Losing a part of me

Category: Cheating

  • Day 1085

    I was in front of my computer all day yesterday, but I was busy most of the day and forgot to post. My weight has crept up two pounds these last couple of days. This, despite my eating pretty smartly. I am not happy about it.

    I had to be up early this morning to drive to a doctor’s appointment in Vaughan, which for those of you not hip to the geography of the GTA is about 75km from here… and for a 9:15am appointment that meant getting up very early and bracing myself for a long drive. I am glad that I was home at a reasonable hour. I had lunch and answered some emails. Now I have to get ready to head to Grimsby for the evening. Another long day. Tonight is my Lodge’s chili night. I am not particularly looking forward to it, but a couple of the brethren told me they are preparing the chili special for my religious dietary requirements. I’ll have a reasonable helping.

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 1081

    My sleep score last night was an 85, the second highest it has been since my hip started to cause me problems. I should mention that there was one night that I did not wear my fitness watch to bed, which is odd for me, but I just forgot to put it on after I got out of the shower. In any event, I feel well rested this morning. I also feel for the first time in a week that there is marked improvement to my hip; to be clear, the improvement has nothing to do with pain medicines (although they have helped keep me somewhat sane). No, I felt real improvement before I got out of bed, which means before I took my pill. I am relieved that it seems to be on the mend. I have been extremely unhappy these last few days, even snapping at people who did not deserve it. I will apologize to them both. Now let’s hope and pray than my hip and leg continue to improve!

    What has not been improving is my weight. I have gained a tremendous amount of weight this past week, partly due to stress-eating to try to relieve the pain. That never works of course, but gaining weight does. My weight this morning is a disgusting amount over the terrible mark. I need to get back on track. Hopefully the lessening of my pain will help with that. I need to get down to a reasonable weight, and that will need to start with depriving myself of certain things. Hopefully by mid-week I will be able to exercise again, but until that is the case I cannot touch another carbohydrate, starting now.

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 1074

    I woke up this morning after a slightly better night’s sleep than the previous night; then again, with a sleep score of 48 it would have been hard to not beat it. I got into bed at a relatively early and really tired, but that did not help me sleep one bit. I tossed and turned until I finally nodded off around 2:00am. I ended up logging just shy of seven hours of sleep according to my fitness watch, and my sleep score was a 76.

    My weight stayed right where it was yesterday, which is not a bad thing considering some of the cheating I did.

    I am not sure what my plans are for the day, as I am still waiting for a friend to get back to me. Either I will smoke cigars with friends, or I will smoke cigars alone. That is the daytime. In the evening I will be with my boys to light the candles. It will be nice to see them.

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 1073

    Yesterday was my big event. A few weeks ago, at Lodge a couple of the brethren expressed interest in the Jewish festival Chanukah, and I got the idea of inviting a few of them to light candles together. When I discussed the idea with the other Jewish member of the Lodge, the idea blossomed into an evening at his house. With twenty-five people in attendance, I was excited to deliver the presentation that I put together, which turned into a seven page, fifteen-minute talk. It was very well received, and a good time was had by all.

    The host is an East-Indian Jew, and so that was the theme of the food. Before everyone else arrived, he showed me which dishes I would be able to eat (butter chicken made with cashew butter so that it was kosher), some of which came home with me as leftovers. Everything was absolutely delicious, and I felt like I was bursting at the seams. The only concession I made to being cognizant of my diet was opting to cut a sufganiya (traditional jelly doughnut) in half rather than eating a whole one.

    I was convinced that this morning I would not see any progress on the bathroom scale, despite the disastrous number I saw yesterday. No, I was quite pleased by the drop. I did not lose all of the four pounds I had gained the previous day, but I did shed most of it. I am still above the terrible mark, but not nearly as badly as it could have been… or was yesterday.

