Losing a part of me

Category: Sleep

  • Day 1015

    He chose pizza. I ended my entry yesterday by saying that we involve Leslie’s son in food decisions, especially on his first night home. He opted for pizza, which for my taste buds is great but for my weight loss is not. I had no choice of the food, but I was able to moderate my intake. I ate three pieces and not four or more. I know, that is still a lot of pizza… but better to have moderated some than not at all.

    My walk yesterday was excellent. I achieved 8.67km and probably could have kept going. Okay, I was pretty drained when I got in so that would have been a bad idea. I did not walk Tuesday, so my current power-walking since I got to Dallas (which is to say since Sunday) is at 23.31km, but it was not until Monday that I set the goal of walking another 24km during this trip, so Sunday’s walk does not count toward the 24km. Monday and Wednesday’s walks add up to 15.17km, which means that I am one long walk or two short walks away from achieving that goal. I will head out later today and put a real dent into it so hopefully by tomorrow I will only have a very short way to go before hitting that goal. I usually go out for an hour or more every time, which means that I should walk at least 6.5km today… which means that if I roll out of bed hard tomorrow I will make it.

    Speaking of bed, I did not sleep very well last night. I had some things on my mind so not only did I not get into bed until very late, but it then took me a long time to fall asleep. My fitness watch registered a little over six hours of sleep and gave it a sleep score of 74. I am surprised it was that high, but I will take it. It also told me that my body battery was up to 69 which is much lower than I woke up with yesterday, but overall not bad compared to the last month – there have only been six days of the last twenty-eight where it was higher than that; I suspect that is something I should be seeing improvements on as I get back to exercising regularly and hopefully sleeping better… and losing weight!

    Speaking of numbers, the one that is usually most front and centre for me is the one on the bathroom scale. I never expect any sort of weight loss the day after eating pizza for dinner. When I stepped onto the bathroom scale to see a loss of about half a pound I was quite pleased with that… if somewhat surprised. How great would it be if I could actually keep it below that terrible mark for the duration of this trip, and then keep dropping it in Canada?

    I have a few things I have to do today but nothing drastic. I am going to touch base with my wife and then plan out when I will go for my walk. I have some reading to do as well. I hope that we can be good for dinner, but it is often hard with a young child. Today is also Halloween, so we will be taking the boy out trick-or-treating… I will not be taking any of his loot!

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 1013

    I told Leslie last night that I was happy with both my eating and my activity of the day yesterday, and that I was hoping to see a significant drop on the bathroom scale this morning. I expected to lose at least a full pound from yesterday. When I stepped onto the bathroom scale this morning I was shocked… and disbelieving. I was hoping to drop below 302. When I stepped off the scale I allowed it to clear and stepped on again. I could not believe that I had dropped over six pounds. While I am excited to see my weight drop (significantly) below the 300 pounds mark, I am skeptical that the drop is more than a blip. Do not misunderstand me… I am thrilled and grateful, but I am not expecting to even maintain that level tomorrow and Thursday. We will see.

    With all of that said, yesterday was a good day for my program. Breakfast was my usual omelette. I went to the supermarket in the morning to pick up food for dinner, and decided to also pick up a couple of salads for Leslie and I to enjoy for lunch. For dinner I prepared seared tuna steaks with white rice. After lunch I went for a 6.5km walk which made me feel great, although it also reminded me of the importance of throwing out socks when they have holes in the heels. Not only did that slow my overall pace a little, but I also came home with blisters on my heel. For that reason, as well as because of what my schedule looks like today, I am taking the day off from walking. With that said, yesterday I decided to power-walk at least 24km over the rest of my stay in Dallas, and I knocked out more than 25% of that goal yesterday.

