Losing a part of me

Category: Plans

  • Day 93

    Yesterday was my first attempt (after my celebratory day on Wednesday) at preparing my large/hot meal for lunch. I also decided that rather than having a large salad with a can of salmon for dinner, I would have a meal replacement. My salads may be really tasty and healthy, but if you factor in the entire can of tuna, they are also easily a 500-calorie meal. Yesterday’s consumption consisted of:

    • A meal replacement shake in the morning.
    • Two pieces of chicken, plus a large salad at lunch.
    • A meal replacement shake in the mid-afternoon.
    • A meal replacement shake in the mid-evening.
    • A pot of coffee.
    • A lot of water.

    I might have been tempted to have more, but in truth I was quite satisfied by what I ate (and drank). I will try to repeat the same plan today and see how it goes after a couple of days.

    Despite all of that, my weight this morning was up slightly… but after the tremendous drop yesterday, that is no surprise. As long as the general trend is downward, I will take comfort in knowing that I am doing the right thing.

    It was a beautiful day yesterday, so one might think that I would have been easily found lounging on the balcony and smoking cigars. No, I can’t do that… the procrastination I have done over the last few weeks means that I am now down to crunch time with regard to creating the course that I have to deliver next week. I worked on it for a couple of hours, but I also had a lot of other things going on. Today seems to be a lovely day as well, but I will not be indulging today… not until this evening, possibly.

    Okay, I have been procrastinating long enough. It is time for me to try to get some work done.

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 92

    Yesterday was a day of triumphs, a day of celebrations. Yesterday was the day that one misguided conversation led to heartbreak.

    I left the doctor’s office slightly disappointed that while I achieved my goal of being under the maximum weight limit of their regular scale, I fell short of my semi-weekly goal of losing two and a half kilos per fortnight. Still, losing one pound per week is not the worst failure. I still hope I will lose more before the next visit.

    I think I mentioned yesterday that while I went through with my plans to celebrate that milestone with a steak, I opted to enjoy it for lunch, rather than my evening meal. It was far too big, and I have to start remembering that I cannot eat meals that big anymore. I did not vomit… but I did regurgitate a few times, which did give me relief. That will also, I hope, serve as a reminder in the future that I cannot eat meals that big, and that the consequences for doing so are unpleasant.

    The one bit of good that came out of that is that I did not have a second daily meal. My usual routine of late has been:

    • Morning: meal-replacement shake.
    • Lunchtime: a large salad (lettuce, tomato, & onion with a little oil and balsamic vinegar, and a can of salmon mixed in. Sometimes with pumpkin seeds).
    • Dinner: a piece of chicken or two, and a salad like at lunchtime, minus the salmon.
    • Evening: meal replacement shake.

    I have done reasonably well with this routine. Yesterday looked like this:

    • Morning: a handful of peanuts in the car after my visit to the doctor.
    • Lunch: a large rib steak, with a side of steamed cauliflower and carrots.
    • Mid-afternoon: another handful of peanuts.
    • Early evening: a meal replacement shake.
    • Late evening: a meal replacement bar

    Later in the evening, I reached for another meal replacement shake, but Leslie talked me out of it. She was right that I should not have had it. She misunderstood why I was going to have it (thinking it was emotional eating), but I had forgotten that I had eaten the meal replacement bar.

    In Israel, we would eat our heaviest meal at lunch, and have a lighter breakfast and dinner. Thinking back on yesterday, that might not be a bad plan for me going forward. This morning the numbers on the scale were in fact down from where they were yesterday morning. I am going to try to do that for a few days and see how it goes.

    HRF Princess Sophie woke me up at 5:00am, which she does by getting off the bed and coming around to look at me. Yes, this wakes me up. I got out of bed and started to get dressed, but she immediately climbed back onto the bed. Okay, maybe she was just a bit restless, and did not actually need to go outside. This happened again a few minutes later; when she repeated the whole routine (including getting back onto the bed) I decided she might just want to cuddle, and I held her as I went back to sleep. The third time (at 5:45am) I decided this was it… I got dressed and took her outside. We walked to the end of the block, she peed and sniffed (as she does), and we went back home to bed. This time, she stayed put until I was ready to get up.

