Losing a part of me

Category: Holidays

  • Day 1069

    My wife had very good advice for me today. She told me that I am stressing so much because of the holidays, and it might not be a bad idea to take a break from my diet (which has not been working anyways) until after New Years. That is not to say that I should go nuts and eat everything, but trying to stick to the severe plan has not only been failing, but it has also been causing me stress and anxiety. Thanks Leslie!

    Tonight is Christmas Eve, and it is not a holiday for me, but I miss being with my family. I bought a nice veal steak for dinner which I will prepare later on.

    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 1061

    I was relieved to see my weight drop back to almost the same level it was before my cheat day Saturday. It is not quite back, but almost. This morning’s 2.2 lbs. drop was welcome indeed… especially knowing that tomorrow evening is my Lodge’s holiday party, and while I will not be over-indulging… I do hope to be able to at least eat something. With that said, I still do not know what is on the menu, and in case it is something that I cannot eat then I will at least have a protein bar stashed away in my car. Of course, I am hoping for turkey and gravy and cranberry sauce… but I will find out tomorrow!

    My sleep score was a 75 last night which is not bad. I am sure that had I gotten to bed an hour earlier then it would have been better. As it happens, when my eyes opened at 6:00am I did not want to go right back to sleep, knowing that my alarm was set for just ten minutes later. My body battery was a 72 this morning… also not bad, but I know that neither of these scores is great.

    There is something that the reader should know about me, which is that I do not remember pain. If something is hurting now then I know it, but if it was hurting an hour ago but is fine now then it is completely out of mind. That is why for the last few days as I wrote my journal entries, I have had trouble remembering why I did not jog my entire workout the previous day. I realized that as I was on the treadmill yesterday and made a note on my phone (for this morning) to remind me that my ankle has been tender. It is because of that I have been mostly walking on the treadmill, and not some sort of ‘out of shape, out of breath’ issue. As I wrote yesterday, “I would rather reach that goal at a slower pace than miss it at a faster one.”

    I did hit my steps-goal yesterday with a 5km workout on the treadmill, but only about half a kilometre was jogging and the rest was a brisk walk. With that I am happy to see this morning that my steps streak is sixteen days, tied for my longest streak which dates from April 10-25, 2023. It was just two days after that I got onto the plane to Dallas, and then to California with my wife for our religious wedding (we had already been married civilly for nearly a year by then). This time I have no travel that will impede it… although tomorrow will be a challenge because of the evening social obligations. I have a few ideas that I am thinking about trying and am not precluding the possibility of spending an hour on the treadmill during my class and watching the lecture instead of my regular TV. We will see… but for that to even be an issue I have to extend the streak today, which means that after class I will be going at it on the treadmill… and thanks to my lovely but occasionally obstinate dog who does not care for the wet weather, I will need to go longer this evening than I normally would.

    It is time for me to get signed into my class so I will end here. 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 998

    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!

  • Day 997

    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!

  • Day 996

    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!

  • Day 995

    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.

  • Day 987

    The first day of Rosh Hashana, and I neglected to post. I will elaborate in may Friday post! Don’t worry, nothing bad… but egg-zausted!

  • Day 845

    I ate mostly well yesterday, but still gained half a pound this morning. Grrr. I hope that will shed off again tomorrow morning.

    Israel has a transition that is a real weird. From Yom HaZikaron, a day of sadness and remembrance for our fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism, we go right into Yom Ha’Atzmaut, our joyous day of independence. We are literally supposed to shed our sadness at sundown and become joyous and festive. It is quite difficult for me, but I somehow manage. Last night I finished my class at 9:15pm and had a video date with my wife and a cigar on the balcony. I was extremely tired after a long day, and was going to go right to sleep except that Her Royal Floofness asked to go out for another walk. I was still asleep by midnight and slept well most of the night… except for waking up to pee.

    Have a great day folks!