    When I returned home, I felt my tummy talking to me, but not of hunger. I knew that I had not been moving my bowels very well the last few days and I thought I was probably a little backed up. I tried to move them before I showered but had very little to show for the attempt. When I was all clean, I decided to lie down for a nap. Five minutes into the nap I felt the urge and was finally able to void my system. I felt somewhat better, but not completely. Thirty minutes later I found myself running back to the loo and repeated my previous success. I was finally feeling better. I know you are asking so the answer is yes, those combined successes certainly contributed to this morning’s weight loss. I do not know if it really accounts for a 6+ pound drop, but it certainly helped.

    With all of that, my sleep score last night dropped to 72, which is the lowest in three or four days. I woke up reasonably well rested, but I know I had a lot of trouble falling asleep last night. Hopefully it will be better tonight.

    In my entry yesterday I enumerated four points that I need to follow in order to resume my successful weight loss. One of those points was to not eat food that is bad for my weight loss. Leslie had asked me if I know that I should not be eating something then why do I have it in the house? She is right. I need to stop buying food I know will be detrimental to my weight loss goals. As an example, a few weeks ago I bought a box of breakfast cereal. I know that breakfast cereal is, as a category, all terrible for weight loss. With that said, I like it, and it is not difficult to convince myself that if I buy it then I will eat it in moderation, and that it will not have a terrible effect on my body. The flaw in that logic is that I am still terrible at the moderation part, and so seldom will a box of breakfast cereal brought into my kitchen last three days. Leslie is so right about this… I have to stop buying it. So many people do not understand why I am doing my grocery shopping three or four times per week. It is because I know that if I have more in my kitchen I will be tempted to eat more. I need to work on this, but until I have mastered it I have to:

    1. Continue doing my grocery shopping several times per week; and
    2. Not allow myself to purchase anything that I can easily overeat.

    I have written in this journal times that losing weight is simple, but it is not easy. As a cybersecurity guy I continue to tell my students that we can implement every security tool available, but the weak link of the chain is always the human factor. Likewise, my weak link is my willpower which is something that I really have to continue to work on. It will come.

    In the meantime, I am hoping to fit into at least a couple of my tailored sports coats next week, and I will continue to powerwalk… either outside or, if the weather is not cooperative, on my treadmill.

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 1011

    I was not expecting great things this morning when I stepped onto the bathroom scale. I wrote yesterday that I prepared French toast for breakfast (with real Quebec maple syrup). We then ordered in fast food (Five Guys) for a late lunch. During the baseball game, Leslie lamented that we should have brought food with us (which meant that she was hungry). I went down the street to the Middle Eastern restaurant and picked up a manakish, essentially a cheese pizza with za’atar. I did not expect to lose weight after eating this poorly. However, I did finally have a decent bowel movement this morning… I think my system was just clogged up for a couple of days. The result: My weight was down nearly (but not quite) one full pound this morning from yesterday. Yay!

    (Note: After writing this paragraph I retired to the W.C. and was able to repeat the success of this morning. It will not apply to this morning’s weight, but maybe tomorrow?)

    We have tickets to see a movie this afternoon. It looks like it will be interesting – a suspense surrounding the choosing of a new pope. I am excited for the subject (it seems to be along the lines of Dan Brown’s DaVinci Code). I doubt it will have the symbological aspects of that book, but it is still of interest to me. Jews do not have any sort of supreme leader, so the whole ritual around the pope is interesting to me.

    My sleep score was up to 84 last night, the highest it has been in a month. That brought my body battery up to about 60, which is still low but better than it has been in a while.

    I did not go out for a walk yesterday, but I think I will go for one now. It is a beautiful day out and we have a couple of hours to kill before we head out to the movies.

    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 992

    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!

  • Day 990

    It was definitely an exhausting week. I am glad that these last couple of nights I have been able to sleep well. After sleep scores of 24 Monday, 69 Tuesday, 50 Wednesday, 21 on Friday, and not getting enough sleep Thursday to even register as sleep… Saturday morning my score was 83 and this morning it was 86. I finally caught up on my rest! My body battery was up as high as 74 this morning, which is certainly the highest it has been (by over 25 points) all week. Of course, knowing that I am waking up at 4:00am tomorrow to fly off to Maine I am sure it will be lousy again, but what can you do?