    It is hard sometimes to walk the line between airing my feelings and keeping confidences. Without any intention to do so I hurt someone very important to me last night, and I am worried that person might not forgive me. I am in a fog of misery today, and I do not know if I will get out of it. I have a lot of work to do today so I hope I can… but this is painful. My two goals are to get through the day, and to not do any emotional eating. Wish me luck.

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 90

    It is hard to believe that today is my ninetieth day on the program. I have not lost as much as I would have liked, but I have covered that before… I am not on the program religiously, but a modified program. Hey, losing nearly fifty pounds in ninety days is nothing to sneeze at, is it?

    Yesterday’s workout was great, but there is no question, you really do feel it later in the evening. I have a new diet buddy that read my article on Food Addiction and told me that she will now be reading my blog for encouragement. She also told me she would love to walk with me. I told her I would be delighted, but she would have to be able to maintain the pace that I was at yesterday. I do not want to make her feel bad if she cannot keep up. We all need to start out at our own pace.

    On much the same topic, yesterday was the best single-day views on my diet-blog, www.losingapartof.me. I find that on days when I share a specific (and topical) article with one of the Facebook groups that I am active on, I see a real spike in readership. How cool would it be if even twenty percent of those people subscribed… or at least read the blog on a regular basis!? All told, yesterday’s total views peaked at one hundred and seventy-nine… and while the majority were from North America, there were viewers from ten countries and six continents in total (although only one hit each from Asia, Africa, and South America)! Considering my average readership has been around 450 views per month, that is really exciting.

    I am proud of my weight-loss, but I am also proud of my writing. Knowing that there are so many people out there fighting the same fight that I am is heartwarming and being able to share with them is great. Don’t think for a minute that my current readers (especially my number one fan) are not enough for me… I write for myself, and hope that along the way, somebody thinks that what I wrote might be important or relevant to them. In the meantime, with all of the views yesterday, I only added one follower… which is exactly the same number of followers I added on the previous day.

    I would have preferred, after yesterday’s strenuous workout, to see the numbers on the scale down this morning. Alas, that was not the case. Instead, I am up half a pound. I am looking forward to my weigh-in at the doctor’s office tomorrow, where I can be assured of the accuracy of the scale. Until then, I have to suffice myself with the knowledge that if I am going to weigh myself every single day, then my body weight will not drop consistently every single day… and even days of perfect behaviour will often only show results a day or two later. That is the reality of life. That is among the myriad frustrations of dieting and weight loss.

    I am super excited that I have my ticket for Dallas booked. I got a frantic call from Leslie worrying that she did not have staples that I use daily, such as a coffee pot or an air fryer. I know she is just excited that I am finally coming to visit and wants me to feel perfectly at home. There are no problems, only solutions; When I first moved into my apartment, before I bought my Ninja coffee station, I bought a single-cup filter coffee filter which I will bring. As for the air fryer, I lived without one for what – forty-nine years? I can live without one for another week in June.

    The only cheating I did on the program yesterday was an extra meal replacement bar in the evening. I figure I burned a lot of calories on my walk, so an extra 160-calorie bar won’t hurt me. Still and all, the higher-than-yesterday weigh-in bothered me… and I have to remember that it was not a meal replacement bar that caused it.

    I have a lot of work to do today, and I am glad the temptations of good weather for sitting outside are completely absent from the forecast of the day. As HRF Princess Sophie and I took our morning walk, there were cars covered in yesterday’s snow – a true sign that the temperatures had not risen sufficiently to melt it. Additionally, while the wind was certainly blowing unpleasantly this morning, Environment Canada has issued a Special Weather Statement warning of strong winds and wind gusts for this afternoon and evening (with northwesterly winds gusting 70 to 80 km/h). All of that, I assure you, is conducive to my not going outside again today, other than to take my pup-princess for her evening walk. With my frustrations with technology abated (for the moment), I hope to be able to make good headway in putting together the slides for my upcoming class.

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 88

    There is a psychological characteristic in me that does not seem to want to accept certain types of moderation. I am not talking about food intake… although I suppose I am a glutton when I do not check myself. No, what I mean is this: I feel that when I veer from my program, even a little, I will be punished the following day on the bathroom scale.