    My original plan was to resume my program on the first of January. This morning my friends who had invited me for New Years Eve informed me they had to cancel, and so I will be staying home and enjoying a cigar date with my wife to ring in 2025. This means that with regards to food overindulgence, my holidays are over. Well, almost… tomorrow evening I will spend with my sons, and I expect they will have some goodies to share. But that’s it. I have some leftovers in the fridge, but that’s it. I can breathe a sigh of relief, and hopefully get back on track a bit earlier.

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 1066

    The last couple of days I have not been doing very well, but I am trying to pick myself up and get back on track. It is hard… especially around the holidays. I wish I was with my wife. She and I got amazing news this week, but that is for the future, and we are still apart this holiday season.

    I am going to see a buddy early this afternoon for a cigar and a chat. Hopefully that will cheer me up some.

  • Day 1063

    This morning I saw the largest single-day weight increase that I can remember, It was a kick in the gut, and a definite reminder that I enjoyed last night’s Christmas dinner a little too much. I do better today… but just the fact that I will not be eating cookies for dessert means I will be doing better than yesterday. I fell off the wagon hard yesterday, but it was a single day fall and today I am getting right back onto the horse. I do not know if I will be exercising today, but aside from breakfast (which is behind me) I will be eating smart today.

    Add to the food, my steps-goal streak came to an end yesterday (as I knew that it would). My new best is seventeen days, and sometime in the future I am sure I will try to top that. That attempt will not start today, but that does not mean that I will not try to exercise. I just hope that my knee holds up.

    My next huge challenge is next week when I go to my friends’ house for Christmas dinner. Until then, I have to be good… and get back down below the terrible mark that I shot past this morning.

    Have a great day, folks.

  • Day 1057

    My weight rebounded a bit following a bit of a cheat day yesterday, but I am not terribly upset about it. I had a piece of veal for lunch with some eggrolls and salad. In the evening, I had another salad (even though I should not have). Despite running 4km on the treadmill (and walking one more kilometre) my weight was up by about a pound.

    My steps-goal streak is now at 12 days, and once again I strategically hit my goal yesterday and then STOPPED. Garmin had set my goal for the day at 11,030 and I ended the day with 11,100. Today’s goal is 11,050 steps, and I will work to reach that but to not surpass it by too much… again. The aim is to hit the goal without increasing tomorrow’s goal by too much. It is freezing cold out today (the windchill when I walked Princess Sophie this morning was -19° and the wind was cutting into the exposed skin of my face like glass shards. If only I could walk Her Floofness on the treadmill, life would be a little more comfortable the next few days. Alas, that is not an option… but that is where most of my steps will come from!

    Let’s see… my sleep score was 82, and when I woke up my body battery was 77. That is a good sign that what I have been doing is working. I will keep at it. I do want to lose more weight, but for the month of December (that most awful of months for those trying to lose weight) I am relieved that I have gotten below the 300 lbs. mark and will fight to stay below that horrible mark for the entire month. That means I will be turning down some invitations, and others I will accept but will not indulge. I believe I wrote the other day that I was going to eat pizza at Ryan’s but owing to the fact that the delivery took two hours I escaped without that particular cheat. There are some foods I can eat in moderation… pizza and wings are probably two that I should not even try.

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 1050

    For a few months I was one of those people who had a piece of exercise equipment that was used mostly for hanging clothes on. I never wanted to be one of those people. When I first bought the treadmill (which I brought home January 1 of this year) I used it quite a bit… and then stopped. For part of the time that I was not using it I was walking outside because the weather was warmer, but for a lot of the time I was just not walking. While I do miss the warmer weather, I am glad that I am back on track with my treadmill. I will continue to walk until I feel that I am able to jog, and then I will continue to jog. I suspect that by that point the winter will be ebbing, but we shall see. It will be nice to be able to walk or even jog outside. I have currently logged about 145km on the treadmill and have found it to be a good way to stay on track when it would be so easy to fall off. Yes, I have plenty of ways to fall without the treadmill… I took advantage (sic!) of several of those ways yesterday.

