be careful. My connection in Philadelphia is extremely short and I am not going to have the time to eat anything… unless I miss the connection which is a real possibility. I am crossing my fingers that I do not.
Dinner will be at home! I am not picking HRF Princess Sophie up until tomorrow evening so I will not be forced to walk. I will try to get some walking in at the airport once I am through the security checkpoint.
Tomorrow things will be back to normal! Phew. I used to love traveling for work. Now? Well, maybe less so.
Have a great day folks!
When I travel for work it is hard to eat well, especially when you must eat where you are taken. Lunch was a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup at LaGuardia. Dinner last night was a Chinese buffet where my options were either deep fried or very unkosher. I opted of course for the former. I do not think I overate, but I am sure I gained weight nonetheless.
Breakfast this morning was either cake or bagels. While the cake looked delicious, I opted for the smarter choice… a lesser of two evils, but I’ll take the win.
What will the rest of the day bring? I don’t know… but I will try to be reasonable in my choices… at least as reasonable as I can.
I will fly home tomorrow knowing that my weight will be up a bit… but not as much as it might have been.
After a disastrous night Sunday, I slept like a log last night. Phew!
Have a great day folks!
I tossed and turned almost all night. I turned over and saw the clock strike 3:00am. The next thing I remember was opening my eyes and it was nearly 6:30am… It was not even close; I was going to miss my flight. I got onto the phone with American Airlines and they told me that they could book me a ticket for nearly USD$700… wow. Or, the very nice agent (Hunter) told me, if I showed up at the airport within two hours of my original flight, they could book me on stand-by. I ran.
G-d was looking down on me. While I was worried that I would arrive at the airport to find hundreds of people in line, I got there at 7:38am (7:00am flight). I found a parking spot right next to the door within seconds. I walked into the terminal and there was no line! The agent was able to get me onto the next flight (10:50am), so I would arrive in Portland at 3:15pm instead of around noon. Remember I said at the outset that He was looking down on me? I received a notification that the 7:00am flight was delayed. As I sat in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection screening area, I received a notification that I would have missed my connection in New York. In the end I would have landed at my destination on the same flight as I will… and I finally got nearly four hours of sleep.
My usual morning routine this morning was obviously thrown into chaos. While I did not move my bowels, I did step quickly onto the bathroom scale. My weight was up slightly, but within the margin that had I woke up at the usual time and successfully vacated my bowels I would likely be the same as yesterday if not an ounce or two down. I am satisfied with that. I do not know what Portland will bring, but I hope that if I do gain a bit that it is not too much.
It is 10:40am and I am sitting on the airplane ready to take off… as soon as they close the doors. Let me try to tether m laptop and publish now. Have a great day folks!