    Yesterday (Saturday) I had my morning shake, and then around 11:00am HRF Princess Sophie and I hit the road. We drove to Caledon to see my friend (and now hers) Jacqueline, and her young puppy (I think she is six months old) Charley. A wonderful time was had, but shortly after we left the house, I realized that I had not taken any meal replacements with me. We stopped in at Bulk Barn, where I purchased a bag of red-skinned peanuts. Remember the previous day, when I bought a bag of peanuts from the convenience store? That bag cost me $5.99, and the peanuts were salted. This bag cost me $1.50, and the peanuts were exactly the way I like them. I enjoyed them as we drove up north.

    Jacqueline knows that I am on a diet, and also respects that it is Passover, so even if I was not on a diet, I really cannot eat any snack she might put out. She offered me coffee, which I enjoyed. We had a great time catching up – it had been far too long!

    We hit the road a little after 5:00pm, and no thanks to Waze on my iPhone, we got to the supermarket around 6:00pm. I know, I wrote yesterday that I would bring her home before going shopping, but we were an hour later than I thought we would be, and it was warm and sunny. Princess Sophie climbed up onto the back dash to sun herself while I ran in and picked up everything that I needed… except one crucial item. Oops.

    We got home and I put the chicken into the air fryer, and the rest of it into freezer bags. It was only then, as I was getting ready to prepare my salad, that I realized that I had run out of balsamic vinegar the previous evening. Okay, I had a choice: Either I could make my salad another way (and while there are myriad ways to season a salad, I did not have too many options in the house), or I could forego the salad, and instead steam a head of broccoli. I opted for that second option, adding a bit of onion as well. I spread much less margarine than I had on my previous attempt, but also added some cheese (but not a lot). I forgot to add salt, but that is not the end of the world.

    Spoiler alert: While steamed broccoli can be quite tasty, steamed onion is less so… at least, not the way I prepared it. I ate it, but it was nothing to write home about.

    Later in the evening I had another meal replacement shake. That was the extent of my food intake yesterday.

    If you look at what I consumed, I obviously did not gorge myself. I did not eat tons of bad food, or even overeat the good ones. Yes, I had a little margarine and shredded cheese on my broccoli. Yes, I had a handful of peanuts (which replaced a meal). With all that, how could I possibly not lose weight?

    I did. After yesterday’s colossal two-pound gain (which followed the previous two day’s 1.5 lbs gain, I was hoping to be down at least a little. I was down a full three pounds from yesterday, and while I am not back to my best weigh-in of the last week, I am damned close to it… and most importantly, I am back under the 350-pound mark.

    I will mention as well that I think that moving the scale from the bathroom to the bedroom has done tremendous good for the stability of my weigh-ins. While I am neither an architect nor a builder, I suspect that the floors immediately adjacent to a load-bearing brick wall will necessarily be more stable than one nowhere near an outside wall, when the floor in the apartment has already been established as not reliably stable. It (the scale) is now under my window, which means I can just leave my phone on the ledge when I weigh in (which allows it to register the weight). Over the past few days (since I moved it) I know that there has been much less up-and-down before settling on a final weight… and so there it will remain.

    My plans for today: I am picking up the cleaning lady from the train station in about an hour. I would have stopped at the store to pick up a bottle of balsamic vinegar, but guess what? Yep, the stores are closed again for Easter Sunday. Sigh. I suppose for my salad today I will be making a slightly different dressing, with the fixings that I do have.

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 82

    While my weight yesterday morning did go up from the previous day’s, it was only by half a pound. Today it is back to where it was on Saturday, which means that for the third day in a row I have remained below 350 lbs.

    The last few days I have been sharing an omelet with Leslie; I am relieved that these have not pushed my weight up at all. That is not to say that I will continue to make them for myself when she goes home, but I am happy that I it has not hurt my progress. I am relieved that Lyle and Dorothy did not want us to stay for dinner yesterday, and so before we left the house, Leslie marinated a couple of pieces of chicken, which we ate with her yummy rice. I succumbed to the temptation of a couple of pieces of her dried mango, but aside from that I was good.

    Another huge non-scale victory is that I noticed a significant drop in the size of my belly and of my (groan!) man-boobs. It is not something that I have been paying ongoing attention to, but I know that they were GIGANTIC and now they are significantly less so. I think I will take this opportunity to measure my chest… okay, I am back… and I have lost about 2 inches on each of the three measurements. Woohoo… but I still have a long way to go.