    From a terrible high Thursday of 302.2 lbs. both Saturday and Thursday, I am relieved that my weight dropped below that dreaded mark yesterday (299.6) and further down this morning to 299.0 lbs. even. I still feel disgustingly fat, but I have to stay below 300!

    I had a decent breakfast and lunch today and am planning on having a reasonable dinner this evening… and will be in bed earlier than usual so that I can get a decent night sleep before driving to the airport in the morning. Yes, I will be away for a short enough period that it will be cheaper for me to park at the airport than it would be to take an Uber. If I shower and shave (and pack) this evening, then if I am in bed by 10pm I will get six hours of sleep. Unfortunately (for the company but fortunate for my tight schedule) HRF Princess Sophie said goodbye when she gladly hopped into my buddy Rob’s car this afternoon, so I will sleep alone, but will not have to walk her this evening. I will miss her but it’s a short trip.

    It is time for dinner so I should get to it so that I won’t eat too close to bed time. Have a great evening folks!

  • Day 988

    Yesterday was one of those days.

    Wednesday afternoon my plan was to get some sleep and then wake up in time to connect to the Erev Rosh Hashana services that my synagogue broadcasts. A bunch of different things happened to keep me from my bed, and when I finally did lie down at 5:00pm, my phone rang… it was a Lodge brother in crisis, and I spent over an hour talking with him and helping him with his issue. I am glad I was able to be there for him, even at the cost of two hours of sleep. I then fell asleep for a couple of hours, but I did not mute my phone. When I get seven text messages in short succession it usually means that there is an urgent matter that needs to be dealt with. It turned out that it was just seven completely unrelated texts that came from different people, and it was a coincidence that they all came within a minute. The alert was enough to wake me up, and I could not get back to sleep. I decided that rather than lying there frustrated, I would get dressed, take Princess Sophie for a walk, and then I would call my wife so that we could light the candles and say our prayers before I joined the services online.

    Why did I go into all of that detail about Wednesday night? Essentially to say that I was so exhausted yesterday because between Wednesday at 12:15am when I woke up and Thursday evening at 5:30pm when I went to bed I got two hours of sleep. I got through my class just fine, but I am glad that in the afternoon I did not have a lot to do. I could not go to bed because my cleaning lady came… had I known what the previous two days would be like I would have canceled that in a heartbeat, but I was committed. I finally got to sleep at 5:30pm with the hopes that I would be able to sleep through until my alarm went off at 12:30am. In fact I did one better… I slept through the alarm and it was 1:05am by the time I got out of bed and got going. I am glad I did not sleep through my class!

    I am feeling much better today than I did yesterday. I was telling Leslie that with all of the difficulties in my life I am still a very blessed man, and I am grateful for so much. I am grateful this morning for having slept last night, and my class is going well. My weight, which has been up every day for nearly a week, finally dropped slightly this morning. Hopefully by the beginning of next week when I fly to Maine I will be down below 300 lbs. again. I will try!

    Have a great day folks!

  • 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 985

    It is 1:30am and I have been awake for over an hour, at my desk since 1:00am. I did not expect to sleep very week considering the time zone in which I am working (Central Europe Standard Time), and that it was light out when I went to bed – and for several hours afterwards. I know I woke up at 7:00pm and thought that I was up for the duration, but then fell back asleep and made it to 12:30am before getting up and at it. Hopefully I will be able to maintain this schedule for the week without too much trouble.

    I should mention that I taught yesterday on less than three hours of sleep, so I definitely needed the rest… I just did not expect I would get it!

    I did step onto the scale before getting dressed. I gained a bit since Sunday morning, but considering the time difference it is likely that I weigh the same as I did then. I ended up making chicken for lunch before going to sleep yesterday, and am satisfied that I did not gorge myself.

    I thought I would be satisfied with a protein bar this morning, but did not feel sated and so I am making some toast. I will make my omelette when class breaks for their lunch.

    Have a great day folks!