    (By the way… welcome to Page 1000 of my journal! It took nearly three years to do, and I am not nearly at my goal… but I will keep at it until I am.)

    I am not sure what put the idea of canned salmon into my head, but I had it for a few days. I had told Leslie that while I might do it, I would rather do it for lunch so that I would have the opportunity to burn it off before bed. Yesterday I made the salmon salad that I had been craving. It was delicious, but I vowed that I would not eat anything else (except meal replacements) for the rest of the day. I then went to meet my friend and her girlfriend for dinner… and how much harm could a poke bowl do, right? Of course, while we are sitting to watch her show, I would never buy a bag of chips… but when the girlfriend offers me some of hers, well that’s not such a bad thing, right?

    Everything I did in that previous paragraph was wrong.

    I had done a very short treadmill walk yesterday. I did not have the energy, but I still did a 2km quick walk in the afternoon. I knew when I got home in the evening that I was still short of my steps-goal for the day. I had to take The Floof out for her walk, but that still left me about 1500 steps short of the daily goal. I had failed in so many other things yesterday, but I wanted to at least accomplish that. I got onto the treadmill at 10:00pm and walked the 1300 steps that I was still short… and then called it a night. My streak is up to 5 days. I will extend that today.

    Let’s take an inventory here. I hit my steps-goal, but in a pretty lackluster fashion. I ate horribly. I slept very well (my Sleep Score was 86, and my body battery actually hit 90 this morning). Some good, some bad. The number that matters – that on the bathroom scale – was very bad. I gained three pounds. Ouch. I have to do better today… and tomorrow, and the following day as well.

    As of this moment I am 1.7km short of reaching the 2024 goal for the MapMyFitness challenge. Had I logged my walk with Her Floofness this morning (as I usually do) then I would have surpassed that goal already. It was not really a decision to hit the goal with exercise as much as it was that I forgot to end the walk, which meant that by the time I realized it, the 1.5km walk was in its third hour. I decided to just discard it and will reach the goal on the treadmill this afternoon.

    Speaking of this afternoon… I will do at least 5km on the treadmill, and then after I am cleaned up, I have an appointment for a haircut. Once that is done, I am heading down to Grimsby where I will meet up with a buddy for a cigar. There is a Lodge meeting this evening, and a bunch of guys wanted to meet for dinner. I am not joining them because I really want to stick to my program… especially after the disaster that was yesterday.

    I fell. I am getting back up.

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 1047

    Yesterday I did pretty well on the program… until the evening. It is amazing how badly emotional pain can affect me. I cheated… but not badly. My eating yesterday consisted of:

    • Breakfast omelette
    • Two meal replacement shakes
    • One protein bar
    • Two poached eggs at night.

    Believe me, I wanted to cheat much worse than two poached eggs… but I did not.

    I also managed 5km on the treadmill, and for the second day in a row I hit the steps-goal on my fitness watch. Yesterday’s goal was 9,930, and I took just short of 11,000 steps. Today’s steps-goal is 10,130. I will do my best to get onto the treadmill and hit that goal, but frankly my exam is this afternoon, and that is my number one priority. If I can get some studying in and then hit the treadmill, then I will be thrilled. If not, then I will try to get onto the treadmill after the exam. That, however, might be tight because of a few other things I have going on today.