    I am going to pick up fish for dinner again, and while I am out shopping, I will have to remember to pick up Kleenex and vegetables… as well as eggs for tomorrow morning’s breakfast. If I can find a pack of 6 eggs that would be great, but I am not holding my breath.

    I have been told to hold off on working on my customer until they figure out their budget for Q2. That means I have some reading to do, which I will do on the balcony with a cigar. I also have to go shopping, which I will do when Leslie gets onto her next call. She just told me that she has never tasted a bagel that she liked, so I am going to see if Fortino’s has a good Montreal bagel for her to try. They would not be authentic, but they would still be better than any bagel that has ever set foot in the State of Texas. That is not to say that I will buy one for myself… but I will buy one for her to try.

    Later this afternoon, Leslie and I have to drive out to Etobicoke to run an errand, which will be a couple of hours of our lives that we will never get back. Don’t get me wrong, we will be happy to be together in the car… but we would be equally happy being together not in the car.

    I have made another decision. If next week, when I get weighed at the doctor’s office, my weight in my clothes is still below 350 lbs, then I am going to treat myself to a steak. I have not prepared any beef for myself since January, and although I have had beef a couple of times (such as at Ryan’s house the other night), it has not been a juicy homemade steak. That will be my one guilty treat to commemorate my accomplishment.

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 75

    Someone does their level best at preventing any productivity on certain days. Fortunately for her she is very cute.

    As I anticipated, my weight was up this morning. I simply ate far too many peanuts throughout the course of the day for it not to be. Where do I begin?

    I already wrote about the breakfast/lunch/brunch that I ate with my son, which was not unhealthy. After I dropped him off, I came home for a few minutes, wrote my journal entry, and then hit the road to go to Cambridge. It was a lovely afternoon except I had forgotten to take my meal replacements with me. There was a jar of peanuts on the table, and I used those as my meal replacement. They are not the worst cheat in the world, but they are not good… especially when I do not measure out how many I am going to eat beforehand.

    I got home around 8:45pm and I made chicken for dinner. Had I stopped with the chicken and salad I would likely have been fine, but I was still hungry, and I had a meal replacement shake for dessert. Of course, there is nothing wrong with the meal replacements… except that total caloric intake is just that, and when I ingest too many calories, I do not lose weight. Add to that, it was nearly 9:30pm by the time I sat down to dinner, and 10:15pm when I had the shake. That is far too late to have that many calories and expect a good weigh-in the next morning.

    My foot is still recovering from Saturday, and my schedule is not really conducive to taking a long walk today. Hopefully by tomorrow I will be able to, but in the meantime, I will take HRF Princess Sophie for her walks, and I will run my errands as necessary. Also, I have quite a bit of work to get done today. I will try to stay on track with my calories though. I have a piece of salmon defrosting for dinner, and I should be able to stay on track.

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 73

    Despite my reasonably faithful adherence to the program yesterday, my weight stayed exactly where it was this morning. I suspect that is because the scale was playing April Fools games with me yesterday. I don’t mind that I do not lose weight every day… it is the days that I gain weight that bother me.

    I finished the last of the milk in my first cup of coffee this morning, so when I finish writing I will probably head to the store. I will also have to check my vegetable stocks – I think I have enough chicken and fish for a few more days, but I might as well check everything. One never knows what fish might be on sale this weekend!

    I had a non-scale victory yesterday. In 2016 my friend Eduardo bought me a bracelet for either Christmas or my birthday or for something. It did not fit until I lost a lot of weight in 2017. I know that when I can put it on, it means that I am on track losing weight. It is by no means loose on me, but it closes and is comfortable to wear. That is a good start.

    I am taking my son (the younger) for breakfast tomorrow, and I am looking forward to that. I have been chatting with my ex-wife, who tells me that she is finally having surgery on her knee in May. That has to be a relief for her, as she has been in pain for a long time. I remember seeing how hard it was for her to walk on my first visit to their house back in July, and I felt terrible for her. Hopefully this will bring her some relief.