    There is a site called MapMyFitness.com which I have mentioned a couple of times over the past couple of years. I do not think I have mentioned it this year, but last year they had a challenge to walk/run 1023km in 2023. This year they extended that challenge to 1024km in 2024. This is not about the number of steps we take throughout the day, rather only in actual registered workouts. I hit the ground running early in the year, but then fell off a few times. I have start-stopped my walking so many times that it is hard to keep track of. Of course, on days when I do not do an actual workout, I often register my walks with Princess Sophie for the challenge, so even with nothing else, considering the average distance I walk with the doggo per day is 3km, without any other workouts I should still surpass 1024km handily by mid-December. However, since I do not always register our walks together, and since I spent a lot of time out of town (whether in Cuba or Dallas), I have not walked her about ten weeks this year. Yes, I do a lot of walking when I am in Cuba… but I do not register walking around as exercising. Anyways, I am happy that with yesterday’s treadmill walk I surpassed 1000km on the year, and I am now a scant 18km from reaching the goal. I thought there was a prize drawing for all of the people who completed the challenge, but sometime in the last few months it seems the site was sold by Under Armour to a company called Outside, and they do not seem to be offering any prizes other than the online badge. I am okay with that, since only 2-3 participants who finished the challenge would have been chosen at random for a prize package, and I have a better chance of getting hit by space debris than winning (186,000 participants, and I am in the top 12.51%, which means that a little over 23,200 people have either completed or are within 18km of completing the goal. I’m good with the online badge!

    My sleep score was only 79 last night, but I felt much better rested than I usually do in the morning. That might have something to do with my having gotten up at 4:15am to pee and thinking as I lay there that I might as well get out of bed because I was not falling back a…. and then I was out again. My body battery only got up to a 56, and I really have no idea how to improve on that… other than losing all of the weight that I want to lose, and then figuring out how to get a good night’s sleep.

    My weight dropped for the third day in a row, but only by half a pound. While I would love much bigger losses, I have to understand that going forward I will need to be happy with a 3-4 pound drop per week, and will not be experiencing those huge per-day losses as I did at the outset. I just don’t have that much excess weight to lose that would account for a 10 lbs. drop week after week. If I can lose 3.5 lbs. per week for the next ten weeks then I will still not be at my best weight ever… but I will fit comfortably into all of my custom tailored clothes… except for what might be too large on me.

    I was speaking with my diet buddy yesterday and recognized a pattern in her that I brought up, and we had a good chat about it. Every time she talks about her progress or slipping, she spends fifteen minutes talking about how other people look and what they do and how they must look at her… and at the end she says, ‘and of course I am disappointed with myself.’ I told her that it seems that she equates her own value to how others are or how they look, but because everyone tells her that weight loss should be for ourselves she ends it with ‘oh and me.’ It is like someone going on and on about what is wrong with Jews, and then saying, ‘but of course I don’t have anything against Jews.’ It is obvious they do, but they know it is wrong, so they say that. I asked her if she has ever spoken to a professional about her weight issues. It seems to me that she will never be satisfied with her weight until she is happy with who she is as a person. I think I gave her a lot to think about, and she told me that she is going to try to find a therapist for that. I am always happy when I can help her… or anyone else for that matter.

    …now if I could only get my own head in a good place, life would be grand.

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 1046

    After two days of missing it, I hit my steps goal yesterday. I walked four kilometres on the treadmill, in addition to being out and about quite a bit. I was rewarded with:

    • A sleep score of 80, based on 7h20m of sleep
    • A Body Battery of 56 when I woke up… not great.
    • Another drop on the bathroom scale… down 1.2 lbs.

    My sleep score is still not where I would like for it to be, but it has started to get better this week since I am exercising… as well as the new ‘supplement’ that I am taking to help me fall asleep. Yes, I am still waking up with a slight headache, but it is not nearly as bad today as it was a couple of days ago.

    In speaking with Leslie yesterday, she berated me for stopping in to buy almonds. She is right of course. I have to stop supplementing what I am supposed to be eating. It is not just about losing weight… it is about changing my habits. Staying away from the store is a good step toward doing that.

    My plans for today are to stay on track. In a few minutes I will press ‘Save’ on this journal entry, and I will log off the computer. I will change into my jogging kit and get onto the treadmill. After that, I will shower and enjoy a meal replacement. In the afternoon I am meeting with my diet buddy in Yukon; we have not connected in way too long, and it is time… especially since both of us are trying to get back on track.

    The weather is still too windy for me to walk outside, but the forecast is for the wind to die down somewhat by late afternoon, which means I might actually sit out to enjoy a cigar with my wife on a video chat. We will see.

    Have a great day folks!