    I have plans on the calendar for every day between now and Wednesday, which is when Leslie finally arrives. This afternoon, Eduardo is coming for a cigar. Tomorrow morning, I will see Gilad. In the afternoon I will go to Cambridge for a cigar with my friends out there. Monday I am having my summer wheels put onto the car (and I am relieved that I decided to wait until after my Montreal trip). Tuesday the cleaning lady is coming during the day, and Wednesday I get to pick up my girlfriend at the airport. I have been waiting for that last one for far too long, and I cannot wait to have her back in my arms again!

    I am halfway through my second cup of coffee… this time without any milk. I thought I might consider cutting the dairy out of my diet, but I think I will wait a few more weeks before I really consider that. I do enjoy my coffee, but since I took my first sip of it at 5 years old, I have always taken it with coffee and some sort of sweetener (at the time my father was a Sweet-n-Low guy, so that’s what I started with. I am now mostly on Sugar in the Raw). Changing it now… well, we’ll see.

    I spent some time earlier this week installing some of the apps that have always only been on my US cell phone onto my Canadian one. One thing that I did not think to transfer at the time was the app for my Garmin fitness watch. I did that this morning and went through the entire configuration process. I have not yet started to be active, but with the confluence of my weight loss thus far, and the weather starting to get nicer, I thought it a good idea to start getting ready for it. In fact, I think I am going to go for a walk right now… I can go to the supermarket to pick up milk. That will not be a very long walk, but it will be a first walk. Every journey starts with a single step and walking to the store is as good a place to start as any.

    I will mention that I am not going to go to the supermarket I would usually go to. I know that I need to buy vegetables and milk. If I needed other things then I would need to go to the Fortino’s which is a little over 2km away, and I would have to walk back of course. No, the grocery store nearest is about 400m from here, and that will be fine. I might, now that I think of it, also walk to the pharmacy, which is probably another 500m from the grocery, so that would be a really good start! I make no promises… we will see how I am feeling after I get out there.

    Have a great day!

  • Day 63

    HRF Princess Sophie asked me very politely to take her out at 6:00am. She does not wake me to go out very often, so when she does, I take her seriously. The last time she asked, I was much heavier; it probably took me fifteen minutes to get dressed. This morning, we were out the door in under 6 minutes… and that included time for me to pee. I will chalk that up as a non-scale victory. The times she has awakened me at 3:00am I always go right back to bed. While my alarm does not go off until 7:15am, I decided not to lie back down right away this time. I had a couple of appointments that I needed to reschedule.

    I decided that Friday I am going to drive to Montreal for the weekend. I realized as I was going to sleep last night that the Princess has a vet appointment for Friday, and I have an appointment in the evening. Both were booked online, and so I sat down at the computer to rebook them. My appointment was easy, and I was easily able to create another appointment for tomorrow morning. I will have to wait back from the vet for confirmation, but I cannot see this being a problem.

    Coupled with the early hour, there was a bit of freezing rain when we went out, and Princess did not want to spend more time than was strictly necessary outside, so the walk was a brief one.

    My diet yesterday was again mostly good. I was out and about for a few hours when I realized I was hungry, so I stopped at Bulk Barn and picked up a small handful of peanuts. When I got home, I prepared my dinner – a piece of salmon with lemon juice, salt, pepper, and fresh dill. It was delicious! I have not yet stepped onto the bathroom scale, but I anticipate good things from it.

    I have an appointment to get weighed today, and I am looking forward to being down at least a few kilograms from my last weigh-in two weeks ago. Yes, doctors in Canada use the metric system, which does not bother me at all. In fact, the only reason I use the imperial system for my weight loss is because a full pound lost is less than half a kilo, which does not sound or feel nearly as impressive. In truth, despite the big switch to the metric system in the 1970s, I was always taught pounds rather than kilos, and while I try to get excited about the more sensible metric measurements (where a kilogram is the weight of a litre of water, and not based on a weight found in a Paris vault for hundreds of years), but I confess I still think in pounds. I doubt this will change, but I hope my children will understand kilos better. For the record, I think in kilometres (although I can do the conversion to miles in my head).

    I can already feel it… there will be a nap in my future. I have a couple of errands to run today, but I should be home by noon. The forecast high is only 6°c, and there might be a little wind still. Hopefully my phone appointments will be considerate and work around my need for a mid-afternoon nap. They are restorative, after all!

    I will write more after my weigh-in, but in the meantime, have a great day folks!